Why you should flee the country.

I went on a date last year with a guy I met at a co-worker's barbeque. Seemed like a pleasant enough fellow so when he asked what I'd like to do, I suggested he join me for dim sum brunch at a fairly local place called China Max.  He sounded slightly horrified at the idea of being anywhere at 11am on a Saturday (not a great sign, as I'm generally up by 7), but he took the details of the restaurant and we agreed on a day, and the next weekend we met up for brunch.

One might assume that the name of the place, "China Max" (not to mention the location of the restaurant in the middle of a heavily asian area, and the fact that I did say it was for dim sum) might have provided enough clues for him to figure out that the food would, in fact, be asian.  However, apparently this was not the case and so it was only when we sat down and looked at the menu that he mentioned he didn't eat (a) any seafood, or (b) anything "foreign".  Besides causing some rather problematic issues with the ordering of food, this also led to the discussion of foreign travel, to which he was entirely opposed, as he said he was afraid to go to a foreign country.

Since I haven't lived in my country of birth since 1995 this seemed like a rather failed match on several points, and in fact the date was not repeated.  However, I was reminded of the guy when I watched this rather excellent TED video about different ways of looking at things in different countries:

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_different.html

It's not long; I recommend having a quick watch.  But to summarize, the speaker uses a couple of excellent examples to illustrate how we can so easily take for granted that the way we think about things is the only way to think about them, and how our thinking can easily be trapped in a little box that we don't even realize is there.  Exposure to other perspectives -- particularly through travel -- is a great way of escaping this trap and one that people who never leave their home country will always struggle with.

The importance of different perspectives and an understanding of differences between countries isn't just theoretical or helpful in terms of innovating new ideas.  It can be the difference between being an average business professional and an excellent one; or the difference between making a costly and stupid mistake and avoiding it.

A great example from my own experience: when I was hired in 2000 to be the IT manager for a US company with an office in Australia, I moved to Sydney.  One of my responsibilities was to ensure reliable and secure nightly backups of all the servers, including the financial system.  The finance team were clearly still highly traumatized by a recent incident and told me several times over in tones of pain and horror what had happened: prior to my arrival, the US head office had assisted in some updates to the financial software that was in global use by the company.  This wasn't unusual: the software was remotely managed primarily out of the US and UK, smaller offices like Sydney not needing a dedicated IT staff resource just for that one system.  Usually the UK office handled international updates such as Australia, but for some reason this time the US staff had been responsible.  As part of the updates the nightly backup schedule had also been updated by them.

Unfortunately, the US staff member who updated the weekly backup schedule was apparently not aware that pretty much every country except the US uses the date format day/month/year.  He had just assumed that the date format would be the US order, month/day/year, and entered the backup schedule accordingly without checking.  As a result, instead of resuming the normal backup schedule, there were actually NO weekly full backups happening for a period of months; daily incremental backups were fortunately not affected, but the error was only noticed when a problem occurred and a restore from backup was needed.  At which point it was discovered that the last successful full backup hadn't happened for months.  The poor finance team had to spend about 2 days feeding in every single nightly incremental backup tape since that last successful one in order to restore the data (and then spend days more reconciling every last penny to verify it), an experience which clearly traumatized them so much they were still talking about it -- and cursing the US narrow-minded view of the world that had led to the mistake -- even years later.

If that staff member had ever traveled outside the US, even just to Canada, there's a good chance he'd have been aware that date formats can change depending on country, and might have at least thought to double check what Australia used before resetting the backup date.  Experiences in foreign countries and seeing how different regions can do things differently would have made him a more valuable professional, not to mention saving the company and the finance team in Australia quite a lot of both time and money.

Besides practical considerations like the above, it's just a good experience for people to learn different cultures.  I think it makes us both more tolerant, and more accepting of differences.  Besides which it's really quite fascinating what one country considered quite okay while others consider entirely inappropriate.

When I worked in Brazil, it was customary to exchange kisses (on the cheek) with co-workers every morning, at least between men and women.  I got quite used to male co-workers kissing me every morning, so used to it in fact that after 6 months in Brazil when I visited the US for business and bumped into the first US colleague that I knew, I unthinkingly kissed him on the cheek, rather to his surprise.  If my boss here in the US started kissing me and every other female colleague every morning it would be seen as VERY inappropriate, needless to say.  But there, quite normal, polite, and expected.

So if I could give graduates one piece of advice as they start their careers, it's to take any opportunity possible to work overseas.  Visit at least if you can't find work, but if you can find a job then seize the chance.  It's so much more than just a job and an opportunity to travel; it'll expand your perspectives, open your eyes, and make you more valuable and useful in your professional career for the rest of your life.  It's not always been the easiest path to take, but I've never regretted all the moving around that I've done in my career.

Great Expectations: in-game stores

People are strange. In particular, people's reactions to in-game stores are strange. In-game microtransactions seem to bring out very mixed and contradictory feelings in people, and at the same time seems to blind them to the fact they're contradicting themselves.

Some things Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson said in one of his early interviews after joining the EQ2 team expressed a truth of in-game stores in general that I think is often overlooked.  In this interview with Zam, he said:

"I'm a big fan of microtransactions. As a player, I'm a fan of them. And the reason I'm a fan of them is if the content isn't good, then the developer doesn't make any money."

and,

"It's just basically choosing how you spend your money, whether or not it's entertainment that's of value to you. 'Cause it's completely optional; none of this stuff is required, if you don't want to pay for it you don't have to."

Now, it's true that there are some games where the purchased items grant actual in-game power so could be considered essential, but for many games that's not the case.  For many games, including the one I work on, it's entirely possible to never buy a single item from the in-game store and be at no disadvantage whatsoever within the game. It's totally optional. And yet, here are two things I frequently see people say about these kinds of items in these kinds of games:


1. They proclaim that the existence of an in-game store is horrible and, they will never use it; and they ask, often in the same sentence, why all the items in it suck so much, saying they're so terrible, they don't want any of them, why can't the designers do better.

2. Sometimes, if a new item comes out in a game I play that I think is pretty neat, I will link it on Facebook or on twitter. And often, a bitter sounding person will reply along these lines: "well *I* sure won't be buying it, because it doesn't have (X) / isn't (Y)". 


These both confuse me.  


In #1, the person seems to be confused about what they actually want.  If they really dislike in-game stores in general and don't want them to exist, then they should be rejoicing if the items in them are completely undesirable, because then nobody will buy them and the store may be abandoned.  And if they really don't ever want to use an in-game store then it seems rather masochistic to be complaining the items aren't something they would want to buy.  It sounds as if the #1 type of person actually does want to buy things, and dislikes the store primarily because it's not selling the items that person wants to purchase.


In #2, while this might be a true statement, I'm always puzzled why someone would even bother to post it. The implication seems to be that the game designers were expecting every single person to love and buy it, that the company thinks they should want to buy it. Well no, not if you don't like it. That's like if I linked a photo of a pizza and said it is now available if anybody wants some, and someone replied that they only like hamburgers so they won't be eating my pizza, which would be much better if it were a hamburger instead and clearly the cooks must be stupid to make pizza. Well, yes, if you don't like pizza then don't eat it. This seems pretty obvious, good plan. Well done for figuring that out, but why even bother posting bitterly back about it? And why does everything have to be hamburgers, when there may well be people out there who do like pizza?


