"Cause thats where they keep the computers...."

Famous Bank Robber Willy Sutton said he robbed banks because, "thats where they keep the money."

Willy, the modern world would have confused the hell out of you.  Frankly, it confuses me.

I like using half-dollars for coin magic.  Their size makes them both seemingly harder to hide while at the same time actually easier to manipulate.  When I was a kid I used to get rolls of them at the Bank.

I have a show coming up in a few weeks and I need to start practicing.  I went to 3 different banks, all of who gave me nothing but dumb looks when I asked for a roll of half-dollar coins.

I don't get it.  The government is still minting them, where are they going?  Aren't the banks supposed to be the oens who distribute currency?

I guess these days tha banks aren't where they keep the money, but just where they keep computer records.  In the end, I had to order them directly from the US Mint and pay $1.25 a peice by the time I added in rush postage.

Its a very weird world I find myself in.

Redefining Virtual Environment

Yesterday I gave the keynote at the Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments Workshop at the IEEE VR conference.  My address ended with the following quote and contention:

Jeff Kesselman's Theorem
A MUD universe is all about psychology. After all, there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics.

Now I'd never be quite so obviously egotistical as to name that myself.  I was gifted with the title "Jeff Kesselman's Theorem" by Raph Koster about 12 years ago when I posted that statement to the MUD-Dev mail list.

Little did I realize I'd come to revisit it a dozen years later.  But in that intervening time, phenomena like Facebook have proved me right.  Facebook is a virtual world as real to its participants as any 3D rendered space.  It has its own rules and culture and, most importantly, it has an intricate web of human interrelationships.

Because that is what makes a world.  Not hills or trees or any of the things we render so well today, but people and relationships.   In many ways, the start of the shift of our way of life from 'real worlds' to 'virtual worlds' was probably the telephone.  Psychologists tell us that this is what teenagers spending long horus on the phone were doing, creating and dwelling in their own little virtual world of close inter-relationships.  If you have someone you call regularly to "stay in touch", thats what your doing, maintaining their presance in your world and you in theirs.

But if rendered mountains and 3D animated avatars arent really  the core of a virtual world, then what is?  What is the fundemental component  that makes a virtual world possible?  I believe its identity.  A continuos identity allows us to recognize each other and form beliefs and opinions about each other over time.  Without that, there could be no relationships. An unusually large percentage of the human brain seems dedicated to recognizing faces.  This reinforces how important identity is in our daily lives.

Some Japanese believe that there are many "you"s.  There is the you that you perceive yourself, plus the individual unique version of you that exists in the mind and perceptions of every person who knows you.  A deep and thought provoking idea that once again speaks to how closely identity and relationship are tied together.

At CampFU we have no 3D rendered environment.  But we have a continuous sense of identity.  Your personally designed avatar is what others see on the site and in every game you played with them. As we roll out all the features, will also have a sense of presence.  You will know when your friends are "around" on the site and have some idea of what they are up to.

And that makes CampFu a virtual world as real as WOW.

Virtual summer is here

Well,

CampFU opened its doors to campers this weekend. As in any new online system like this there were a few creeks and groans under the sudden load of real, uncontrolled users.

In particular, the automatch system that finds others for you to play with is straining and needs some tweaks. I want to assure all our new campers however that the rebel monkeys are hard at work this weekend on this and other improvements and you should see rapid evolution of CampFU into a smooth and seamless experience over the next few weeks.

We have a whole lot of additional features planned for the site once the basics are running smoothly, including various ways to form on going teams and social connections. This is all being supported by The Monkey Wrench, our real-time collaborative social-gaming web platform. Down the road you can expect other, different sorts of virtual environments to join the Monkey Wrench family of online experiences.

So come on down and check it out. And if you happen to play with someone names C_T_Orangutan, be kind 'cause thats me!

Another one bites the dust

Well, a once promising MMO is going down in flames. All though the arm-chair pundits are all repeating the common-wisdom. We all know that common wisdom is neither.

Its the usual death-watch chatter. "Nothing can beat [fill in current market favorite here]!" We all know from history that's false. If it weren't, we'd be playing Ultima Online right now. "It shipped too early!", well, that certainly doomed Everquest, or a whole host of other MMOs that went out buggy and incomplete and went on to be major market successes.

