Game Design as Cultural Practice Fall 2009

The difference between Virtual Worlds and MMOG’s is whether or not something tries to kill me while I do menial tasks for useless trinkets.

One of the most depressing realizations that a cynical person can come to is that no matter what they do, the world will neither change over nor miss their personal existence. Due to some horrendously conservative choices made by developers behind massive environment games, these realizations are not only limited to cynical people but also get to damage the optimism and personal joy of everyone involved.

For my two experiences, I will refer to Club Penguin and my personal transcendence to World of Warcraft Level 50 Night Elf and subsequent account deletion (it was for my own good).

First, let’s argue the blog topic and explain how these two kinds of games intend to be different from one another. World of Warcraft is a consistent reality (you even have to watch yourself fly places!) that has “real” hazards that can render you harmed through “real” consequences. You as the player are constantly in respect of these consequences that can be levied upon you and you must be ready to deal with them by acquiring new gear, teaming up with more and more players, and slaying new fiends.

Club Penguin is a fun loving comfortable environment where there is no real danger other than getting out-shown by your peers by not having enough gold to buy large amounts of gear. You earn gold by playing mini flash games.

In theory, there is a wonderful difference between this casual playground and this grueling fantasy land. Unfortunately, in reality, the difference is almost negligible. Of the attributes I laid out for both types of games, note that neither one had the honor of allowing the player to carve his own impact on the environment. This is because, due to the fact that the designers want to make the assumption that you’ll never be available for something else that the players would deem a fun experience, they must create game scenarios that can be easily instanced for millions of players at the same time regardless of active population. This makes everything boring because everyone has to get the same experience so no one has to go through the awful unbalanced personal experience of having a quest giver absent from their town hall.

For this reason, the game content of an MMOG can never fulfill Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer’s idea of a virtual community as it will never physically “scale with its population” or sustain a remotely dynamic environment. Instead, the designers simply become gate keepers that are in constant fear that their game will be exploited and their in-game economy will become completely broken and fun will be removed. This means that prices are automatically set, but it also means you cannot creatively approach any challenge, because if for some horrible reason everyone found a way to exploit your creative approach then the game’s economy would crash along the millions of subscribers that need to be constantly glued to the banality. T.L. Taylor’s claim that communities are built around the process of “conveying, stabilizing, and... challenging ... identity and community” vanish in sea of pointless tasks that often just get finished by doing the least amount of work necessary, for extremely long periods of time. (Taylor 29) Finally, this means that all conflicts in the game must be simple and repetitive because any large amounts of allotment could be a potential exploit. So, the difference between virtual worlds and MMOG’s is, in practice, watered down to semantics. The game has become so closed that Julian Dibbell’s treasured rape scenario will never even be possible, now we assume this is a good thing. The truth is, though, in a world where can’t get (cyber) raped, we also cannot come into (cyber) contact. Instead we trudge around like a legion of bitterly cynical people, ineffectual against the environment that controls us. The legal mechanisms are static, the environment is fixed, and social structures are produced out of boring necessity; were she dead, Jennifer Mnookin would be rolling over in her grave.

The horrific complaint is not just relegated to MMOG’s either. The desperate need for balance and containment applies to Virtual Worlds and in most cases, much worse ways. Personally, I think the differences between Virtual Worlds and MMOG’s is the difference between micro-transactions and subscription fees. Micro-transactions dominate Virtual Worlds in a very unhealthy way. Second Life is the biggest offender. The fact that someone can make a career out of selling virtual land highlights a problem with our expectations as gamers and a gaping hole with the balance of merchandise in the future(imagine an entire gross domestic product based on virtual land – I don’t want to). While Second Life does get a pass for using a MUD convention treasured by Pavel Curtis  and allows users to sell and own custom content (anyone is allowed to make content and sell it), it does still go to great lengths to make certain plots of land valuable and un-editable. In club penguin I can spend hours upon hours making all the gold I want, but it just amounts to selecting from a list of predesigned clothing, essentially I’m putting hours or money into watered down merchandise. The real problem with this valued merchandise is that once again, economy and balance must be held to such a regard that creative decisions or actions need to be categorized and contained to prevent exploitation.

Why is it that designers must make such conservative choices? Celia Pearce has the fortune of being able to traverse through what one would consider to be the idyllic MMOG/Virtual World, Uru. A Virtual World that had many attributes taken from MMOG architecture, Uru was live for a very short amount of time. Oddly enough, though, creativity soared. Pearce discusses instances where players began to terraform their own environments and create almost a virtual state that carried what she was compelled to call “refugees”. Out of sight from a production herder, the group involved with Uru was able to go to any length they deemed necessary to maintain a community, and in many cases this included penning a whole world in the style of the fictional characters that populate the Uru universe. For most massively available online games, this freedom does not exist, however, the capabilities to have such freedom clearly do.

Brenda Laurel says it best when she says that “being able to see the effects of our actions is what gives us the sense of agency or personal power”. (68) In the MMOG/Virtual World paradigm, the player is, by design, stripped of that agency. After that, what is it that we have? Some big shoulder armor for my night elf and sunglasses for my turquoise penguin, that’s what.

Curtis, P. "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities."  

Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). "A Rape in Cyberspace."http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html

 Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991) "The Lessons of LucasArts Habitat."

 Pearce, C. (2007). "Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft." In Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Friedrich von Borries, Steffan P. Walz, and Matteas Bottger (eds). Basel: Birkhauser. http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceSpaceTimePlay.pdf

Pearce, C. (2006). "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up." Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1, Winter 2006.http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceGC-Jan06.pdf

Taylor, T.L. (2003). "Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them." ion 19, no. 1. 

Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) "Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO." Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June, 1996. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue1/lambda.html

Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

SAmer Ead - Blog 6: Design Reflection.

    “The end condition is determined by the actions.” (DeKoven) While creating ‘Dysphoria’, we team ‘Vignesh Pro Studios’ decided to take the notion provided my DeKoven’s quote to relatively new level. The ambition behind the prototype was to create a setting where the player was not the main character, but they had direct influence on the character’s actions. The game’s design was intended to be a mesh-up between various experiences from other games and the rotoscope feel, primarily introduced in Waking Life. Using no better than Zimmerman’s own words “While every game embodies some kind of conflict, we were drawn towards modeling a conflict that we hadn’t seen depicted previously in a game,” (Zimmerman) to a certain extent.

