Feet of Clay

What is best in life?

2008-07-07T01:27:00.006-05:00

For Funcom, not their retention rate or staying power. It's impossible to say exactly what the sales numbers were other than a 1M "sell-in" (shipped boxes) number, but whatever they were, they don't seem to be holding, XFire shows them off 50% on playing time from their peak, anecdotal evidence all leans towards "massively cool to start, but gets old". Apparently in their quest to turn their system up to 11 by going to level 80, they stretched 30 levels worth of content across 60, and it shows.

Funcom has had problems with their launches before, Anarchy Online came out the summer before DAoC, had absolutely awful technical issues (at one point, a bad patch deleted the Windows registry of the unfortunates who got caught by it). They extended their free time, extended it again, and didn't start actually charging customers until one week before Camelot launched. We were very thankful.

Now they've got a problem where they tied the combat system to animation lengths (which looks really cool), but female characters have slower animations while doing the same damage. So starting a female character is effectively a 20% melee penalty, and they are saying it will take weeks to fix because the client controls combat timing.

I can't come up with a neat summation of how many different kinds of mistake they made there without pouring salt in a wound that no doubt already hurts Funcom plenty. All I can say is that these wounds are inarguably self-inflicted.

h/t to Tobold for the link to Classy Gamer

Why I Won't Be Buying Spore

2008-07-01T04:21:00.003-05:00

Because SecureROM still sucks big donkey balls.

I'm not rootkitting my own computer with an application that messes up my DVD-R, firewall, anti-virus, etc. The creature creator is cool and all, and Spore is exactly my kind of game, but I refuse to have any part of this.

Will Wright, you're a genuis, one of the few people who can truly claim the title of "Designer God". So why are you letting these mental midgets screw over your fans?

Somebody Had To Do It

2008-06-28T01:37:00.004-05:00

Well, it looks like we finally have the first case of a crime spree inarguably inspired by GTA. Some teenaged idiots in Long Island ran around hitting people with sticks, bats, and crowbars, apparently knocking out someone's teeth in the process. They were going to carjack an old lady, but unlike the game, scared motorists lock their doors when you start yelling at them

UPDATE: Later reports indicate that the boys involved did not in fact makes these claims, that the police generated this theory and some of the boys did not deny it. So this is just more of the same old hysteria.

For Sale: One Lifestyle, All Inclusive

2008-06-27T21:33:00.002-05:00

There's this guy in Australia who is selling his life on eBay. Not a chance to kill him, but a chance to step into his shoes and take over his life. You get:

LIFESTYLE
Perth, Western Australia
Hobbies
HOUSE
VEHICLES
Car
Motorbike
Jet Ski
Bicycle
OTHER GOOD STUFF
The Spa
Home Entertainment System
TV, DVD Players, DVDs and CDs
Computer Equipment
Cameras
Sofa and Rug
BBQ, Outdoor Setting, Hammock and Outdoor Equipment
HOUSE CONTENTS
FRIENDS
JOB

How much is this really different from what happens when you buy a character in an MMO?

Hyperpolitics

2008-06-26T12:35:00.003-05:00

Mark Pesce (one of the inventors of VRML) blogs quite regularly about the social implications of the way we're all connected. He's got an entry up about how "hyperconnectivity" is changing politics:

For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.

Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused, as if he’d never given the question any thought, before answering, “I don’t know. I don’t believe anyone’s thought that far ahead.” There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he’d like to see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.

I've been thinking for quite a while now that Obama is not so much leading a movement, as he is marching in front of one. One of the big questions is if he can lead it somewhere it won't go on its own.

The verdict appears to be "No". Obama has, for strategic political reasons, chosen to embrace the "Telecom Immunity" of the recent FISA law. The reaction from the "Netroots" has been something other than revolt, but definitely not compliance. They're still going to back him fully for President, but simulataneously they are raising money to extract retribution on the architects of the law and some representative examples of the congressmen who voted for it. Last I checked, they were closing on $500K just for that purpose.

The movement is the people. Obama, or any other candidate, is just its tool, not the embodiment.

Politics as RTS

2008-06-25T19:06:00.002-05:00

Scott pointed to this analysis of the presidential elections this cycle as if they were a game of Dawn of War. Although political insiders have long been fond of using sports or poker metaphors for politics, this analysis is a far more accurate reflection of what has actually happened, if you're a gamer. Anyone who has played an RTS but doesn't follow politics is going to understand far more about what happened this year because of this analogical breakdown of the season than they would if any other metaphor were used.