That one annoys me particularly because I think it shifts blame from the true culprits for AoC's demise. Yes, there were serious technical issues but thats never stopped an MMO from being successful before. Hardcore MMO players will put up with a lot IF they feel they are being included in the process of fixing the issues. Complaints about incomplete content also fail to acknowledge that the content that WAS included at launch was unique and compelling in a way no other MMO (including the much vaunted WOW) has managed to hit. Since then AoC has filled out the gaps in content that did exist.

The game and quest designers did a brilliant job and deserve recognition for that. The artists did an amazing job and also deserve proper recognition. And the programmers... well, they did no worse then on most games these days, especailly early stage MMOs.

The blame for the crash and burn of AoC *must* fall squarely on the shoulders of Funcom management and their total mishandling of their game's community. To begin with, the game shipped with infuriatingly inadequate customer support. You placed a ticket in the queue, and then about 6 hours after you had gone offline, they'd send you a note saying that they couldn't help you because you weren't online any more and wipe out your ticket. This is a true "customer disservice" system, one seemingly designed to take upset customers and make them more so.

To compound the problem, they outright dissed the PvE RP community, refusing to even answer questions as to why they wouldn't give them basic courtesies, like marking one PvE server an RP server, and instead fawned over and catered to the tiny hardcore PvP minority. After being ignored for the better part of the year and by two successive producers, many of the RP PVE people like myself came to the conclusion we weren't wanted and left.

It wasn't long before AoC gained the reputation of a "PVP gank-fest" discouraging further players from even trying it.

No, the blame for this business failure, as is almost always the case, falls squarely on the shoulders of management. In the end AoC was the Commodore Amiga of MMOs. Those of us old enough to remember can think back to when Commodore bought Amiga. They gained what was a brilliant, decade ahead of its time art machine. And they tried to sell it as a business computer for 4 years and ultimately failed. AoC is a brilliant exploration/questing game. But their management decided to sell it as just another ganker-PvP game. And thus, it failed.

If there are lessons to be learned here they are not "don't try to beat WoW" but "take care of your customers and they will take care of you." Its also not to get distracted by the clamoring of a minority, however vocal. Especially one who, by their very nature, chase others *away* from your product. Instead focus on your core strengths and serve the largest group you can find that they address.

Deduction or Induction? A classic nerd debate

I've been working on my own game system, MUTT.  MUTT has a detective skill that I call "induction."  This is because I firmly believe that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the wrong word when describing Sherlock Holmes.

A good nerd-friend challenged me on this somewhat classic debate: whether Holmes induces or deduces his answers.  Below is the argument my discussion with him produced.

The word "deduction" has a variety of meanings, as anyone can find if they go to the dictionary.   Debating such meanings relative correctness would be pedantic and pointless.  However Sherlock Holmes is often held up as an example of deductive reasoning in a formal sense. IF we limit our discussion to that issue: does Holmes formally deduce his results, I think the answer has to be no.

I would suggest in fiormal terms a typical Holmes argument takes the following form:

(1) If P then Q
(2) If P then S
(3) If P then T

Q S and T are all true, there for the only reasonable conclusion is P.

He is certainly not alone in this reasoning. This is classic court-room stuff and even has a legal term-- "the preponderance of evidence." But is it, formally, deduction? By deductive reasoning it is clearly fallacious. Just because P is *an* explanation for Q S and T does not make it automatically the *right* explanation for Q S and T. In fact, there is no logical requirement that Q,S and T have the same cause at all, just so long as there are no other predicate statements that say the disparate causes cannot logically co-exist.

Holmes himself in fact shows us this when he describes his own methodology-- "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." ^[4] In order for this claim to be logically true, it presupposes the omniscience to know all possibilities and impossibilities. What Holmes really means is "When I have eliminated every other possibility I can think of, the one left must be true." Which fits with his ego, but is hardly a logical conclusion.

SO either Holmes does a very bad job of formal deductive reasoning, or in fact engages in educated guesswork from specific bits of evidence leading to a theory of the whole cause, which would be reasoning by induction. I chose to believe the latter.