    During the project pitches period the team cumulatively seemed excited to work on creating a mesh up of preexisting designs creating a new notion of gaming, rather new graphics to an old concept. Even though the path was more challenging we felt like we had a good idea and went with it. The goal was to experiment in hopes to learn new things in regards of game design while prototyping the idea for the class project. As the procedure for building the prototype began, we progressed slowly but surely towards our goals. We were focused on providing a “coherent conceptual model” (Norman) so that once a part of the interface is learned, the same principles apply to the rest of the platform. We also tried to experiment with our user interface in order to increase our efficiency and usability, after all “usability focuses on minimizing complexity and reducing user frustration.”(Lazzaro) The new concept was intended to make things interesting and partially vague, we had planned for the auto-generated responses of the silhouette character not to be so predictable but more spontaneous. They were based on a set of factors called the character moods. As the character interacted with the environment his mood stats changed and his interactions changed. Thus each object placed by the player into the environment would have multiple possible resulting animations. Each of these animations changed the future of the game even for a fraction of a percent to make it a little more intriguing and a little harder for the player. In various instances those slight changes could make render the player incapable of performing certain things. For example, if you place the hose – one of the objects – too close to the silhouette and then try to add the tire to it to try and make a swing, the silhouette might beet the player to the hose and interact with it before allowing enough time for the combination. Please note that in this exceptional incidence the game is experiencing inter-object interactions that are changing the base animations completely to create a new set of chain reactions. “In short a 100% success rate eliminates most of the aspects that make a game fun.”(Lazzaro)

    Unfortunately time constraints forced us to continuously change options, graphics, and evidently remove certain features from the prototype in order to have a finalized draft by the due date. Some of the sacrifices made were vital to the feel of the game, such as having a entire dynamic house that the silhouette could move around, which required depth calculations, time, space, location calculations, which would have transformed our concept into a three dimensional world. But as Professor Celia point out in one way or another multiple times in class, that the higher we aim, the higher the chances of not finishing on time are.

    Personally, my job was to create the artistic gadgets, as I was the only one in the group with previous artistic experience, specifically in vector based art, and exclusively flash. I started by researching for the similar assets that were available in other games in order to be able to picture the final objects, as well as to put the rest of the team into motion with respect to what they should expect to be dealing with. I than designed the user interface, which had to be edited and changed several times in order to better suite our modifications and better satisfy our user’s expectations. I tried hard to make things sharp, and as least cartoony as possible in order not to waste the seriousness of the situation that the character finds thy self in during the game. Once the interface was primarily done and ready to be configured by our programming team, I started animating the character and the objects simultaneously, by multi-tasking, in order to provide as many complete animations as possible, the idea was to have basic silhouette animations that took place if no player interactions took place at all. And then silhouette animations that took place in correspondence to and alongside object animations. As I previously stated more than one interactive animation exists for each of the objects, and thus some cut-down measures had to be taken there as well in order to be able to satisfy the bare minimum quantity while providing and maintaining a high level of quality. Overall, it was hard to put together something that the team members could not visualize or relate to due to lack of previous examples, we tried our best to make use of all the testing, and drafting, sketching, and all other methods taught to us in class in order to come up with a relatively genuine product.

    I admit that it was a daring risk to try to implement a novel concept to our game design, but we put forth a lot of effort in order to come up with something as best we can in the time allotted to us. We all certainly learned a lot about the procedure of crafting, creating, and producing games. My only regret was that we did not have enough time in order to bring to life, or to the extent of life that we would have hoped for, our genuine concept of a mesh-up game.

 

Work Sited:

Norman:

Norman, D.A. (2004). "Affordances and design." http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html

Lazzaro:

Lazarro, N. & Keeker, K. (2004). "What's My Method? A Game Show on Games." In CHI 2004 Conference Proceedings, April 2004. http://www.xeodesign.com/whatsmymethod.pdf

Lazzaro, N. (2004-2005) "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story." Self-published white paper. www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html

Zimmerman:

Zimmerman, E. (2003). "Play as research: The iterative design process." http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/Iterative_Design.htm

DEKOVEN:

DeKoven, B. (1978) The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. (2nd Edition)

 

The Socal Life of Networked Play: Games v Worlds

I have spent time in both MMOG as well as virtual worlds though I have had a much more extensive time playing MMOGs I spent a round a year playing World of Warcraft (WoW) and one of my classes had us spend a lot of time in second life even as far as holding a class in second life which was a bit of a unique experience. One of the main differences I noticed was how much players identified with their characters. The players of a MMOG will often make decisions related to the playability of their character: stats, abilities and so on. On the other end of the spectrum some one playing in a virtual world will make decisions either based off their real world persona or the persona they invent for the game.

            The two worlds also separate by how the rules are enforced. As Curtis mentions the player base of LambdaMOO was controlled by special players called wizards “a special class of [player]…who fulfill both the ‘authority’ and ‘police’ roles. “ The wizards basically enforce the rules and punish others by “toading” the offender’s characters.  This method of punishment can be seen as a more real world punishment then what would be seen in a MMOG. The act of punishing a character in world to keep the current story immersed rather then just banning the character. Virtual worlds often have a more open rule set. In a MMOG the rules are set in stone the only way to break a rule is a glitch. In a virtual world the rules are much more lax giving players more freedom in what they can do but also allowing them to be more harmful at the same time. Dibbell wrote about one such attack that was with in the rules of the game but violated the players on a personal level. A character named “Mr. Bungle” created “the ‘voodoo doll,’ a subprogram that served the not-exactly kosher purpose of attributing actions to other characters that their users did not actually write.” I actually have experienced something like this first hand in wow, not nearly to this extent though. Someone once used word wrapping to make it look like my character was quitting and giving away all of its gold. Well a moment after that happened, my chat box turned pink with private messages asking for hand outs. It was a minor nuisance but seeing as it can be a problem in a graphical game to have some one else put words in your mouth it must be devastating to have some one do that when text is your only means of communication. Also the fact that these players were invested in what their characters were and what they did only compounded the damage.

