Food for thought

Been too busy leveling up my characters in EQII to spend extensive time blogging this week!  So just a quick update with a couple of interesting links I've read lately.

Be Lucky - It's An Easy Skill To Learn: research by Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire, England suggests that being lucky is something that can be learned, and more to do with a person's attitude and state of mind than any external influence.

I agree with this very much.  I consider that I've been very lucky in life on the whole, but I definitely don't think I played a passive role along the way.  Every now and then an acquaintance of mine will comment enviously of my luck at getting my job, or complain how their luck has prevented them from doing the same.  And yes, I was lucky; but it was luck + effort, and not a small amount of the latter either.  I don't believe there is any type of luck that can't be improved by the right attitude and some effort.  And anyone who thinks they can just sit on their butt doing nothing while waiting for their good luck to arrive gets no sympathy at all from me.  And should probably read this blog post.

Easy = True: we tend to believe and to like things that are easier to pronounce and understand.  Which may go some way to explaining why the most inane sound bites can nonetheless be remarkably persuasive.  Apart from the many fascinating moral, political, and behavioral issues that the article raises, it makes me think once again how important UI design is in a video game.  According to this research, bad UI design isn't just an inconvenience, it actually makes the game harder, and makes the customers like it less.  Is that important enough to pay attention to yet?  And what other tricks could game designers learn from this kind of research to help players find things easier, think about things more clearly, and be generally happier?

The darker side of Facebook applications

No original thoughts from me in this post, but I know quite a few people read this blog who don't necessarily read other gaming news sites, so I thought I'd share a few articles about the shadier side of Facebook/MySpace games and applications that have been receiving a lot of attention within the gaming industry lately. (Those who actually work in the industry have probably already read them, please do feel free to skip the rest of this post if so!)

It started (at least in the public eye) last week, when TechCrunch columnist Michael Arrington attended the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco. Social media focused companies like game developer Zynga (YoVille, Texas Hold'Em, FarmVille, and similar games) and advertiser Offerpal Media (an agent for many of the targeted advertisements you see on Facebook) were in attendance. In the Q&A session of the final panel, he took the opportunity to confront representatives of these companies on what he called "the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success." Anu Shukla, the CEO of Offerpal, gave an emphatic rebuttal to his accusations. If you're interested in watching their exchange, you can see the video here:



Essentially, Arrington accused these companies of making their money in extremely unethical ways, with detailed examples to back up his claims, and Shukla refuted his arguments. Once the summit ended, both parties in the debate used their respective blogs to re-state and further detail their side of the story.

• Offerpal posted "Virtual Good Summit 09: What An Ending!" on their corporate blog, essentially just reprinting the defense that Shukla had made in response to Arrington.
  
  

• Meanwhile, Arrington gave more detail about Facebook based scams and the unethical behaviour of these companies in his 31 October post "Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell"

Initially, both sides presented strong arguments and it wasn't entirely easy to tell exactly where the truth lay in a very grey area. However, if you follow the Arrington link above you'll see a series of updates to the story that have occurred just in the past week, which speak pretty loudly for themselves. The highlights included:

• An interesting guest post from Dennis Yu entitled "How to Spam Facebook Like a Pro: An Insider's Confession" gave an insider's view of how to spam and scam on Facebook advertising (and what the implications can be to you, the user).
  
  
• MySpace, and then Facebook, hastily took steps to tighten up their anti-scam regulations.
  
  
• Marc Pinkus, the Zynga CEO (whom Arrington called out as admitting to deliberately scamming users as a fundamental part of their business model) announced that they were working hard to police and remove bad offers. ("Zynga Takes Steps to Remove Scams from Games")
  
  
• And just yesterday it was revealed that Anu Shukla has been replaced as the CEO of Offerpal. In "An Open Letter from Offerpal's New CEO" the new CEO George Garrick states that he "quickly concluded that regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers" and promises to that the community will very quickly see action and results towards improving that situation.

Further updates will no doubt be forthcoming from Michael Arrington's column on TechCrunch, and it certainly seems likely that this isn't the end of the changes that will happen in this area.

So there you go, if you missed this little bit of industry intrigue, now you're enlightened. I have no particular point to make other than to share some interesting information, but hopefully this all will lead to good things for users of MySpace and Facebook apps, as well as a better environment for game development companies themselves that does not actually put ethical behaviour at a disadvantage!

(I also must confess that watching the back-and-forth unfolding of this argument this week has also been the best can't-look-away-from-the-train-wreck type industry entertainment since watching Brad McQuaid self destruct.)

Tangentially, if you're curious about what kind of information the Facebook applications you click on can learn about you, check out this interesting talk given in September by my friend Paul Fenwick. Heck, listen to it just for the charming Aussie accent.

Now carry on back to your regularly scheduled tradeskilling!

The Good, The Bad, and the Moral

Evizaer over at That's A Terrible Idea posted a nice discussion of the overuse of good vs evil in games. It's certainly not just talking about MMOs, but the comments apply very much to MMOs as well as other types of game. And since I work in MMOs, I had a few thoughts relating to them.

Looking back at the original EverQuest, which set a lot of the base assumptions that subsequent MMOs have adopted, the races were extremely closely tied to moral choices. If you were a particular race you could not be certain classes and you could not worship certain gods. For example, if you were a dark elf, you could never become a paladin and you could never worship Tunare, the goddess of nature/growth. Your moral "worth" was unalterably tied to your race, an assumption that is actually extremely offensive and bigoted if you were to think about it in real world terms, and (as Evizaer points out) it seems remarkable that we accept this so easily in games.

In EverQuest II, although we didn't want to change the flavour of the world with its races and gods, we moved away from many of the original restrictions, and allowed all races to become any class and worship any god, although some races still start off naturally biased to evil or good. In EverQuest II a dark elf who wishes to reject his evil upbringing must betray his or her starting city and move to a good aligned city, at which point he or she forsakes the option of becoming an "evil" class profession (like necromancer) but can now choose from the "good" class options such as paladins.

This would seem to be a much better way to separate moral choices from racial origins and you'd think it would be very popular. And it was indeed welcomed by many. Nonetheless, "all races, all classes" (sometimes referred to as ARAC) was actually quite a controversial decision back in the day and there are still many players whose gaming origins are far back in the first EverQuest who deeply dislike this aspect of EverQuest II.

Although I agree that the base assumption that moral worth is inseparably tied to race is repulsive in the real world, I don't necessarily think that these players who prefer their games this way are racist or generally horrible people. Rather, I think that many people see games as more symbolic than actual representations of the real world. Like a simple child's fairy tale, games can tell us stories about the world by representing concepts very simply. The real world is very complex and confusing. In fairy tales, and in games, we can retreat from reality for a time and relax in a world where things can be black and white, good and evil, us and them. It's hard to fight evil in the real world with its shades of grey; in a game, you can ride forth in your shining armour and smite evil without any doubts about the moral ambivalence of your actions.

Some players definitely do embrace a more realistic portrayal of good and evil, but there are clearly many who do still prefer a more black and white game world. I really like the list of alternate choice suggestions in Evizaer's post, and I think that some of those could make very interesting games. Nonetheless I suspect that despite the unarguable logic of that post, we are never going to see the end of games with a good/evil divide. It's one of the most fundamental concepts in the human mind and one around which is based a vast amount of our literature, culture, and particularly religion. Certainly games could do a better job of making the division more subtle and less of a Jesus/Hitler divide. But I suspect the basic concept of the world being good/evil is always going to be appealing to people, and therefore games that allow us to explore that dichotomy are going to continue to be widely appealing, regardless of how tired the game designers may get of the concept.