Politics is a complicated game, but it is far more game-like than many other things we've long been comfortable using game metaphors to discuss (business, marketing, careers, etc.).

Oh yes, John McCain. Forgot all about him did you? That’s the story of a three-player FFA. Two opponents go at it for the whole game, only to be run over by the unmolested player. But it’s not such a slam dunk just yet. McCain has spent nearly the entire game without a single serious fight. But he hasn’t expanded aggressively, nor built up troops. In fact, I can’t tell you what exactly he did, but when Obama is making a push for vehicles, and STILL has resource and troop advantages after taking out one of the most formidable RTS players, you did something wrong. I mean, McCain is BARELY getting vehicle out now. That’s unacceptable.

In a gaming metaphor, McCain's been trying to turtle, consolidate his base, but not very effectively. He keeps changing his mind about the layout, and blowing up bits of it at random. Now is when he should be arriving with a horde of units to sweep Obama from the board, but although he's building energy units (raising money) like crazy, his unit count sucks and he's left too many open resource points for Obama to grab. Now, he could be working on a devastating superweapon in a secret location (preparing to "Swift Boat" Obama, or an October Surprise like invading Iran), but if he doesn't start contesting for map control soon, he's going to have a hell of a lot of ground to conquer.

Cloning vs. Stealing

2008-06-14T20:39:00.004-05:00

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." In the games industry, we're always copying each other's art styles, game mechanics, plots, etc. Especially in the MMO world, where 99% of every game is a grab bag mixture of ideas from other places. All's fair, if we had to tip-toe around trying to avoid using ideas that have been used before, we'd have to wait 17 years for the patents to expire to use them (licensing them for a hit-driven business would not work at all). Games would become a non-viable medium. This effect has been seen in other industries, for example the auto industry refused to put air bags in cars until after the patent ran out, because if they had become a standard, required safety feature, they would have been at the mercy of the patent holder.

But at Richard Cobbett's site I got clued in on something much more blatant. Tere's a game called "Limbo of the Lost", and in this game they solved the content problem by using DirectX Spy utilities to copy every last poly and texture from other games, right down to the last detail. Lots from Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but also WoW, Unreal Tournement, and others. They shuffled them around, created a completely plotless adventure game in this world of stolen polys, and released it in Europe. As a game, it's pretty bad. But even if it was good, this goes far beyond the "play-alike" efforts to recreate old games like Ultima Lazarus, or the Spring Engine recreation of Total Annihilation.

The difference here is that the company that put it out has a publisher, and both they and the publisher have lawyers. Where a fan-driven rebuild of an abandonware game usually has to fold at the first hint of legal action, these outfits seem to be prepared to go the distance.

On the other hand, this does bolster an argument I've been making for a while: As we approach the plateau of semi-realism, it becomes more and more feasible to re-use art assets. I was thinking creatures and outdoor objects, not entire buildings, and doing it with explicit permission, though.

UPDATE: Richard tells me that the game backgrounds are strictly 2D, screenshots taken from these other games. Although sucking the models and textures out of DirectX is possible, nobody has done that yet.

Jack Thompson Is Still a Poo-Poo Head

2008-06-05T19:13:00.002-05:00

Jack Thompson Finally wore out his welcome. Doubtless Thompson will try to flout or push the limits of this action, but for all practical purposes, Thompson is no longer a lawyer (at least for the next 10 years).

Pursuing Political Trivia

2008-05-27T19:19:00.004-05:00

This is more a game about politics than politics as a game, but MoveOn has created the Bush/McCain Challenge, the goal of which is to make the player realize how hard it is to tell the difference between Bush and McCain's positions, and further the "McCain would be a third Bush term" meme (and therefore tie McCain to the least popular president ever).

I'm comparatively a political junkie, and I got exactly one right. And that one was almost a gimme, as it featured one of McCain's more well-known quotes.

Forum Warz, For Realz

2008-05-24T13:31:00.010-05:00

So, I'm assuming anyone still having my blog in their newsreader has seen Forum Warz. If you haven't, go play it. If you're easily offended, bite me.

Anyway, if you want to play for higher stakes, John McCain has got you covered.

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you’ve commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center

Got that? Go to one of the targetted blogs, spam the astrofturf talking point of the day, and report back to receive your shiny. If that's not the Forum Warz paradigm adapted to a real political campaign, I don't know what is.