            Another interesting difference between MMOGs and virtual worlds is highlighted by Farmer & Morningstar. They had to face the community asking questions such as “is an avatar an extension or a human being or a Pack-Man-like critter destined to die a thousand deaths or something else entirely? Is Habitat murder a crime?... Is it all ‘just a game’?” and many other questions. They had to face the questions of a community trying to breath life in to their avatars and ended up developing the early parts of a judicial system to handle crimes. In a game like WoW if you get upset about you character getting killed you’ll usually get told you should have played on a pvp server your character is seen only as an avatar a representation and no one really cares what happens to it. On the other end in second life I’m not even sure that there is a way to kill other players but I’m willing to bet even if there was no real penalty to being killed the players would still feel as if their character had been violated.

            Virtual worlds also carry something not many MMOGs support. Virtual worlds support a lot of user generated content which allows players to mold the world to match their own stories. The text based MUDs are a great example of this because they simply need to come up the descriptions and interactions of objects to be able to add them to the world. Worlds like Second Life also support a lot of user generated content. Second Life lets a player buy land and build what ever they want on it and they can program anything they build to have certain behaviors so anything from a horse to a plane can be made. Though as Mnookin mentions, allowing the users to create their own content can lead to problems of people getting attached to their creations. One interesting example of such ownership is in the case of “Margaux v. Yib, Yib refused to allow a helicopter pad created by Margeaux [to have] a place in her list of outdoor rooms.” Yib’s designs had be come a standard for aviation and because of that her list was seen a public property. This is something that will never happen in a MMOG. The closet thing would be modding the WoW interface with add-ons and macros and those are stored on your computer no one else has permission to those with out your permission. Another example of property comes from Pearce’s “Productive Play”.  In the article the closing of Uru and the immigration of its players to There is talked about. One of the interesting points of this migration is transfer of culture to the player’s new homes and how the inhabitants of There took offense to it. “At first, players created artifacts that were directly derived from the original Uru game. Over time, players who emerged as the artisans of eh group began creating new Uruesque objects.” When their culture began to see resistance, one of the Uru players begin to build “Uru-like objects” and sold them to the There population. These objects spread though out the world and became somewhat of a standard. The player content allowed the culture of another game to be spliced in to the current world and something new was created. A MMOG like WoW wouldn’t be able to support something of this level. The game is too rigid and the effect that players have on the game is too small to change more then how players interact with each other: the world it self can’t really be changed.

            Another diffrence between the two types of games can be seen in Pearce’s “Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft.”like Disneyland, World of Warcraft contains different ‘lands’ with unique theams: on the ‘Alliance’ side (the good guys), there are human areas, elven areas, dwarf areas and gnome areas, while areas such as ‘the Barrens,’ ‘Desolace’ and ‘Mulgore’ are dominated by the ‘Horde’ (bad guys).” Pearce’s quote demonstrates what the main difference between the zones is in a typical MMOG. The zones are split based upon good and evil and that’s the main theme spread across all parts of the world. In a world such as Second Life the theme can change dramatically from zone to zone. For instance one zone may be medieval themed while another is steam punk and a third is Jurassic.

            Taylor discusses another way that designers choices can affect how the players respond to the game or virtual world.  Taylor “Multiple Pleasures” discusses how many female players respond to the way there character looks and behaves as one player said “The avatars do kinda affect the way I think about my characters sometimes […] When I play a wood elf with the happy expression on her face I kinda try to be more cheery.” The mood of the character affects the player’s mood, in Second Life where the player can control facial expressions and clothing and even go as far as to turn their character in to a mythical beast; the user is given a lot of power not only over their character but also how they feel while playing. To contrast, in WoW where the user can only select from preset characters the way they feel about their characters is locked in and it’s a lot more common to run in to the problem of “combat lingerie” which may upset gamers who care about how their characters look.  Taylor also talks about character permanence in “Intentional Bodies” the article mentions that players were billed if they wanted to change something such as their name or appearance though as Taylor says “there was also a desire to allow people a broad degree of flexibility when it came to personal identity and their avatars.” What the programmers later realized was that these fees were too much and it stunted the experimentation that players could have had with their avatars. The opposite ends of this spectrum can be seen in WoW and Second Life. Second Life allows players to change their form on a whim and players will take advantage of this to help define who their character is or who they want them to be. While features can be changed in WoW it comes at a cost either of in game money or real world money depending on the change. WoW’s model stunts a player’s extermination with their avatar by making it difficult and costly to go through the process so players don’t really focus on such elements.

 

Bibliography

Curtis P. Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities.

Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). A Rape in Cyberspace.

Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991). The Lesson of LucasArts Habitat.

Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June 1996.

Pearce, C. (2006). "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up." Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1. 1-8.

Pearce, C. (2007). "Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft." In Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. 1-6.

Taylor, T.L. (2003). Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them. International Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 19, No. 1. 25-34.

Taylor, T.L. (2003). Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online Gaming. Convergence, Vol. 9, No. 1, 21-46.

Alternative social lives in alternative social worlds

    Online communities have always intrigued me.  Even when I was young I would play this small scale online ‘game’ in the JumpStart series that allowed you to move around a theme park and interact with other people.  Granted, users were rarely on, and my parents weren’t crazy about me playing with strangers, but I was fascinated by this idea of alternate identities and creating alternate communities.  It wasn’t until much later in life that I was introduced to MUD’s, arguably one of the deepest forms of online communities out there.  In these MUD’s you can create a character from scratch, to be whomever you what her to be, a truly unique personality, one that does not have to correspond to the physical person at all, but can be a total disembodiment of the user playing.  You can literally create a completely new you with no consequences [2].  While MUD’s are still around today, the more popular versions of online communities come in three dimensions now.  With systems like World of Warcraft and There.com now readily available, there is a wide array of choices for people to be a part of one of these separate societies. 

 

Personally, I have taken part in two distinctly different networked playgrounds: World of Warcraft and Second Life.  WoW is a massively multiplayer game, with set rules, a tiered leveling structure, and objectives to beat.  Second Life, on the other hand, is a virtual world that allows its users the freedom to do what they please without having to follow any sort of narrative or linear path.  Both these platforms are ludicrously popular and, while they definitely share some features, we will see how different they really are.  Why are online communities so popular?  The short answer can be derived from something already mentioned- you can be anyone you want!  Pearce and Curtis both discuss how, in online communities, you can create an avatar that may or may not be anything like your real self, and then inhabit a virtual world with this avatar.  You can act however you want (assuming you follow the laws of the game) with little to zero consequence for social errs.  There is no penalty, for example, for taking all of your clothes off in WoW and running around the city.  And, in the worst-case scenario where your avatar has somehow been irreparably socially demoted, you can always just create a new avatar [1, 5].