That's the beauty of completely optional and nonessential content, isn't it? If you don't like it, don't buy it.  If I walk into a clothing store I certainly don't buy every item in it; I usually don't even like most of them. That doesn't mean I'm going to run up to the sales clerk and hold up a pair of jeans, bitterly shouting that I would have bought them if they'd also had 4 additional pockets but they don't so I'm not going to.  Stores offer a wide selection of items that will appeal to a wide variety of people. Very few people will like everything, and it's probably better that way too or we'd all end up looking identical if we all had exactly the same tastes!  I think pretty much everyone understands this when they walk into a clothing store, so it remains a bit of a mystery to me why some people seem to get so bitter when not every single item in a game's in-game store appeals to them personally.


Anyway, no real deep & meaningful conclusion here or anything, just an interesting thing I've noticed when I watch people talking about in-game shops in computer games.  I am slowly developing a few theories as I watch.  Anybody else care to speculate on why folks don't have the same expectations of the in-game stores as they do of real world ones?

Gamer Entitlement Going Too Far

Anyone who works in or even near the game industry is probably familiar with the phenomenon of entitlement - how people who play games feel they are entitled to rather a lot more things from a game than the game's developers, or legal terms of use, might actually reasonably expect.

This happens in other areas of life too of course, but for some reason computer game players seem to get particularly passionately attached to their games of choice, and can sometimes react unexpectedly strongly to the most minor things.  I've read feedback reports from my own game where people have said they're quitting the game over ridiculously tiny things - to give one example, because we changed the little picture that appeared on the coins in our game (graphics only even visible a tiny portion of the time).  I've read submitted feedback that compared the developers on my game to pedophiles, Saddam Hussein-followers, and much worse language too.  A week often doesn't go by without seeing someone in the feedback saying that at least some of us should be fired, are incompetent, could be replaced by a 3 year old, or clearly have no brains/sense/right to life.  And you need only stop by the discussion forums of pretty much any MMO to see similar passion is alive and well in discussions of most games.

I don't agree this is right, and although I understand how someone who loves a game can be so passionate about it, I think it's a misguided sense of entitlement that leads people to cross the line between politely stating an opinion or objection, and personal insults or even threats.  Happily, the majority of people who play the game I work on are generally polite and sane, despite a few apparent exceptions.  However, I read an article on Kotaku today that made me really fume about the misplaced sense of entitlement that some groups of gamers can develop, and somehow manage to justify:

Minecraft Apparently Under Siege

The gist of the article is that a group of players are disappointed at how slowly developer Notch is putting out updates to the small independent game Minecraft, and have decided to try to "force" him to work faster by launching a DDOS attack on the Minecraft servers.  Their thinking, apparently, is that if they prevent ANYBODY from playing Minecraft then Notch will lose money and have to do what they want.

From the article above, a post purportedly from the people responsible for the attack:

"It's purpose is to send Notch a clear message of how the future of minecraft will turn out unless he gets to work, namely by influencing the amount of sales taking place, due to the attacks.
Start providing your customers with the updates that you promise them.
We have roughly 83,000 bots available, and preserved for this seizure, we could if we wanted to keep this going for weeks, however we have decided to give it a week, and see whether or not your attitude, and commitment will change, we believe it will when money stops rolling in for the time being..."

I just haven't got the words for my disgust at this behaviour.  As a human being and democratic citizen, I resent some other group of people impinging upon my freedom of choice by deciding for me what I can and can't play and what I do and do not want. As a gamer who happens to be enjoying Minecraft, I am perfectly happy with the level of updates in Minecraft and I don't appreciate someone else telling me I should not be, let alone attempting to prevent my playing it.  And as a game developer, I am disgusted by the damage that this group is trying to do to a small, dedicated independent developer.  From what I've read, Notch is a very smart and talented programmer who has managed to create a really captivating game pretty much all on his own, and is trying to continue its development independently.  This is an accomplishment that many game designers can only dream of: the freedom to work for yourself, and do exactly what you want to create what you believe is the best game you can, without having to operate within the confines of a big corporate structure or team.  Notch has that dream within reach, he may become that one in a million game designer who is really able to be independent -- and a small, selfish group of individuals are trying to bring him down, just because as an independent developer he's not able to work as fast as they want him to?  Sickening.

The guys who are launching this attack have spent as much as anyone on Minecraft:  10 Euros (about US$13).  That's the cost of going to see a movie in the theatre ... less than you'd pay for a nice meal at a restaurant.  If they are that passionate about the game, then they've clearly already played it for many, many hours longer than a movie or a nice meal would have lasted.  There is no possible way they can justify their feeling of "entitlement" to more than they've already had.  They paid a very tiny price for days of enjoyment of an excellent game that they are well aware is still in alpha stage -- not even in beta.  This isn't the way to express their disappointment that updates aren't forthcoming as fast as they would want.  This is outright bullying, and it's inexcusable.  It's also illegal, and I hope they get their pathetic selves thrown in jail for it.

Acts like these make me lose faith in computer gamers.  :(



Edit to add: another great post on the topic, from @LivingWorlds.  In which he uses rather stronger language and discussion than I was comfortable using, but quite agree with.

Player-eating spiders, and why collecting real data is important.

I had an interesting conversation with a couple of co-workers at lunch today. We were reminiscing about fond memories from older MMOs, and a number of examples were brought up. A newbie zone in WoW which was directly adjacent to a very high level zone, leading one co-worker to be very swiftly eaten by a very horrible spider. Another co-worker in WoW who tried jumping into the Ironforge, thinking that surely the game wouldn't let you do that, and then discovered that (a) yes, in fact, the game would let you do that and (b) the corpse was now unrecoverable. Zone sweeper mobs in EverQuest that would come out of nowhere and stomp you flat. Terrifying zones like Kithicor Forest that would guarantee your horrible death if you entered at night, but which were directly adjacent to starting zones full of clueless newbies. And so on.

One co-worker was quite certain that it was these hair-raising experiences and the abrupt deaths that actually made the games so memorable. Of all her early memories in these games, those moments now stood out the most strongly. And certainly all of us had similar strong memories we could refer to, and now thought fondly of, even though at the time they were most certainly frustrating or terrifying or both.

Coincidentally, I noticed that Laralyn posted a few similar thoughts on Twitter today:

• In FSW, when a soldier on a squad got shot, focus test players always reloaded. We added a new mission objective to take the wounded man  to the CASEVAC, and it became a part of gameplay. It made the game feel more meaningful and dramatic, and less than 20% reloaded.
• I'm thinking through ways you could apply that to an RPG, so being defeated didn't mean automatic reload.
• Working through the same thing with lock-picking, Failure (jam, broken pick) = reload, but no failure = whittle until win, which is no fun.
• This discussion makes me think the perfect game is a series of close wins, where you never fail but you feel like you ALMOST failed.

The question we raised at lunch though was, for those "eaten by a spider" "lost my corpse" "dead in Kithicor" moments in MMOs, for every person who gets past that point and turns it into a fond memory, how many other people never get past that point and quit the game because of it?  For every person fondly remembering "ha ha, I lost my corpse in Ironforge", how many just left the game in disgust because they lost their corpse in Deep Forge?  How does a game designer create an "almost failed" moment when one person's fail point is another person's easy mode?