What's even more interesting is the selected blogs that are targetted. The list of "Conservative" blogs:

24th State
A Bama Blog
Ace of Spades HQ
Alaska State Politics
Anchor Rising
Ankle Biting Pundits
Arena of Ideas
Bates Line
Bearing Drift
Bearing Drift Ohio
Bill Hobbs
Blackfive
Bluey Blog
Boots and Sabers
California Conservative
Claremont Conservative
Club for Growth
ConservaBlogs
Elephants in the Blue Grass
Flashpoint Blog
Freedom Dogs
Frugal Hoosiers
Grassroots PA
Hot Air
Hugh Hewitt (Townhall)
Human Events
IlliniPundit
JeffEmanuel.net
Katy's Conservative Corner
Keeler Political Report
Little Green Footballs
Make Blue Red
Mason Conservative
Michelle Malkin
Michigan Conservative Dossier
Montana Headlines
Mount Virtus
NC Republican Roundtable
NW Republican
Okie Campaigns
On Life and Lybberty
Oregon Commentator
Patrick Ruffini
Power Line Blog
Red Jersey
Red Mass Group
Red State
Residual Forces
Riehl World View
Right Angle Blog
Right Michigan
Right Wing News
Save the GOP
Say Anything Blog
Shaun Kenney
Stay Red Kansas
The American Mind
The American Scene
The Corner
The Right Track
The Volokh Conspiracy
ThinkRight Arizona
Townhall.com Blog
Urban Elephants
Victory Caucus
Virginia Virtucon
Voluntarily Conservative
Weapons of Mass Discussion
Western Word
Wizbang Blog
Wizblog

Big list, no? Now, the "moderate" list:

Delware Politics
EnlightenNJ
Politico
The Fix - Washington Post

Not so big, what? Now the "liberal" list:

No, that's not an HTML error. There are no "liberal" blogs listed by default. However, that doesn't mean there are no "liberal" blogs they are targetting. No, you have to get enough points on Conservative targets, get approved for a larger Moderate list, earn enough points there and then you'll see a larger Liberal list.

You have to level up to go into the Liberal zone.... You can't make this shit up. I did guess at something similar a few months back, but damn...talk about taking game design to the "dark side". I don't mean that one of my colleagues is apparently working for a Republican, I mean that using game design principles in this way is distinctly evil and dishonest, in and of itself. And this is primitive, and may not even work all that well, with the way illuminated I can see some really ugly things you could do. It would make whispering campaigns, smear emails, and push polling look downright benign.

No, I'm not going to detail it. Not until I figure out just where the lines between "game design as social empowerment" and "game design as social mindfuck" is.

No Apologies

2008-05-24T01:00:00.005-05:00

There are two "Troop Support" charities I would like to shill for today. The first is "Books for Soldiers".

During the first Gulf War, several of my friends from school were in the reserves and were activated to fight the Iraqis. CNN reported that once the soldiers were deployed, they were faced with massive downtime and were restricted to their base due to the travel limitations set by the Saudi government.

I am a voracious reader and at the beginning of the Gulf War, I had a closet full of paperback books. Books that were not being used. So instead of selling them at the used book store, I packed them up in small care packages and sent them out to all the soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen I had addresses for.

Within a few weeks, I ran out of books before I ran out of addresses. Friends and family members began donating their paperback books and in the end, over 1000 books were sent to the Gulf.

After the war, we received many thank-you notes from soldiers who got one of our books. Unless it was time for them to fly back home, mail-call days were one of the most anticipated events of deployment. Regardless of why the military is deployed, the men and women of our armed services are there for us. They deserve our support and if we can make their deployment easier, then all the better.

Currently, BFS is a non-profit corporation, operated as a ministry of the non-denominational, interfaith Order of the Red Grail church in North Carolina. Click here for our entry on the Secretary of State of North Caroina's website.

BFS needs to raise $70K by November to remain open, so PayPal donations are welcome. They also handle DVD's and Videogames. If you need an excuse to clear out those boxes of old books and movies you haven't touched in years, this is the time.

The other is "Soldiers Angels". They concentrate much more on emotional support of soldiers and their families, as well as discharged veterans and their families.