Of course both WoW and SL offer this feature, the most attractive feature of online communities.  But the difference is the context in which they are offered.  In WoW you must make a character in a medieval fantasy setting.  You can be an elf, a creature of undead, or perhaps a dwarf, but really there is only a static set of possible characters.  While this limitation seems like a drawback, it actually increases the alternate social experience for people.  Taylor talks about how, in games such as WoW, you are forced into these certain social roles, and then you must live that role.  Players enjoy playing as only an elf, to take part in elf culture, to become knowledgeable in the social responsibilities of this role [7].  Of course, in WoW, your class has a huge influence on your avatar, so this aspect further embeds the players alternate identity.  Personally, I play WoW for this exact reason.  I enjoy taking on an alternate persona, to have responsibilities that do not exist for me in real life but, because of my defined role in the game, people rely on me for.  One character I had, for example, was a healer, and so I had to specialize in jobs and tasks that improved my healing.  To me it is fascinating, and extremely satisfying, to focus on one responsibility and to excel at that, to become a part of the ‘healer’ culture of the Warcraft world, and then to fit into a team as a specialist in my talent.  This aspect of avatar creation is something that sets WoW apart from SL.

Second Life has its own forms of unique attraction, though.  While WoW forces its players to fit into a certain social identity, SL lets the player be anyone she wants.  This ultimate freedom is what pulls people to this type of universe.  In SL you can explore, buy, sell, start a business, build buildings, join a club, start a city, or do nothing.  There are no quests and no story, just a world to inhabit, to be discovered and created by its citizens.  This carries over from MUD’s, where players were “literally building their own universe room by room” [4].  In SL, the players are in complete control to do this, to create their own communities and homes.  It allows people the freedom of the MUD’s but in the visually rich environment of three dimensions, something MUD’s could not offer.  This self-government feature is something that is crucial to the SL experience, but does not always work well.  Farmer and Morningstar, in a discussion about the LucasArts Habitat, say you have to allow the users to get together and develop goals and that it is the responsibility of the developers to recognize what these goals are of their users and to help them achieve it, but to not become involved [3].  Too much control will drive users who want the autonomous control away from the system, while too little control can cause internal issues and create a lack of focus for the world after awhile.

My personal experience with SL was initially enthrallment.  I was excited about the potential of the world, and I had the most fun just flying around to different communities and seeing what everyone had built and done.  But soon I discovered that if you didn’t join any groups or meet anyone, you could become bored extremely quickly.  So I joined a few groups and met some new friends.  I began to settle in a ‘society’ in the world.  But eventually I became bored again and just flew away to new lands, to explore more.  The vastness of the world kept me wanting to continually be moving, but it also made me feel like I could never truly become a part of it.  Maybe I didn’t devote enough time to truly becoming a member of the SL community, but eventually I stopped playing.  I think the similarity to real life (i.e. human avatars, normally structured communities, business, etc.) turned me away in the end.  When I join an online community, I want to really lose myself in an unfamiliar world. 

So it is clear that online games and virtual worlds will approach designing features differently, to cater to the kind of users that will be taking part.  WoW strives to immerse the players in an experience that is very separate from real life, while SL wants to create an environment that its users can then inhabit and manipulate to make truly their own.  But both are systems that are community driven and rely heavily on a graphical interface to push their features.  Modern virtual games and communities are becoming similar to amusement parks where people can come together and take part in attractions, made much easier with the advent of 3D [6].  The people are the focus of these worlds; how they create their avatars, what they do, how they interact with each other.  Creating my avatar is something that is important to me when I join a community online, and Taylor says it is one of the most critical aspects of a successful virtual society.  You must hand as much control over to the individual as possible, so they feel they are truly the ones inhabiting the world [8].  Both WoW and SL do this successfully, if somewhat differently, and they have set the standard for online communities of their kinds.

Works Cited

1. Curtis, P. “Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities.” <http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/curtis_mudding.article>

2. Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). “A Rape in Cyberspace. <http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html>

3. Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991). “The Lessons of LucasArts Habitat.” <http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html>

4. Mnookin, J. (1996). Virtual(ly). “Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a    Special Issue, June, 1996. <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue1/lambda.html>

5. Pearce, C. (2006). “Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up.” Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1, Winter 2006. <http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceGC-Jan06.pdf>

6. Pearce, C. (2007). “Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft.” In Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Friedrich von Borries, Steffan P. Walz, and Matteas Bottger (eds). Basel: Birkhauser. <http://lcc.gatech/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PeaerceSpaceTimePlay.pdf>

7. Taylor, T.L. (2003). “Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online Gaming,” Convergence, Vol. 9, No. 1, 21-46, Spring 2003. <http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/CourseReadings/TaylorMultiplePleasures.pdf>

8. Taylor, T.L. (2003). “International Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them.” International Jounal of Engineering Education 19, no. 1. <www.itu.dk/~tltaylor/papers/Taylor-Designers.pdf>