We who are in the first group are the ones who love games and who are resilient enough to get past these setbacks, and even turn them (eventually) into fond memories.  We are the ones who, because we love games, end up being the ones who go into game development and make more games.  But have we ever stopped to try and measure the hard numbers?  Is there any way we can get actual data that would give us an idea of how many people just quit the game at that point, compared to how many stick it out and end up with a fond memory?  I've never seen any information of this type, although to be fair I haven't gone looking extensively.  

We tend to assume that everyone is like us and will be able to handle, and even enjoy, the same types of challenges.  But what if that assumption isn't true?  (It probably isn't.)

If we don't have a way to measure this kind of data, will we ever know?

And if we keep assuming everyone is like us, will we ever bother finding ways to measure this kind of data?

It's a guide's life

EverQuest and EverQuest II have a volunteer guide program, where players who enjoy interacting and roleplaying with others can volunteer a few hours per week and are given the tools to run little unique quests and events.  (Guide FAQ for more info).  I like to think of guides as the fairytale characters of EverQuest - the scruffy beggars or scary crones or ugly toads that the hero/heroine meets and offers to help out of the goodness of his or her heart, who then turns out to be a fairy in disguise who gives them a reward.

I was a guide towards the end of my time playing the original EverQuest, and then when I changed over to EverQuest II, I was a guide there also.  I am not a guide any longer of course, but I remember well some of the rewards as well as frustrations of being a volunteer in the program.

The most surreal moment in my guide experience was in EQLive, when I was still a wee apprentice guide brand new to the program and with no powers to do anything except chat with people and hand out cookies and milk.  I logged in and zoned to the Plane of Knowledge, a central gathering hub for players at leisure.  I approached a couple of players and greeted them, planning to offer cookies and milk; immediately one of them responded with an enthusiastic "hello!  I want to be an otter!"

Puzzled, I asked him if he'd felt this way for long?  He remained insistent that he wanted to be an otter.  I tried to make conversation back, but he wasn't making a lot of sense and wouldn't talk about anything except otters.  Eventually I gave him some cookies and milk and backed away slowly.  It was only afterwards that I learned that not long before I'd logged in, one of the SOE GMs had been sitting in the Plane of Knowledge having a bit of fun by turning people into Othmirs (an otter-like race from the continent of Velious) - certainly nothing that an apprentice guide would ever have the power to do.

When I joined the EQII team, because I'd been in the guide program previously I seemed a natural to help out the guide team in EQII.  It's a secondary responsibility, but as time permits I try to add in new quest tools and goodies for them here and there.  I recently added a new quest that guides are able to give out as a little prelude quest to the upcoming addition of New Halas and today at lunch time I decided to log in and try offering it to a few players myself to ensure all is well.

What always amazes me, both as a developer and as a player of MMOs, is how many players just seem totally uninterested in custom content.  When I play, if I notice an NPC out of place or a strange person standing around apparently offering a quest, I am always ready and eager to go and investigate.  Heck, I strike up conversations with random people I bump into in game, even if they're clearly just other players.  But many people don't seem to do this.  I wonder what goes through their thoughts?

Today I logged into a random server which turned out to be Lucan de Lere (one of our roleplay-preferred servers) and wandered around various lower level zones looking for people.  I found about half a dozen in The Caves, a small adventure zone off the city of Qeynos, so I put a quest feather over my head and stood around saying things aloud such as "Lately I've been having such strange dreams and visions!  What can they mean?", "I dreamed Mithaniel Marr was walking the lands of Norrath once again," and "I keep having visions of Halas reborn!  What can it mean?  Can't anybody help me?"

The first two players who saw me came up, and I hailed them, and directly told them I had been having strange visions, and would they help me to learn more?  Both of them stopped, hailed me back, and then said "sorry, I cannot" or "no, I'm not interested", and ran off again.  At least one other just ignored me completely and ran right past.  And keep in mind, I was a large barbarian woman with a big sparkling quest feather spell effect hovering over my head, it should have been pretty obvious I was something not usually found in The Caves.  (I even did a zonewide /shout asking if anybody would help me.)

I got one person in The Caves to accept the quest, and a nice couple in Gorowyn, and then I did a search online ("/who halas all") to see if anyone happened to be online with a name or guild related to Halas.  And there was!  There was one person online from a guild with Halas in the name so I thought of course, they should be very interested in topics relating to Halas.  I went to the zone the player was in (Rivervale) and stood just down the path from her, where she was bound to pass by, again with a big sparkling quest feather over my head.

And she just ran straight past.

So I followed her, and wandered obviously around her (she was harvesting) saying things about what strange dreams I'd had of Halas, and asking had she been having visions too?

Nada.  Not even a hail back, I might have been invisible.  Eventually another person entered the zone from another guild, and had a little chat with me and accepted the quest, and I decided lunch time was over and camped out.

Checking the server logs now, it looks as if the nice couple from Gorowyn will be the first to complete the quest and get the server (possibly worldwide) discoveries on the quest rewards.  And good for them, they were very sweet and helpful.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with not being interested in special quests and guide events; everybody plays games differently and is interested in different things.  It's just baffling to me as it's so different from my own interests, and also because so many people complain so vocally on the forums that they never see guide quests in game, yet when you're a guide, so many people totally ignore you (or even say outright that they have no interest in helping you).

I'd love to know why the people who weren't interested were not interested.  Did they (despite the big quest feather) think I was just another fellow player, and they weren't interested in helping out a fellow player at all?  Did they simply not even see me, they were so focused on whatever their current goals were?  Did they have their UI hidden to take screenshots, and didn't even see any of my dialog?  Were they simply so concerned with powerlevelling up that quests of any type were of no interest to them?  And, if they had decided to accept my quest, would they have been glad they did, or thought it was a pointless waste of time?  (The XP is decent, the rewards are a book of lore and a house item, nothing particularly uber.)

As a designer, and particularly as a designer of quests that guides can give out, I always want to understand the answers to these questions so I can improve things.  If these players simply aren't interested no matter what, then all is well and good; but if they don't understand what's going on or actually don't see me at all, perhaps there's something I can do that would add to help make it clear to players what's going on.

Sometimes I do wish I'd done a degree in psychology rather than molecular biology; it might be more directly applicable these days to trying to get inside the mind of MMO players!  =)

GDC 2010: Achievements

It's been too long since I posted here, but in my defense, I took some time off after the expansion launched, and at present I'm in San Francisco after attending GDC.  For those readers not in the industry, that stands for Game Developers Conference, and is a week-long conference consisting of discussion panels, round tables, lectures, a large display floor, and lots and lots of opportunities to mix, mingle, demo, meet, and generally discuss anything and everything to do with games.

I have been here for 3 days (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) which is when the bulk of the talks/lectures are scheduled, and I've taken the opportunity to attend quite a few of them.  I had never been to GDC before so I decided to attend this year mainly to see what it's like.  Very interesting, is the answer!  Some of the talks were better than others, and inevitably there were a few annoying time slots when I wanted to attend two different things at once (or even three), but enough of the information was interesting enough to make me quite enthusiastic about the topics.  GDC is also a great chance to meet others in the industry, and catch up with old friends who may have moved on to new companies and/or cities.  This week I've had lunch, dinner, or drinks with people from Blizzard, Bioware, Ohai, 38 Studios, Trion World, and more; and listened to people from these companies and many more discuss their own perceptions of gaming, their own product's particular challenges or successes, and much more.