Who We Are
Our 200,000 volunteer members in over 20 different teams and programs operate internationally to provide letters, care packages, and comfort items to the deployed, and support for their families here at home. We also provide assistance to the wounded, continuing support for veterans, remembrances and comfort for families of the fallen, and immediate response to unique difficulties.

Through special projects, dedicated teams and individuals supporting our troops, we make a visible difference in the lives of our soldiers and their loved ones. To find out how you can get involved, check out the list below

They operate "Adopt a Soldier" along with a lot of other efforts to make things better for our soldiers, veterans, and their families.

Old Theories Never Die

2008-03-03T01:42:00.003-06:00

My MAISE motivations-based theory of player behaviour in games has been reposted at f13, thanks to Schild tracking it down for me. I have been wanting to resurrect it, but my copy was on a laptop that refuses to boot up anymore. I'll probably mirror it on the archive with the interviews and other embarassing dead horses in a few weeks.

All things considered, I think it holds up pretty well, which is kind of disappointing. I would have hoped that by now someone, somewhere would have either improved it, or shown it was irrelevantly wrong. It's a 3 year old theory, for crying out loud, have we done *anything* in the last 3 years but stare in shock at WoW's market share?

Layers Upon Layers

2008-02-29T16:22:00.002-06:00

Below I talked about how your ex-SO's would be able to tack meta-data to you that would follow you around.

Via SmartMobs, here's a dating service with metadata for cell phones. If you wear the Wickd clothing (with visible circular bar code), someone else can look up your profile on Wickd. This makes "getting her number" redundant.

However, how long before there's a site where you can cross-reference off someone's profile and get their history? Those histories already exist in embryonic form. This isn't really a game, but it is an example of what happens when the virtual social network gets mapped back into the real world.

Losing My Religion

2008-02-29T02:51:00.004-06:00

At various points in my career, I've (self-mockingly) used religious language to describe my own process of exploration. I don't take it all that seriously, it's a metaphor, not a description. So working customer service was my "baptism by fire", being a designer at Mythic was my "initiation", the abortive stint as Lead Game Designer at Mutable Realms was my seminary, my blogs and columns have been my pulpit, the period between Mutable and Orbis was "wandering in the wilderness", and so on.

By that metaphor, the last few years have been a hermitage. F13's Yoru alluded to this in the interview we did at AGC last year, when he said I "retreated in your Miyamoto Musashi manner". What I was trying to avoid is a dilemna many game design theorists have fallen into. Either they can continue to be taken seriously, remain "marketable" as game designers, or they can "jump the shark", ala Chris Crawford's infamous "Dragon" speech. There were ideas I wanted to explore that seemed just too wierd, "too hip for the room", and I realized that I couldn't explore them without going down some laughably wrong blind alleys where a public expression of my thinking process would turn me into a self-parody. I joked that I was "Sitting on the mountain, waiting for the master."

In the parable I'm referencing there, a man is seeking enlightenment and hears that on a nearby mountain there's a Master who can give him good advice. He goes to the mountain, but the Master isn't there. He sits down to wait, and while he's waiting more pilgrims come. They ask him questions, he answers them, and they leave. At the end of the parable, he finds out all these people thought *he* was the Master they had come to find. The "Master" he was waiting for arrived when he did.

So, in my highly tortured metaphor, what great revelation do I bring back from the mountain? It's this: Fun is brain reward. Back when Raph Koster came out with his "A Theory of Fun", I pointed out that there were many kinds of fun that did not fit his thesis that "fun" was pattern-matching. Among these were "Performance" (playing a game you have reached a level of mastery in), "Socializing" (playing to interact with others), "Achievement" (playing to rack up loot, score, or other virtual achievements), and "Grief" (possibly just the dark side of social gameplay, interacting with others in ways to cause them distress).

What all of these have in common is that they trigger deep brain pleasure-center activity, at a level below conscious awareness. Gameplay is not in the cards, not on the board, not on the screen or in the code. It's certainly not in the design document. Gameplay is in the mind of the player.

This means it is impossible to have a rigorous craft of game design that is not informed by the best possible information about how the mind works. And you can see how much of the current state of the game design art is defined by our adoption of the tools of psychology, especially Behaviorism and Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs (along with Aesthetics theory and other work on how the environment affects the mind). But it's not enough. We've hit a dead end, and gameplay is becoming commodified, usably equally for celebrity vehicles, advergaming, cross-genre franchises, and other strictly derivative products built out of the commodities of modular gameplay, mixed with marketing and set on "Puree".