The Social Life of WOW & SL

    I’ve never been much of a fan of MMOG or virtual worlds.  To be honest, until this assignment I’d never played and had little involvement in any of the games listed.  The only game I’ve ever had any involvement in is World of WarCraft and my involvement in that was watching it slowly ruin my friend’s actual life.  MMOGs and virtual words like World of WarCraft consume players.  The main difference between the two is the objective.  While there’s plenty to keep you occupied in WOW, the game is largely goal-oriented, navigating dungeons, leveling up, and defeating bosses.  Second Life is a virtual world in the truest sense.  Second Life, like a MUD is “not goal-oriented; it has no beginning or end, no ‘score’, and no notion of ‘winning’ or ‘success.’” [Curtis 1]  WOW, though goal-oriented, doesn’t really have an end either.  While you can make it to the final dungeon and kill the final boss the world never ceases to exist, and expansions and new content patches are released a few times a year to continue to expand the world and keep it interesting to users.  What made the game fun for me was the PVP combat WOW offered which makes sense since “conflict is the essence of drama” [Morningstar and Farmer]. 
    Both games allow the players to assume new online identities and promote a certain “commitment to some vision of diversity”.  WOW offers this diversity in a more fantastical way with various races and species, while Second Life restricts you to the human species.  You can do things like customize your clothing (gear in WOW) choose careers/professions, fisherman, blacksmith.  The games differ in their social aspects.  In WOW you join other players to build a stronger party in order to conquer dungeons and defeat bosses.  The incentive to socialize was to find players that would improve your party and help accomplish goals in the game.  In Second Life, I found it hard to find an incentive to socialize.  I guess the allure of the game is that since you’re in a virtual world, a player is less shy, less timid, and feels more comfortable to interact with others than they might in the real world. 
    One thing I find particularly interesting about the games is the impact they have on people’s real lives.  As I stated earlier, my friend became so consumed in WOW that he stopped caring about his real world responsibilities and ended up failing classes and having to drop out of school for a semester, all over a video game.  He told me that people will actually spend ridiculous amounts of time on the game to harvest fake money and items, in order to sell them for actual money in the real world.  In Second Life, you can buy the virtual world money, called Lindens, using real world money.  I guess it shouldn’t strike me as weird though, people are essentially using their money for entertainment in the form of an online virtual world.  Dibbell writes of one case of an online affecting someone in the real world.  In LambdaMOO, an object oriented MUD, a user, Mr. Bungle, wrote a script to create a voodoo doll which allowed for him to essentially control what other users do.  Naturally, he used his powers for evil, sodomizing a woman in the MUD world, traumatizing her in real life.  While Mr. Bungle used the ability to create his own objects for evil, and in a rather unproductive way supporting the argument that games in general are unproductive, Pearce argues that games can be made productive. Pearce mentions a “hybrid entertainment form in which players …produce their own entertainment media.”  Second Life offers this affordance to its community.  They allow people to write code to create objects and sell them in the virtual world.  One Second Life enthusiast actually created her own clothing company within the world, bought land and sold her product to others in the community, all the while making a substantial amount of money in the real world. 
    I’ve seen games affect people’s emotions; getting angry and frustrated at a game they had difficulty mastering.  I’ve seen games affect people’s responsibilities to the real world: my friend neglecting his responsibilities to his school courses.  I’ve also seen the effect the gaming world can have on people’s wallets: watching numerous friends spend money they don’t have on games they don’t necessarily need.  The digital gaming world has evolved immensely since its birth, and is only continuing to grow.

Work Cited

Curtis P. Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities.

Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). A Rape in Cyberspace.

Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991). The Lesson of LucasArts Habitat.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). A Game of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space. In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia. 1-11.

Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June 1996.

Pearce, C. (2006). "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up." Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1. 1-8.

Taylor, T.L. (2003). Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them. International Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 19, No. 1. 25-34.

Making Interfaced: A Jewish Mother's Story

Signing up for a class titled “Game Design”, I automatically assumed that I would re-learn the same processes and eventually design a thoughtless game where the protagonist, a burly strong-man, defeats some ugly ogre to save a princess. Little did I know this class would open my mind to a new train of thought regarding game design. My horizons have been broadened, for the better or worse. Worse for the fact that I sometimes look at the games I play and wonder “How could this mechanic be made more accessible?” or “Why did they choose that design over this?” Now over-analyzing games has always been a hobby of mine, but the aspects that I focus on now sometimes surprise me.

The process of game design and production is a long and difficult road, one laden with obstacles that are often unforeseeable. At the end of the road lies satisfaction and accomplishment like you’ve never felt. It’s one thing when you complete a difficult project for science or math, but when you make a project that’s played and enjoyed by others, it’s a completely different feeling. On this journey you’ve got a crew, and this crew becomes your road-trip necessities: entertainers, navigators, drivers and suppliers. Interfaced is one of the most well-planned and well executed games I’ve worked on, and it wouldn’t have been had I not worked with the team I had. I’d like to use this post to discuss the good and the bad that came out of this process, not only to fulfill the requirements for this assignment, but to force myself to think critically on what’s taken place to better my abilities for the future.

Good – Balanced Team
We were quite stubborn during the “Team Up” game. When Celia brought up the idea of creating balanced teams by means of splitting up certain “cliques”, we weren’t for that. I think Michael was the main advocate for our non-movement, which, at the time, seemed like a bad idea. I mean, who would want to go into a project not sure if you have the right guys for the right jobs? Not only did our original five stick together, we recruited an artist from another team that seemed already established. When all was said and done we had six guys total, and each of us were well versed in what was needed for the group. None of us had to really go out of our comfort zone to build the game, which I think was one of the reasons we were able to develop Interfaced so quickly.

Good – Communication/Planning
As project manager, this was my job. I can’t say that I did amazing, but I can say that we hit the ground running. Nothing was held back – everyone contributed to everything. Before we even started holding team meetings, we had nearly five or six different and equally intriguing game ideas posted on the Wiki Holden created for us. All of our design work was well documented and placed so that the team could view it. When something came up, it wasn’t a conversation between two members rather it was an issue for the entire team to handle. I was able to set up schedules and our team was able to meet those deadlines.

Good – Starting Early
One of our initial goals was to get something playable by IGF. As that deadline grew near, you could tell that some of us had our doubts, but whether we made it or not, starting early would only benefit us. This is where scheduling became important because I was able to setup certain milestones to check ourselves by. I left these vague and allowed the group to flesh them out. One benefit of this early leap into production was the fact that we were able to get a good digital prototype working for testing. Zimmerman mentions that “Initial prototypes are usually quite ugly. Game prototypes do not emphasize aesthetics or narrative content: they emphasize the game rules, which manifest as the internal logic of the game, tied to the player’s interaction.” I couldn’t agree more with the ugly part, but what our prototype did provide was a basis to work off of. Although we still spent the weekend before the IGF submission locked up in an apartment coding, our early build enabled us to start using the art assets level designs rather than waste time staring at a blank screen.

Bad – Accounting for the Player
I’ve heard of many developers making the same mistake – our game comes so easy to us as the creators, so we assume that the audience will pick up the game and be experts like us. Wrong. We wanted to make a unique game that used and altered interface elements from other games. “If you know how interface objects work in other games, you’ll understand ours”. But if you completely change the way these parts work (i.e. making them interactive and functional within the game-world), you’re going to confuse some folks. In our battle to make it intuitive, we broke one of Norman’s rules for helping new users understand what to do:” #2 - Use words to describe the desired action (e.g., "click here" or use labels in front of perceived objects).” It would have saved us a lot of head/heartache during play-testing – Why can’t they understand this?? Why do I have to keep explaining this again?? Luckily we’re planning to continue iterating on the build, so we’re including signs and WORDS (per Norman’s request) to help new players understand our attempted intuitivism.