Two lectures particularly enthused me, Chris Hecker's talk on achievements, and Dmitri Williams' talk on what kind of useful information you can get out of your game data.  The second probably does not make for a very interesting blog post unless you are particularly enthused by business intelligence databases, but I'll take a stab at summarizing the first.

So, ever since Skinner and particularly since the 1970s, psychologists have done a lot of studies about what motivates (and demotivates) people.  There's a ton of data out there, however not all of it agrees on all points, since measuring people's behaviour is not always an exact science.  However, according to Hecker, over all the studies it was possble to pull out two key points on which they all agreed:

For interesting tasks:

1. Tangible, expected, contingent rewards reduce free-choice intrinsic motivation
2. Verbal, unexpected, informational feedback increases free-choice and self-reported intrinsic motivation

A couple definitions of terms here - intrinsic motivation means that the task itself is motivation to do it (like, I want to do a crossword puzzle because it's fun to do a crossword puzzle - the motivation is in the task itself). This is as opposed to extrinsic motivation, which means the motivation comes from outside the task (like, you pay me to do crossword puzzles).  Tangible reward = real, you can touch it, such as money, as opposed to verbal rewards like someone saying "good job".  And contingent reward means that whether you get the reward depends on what you do, for example knowing that every time you finish a crossword puzzle you get $1, as opposed to unexpected rewards which you can't anticipate when or whether you will get them.

To give some examples of the interesting task rewards listed above:

1. Giving someone a tangible reward they know about in advance which is based on their performance (e.g. read this book and I will give you $5) reduces people's motivation to do the task subsequently without a reward.  (e.g. they are less likely to decide they want read books on their own, for no reward, after you start paying them to).
2. Giving someone verbal feedback they aren't expecting makes them more likely to report they are likely to do the task again without a reward.  (e.g. unexpectedly telling someone "hey, you read a book! that's great!" may make them feel more positive about reading more books in the future).

In this talk, only interesting tasks were looked at.  For boring tasks, like data entry for example, promising rewards can have different effects on motivation because people are never really going to be motivated to do really boring stuff for the sake of doing really boring stuff (there is little or no intrinsic motivation to boring tasks). But the talk ignored boring tasks, since it's a sensible assumption that computer games are made with the intention of being interesting, and nobody intentionally makes a computer game to be boring.

There were many examples given of how offering rewards changes the amount of intrinsic motivation that people reported to do tasks.  Some examples:

• take a group of children drawing things.  Give half of them candy as a reward for drawing things, and don't give the other half anything.  Next time, the children who got the candy will not be as interested in drawing things.
• offer a child money to clean his room.  The room will never again be cleaned unless money is offered again.
• give people money to wear seat belts, they will wear seat belts less often.
• give kids a reward for reading, they will read less.

Once an external reward is offered, the focus changes.  The task itself is made to look less interesting than the reward, and people focus now on the reward instead of the task, which becomes just an annoyance to complete as a path to getting the reward.  There are numerous studies showing this (and even quite a few arguments published demonstrating that this is why investment bankers should not be rewarded with big bonuses).

Now, if you're at all familiar with achievement systems in computer games then you can probably see where this is going.  Achievements are an external reward system which is contingent on completing certain specified and usually predetermined tasks.  Whether you define an in-game reward as tangible or verbal is a matter for debate, since most of the existing studies looked at real world examples, which do not translate entirely directly into a virtual world, but it probably makes sense for an in-game item to count as a tangible reward.

So what are achievements doing to players' enjoyment of the games?  If we tell you that you'll get an achievement for killing 500 orcs, do you now curse and swear as you slog through joylessly killing 500 orcs just to get the achievement -- have we removed all the fun from killing orcs for the sake of killing orcs?

In EQ1, many many years ago, I spend hours and hours and days and days doing various crazy things just for the sake of doing them -- such as killing enough minotaurs and kobolds to be non-kill-on-sight in the gnome city even though I was a dark elf, or handing in endless numbers of bone chips to allow me to safely enter the city of Cabilis.  There was no reward for doing any of this other than being able to stand safely in those cities surprising the "normal" residents, and I spent days on it.  There was even one completely dedicated player I knew back then who set out to earn friendly faction standing with every single tribe of goblins in the world ... and eventually did so (even in Droga).  This was not a task of hours, or days, or even months, it was literally years and years of dedicated work.  There were no achievements back in those days, this was all done just for the interest of the task and the challenge itself.

In EQ2 or in any other MMO that I play nowdays, I can't imagine ever spending that amount of time to do anything similar.  Unless of course we put in an achievement for doing something like that ... in which case someone would do it, just to get the achievement.

Hecker's "nightmare scenario" was as follows:

1. You make an intrinsically interesting game.  Congratulations!
2. You decide to add extrinsic motivation (ie, achievements) to make your game even better.
3. Unintentionally, you destroy players' intrinsic motivation to play your game.
4. Because achievements are easily measurable, the metrics that you are using to measure player actions actually push you towards designs where extrinsic motivations work better and better - which becomes a less and less intrinsically enjoyable game experience.
5. As a bonus, women appear to lose intrinsic motivation to enjoy tasks even faster than men do, when extrinsic motivation is added.  So you also end up distancing your female players even more.

Nightmare result: you end up with a boring and unenjoyable game that people (mostly men) grind through just to get the achievements.

Hecker was the first to acknowledge that we need to do more research to see how the psychology research he referenced would translate into virtual worlds.  He is hoping that someone with access to the data needed will be able to produce more information, or at least make the data available for others to research it.  But there certainly seems to be enough real-world-based evidence to raise questions such as, are achievements actually making our games less intrinsically interesting?  Or are we implementing achievements in a way to ensure we don't do that?

In closing, until we can definitively determine how achievements are affecting gameplay experience, his final note of caution was to minimize the potential damage from achievements as follows:

1. Don't make a big fuss about them
2. Use unexpected rewards
3. Use absolute, not relative measures (e.g. "you killed 10 rats", not "you are the 9th highest rat-killer in the world")
4. Use endogenous rewards, not external ones
5. Make them informational, not controlling

Chris Hecker's website is at http://www.chrishecker.com, although unfortunately he hasn't updated the site yet with his talk on achievements.

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?

Easily Distracted

I'm just not very good at levelling up in MMOs, I'm afraid.  It's not that I don't like them - I do - but something about the leveling process fails to captivate me.  I know it's supposed to get me hooked - just one more quest till the next level, just one more hour till the next reward - but I guess there's just something missing in the area my brain that controls that area.  I have had the same experience in every MMO I've played, from the original EverQuest to my most recent trial of Aion.

It's not that I can't level up - I do have characters at max level in EverQuest II.  But it's not something that I do for the sake of doing it, it's just something that happens while I'm doing other things, unless I really force myself, in which case it's a chore, not compulsive fun.  (The closely related task of gearing up is equally yawn-inducing to me.)