So, would that be so bad? Once we've stopped pushing technology, stopped competing on gameplay, we can start working what what we want to actually do in game, what "message" they carry.And there's a good case to be made there, and a lot of truth in it. But I think our understanding of what we're actually doing in gameplay and design is far too primitive for the most part, there's a lot of work left to be done. Ultimately, what we're doing is engaging someone's mentality at a deeper level than even movies. Books tell you a story, movies show you a story, and both have various tricks for "identification" and "suspension of disbelief", ways to make you treat the things told or explained as real experiences, drawing you into the message and taking the viewpoint for your own.

In games, the viewpoint is your own. When the game tears control from you and forces you to watch a cut-scene where your character makes a decision without your input, it jars. A couple of games have used this to good effect: Max Payne ("You're a video game character, Max."), and BioShock. When it tears your viewpoint out of the character and drops it into another, you either lose identification with the character, or you ignore it and treat both characters as "you". You are the one making the choices, what happens on the screen is just feedback. Changing viewpoints and lack of input are annoying, but ultimately they aren't "you".

In the mid-game false climax of BioShock (if you haven't played BioShock yet, I'm not going to spare you the spoilers), you confront Andrew Ryan, which they have built up to as a traditional "boss fight". You break into his office, and...there's nothing there. No enemies lying in wait, no keys to collect, no codes to guess, just a not-particularly difficult geometry maze to navigate. You do so, and find Ryan....

Only to go into a cut-scene. Normally this kind of thing would make me annoyed, but very quickly you realize this is no ordinary cutscene. "Would you kindly put down your weapons." You proceed to find out that you can't resist anything you're told that is preceded with the words "Would you kindly." You're mentally programmed to have no freedom where those commands are concerned. Andrew Ryan (who you have just realized is your father) proceeds to order you to beat him to death with a golf club while he gives a monologue about how "A man chooses!" You, of course, have no choice at all, it's a cut scene.

So Andrew Ryan dies, and you find out that "Atlas", the freedom fighter that has been whispering in your ear, is actually "Fontaine", a crime boss. And he says "Would you kindly pull that lever and turn off the self destruct." You're no longer in a cut scene, but it doesn't matter: There's absolutely nothing else you can do. No matter how long you wait, no matter how thoroughly you explore the area, all you're going to get is occasional taunts from Fontaine. Eventually, you pull the lever, you have no choice.

This throws into high relief a fundamental attribute of game design: Most choices aren't actually choices. Follow the right path, or fall off the cliff. Fight the NPC, or be killed. Pick the right character attributes or skills, or be a gimp. Develop your economy in an RTS, or be "free beer". The only meaningful choices are those that lead to different endings of the game that are equally desirable, and in most single-player games there is only one, or at most two, desirable endings. Everything else is a false choice, a "difference that makes no difference."

Now, you can go to great lengths to disguise this. Mass Effect is probably the best example of this, all through Mass Effect you are presented with the apparent opportunity to make choices. You have alternative conversation choices, side quests, and the often-present meta-choice to follow the rules in pursuing your mission, or to be completely ruthless in pursuit of it.

And ultimately, they're all false choices. Blow through the main storyline skipping all side quests and optional dialog, and you're going to wind up at the same final boss battle, with pretty much the same level of combat capability. And after you win (and after all, you have no choice but to win), you're going to be presented with the only actual choice of the entire game: Which NPC to crown Galactic Overlord. Trigger final cut scene, the end.

If Sid Meier is right when he says "Good games are a series of interesting choices," how do we make the choices interesting when they aren't really choices? Even inside the context of the game itself, they are a "difference that makes no difference," and therefore is no difference at all. Sure, we can fake it, but sooner or later, won't the players see the pattern and get bored with it?

If you wanted to make a game with 10 meaningful choices, you would have to have 1024 different endings, each of them equally desirable. Good luck with that. So, by the postulates we've come to accept (and the Meier quote is pretty widely accepted and elaborated on), there is no such thing as a good game, and short of holodeck-level technology that can simulate a world and realistically human inhabitants, there can't be one. We're all wasting our time.