Bad – Iterating on an Early Build
Even though starting early was one of our good choices, us deciding to use that early build to build the entire game might have caused more pain than it was worth. If we had built the game from the ground-up after most of the design was finished, we could have structured our code in such a way that was would have run into fewer bugs. Instead we faced things that weren’t fixed early enough, yet had so much built on top that it was more problematic than it should have been to fix. Luckily we had three guys on our team that were pretty competent in coding, myself included, so many of the bugs were fixed, but some are still present.

In the end I think we were all very happy with the turnout. Most people really liked our idea and how we implemented it. We created what Lazzaro describes as an “Easy Fun” game, one where “players enjoy intrigue and curiosity. Players become immersed in games when it absorbs their complete attention, or when it takes them on an exciting adventure. These Immersive game aspects are “Easy Fun” and generate emotions and experiences of Wonder, Awe, and Mystery.” (7). It was probably a much different game than we anticipated creating upon entering this class called “Game Design”, but as mentioned before, our minds were opened.

Norman, D.A. (2004). "Affordances and design." http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html

Lazzaro, N. (2004-2005) "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story." Self-published white paper. www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html

Zimmerman, E. (2003). "Play as research: The iterative design process." http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/Iterative_Design.htm

Batman as a Gender Unifier? I know, I was shocked too.

 

For many years the comic book industry hasn’t been treated as a boy’s club of sorts. Most male characters are oddly proportioned muscle bags and the women are all the fantasy of 15 year old teenagers. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the comic industry is even more gender segregated that the games industry. Fron characterized the game industry as,

” [a] adolescent male sensibility that transcends physical age and embraces highly stylized graphical violence, male fantasies of power and domination, hyper-sexualized, objectified depictions of women, and rampant racial stereotyping and discrimination.” [1]

It’s appropriate then that there is so much cross-over between the two, with the latest Endeavour being a new Batman game. At first glance the latest Batman game epitomizes what Laurel describes as “the chasing, shooting, fighting, exploding, hyper-male world of games” [2]. Sure there is one level of game-play where players are taking on 20 gang members at once, (handling them soundly I might add) in a combat system “focused on tactical agency and strategic exploitation of spatial constraints” [3]. Despite this masculine based game-play there is also another level to the Game. Throughout the game the Riddler is giving batman riddles. To solve the riddles players must explore that area, look for secrets, and uncover hidden alcoves. In other words, to complete this portion of the game, players must explore. Fullerton has said that while males tend towards more violent and action games, females are more inclined to play games with exploring [4].These exploring sections usually occur at a very slow pace. Since they are optional there are rarely any enemies and players can just focus on exploring the area. These sections slow down the pace and allow players to enjoy the expertly crafted visuals of the game. This section of the game-play actually reminded me the most of a game mode in Jenkins reading, “Secret Paths encourages us to stroke and caress the screen with our cursor, clicking only when we know where secret treasures might be hidden” [5]. Where the latest batman game truly shines is when it combines the action game-play with the exploration. There are numerous sections where the game puts you in a large room with a number of patrolling guards. The guards have guns so you can not take them head on. The players are encouraged to explore the area  at a slower pace in order to discover the various idiosyncrasies of that particular room. By exploring the room you are given easier and more interesting ways of clearing the room. In my opinion, this is the kind of game-play Laurel was calling for when she stated that “a change must be made to allow for males and females to inhabit the gaming community.”

 

The Power of the Narrative Experience

The Power of the Narrative Experience

 

For me, whether it's a book, film, or video game, the element that sticks with me the most afterward is always the story. A good narrative has the power to make cheap production seem exceptional. Unfortunately, it works the other way around. A poor story can destroy any technically impressive product. An immersive story gives games replayability, in my opinion, although I will concede that good gameplay can also provide replay value.

     I must confess that I have never been intrigued by games that attempt to contrast the conventions. While I  can respect and appreciate the effort, those games never keep my interest, even if the story is enduring. I have to agree with Don Norman in saying the breaking the conventions is failing. Not's not to say that gameplay shouldn't evolve, because it certainly should and it has. Rather, I prefer to see the evolution of games through the emergent behaviours of already conventional games. No offence to the Wii because I feel like it has done wonders for the game industry, but games that try to force some new mechanic always appear gimmicky and unrefined. Nicole Lazarro says that games must be challenging in order to create enjoyment. While I agree with this statement, for me it only applied to conventional games. Often with games that introduce a new mechanic, the difficulty comes from the unfamiliarity with the controls and programming errors with the mechanic. It basically comes down to me enjoying what Lazarro describes as "easy fun", or the curiosity and intrigue that comes from a good story. Don't get me wrong, I love a good challenge. In fact, on my first playthroughs, I always pick the hardest difficulties. But it comes down to how these games affect me long-term and "easy fun" games resonate within me longer.

    I think it was most fortunate that my teammates were on similar wavelengths as me. During brainstorming, our focus was not so much on what kind of gameplay we would implement but rather what kind of story we wanted to tell. Once the story was fleshed out we decided that having a known and proven mechanic (2d platforming) would help complement the story since a new, unconventional mechanic could just push the story into the background. In terms of designing and Zimmerman's iterative design, much of it was playtesting and figuring out how the levels could serve as metaphors for the story. What helped in speeding up the process of our iterative design was the we already had a proven mechanic and all we needed to do was build it around the story we had. Of course, in order to avoid making a game like Spectre which was so focused on the story that all "hard fun" was thrown out, we had to test the levels to make sure that the platforming was being used effectively and in a way that would challenge and entertain.

    In order to make our game more attractive to no-gamers, we took on the task of getting rid of  "fail-states". Essentially, whatever the player did, we tried to give positive feedback to show them that they had not failed the level or done anything else wrong. One could see this as trying to implement a unconventional mechanic but we saw it more as emergent gameplay, gameplay that had derived from the structure of the story. Our story had several endings as there was no way to actually "lose", thus the use of the "no fail-states" didn't seem against our conventional platforming mechanic.