Of course, these days it doesn't help that after spending 10-12 hours at work on EQII, it's really not extremely appealing to come home and spend another few hours staring at more of the same.  When we're working overtime at work I find myself much more tempted to do other things besides play computer games when I get home - reading, cooking, even cleaning.  Still, I did log in last night thinking I really should get my dirge the rest of the way to 80 while I still have the bonus XP from my 80 wizard. (In EQII, once you have a max level character all other characters on your account get an XP bonus so they level up faster.  However, the max level cap is going up with February's expansion so I'll lose that bonus soon.)

As usually happens though I did a few quests but soon got distracted.  In this case it was by someone in the general crafting chat channel who was low level but trying to do a harvesting quest in the Kingdom of Sky zones, which are higher level than he was.  He was clearly having trouble figuring out how to harvest safely.  Far more interesting than levelling up a dirge!  I hopped on my lower level monk and headed up there, and offered to give him a little tour of the safe areas where low adventure level players can get to.  Of course, the reason he was up there was a quest that I myself created, so I suppose I was technically responsible for his predicament in a way.  But I used to give harvesting tours long to harvesters in distress before I was hired by SOE anyway.  And I can't think of any MMO I've played in the past 10 years where I was actively excited by leveling.

There's almost always something more interesting to do than plain old XPing, in my experience.  Sometimes I hear a newbie in the chat channels who needs some help, and I go and do that.  Sometimes I decide to decorate someone's house.  Sometimes I help random people or guildmates with quests.  Sometimes I go crafting, or exploring, or finish off some collection quests, or some achievements.  Often I'm tempted to make new alts, since I really enjoy trying out new race/class combinations and thinking up new character appearances and names and backgrounds.  In Aion I've gone through three alts so far without getting any of them to 25 yet.  In City of Villains I can't even count how many villains I made, none of whom reached 30.  In WoW I managed three alts, even though I quit the game in frustration before any of them reached 20.  Champions Online was so broken it actually forced me to quit the alts before I wanted to, so that probably doesn't count, but even in Conan I had two going and that was painful indeed (one of them was a female bear shaman, the most broken possible combination at launch).

I know this is fairly unusual; MMOs are full of people who seem to enjoy leveling up just for the sake of leveling up, and it's practically the basis of gameplay in many of them.  I guess I'm fairly unusual in my lack of interest (or maybe other people like me just don't tend to play MMOs).  I still have lots of fun doing other things when a game permits me enough lateral options to have a broad gameplay experience, and EQII in particular is very good at supporting lots of different play styles.  Still, I sometimes feel as if I enjoy MMOs despite of their core design, not as part of it.  Now that I actually work in game design it makes me wonder how I would design a game that isn't so leveling-centered, and what aspects of MMOs I would actually make the core of gameplay if I were trying to appeal to people like me.  I like exploring, I like the social interactions, I enjoy the creative side, and the crafting (as in making useful stuff for other people) aspect.  And I'll generally choose any of those over XP leveling any day, as they're just more interesting to me.

Perhaps it's wrong to think of making separate games at all; perhaps it would be better to think of ways to integrate the different play styles better into one game world.  Perhaps they're just two sides of the same coin and could support each other solidly.  I sometimes feel EQII is almost there in the way it allows crafters to level up separately from adventurers, but there isn't really a true interdependency either.  In EQII it's more like two independent systems running side by side in the same world, and while that's good in many ways, I still feel there could be a better integration somehow.  Though at least it's better than most MMOs; too many try to force the different play styles together in ways that don't really make a lot of sense.  For example, in WoW you can't tradeskill without going out killing things for components, and exploration is pretty much impossible at low adventure levels as aggro range increases the larger the level difference.  In Aion your crafting skill is capped by your adventure level.  So if crafting or exploring interests you but killing things does not, well, these games are obviously not going to be ideal.  In a real world context it makes no sense - how good I am at cooking or sewing has absolutely nothing to do with my skill in karate or hunting, that's nonsensical.  Yet so many games try to force the two to relate in some way, and of course it feels awkward and forced.

I hope that as MMOs continue to mature and develop, we'll start to see more developers moving away from this forced dependency and lazy assumption that leveling is all that's needed to make gameplay fun.  EQII was a great step in the right direction (as was Star Wars Galaxies) but it's been 5 years since either of those and I'm just not seeing anybody else moving in that direction yet.  Is it a nasty catch-22 in that the current generation of game developers entered game development through their enjoyment of leveling-oriented MMOs, and therefore assume that everybody else must love them too?  Or is it just that the 500b gorilla of MMOs, WoW, is not particularly innovative in any area, and therefore new game developers (and their investors) are nervous about trying anything different?  I don't know, but I'm going to keep hoping (and poking and suggesting, where I get the chance) that future MMOs will try to broaden the types of game play options available.

(In an unrelated note, having stated my pessimistic predictions for STO in the last post, I felt obliged to sign up for the open beta now it's open, and so I'm currently downloading the patcher in the background.  We shall see ... though, judging by the snail's pace this download is crawling at, it won't be tonight.)

(Update: this comment by Zubon re: STO open beta made me nod agreement.)

A_random_sexy_elf_girl_001 hits YOU for 5000 platinum!

It's a well known truism in MMOs that you can roll up a sexy female avatar and people will rush to give you free stuff.

While there may be some degree of truth to this, I've never found it to be quite so cut-and-dried as all that. What I do find though is that in pretty much any MMO I have played, if you are friendly and polite and make conversation, particularly "in character" for whatever character you happen to be playing, others do react generously with help and sometimes gifts.

This certainly isn't limited to female avatars or pretty elfy ones though. While I do normally play female characters, I've experienced the kindness of others regardless of the attractiveness of my avatar.

In EverQuest I noticed no particular difference between the offers of assistance that my dark elf and my gnome received.

In Star Wars Galaxies I played around with a Bothan (that's the race that looks like llamas) and was tipped very generously on numerous occasions because I spent my time in the cantinas actually entertaining others andby telling terrible jokes, instead of just AFK macro dancing.

In World of Warcraft on my very first day in game a nice fellow offered to buy me a set of free bags just because I asked some polite questions in a channel. Not only was I playing a Tauren (horned cow-like people) but he couldn't even have known what gender I was from my name in a channel (it was quite gender ambiguous).

In EverQuest II groups frequently mistakenly call my bald and rather flat-chested erudite "sir", yet she's often been on the receiving end of kindnesses. Likewise, my ratongas (a race of rat people are hardly considered a sexy race, yet cheese and help have often been offered.

In City of Villains among all the spandex-clad superhero suits, I created a bespectacled, understated librarian type in a plain black business suit and almost the first person I grouped with asked for my help transferring money to an alt, then gifted me with tens of thousands of spare credits.

Clearly there's more to this than the simple assumption that avatars with sex appeal get gifts thrown at them.   Really, it's hard to believe that anybody who's played an MMO long enough to amass sufficient wealth to be able to throw gifts at random newbies would still be unaware that many female characters are actually played by males, and that the attractiveness of a female avatar in no way relates to the appearance of the person behind it.

No, it simply hasn't been my experience that just rolling up a_random_sexy_elf_girl_001 will guarantee showers of gifts.  Sure, flirting and deliberate manipulation may be one way of getting assistance (regardless of your gender).  But politeness, intelligent questions, and "in character" conversation, on the other hand, are almost always welcomed with kindness and assistance as well.  This is one stereotype I mistrust, and I suspect that a closer and more quantifiable measurement might go a long way to showing that life in an MMO isn't quite as black-and-white as the stereotypes would have it.