Of course, maybe a choice doesn't have to be meaningful, to effect the ending, to be interesting? Going back to Mass Effect, you have a lot of choices presented to you about how to develop your character. You start with your Class choice, playing as an Adept will be very different from playing as a Soldier. And what skills you choose to develop will matter, as will what skills you choose for the NPC's (or if you let them autotrain). These are interesting choices, that do not effect the outcome of the game, but the process that the player uses to go through it. It's not the ending of the game that represents the interesting choices, but the experience the player has on the way to that ending. The journey isn't half the fun, it's all of it.

Gameplay is not on the screen, nor in the storyboard, but in the mind of the player. The question of "What is fun?" comes back to inescapably deep questions about how people think.

Internet Funny

2008-02-27T22:22:00.001-06:00

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd... "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered "sure".

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep. "That is correct; take one of the sheep." said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.

Then the shepherd says: "If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?", "OK, why not." answered the young man. "Clearly, you are a consultant." said the shepherd. "That's correct." says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answers the shepherd. "You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don't know crap about my business...... Now give me back my dog."

1 Million Strong, And Growing

2008-02-27T18:01:00.003-06:00

Barack Obama passes 1 million donors. This is so unprecedented, there's no way to describe it without getting hyperbolic. It's not just record-breaking, it blows past all previous records for single-month campaign fundraising and approaches the typical profile of an entire election cycle.

Hillary's campaign has been making noises about "closing the fundraising gap", and Hillary spent most of last week attending fundraising dinners around DC. But I think the gap they think they're closing is with last months 170K donors, $36M performance by the Obama campaign. Just as they thought their 4000 "Precinct Captains" in Texas was a lot because it was more than had been seen by the Democratic party in that state since LBJ (Barack has over 8000), they think the $25-35M they just raised is a lot because it approaches what Barack raised last month (EDIT: The officially leaked figure is $35 million).

Meanwhile the Barack campaign is evolving on "Internet Time" (when was the last time you saw that phrase used without sarcasm?), and just blowing their doors off in every way. Around the 2nd of march the Obama campaign will probably release the estimate for February fundraising, and the Clinton campaign is going to fill their shorts. We're talking $60M, minimum. Could be more, even a lot more. The fact they've let the 1M donors milestone pass without comment makes me suspect we're talking about an insane figure, perhaps north of $100M. To put it in perspective, the Clintons raised $107M in all of 2007, and that was a record for a primary campaign, which they crowed about everywhere in service to the "Inevitability" narrative.

The Campaign Game

2008-02-22T16:47:00.002-06:00

Rember that comment below about how politics, especially the campaign/activism process, would become more gamelike? The Obama campaign is ahead of me, this is the email they just sent out to their "Precinct Captains":

It's been one year since Barack Obama spoke to thousands of enthusiastic, inspired, and hopeful Texans at a rally in Austin. Tonight, Senator Obama will address another large crowd in front of the Texas State Capitol -- but much has changed since February 23rd, 2007.

We are as hopeful as we are focused, as inspired as we are organized. Our enthusiasm has moved millions. After winning 25 states, including 10 straight since February 5th, Barack is back in Texas -- and Texas could be the most crucial state yet.

Early voting over the past three days has nearly eclipsed total early voting in the 2004 Primary. We still have 7 days until early voting ends on Friday, February 29th. Don’t wait to stand up for change – click here to find an early voting location near you, and cast your vote for Barack Obama now.

We need each and every one of you to make at least 50 calls per day for the next 12 days. We know it is asking a lot, but the stakes are high, and our moment is now.

This won't be easy, so here are a few extra incentives::

MEET SENATOR OBAMA
Make the most calls (statewide) between now and 9pm, Thursday, February 28th, and we'll arrange for you to meet Barack in person!

PHONE CALL WITH BARACK
The Precinct Captain with the most calls (statewide) between now and March 4th will receive a personal phone call from Barack!

AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF BARACK'S BOOK
The top caller from each region between now and March 4th will receive a signed copy of one of Barack's books. (Ten winners statewide!)

Log on to MyPrecinct now, and start contacting voters. Need help? You can now see the name and e-mail address of your local organizer on the "Tasks" page of MyPrecinct. If you have technical problems with MyPrecinct, send an e-mail to precinctcaptains@texobama.com.

Also, many of you are having Vote Early for Change house parties this weekend. Be sure to check out all the materials you’ll need for the house parties on www.TexasPrecintCaptains.com.

There's also a points system for volunteers on the campaign web site, you get points by making phone calls, joining activist groups, and other campaign activities, and your current position in the rankings is shown. There are prizes similar to above for high-placing volunteers.