So what do YOU think?  Comments are open.

CampFu is coming!

I need to congratulate and acknowledge my *super* team here Rebel Monkey.

They have worked long and hard and given up many a bannana break to get us here but CampFu is almost ready to beta!   This will be a soft launch so, if you signed up for the beta, watch your email for your invite to go camping.  If you HAVENT signed up for the beta, you can do so right now at www.campfu.com 

Don't miss out on the fun!

2008 The end of the MMO?

Many people are looking at the lackluster performance of last year's MMO hopefuls and sounding bells of doom for the genre.  While I *DO* think the genre is in trouble, I think most of the commentators miss the real reasons.

In "Kill Ten Rats: Tao of the MMO" the author suggests that the subscription business model is at fault.  While I am all for experiments in business models, and in fact we are doing something very different at Rebel Monkey, I don't think his argument holds much water.  In the same breath he talks about his friend dropping $200 on Steam games.  At $15 a month, thats only $180 a year's worth of gameplay.  By the time/value equation that many pundits are saying will drive leisure spending in the down-turn, thats a bargin!

BUT its only a bargin if you are actually being entertianed.  And that I think is where the true short fallls have been.  Lets look at some of the less then spectacular showings of last year....

"Age of Conan".   This game had promise.  Although ultimately the same questing-grind as every other MMO, the quests were at least fresh and original and didn't feel like you were doing the same things over and over again.  In addition the art direction was simply stunning. This is mreo then eye candy, this directly plays into the "explorer" mode of gameplay.  Finding a new, different, and gorgeous vista open out before you with every new area you came across made that an unusual pleasure in AoC.

Unfortunately, AOC failed to live up toits promise in two ways.  The first was technical, released before it was technically ready it generated a floodof customer service issues that Funcom was ill equipped to handle.  Furthermore, Funcom made the classic MMO mistake of failign to grasp that, when you eneter the service business, customer service is the heart of the business.  Their CS support was inadaquate, hastily thrown together, and reeked of condescension and lack of respect for their customers. 

In the end, it was bad management that doomed AoC more then anything else.

Warcraft.  To be fair I never really expected Warcraft to be very successful.  While the GDW Warcraft miniatures table top game is a stand-out in its space, miniatures have *always* been a niche within the niche of wargames.  It really didnt strike me as a property with much "legs."  Havign said that, Mythic has dopne a nice job with it. 

Squint and what Warcraft really is, is Dark Age of Camelot: The Sequel.  They have perfected their RvR concept that first appeared in DAOC and moved it from an endgame experience to an important and integrated part of the leveling up process.  Its is  also painless PvP and thus the only fun I've ever had IN PvP. 

Unfrotunately, in the end, it suffers from a number of core MMO problems.  The ever-war that cannot be won or lost but just tilted back and forth grows tiresome and boring.  Its a story of battle after battle without there ever being a real purpose or conclusion.   The Public Quest idea is a nice one, but as you go up levels it gets harder and harder to put together pick-up groups to do them.  The zones, while havign soem superficial variety, are  in the end uninteresting and do not inspire the same exploratory "wow" factor that AoC did.

I DO have to give mythic credit for understanding they are  in the people business and showing more respect for their custoemrs then FunCom.

In the end, I think MMOs ARE suffering, but not from their busines model but rather from a lack of real progress in game structure.  The only successful formula in entertainment is "do domething different."  And it is here IMO that MMOs have really suffered.  Whatw e have seen are, at most, tiny steops and evolutions.  Take a look at the language MMO players use to describe their MMOs.  The word you hear most often is "Grind."  "Grind" is NOT a fun word.  I don't knwo why MMO develoeprs havent clued into that yet.  If anyone EVER says they are "grinding" your game, you have just failed to truly entertain.

And that, IMHO, is why the genre is collapsing.  I give some props to the MMOS of 2008 for trying new thingsm but in the end, they just arent enw or different enough.  Rather they are refiniements on gameplay that the players have seen before, done before, and are tired of.

My prediction is that the next break through MMO will do gameplay very differently from MMOs of the past.

Who knows, it might be us ;)