No real deep and meaningful thoughts here, I suppose.  It's crunch time at work and I'm back from over 12 hours in the office, so I'm probably lucky to be coherent at all.  Just some random reflections that have been bouncing around in my mind.  =)

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.

A week of customer service

Ah, customer service and the consumer experience in general, how powerful you are. A good experience can win a customer for life, and a bad one lose one just as fast. And I'm not just referring to customer service within computer games, although that's just one example of how important the experience is in general. No, I've had a week of the most mixed experiences in very diverse areas.

The first experience was by far the best - in fact, possibly among the best customer service I've ever experienced anywhere. My sandals were wearing out; great sandals, but I'd been wearing them all summer and the leather was starting to crack and rub my toe raw, so I decided it was time to replace them. Alas, at the end of September, all the shops around San Diego have moved their stock to winter inventory and the selection of sandals is very limited. So, I tried searching online for the brand name of my current sandals (Umberto Raffini) in hopes I could just buy a new pair exactly the same. Unfortunately, I couldn't find them. However, Google did bring up a site called Zappos, which I'd heard of before; in fact, Tracy "Owlchick" Seamster had mentioned it on the G.I.R.L. Blog. What can I say? I was impressed. Nice clean, clear site design, and their search options help you narrow your search down lots. Each item has no less than 6 photos showing it from every angle and close up. Customer reviews give more information and opinions. I went through all the sandals of the colour and style I wanted and added about 5 to my shopping basket, then went through the reviews of those and narrowed it down to just one, Softsoles brand "Cammy" style in black. Not too scruffy to wear to work, yet very comfortable, and had excellent customer reviews. And look, free 3-4 day shipping, and Zappos has a free return policy if they don't fit, so why not?

Order placed, I randomly tweeted on my personal twitter account that I had just bought some sandals from Zappos and was impressed by the site so far. Within minutes, someone from @zappos_service had replied saying the sandals look great and suggesting that I direct message my order number to them so they could expedite the shipping. Which I did; and within an hour I got an email update saying that my sandals would now arrive the next day, instead of the normal 3-4 day wait. Not only that, but in order to send them the next day, they actually had to cancel the original order (which had shipped already) and send out a new order via overnight UPS so it would arrive the next day, and all of this at their expense. And not only that, but they also upgraded me to their "VIP" service so that if I order anything in the future, I'll automatically get free overnight delivery. Hmm. Am I likely to use Zappos.com again after this? Heck yes. In fact, I'll soon need some sandals for my hallowe'en costume and I know where I'll be going. The sandals did arrive the next day as promised and are indeed super comfortable, and I've been wearing them since. Now that's a great customer service experience. (Their order map that Tracy's blog post mentions is also so cool that I caught my boyfriend playing with it for at least 10 minutes, watching shoe orders and voting them "good" or "bad".)

If only I could say the same about the next few...

My grandmother, wonderful woman that she is, lives in England and for the last 10 years or so I've occasionally sent her chocolates and fudge for special occasions. I used Thornton's with no problems for all the years I was living in Australia; they're a great chocolatier with little shops all over England and I never come back from visiting without a bag or two of their champagne truffles. Unfortunately, when I moved to the US I discovered a serious problem with their web site: it doesn't accept American credit cards. I have no explanation of why this might be the case; both my Australian and my US credit cards are visa cards, and I've never encountered any other site that has trouble with US credit cards. However, for the past 2 years every time I've wanted to send something via Thornton's to a family member in the UK, I've had to phone up to place the order. And since their telephone support is only available during UK working hours, this requires me to remember to place the order before 9am in my time zone (5pm in the UK), which is not exactly convenient even aside from the international call charge.

Every time I go through this ridiculous process I ask why their web site can't accept US credit cards, and every time the person I'm talking to tells me that it's not their fault, it's an issue with the credit card companies and they can't do anything about it. Which is clearly a ridiculous answer. The issue apparently affects Thornton's and no other web site I've encountered, and that means it's clearly something specific to Thornton's. And while it may ultimately be something that the credit card companies need to fix, there's no chance in hell that it's ever going to be fixed unless Thornton's takes the initiative and chases those companies down. Is Visa ever going to phone up Thornton's and say "hey, we notice that your US based customers can't use their visa cards on your site, but don't worry, we fixed it for you?" Yeah, just about the time pigs fly. Thornton's has the responsibility to fix the issue and Thornton's has failed to do so for over 2 years now (probably more). Last Christmas I sent my grandmother chocolate, and I ended up speaking to a completely new phone operator on her very first day. It took a 45 minute long distance call, she got the order wrong, got the address wrong, and got the delivery date wrong, and my grandmother ended up with her Christmas present delivered around the 5th of December instead of at Christmas. When I complained to Thornton's they sent an additional small box of chocolates to her at the correct time, but basically said they were sorry but couldn't do anything about it.

So I had already pretty much resolved never to use Thornton's again, but my grandmother is very ill and I wanted to send something quickly. I decided to give their web site one last try to send her some fudge, and lo and behold, the same problem appeared and my credit card wasn't accepted. I tried 2 credit cards and my debit card and got the same error. With no way to reach their customer service team without waiting till the following morning, and keeping in mind my last absolutely awful experience with phoning them, I decided to just try another site. Sorry Thornton's, you've lost my business after 10 years of regular orders.

A friend in the UK recommended Montezumas and they looked good, but when I tried to actually place the order, web site fail! It was impossible to enter a billing address that was not based in the UK, even though the delivery address was in the UK, which should be all they need to be concerned about. The billing address only offered a drop-down box for the country, and the options only included countries within the UK, which would mean that my credit card could not be properly billed as the addresses would not match. Too bad, Montezumas, you could have had all my business that Thornton's just lost, but your web site failed.

Next attempt, Rococo Chocolates, also recommended by the same friend. Ok, I want to buy fudge. I might settle for some liqueur truffles. But look, there's no search box and no site map. My only choices are by category. Where would fudge be? Gift boxes, chocolate bars, gift bags, chocolate art, hampers, confectionary, sugar-free, kids, and accessories are the only category options. Under confectionery perhaps? No, that appears to contain only "gift cubes and boxes", "nougat", and "sugar crafts". 5 minutes of poking around the site's incredibly unhelpful categories and failing to find any way to search for either fudge or alcohol chocolates, and I gave up on that site before even getting to the check out.

A desperate google search for fudge delivery in the UK finally pointed me to Not Just Balloons, where I managed to locate fudge and even place an order. This seemed like an OK experience, until I got an email the next day saying my order had been placed too late for overnight delivery and please contact them before 3pm to confirm if Monday delivery was acceptable. Since they are based in England, of course, the email was sent at 12:50am when I was fast asleep, and 3pm their time was 7am my time, when I was also asleep. A good customer service representative might have considered the billing address of the credit card a clue here, but apparently not. I replied at 9am when I got the email, which should still have been during work hours, but I still haven't received a response so I have no idea if my grandmother got the fudge on Friday, will get it on Monday, or if the entire thing is on hold. The most annoying thing about this is that their order page helpfully shows a clock and says "you have 1 hour 15 minutes to place your order for next day delivery". The time it displays ticks down, but when I placed my order, it said I still had 1 hour and 15 minutes for next day delivery so the fact that I even got the email was a failure on their part.