Layered Reality

2008-02-22T15:44:00.003-06:00

One of the most "important" things I think the "convergence" of technologies represented by the "Smartphones" is that they add layers to the reality around us. If you're able to look up information about the locations you're currently at, all kinds of things start changing. Want to find a good resaurant? Punch up Google, run an address-based search, and look at the reviews for that hole-in-the-wall Greek place 3 blocks over. Wondering if that's a good price on the Clearance table for a video card? eBay.

Want to know what your neighbours are thinking about you? A day will come when all of us move in a cloud of "metadata". You're going to be tagged with the information that normally is passed on as gossip. Yeah, think about that for a minute. That girl you dumped before Valentine's Day in High School so you could date her worst enemy? She's going to be able to hang the Mark of Cain over your head.

Efforts will be made to stop this in the name of privacy, and regulate it. But ultimately, the most it will be able to do is restrict the flow a little. If someone wants to know what bad things other people say you've done, the moment they meet you, they're going to be able to find out.

What does this have to do with game design? Some of these layers will be games. I doubt we'll find ourselves in Strossian augmented realities, where things can be seemlessly made to look like Discworld or Halo. But there will be a "ludic layer" to our reality, as "real" as the invisible webs of society, law, and meaning we already live in.

That's a Big Rathole

2008-02-18T17:54:00.003-06:00

NCSoft Korea is a publicly traded company, and Korea has some pretty strict laws about disclosure. So last week, the CFO announced that "Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa" was a huge bomb. $106M dollars in, $5.3M made last year, about $16M expected for this year (and I believe that's revenue, not operating profit).

Richard Garriott apparently could not be reached for comment, as he is currently preparing to be shot into space. No, I'm not kidding.

The "We" in "Yes We Can"

2008-02-17T21:33:00.002-06:00

Henry Jenkins of "Convergence Culture" blogs a bit about how the Obama wave is more than a campaign. He states much of it better than I could, I only wanted to add this, which I wrote on the f13.net Politics board:

My daughter asked me last night why I was so excited about Obama. Apparently her generation has come to think of him as their candidate, and they're a little confused at the way that their elders are embracing him. Not just accepting him, but latching onto him with the zeal of the born-again convert. I expect there are a lot of those conversations happening.

What I told her was that in my entire damned life, there has never been a single time I went into the booth really wanting to vote *for* someone. Every time, I was voting against someone even worse. I expected my politicians to be venal, and self-serving, and untrustworthy, and the best I hoped for is that they would be honest enough to at least *pretend* to do the job while they were there, and not outright steal. Not a single time in my life had I ever thought someone deserved my vote.

You can talk about "narratives", and demographics, and trends, and all the other usual mechanics of politics. But Obama is going to win because when people hear him speak, they can feel the resonance. Something cuts right through the bullshit and tells you "Here is a man who believes in America the way you believe in it." That indefinable something that goes beyond patriotism, beyond ideology, beyond meaningless platitudes about mom, apple pie, and baseball, right to the core of the *idea* that is America.

In narrative terms, he's pushing hope. We've had 7 years of "Be afraid, be very afraid" and he's telling us "We can make things better." Not "Vote for me and everything will be rainbows and gumdrops," but simply the promise that we will stop descending into our orwellian nightmares and start making things *better*.

An entire generation came of age without believing politics was anything more than posturing. Obama's movement is bigger than he is, and I think that's deliberate.

People-Powered Politics

2008-02-16T15:21:00.002-06:00

The Nation has an extensive write-up on the new ground-level politics.

To understand why turnout is going up, you have to know a little bit about how voters make choices. Since the 1960s, television has been the primary conduit for political information, with campaigns spending about 80 percent of their budget on media. But while broadcast television can reach millions of voters, it is, as Podhorzer notes, a dying medium. "The main thing that has changed is the heading to collapse of broadcast TV and heading to dominance of systematic, organized word of mouth and more targeted communication," he says. What's most promising about the shift from broadcast campaigns to those centered on "systematic, organized word of mouth" is the possibility of activating new voters, something TV has never been capable of doing. Political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green, experts on election turnout, conducted an experiment in 1998 with voters in New Haven, Connecticut, showing that person-to-person canvassing when the canvassers are ethnically and demographically matched to voters can increase turnout by 10 percent with a single contact and a nonpartisan message.

[...]