    The concept of our game came down to what our self interests were (story), how we could still create a fun game with an old mechanic, and how our target audience could be expanded through the natural progression of our story. Norman states that the use of metaphor can be dangerous and understandably it is because it can either go over the player's head or be misinterpreted. However, I believe what made our game successful was that the metaphor wasn't necessary to understand in order to enjoy the game. In other words, the best kind of games are those that find the balance between the intrigue and experience, and challenging goals. I believe we came close to that equilibrium.

Bibliography

Lazarro, N. & Keeker, K. (2004). "What's My Method? A Game Show on Games." In CHI 2004 Conference Proceedings, April 2004. http://www.xeodesign.com/whatsmymethod.pdf

Lazzaro, N. (2004-2005) "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story." Self-published white paper. www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html

Zimmerman, E. (2003). "Play as research: The iterative design process." http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/Iterative_Design.htm

The Worlds of Guild Wars and Habbo Hotel

The Worlds of Guild Wars and Habbo Hotel

 

    As a MMOG Guild Wars is rather successful, going off of the free-to-play plan where players are only required to pay once and play without a subscription fee. As a virtual world, Habbo Hotel has become a veritable hit, using a slightly different free-to-play method where even the initial game is free. Both games are similar in their money-producing methods, but that is where the similarities end, because Guild Wars is one kind of game while Habbo Hotel strives to provide a totally different experience. Although the connection to earlier, frontrunners in these kind of games such as MUDs is obvious, there has been enough of an evolution between the two type of games, MMOG and virtual world, that the dynamic and social ethos of the two separate worlds has become wholly unique.

    To start off, there is a certain element to virtual worlds that is usually not apparent in the typical MMOG, especially Guild Wars. This element is the use of more realistic avatars that attempt to show off more of the player individually. This creates a connection between the player and avatar that, as Julian Dibbel puts it, is neither real nor make-believe but is "profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true". In this case, the realization of a more life-like avatar that the player can customize to match stylistic preferences allows a deeper connection during play time. In a game like Guild Wars, all the necessary avatar customization are there, only the whole setting and prototypal look of the avatar can throw off any real-life reflections that are provided with virtual worlds. This ability to suck the player into the character of the avatar is important in how the gameplay of the two games is different, and therefore how the emergent actions of the players create the dynamic world in which these games claim to contain.

    Jennifer L. Mnookin, in her essay on the LambdaMOO phenomenon, emphasized the beauty of emergent laws and social conduct within worlds like Habbo Hotel. She mentions that at times, the legal system can be "whatever the players make of it". Such is the case in Habbo Hotel where players are given the freedom to make their own rooms, whether they be another of the popular "dating" rooms, or just a place for people to chill and relax. Within these rooms the creator is given the power to control and mediate the action, kicking individuals out at any moment and providing their own little rules like "no cursing" or "girls only". Thus, each of these rooms become what Mnookin describe as social clubs, or rather places where the laws are generally irrelevant to the larger framework at hand. Conversely, MMOGs like Guild Wars are based more on a set gameplay with more concrete and universal laws that, usually, cannot be altered or broken without penalty. Again the affordances and constraints between the two different games is clear and can be defined more clearly through Pavel Curtis' description of what MUDs do for the players.

    Guild Wars uses a more standard set of rules to govern its gameplay and part of the reason why MMOGs provide less freedom in this department is the acknowledgment of goals and missions. In order to accommodate this, the game developers cannot allow too much freedom with the rules of play simply because then the "goal" or "end" becomes irrelevant and the game is not a game anymore. Curtis says that MUDs usually ditch the idea of an ultimate goal and therefore people do not play these worlds as games but rather just as social experiences. Such is the case for Habbo Hotel where there is never a clear "win" state that everyone is striving for. Some could say that their ultimate goal is to have a high level pet, or maybe have the biggest room in the hotel. But, these are all user-created goals, much like everything else in Habbo Hotel, and Curtis describes this as a key component to MUDs and virtual worlds. Chip Morningstar and Randall Farmer mention this as an important part of their premise in "Habitat", basically the forward motion of gameplay through the purely created achievements of self-fulfilling goals. That's not to say that Guild Wars is totally rigid in their system. Interestingly, one can observe a real time shifting of the economy, generally in terms of fluctuating prices of items. Like Habbo, Guild Wars has  a distinct system of trading and sell/buy that changes dynamically based on player interaction. This is perhaps one of the few moments where MMOGs can claim to be moving towards what Celia Pearce says as the threatening of total power from the producer and putting part of the media creation within the hands of the players. Such is the case for MUDs and virtual worlds where self-creation is encouraged and in fact necessary.

    It is interesting to note that T.L. Taylor talks about the tools given in MUDs and virtual worlds as ways for people to shape an identity and embodiment. However, Pearce says that for a commitment to the idea of a community, there needs to a some persistence. In Guild Wars, once a character is picked, the player is stuck with that character and not much customization is provided apart from surface level clothes and such. This allows for, as Pearce puts it, a way for the player to maintain the same role throughout the game. Habbo Hotel, in attempting to allow total creative liberties, allows the changing of the avatar to a full extent. Skin color, hair, and animations can all be changed, from one minute to the next.  Players of Habbo Hotel can approach the game in a much different way because they are not required to stay within the rules for even their identity.

    At a cursory glance, the two separate worlds of Guild Wars and Habbo Hotel seem similar. They both provide the platform on which people can socialize and engage in apparent goals and activities. However, a closer looks shows that virtual worlds indeed try to provide a different experience, one less interested in having gameplay, but rather giving free reign to play how you wish. MMOGs at times can seem like they are attempting to portray this concept of user-created worlds, but ultimately they are just allowing social interactions within a preset world.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Curtis, P. "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities." http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/curtis_mudding.article

 

Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). "A Rape in Cyberspace." http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html

 

Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991) "The Lessons of LucasArts Habitat." http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

 

Pearce, C. (2007). "Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft." In Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Friedrich von Borries, Steffan P. Walz, and Matteas Bottger (eds). Basel: Birkhauser. http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceSpaceTimePlay.pdf

 

Pearce, C. (2006). "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up." Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1, Winter 2006. http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceGC-Jan06.pdf

 

Taylor, T.L. (2003). "Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them." International Journal of Engineering Education 19, no. 1. www.itu.dk/~tltaylor/papers/Taylor-Designers.pdf

 

Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) "Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June, 1996. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue1/lambda.html

Networked Play: Somewhere Between a “Guest” and a “Resident”

I have a confession to make: like many other students in this class, I’m not a fan of online communities, or playing online in general.  Frankly, I find that there are way too many people.  I prefer to play with AI bots, which are less erratic and don’t expect me to communicate with them.  So I embarked on an exploration mission of these online worlds as an experiment.  Honestly speaking, I was more of a “guest” than a “resident,” as Pearce describes the differences between visitors to Disneyland and members of online communities in “Narrative Environments.”  The MMO I looked at was Urban Dead, a text-based zombie game; the virtual world I looked at was Second Life (just because I’m such a maverick).  