So, my final customer service frustration this week ... Dell. On Tuesday the graphics card in my Dell XPS desktop inexplicably died. I was trying to log in to Test server on Tuesday night to do some work, as I normally try to spend a couple hours hanging out there hearing what out players are experiencing and thinking, as I've mentioned previously. I barely had time to say hello though when my computer suddenly said "entering power saver mode" and shut down. I rebooted, logged in again, and suddenly the screen was giving me odd colours, then froze up entirely and gave me a blue screen listing display drivers as a cause. So, reinstalled my graphics drivers, tried again, and ... crash. Tried Aion to make sure it wasn't EQII related, and couldn't even get to the character select screen before it locked up. Gah! Fortunately, my boyfriend had a similar graphics card in his desktop that we could use to test, and after swapping that card in, everything worked just fine. Now, I worked for 9 years in IT support and while I'm not a total hardware expert, I'm confident to say that this is pretty definitively a graphics card issue. And look, my desktop's still under full warranty with Dell. No problem, right? Oh so wrong ...

The first time I phoned customer support, I was put through to a very unhelpful lady who insisted that before she could do anything for me, I had to update the bios of my desktop and run a diagnostic on the graphics card using the Dell diagnostics CD. Both of which were clearly unnecessary in my opinion, but as she refused to do anything else until I did this, I hung up, swapped the old card back in, and tried it. Obviously, nothing changed. I called back and went through to a switchboard, since I couldn't find my express service code. The operator put me through to someone else, and after lengthy holding that person put me through to a great guy called Jonathan who completely agreed it was a graphics card issue, but unfortunately he was part of the premium service team and apparently I shouldn't have been transferred there at all. He updated my records to show he agreed I needed a new card, and transferred me to what he said was the XPS department. They read his notes, agreed I needed a new graphics card, and helpfully explained that they weren't the people I needed to talk to, and transferred me again. By this time, I'd been on the phone for an entire hour and still wasn't any closer to getting a new graphics card than before.

By the time I finally I got through to someone who could arrange to send out a new card, I had been on the phone for 1 hour and 7 minutes, not counting the original 15 minutes with the "update your bios" lady in the original call. An hour and a half of my time just to get a replacement graphics card under warranty when I had already fully diagnosed the problem myself? Not good customer service. In fact, a waste of everybody's time. When you consider the hourly cost of my time, the cost of the time of all 5 people that I completely unnecessarily spoke to, and the phone call cost, I could probably have just bought a new graphics card for not much more, and I'd be up and running now instead of waiting for the new part to arrive. Although I eventually got what I needed, Dell was the worst customer experience of all since it was such an unnecessary waste of both my time and everyone else's.

All of which is probably a much longer rant than anybody has bothered to read, but goes to show what a huge difference there can be between a fabulous customer experience (Zappos) and a horrible one (Thornton's and Dell). Will I use and recommend Zappos again? Definitely. Will I use or recommend Thornton's again? Highly unlikely. Will I use Dell again? Unfortunately, since I still have a system under warranty with them, I may be forced to. I certainly won't recommend them though. Next time I want to upgrade my desktop I'll certainly be taking a good hard look around at other options, and my old Dell Inspiron laptop is being replaced with a Toshiba netbook, not a Dell.

What's really odd when you think about it is that all of us experience customer service and know how important it is. Everybody at Dell who could influence the customer service experience there has had their own share of customer service wins and fails. Yet when it comes to their own company, they expect their customers to forgive far more than I'm sure they would ever put up with as a customer of another company. How is it that so many companies have such enormous blind spots? How can it be that Thornton's has been well aware that their website is failing to allow an entire continent to give them money, and haven't bothered to fix it for over 2 years? In theory the capitalist system should weed out failures like these companies, but it just doesn't seem to be happening, or at least, not happening fast. Thornton's undoubtedly still turns the bulk of their profit from in-store sales and can apparently afford to ignore their internet market. Dell has a huge market from corporate sales (to whom they provide much better support) and can apparently therefore afford to be inefficient with the small individual customers. I'd like to believe that eventually these companies will shape up or fold, but perhaps I'm being too optimistic about the power of market forces. At any rate, as a consumer I can still control my own actions, and today they will be taking me to Zappos, not Thornton's.

Anybody know a good chocolatier in England that would like to accept international orders? :p

But it's just not FAIR ...

I'm currently readon an interesting book by James Surowiecki called The Wisdom of Crowds. Basically, it's an examination of how groups of people make decisions, both good and bad. And many of the points that he highlights are quite different from what you might expect.

I'm only about half way through the book, but I came across the description of some interesting sociological experiments in chapter 6 (section II). Here's the part that particularly intrigued me:

The explanation for people's behaviour might have something to do with an experiment called the "ultimatum game," which is perhaps the most-well-known experiment in behavioural economics. The rules of the game are simple. The experimenter pairs two people. (They can communicate with each other, but otherwise they're anonymous to each other.) they're given $10 to divide between them, according to this rule: One person (the proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (50/50, 70/30, or whatever). He then makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the other person (the responder). The responder can either accept the offer, in which case both players pocket their respective shares of the cash, or reject it, in which case both players walk away empty-handed.

If both players are rational [in an economic sense], the proposer will keep $9 for himself and offer the responder $1, and the responder should accept it, since if he accepts he gets some money and if he rejects, he gets none. A rational proposer will realize this and therefore make a lowball offer.

In practice, though, this rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers -- anything below $2 -- are routinely rejected. Think for a moment about what this means. People would rather have nothing than let their "partners" walk away with too much of the loot. They will give up free money to punish what they perceive as greedy or selfish behaviour. And the interesting thing is that the proposers anticipate this -- presumably because they know they would act the same way if they were in the responder's shoes. As a result, the proposers don't make many low offers in the first place. The most common offer in the ultimatum game, in fact, is $5.

Now, this is a long way from the "rational man" picture of human behaviour. The players in the ultimatum game are not choosing what's materially best for them, and their choices are clearly completely dependent on what the other person does. People play the ultimatum game this way all across the developed world: cross-national studies of players in Japan, Russia, the United States, and France all document the same phenomenon. And increasingly the size of the stakes doesn't seem to matter much either. Obviously, if the proposer were given the chance to divide $1 million, the responder wouldn't turn down $100,000 just to prove a point. But the game has been played in countries, like Indonesia, where the possible payoff was equal to three days' work, and responders still rejected lowball offers.

It isn't just humans who act this way either.... primatologists Sara F. Bronsan and Frans B.M. de Waal showed that female capuchin monkeys are also offended by unfair treatment...

Capuchins and humans alike, then, seem to care whether rewards are, in some sense, "fair." That may seem like an obvious thing to worry about, but it's not... The responders in the ultimatum game are being offered money for what amounts to a few minutes of "work," which mostly consists of answering "yes" or "no." Turning down free money is not something that, in most circumstances, makes sense. But people are willing to do it in order to make sure that the distribution of resources is fair.

Does this mean people think that, in an ideal world, everyone would have the same amount of money? No. It means people think that, in an ideal world, everyone would end up with the amount of money they deserved. In the original version of the ultimatum game, only luck determines who gets to be the proposer and who gets to be the responder. So the split, people feel, should be fairly equal. But people's behaviour in the game changes quite dramatically when the rules are changed. In the most interesting version of the ultimatum game, for instance, in stead of assigning the proposer role randomly, the researchers made it seem as if the proposers had earned their positions by doing better on a test. In those experiments, proposers offered significantly less money, yet not a single offer was rejected. People apparently thought that a proposer who merited his position deserved to keep more of the wealth.

Put simply, people (and capuchins) want there to be a reasonable relationship between accomplishment and reward.

Anyone who has worked in game design is probably already familiar with this phenomenon as applies to players in competitive computer games such as MMOs. A frequent lament on MMO discussion forums is how the designers, or the game mechanics in general, are favoring one group over another. Group A complains when Group B gets too much attention, loot, or whatever. As a game designer and also as a player, I have frequently read such discussions with more than a bit of impatience and wondered why Group A is getting so upset about Group B getting something, when it really doesn't affect them personally at all. To pick just one example, if Fred got his Uber Sword of Wumpus-Slaying on day 1, and then we change the quest so that it's easier for George to get the same sword when he does the quest on day 365, why is Fred so upset? Fred still had the sword for a whole year before George got his, and had all the utility, fun, and boasting rights that came with that, and the fact that George now has his own Uber Sword of Wumpus-Slaying doesn't change Fred's game-play experience in the slightest. Yet this is one of the most common complaints on any MMO forum and comes up again and again.

I can't say that reading this study has provided me with any answers to the problem. But it does help me to see that this kind of behaviour is part of a bigger picture of human behaviour, not an exclusive characteristic of MMO players. And it definitely highlights that when developing an MMO, we need to keep in mind that player perception of fairness is perhaps even more important than it is to truly distribute those rewards fairly. "Fair" distribution of rewards according to some cryptic scheme that only the designers can see will not be perceived as fair, and will not be well received. Clear ways of measuring player accomplishments, and equitable rewards balanced in line with those, will go a very long way toward reducing general unhappiness and complaints of unfairness.

This may seem like an obvious statement, but in a complex game like an MMO where there may be many different types of accomplishment, it's far from simple even to equitably measure the different accomplishments, let alone to determine the "conversion rate" between one type and another. Is a "killing the dragon" accomplishment worth more than an "interior decoration" accomplishment if they both took the same player the same amount of time? Is a "raiding" accomplishment deserving of better rewards than a "solo questing" accomplishment? Simple measurement of play time invested is not sufficient to compare the two; and when games are looking more and more to entice casual players who want to be able to have fun and make progress in limited play time chunks, time is not a good measure of accomplishment. It seems almost like a standard that designers of new MMOs should sit down and define before they produce any gameplay content: which type of accomplishment is worth most, what defines worth, what defines the value of the reward that is earned.

Most MMOs I have played seem to have a very rough set of standards along these lines, though rarely comprehensive and often inconsistent. Where they are even more lacking is in making these standards accessible in some form to the players. Result: endless player debates over the comparative merit of one accomplishment over another, and thus, an equally endless debate over whether the MMO's rewards are "fair". Perhaps it's an overly simplistic wish on my part, but I'd love to find a game that defines these accomplishment measurement standards clearly and consistently, and without being so narrow in definition that large elements of the player gameplay experience are missed out entirely. One day! =)

Creating happiness in MMOs

TED.com has been around for some years, but in 2006 they started making public the many interesting talks they have hosted. Today I watched a fascinating talk by Nancy Etcoff, a psychology researcher based at Harvard: On Happiness And Why We Want It.

Etcoff discussed her studies on the psychological basis of happiness, and pointed out a number of interesting points. Most interesting to me was the evidence that evolution has led us to bias the negative far more heavily than the positive: in other words, the impact of a bad thing happening to us is far greater than the impact of a good thing. Etcoff used the examples of how we are many orders of magnitude better at detecting the taste of something bitter than we are at detecting the taste of something sweet; and the "five to one" ratio identified by marriage counsellor John Gottman as the ratio of positive to negative interactions that indicates a healthy relationship that is likely to last. "People are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain," she says.

How does this reflect in game design? Specifically in MMO game design, since that's what I do? It seems to me that MMOs have already learned to cater to this behaviour to some extent. Players are given a constant flow of positive feedback in most modern MMOs, and the negative impact of death is increasingly minimized. A player levelling up in a modern MMO may do so by completing a series of small, simple quests, each of which provides positive feedback and probably a reward upon completion. Alternately, they may level up by killing a series of monsters, each of which drops a treasure chest or awards some kind of tangible reward in addition to experience, again reinforcing the "you win!" message. But is this conscious design, or just that the games have adapted to what seems to make the players happiest? I think for the most part it's been the latter - mainly trial and error, through observing how the players react to different things and changing the game (or planning the next game) accordingly.

(In a PvE -- player vs environment -- game, it's far more possible to control the variable to provide a player with positive reinforcements far outweighing the negative ones. In a PvP -- player vs player -- game, however, this is far less possible. In PvP environments, if one player wins it means another loses, so it's much harder to ensure all players have more positive experiences than negative ones. It would probably be a revealing study to compare player happiness levels within a game that has both PvP and PvE environments, and see to what degree those levels are influenced by game design decisions.)

Another interesting TED talk on the topic of happiness is Dan Gilbert's question, Are We Happy?

Gilbert's talk is well worth watching in full, but in it he discusses a series of experiments in which college students were divided into two groups. One group was offered a choice of two photos and told that they could change their mind and come back to swap their choice for the other one at any time if they wished; the second group was also told to choose but that their choice was final and irrevocable. After a week, the first group was distinctly UNhappy with the photo they chose compared to how they rated it on the day of choice, while the second group was significantly MORE happy with the photo they chose. However, when a third group was asked if they would rather have the flexible choice or would rather have an irrevocable decision to make, the majority said they wanted the flexibility -- even though this would clearly result in them being far less happy with the photo they finally ended up with.

Gilbert's data demonstrates that while people think they want flexibility and choice, in actual fact, they are measurably happier with what they're given when they have no choice at all. This too raises some questions about game design. While players are constantly clamoring for more choices and more options, are we in fact actually making them happier? Or do they just think they will be happier with more choices, as the third group of college students were? Would players be happier with quest rewards that offer no choice, rather than allowing them to select which reward they want? Would they be happier with a smaller variety of classes, class abilities, or races? I don't believe that less is better in all situations, but I do think in some cases it might be best not to offer options. In many class-based MMOs, for example, players often request that they should be allowed to change classes without having to reroll or create an alt. Based on Gilbert's talk, I wonder whether this would really make them happy. Would they then pick one class, and constantly agonize over whether they picked the right one and whether they should change again? Being forced to stick with the one class might actually increase their happiness with the class that they have chosen; it could prove to be a poor design decision to acquiesce to these requests and allow free class changes.

Fascinating thoughts, the way these behaviours are already being taken advantage of in MMOs, and the way they could potentially be in the future. However, that's enough rambling for a first blog post, so I will just heartily suggest following both the links above and drawing your own conclusions.