I’ll briefly describe Urban Dead (http://www.urbandead.com -- note that it’s free!), since it might be unfamiliar.  It’s a survival-horror text game based, as are many MMOs, on a conflict between two sides: the zombies and the survivors.  Not unlike “Rock Paper Scissors Tag,” players will switch sides easily: survivors can become zombies when they’re killed (unless revived by another survivor), and zombies can be resurrected into survivors again.  Players have a limited number of moves per day -- this is the Kingdom of Loathing model -- and need to find a safe place to finish the day’s turns (they “go to sleep” when out of turns, becoming fair game for the opposing side).  The main emotion is fear, I found -- much of your time is spent barricading structures against attacks, or venturing out to ransack abandoned buildings (which aren’t always empty!) -- and I didn’t think that the text-based nature of the game detracted from the experience.  What is interesting is that the source of this fear is always the players on the other side, since there are no AI-controlled monsters; somehow this made the danger more real, since I knew the zombies were clever and might be teaming up against me.  However, in an interesting inversion of many MMO conventions, the zombies don’t have the ability to communicate with one another (at least, not until they reach a high level).  I’m firmly in the camp of what Bartle, in “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS,” would call an explorer -- I mainly want to do my own thing, experimenting with the world and its mechanics, and find that other people mainly get in the way -- so this constraint suited me just fine.

In other ways, too, a highly-directed, highly-constrained game like Urban Dead is a useful contrast with more community-based games like Second Life; I’ll mainly describe Second Life (which has been done to death already on this blog) as it contrasts with Urban Dead.  

To begin running down the list: Urban Dead does not allow players to create their own objects (humans can create barricades against zombies, but these barricades are not unique and are not a mode of player expression), while Second Life obviously does.  Urban Dead is therefore not “productive” as Pearce defines it in “Productive Play,” since there is no cultural production, art, or meaningful contribution to the game world (save for the fact that the strength of the game depends on having a lot of players altogether); Second Life, by contrast, is built mainly on the work of its residents.  

The fact that Urban Dead is so highly constrained, in terms of the actions it allows its players to take, also means that an effective legal or political structure, as is present in Second Life and many other virtual worlds -- and described, in the case of LambdaMOO, by Mnookin in “Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO” -- is largely unnecessary.  To some extent, the ideal social behaviors are embedded in the game, in the form of its incentives: for example, it is possible to kill other players on the same side, but players only receive half the usual number of experience points.  Other forms of socially-unacceptable actions are basically impossible.  There is, for instance, no way to “rape” another character or take control of them in any way (I refer, of course, to Dibbel in “A Rape in Cyberspace”), since it is only possible to communicate via plaintext; I suppose that one player can say to another, “I am raping you,” but in the year 2009 I don’t think this would raise too many eyebrows.  Virtual worlds like Second Life, on the other hand, are often playgrounds for inappropriate or antisocial behavior, due to the wide range of behaviors available to the player (and, more generally, the extra control that players have over their environments), and therefore require more strict and comprehensive sets of regulations.

Additionally, the fluidity of the players’ identities in Urban Dead -- how one switches sides between zombies and humans -- most likely means that players have less of an attachment to their characters.  Identifying strongly with one’s character is a common feature of online gaming in general, both in MMOs and virtual worlds, and is one reason why women gamers comprise a comparatively larger share of the online gaming market (as described by Taylor in “Multiple Pleasure: Women and Online Gaming”).  Virtual worlds take this a step further, allowing players to construct and personalize their own environment (as Curtis might say, they are “extensible from within”).  

I find that the constraints in MMOs, in general, lead to a more surface-level interaction with the game: as Farmer and Morningstar might point out, MMOs  don’t “trust” players as much -- it’s not possible to “delve into the program’s mechanics” (“The Lessons of LucasFilm’s Habitat”).  This is due, perhaps, to another major difference between MMOs and virtual worlds: the nature of goals, and the incentives that they provide.  Since MMOs are more goal-oriented, players have a much stronger incentive to tweak the game’s rules in certain, very specific directions (stronger weapons, more experience, etc.).  Conversely, one of the primary features of virtual worlds and MUDs, according to Curtis in “Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities,” is that there are no inherent goals; players therefore, in theory, have no directed incentives in which to cheat the game, and thus can be trusted a little more to create their own objects and environments (which, of course, leads us to the need for social regulations and laws, as discussed above).  

Generally speaking, I think that Urban Dead is a more “game-like” MMO than others that have been discussed on this blog: it is less socially-oriented (though certainly there is a community), more specifically goal-directed, and more constrained.  It is also meant to be played in short sessions, due to the limited number of turns per day (this was a bonus for me, as I worry that I would get addicted to a game like World of Warcraft); speaking as a “guest,” it was relatively easy to get into.  Second Life, on the other hand, is the quintessential  virtual world: more social, with more emphasis on your avatar, potentially very absorbing and immersive, highly expansive, and with a relatively high barrier to entry (at least for me -- I couldn’t really get into it).  In other words, Second Life struck me as less friendly to “guests”; I was constantly reminded that I was a foolish newbie, that I hadn’t constructed anything, that I wasn’t really a “resident” yet.  I might actually stick with Urban Dead for a little while, though, and maybe I’ll start to feel “at home” soon among the barricades and abandoned buildings.

Works Cited

Bartle, R. "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS."  The Game Design Reader, ed. Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman.MIT Press:Cambridge, MA, 2006. 754-787.

Curtis, P. "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities."

Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). "A Rape in Cyberspace."

Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991) "The Lessons of LucasArts Habitat."

Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) "Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June, 1996.

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