After 2004 several efforts were launched to fix this problem [poor coordination of house-to-house campaigning]. Two high-quality voter files were created, one at the Dean-led DNC built by technologist Josh Hendler, and one outside the DNC called Catalist, assembled by a group of former DNC consultants. A front-end web application known as the Voter Activation Network, or VAN, was standardized across campaigns. The Donkey, a volunteer management program developed in 2005, along with bar-code scanners, Palm Pilots and Google Maps, whose satellite feature allowed field organizers to cut turf without having to physically explore the routes, produced huge efficiency gains. Judith Freeman, co-founder and chief executive organizer of the New Organizing Institute and a former senior political strategist for the AFL-CIO, notes the change. "Prior to 2004, the work of creating walk packets and materials for door-to-door canvassing was a labor-intensive process that could take all night and a significant amount of a field manager's time. Now much of it is automated."

The dominance of the Relgious Right in the Republican Party, and of the Democrats by the Republicans, was driven by the face-to-face politics of the social networks of churches. Get an influential church-member (not neccessarily the lead pastor) to organize the volunteers for that church into a canvassing force, and you can swing a lot of votes. Much as the labor unions were the "mothballed fleet" of the Democratic party throughout the middle part of the twentieth century, the decline of the unions and ascendancy of politicized relgious organizations were the driving force of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

These new tools are inherently different from the paradigm of earlier election cycles. For one thing, they are fueled by enthusiasm. Where TV-based campaigns encourage a lowest-common-denominator platform where you don't do or say anything that does more than slightly tilt a voter in your direction, people-powered face to face politics is driven by enthusiasm, even zealotry. That is probably why the "center" of political action moved to the right even as the average American was moving left, the public TV messages of both sides was a "moderate" one, while the face-to-face politics was dominated by the church-led volunteers.

The fundamental nature of US politics has been changed forever. "Disintermediation" of politics means no more room for moderates, in either reality or presentation.

Games as Politics

2008-02-15T19:41:00.003-06:00

BioShock is my new poster child for the relevance of videogames as part of the "social dialog" and as such, candidates for strong First Amendment protections. Kotaku has a good explanation of why.

BioShock may have been conceived as a study in nuance, a place for gamers to discover and explore at their own pace, but its dip into the ethical morass of Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophies has brought her beliefs back into the mainstream spotlight and even piqued the interest of the Ayn Rand Institute's president, Yaron Brook.

Brook, a former member of the Israeli Army military intelligence and award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, first took notice of the game when he discovered his 18-year-old son playing it. It's a fact that didn't bother Brook despite his son's objectivist beliefs and the game's not so positive take on the philosophy.

Like Ken Levine, I am not a big fan of extremism in ideology, my usual tagline for it is that "Philosophical purity makes you stupid". Back in the early days of the Internet, I crossed swords with a notorious forum warrior who managed the cognitive dissonance of being both a Social Darwinist *and* an insulin-dependant diabetic. He eventually resolved the paradox by going off his insulin and dying.

In the same vein, although I find much of Ayn Rand's philosophy to have merit, the purity with which it is pursued by self-labelled "Objectivists" as well as derivative ideologies such as "Neo-Conservatives" and "Christian Reconstructionism" is frightening. In both cases, it seems to mutate into a pursuit of orthodoxy, a rejection of compromise in favor of a view that the world would be much better if everything was done the right way, and the way to do that is to force those generally in alignment with your core assumptions into absolute agreement, and demonization of those that oppose your movement.

Previous counters to objectivism in media and the arts have been comparatively pale compared to the strong imagery of Ayn Rand's originals. The most powerful counter-argument was tangential, the Greed is Good speech by Gordon Gecko in the film "Wall Street" being the best of a bad lot.

BioShock takes the utopia painted by Rand and shows what could happen if it was actually pursued, a dystopian vision of "I got mine" at any cost. And the death of Andrew Ryan neatly reprises the idea that "Philosophical purity makes you stupid." Andrew Ryan may not be a hypocrite, but he's also too intellectually closed and determined to live his philosophy out to recognize that it has all gone horribly, catastrophically wrong.

The most important thing to note here is that BioShock brings something genuinely new to the debate, an illustration of the dark side of objectivism that isn't just told to you, isn't just shown to you, but that you experience. If that isn't "speech" of exactly the kind the Founding Fathers felt should be protected, what is?

More Evidence of a Sea Change

2008-02-15T19:05:00.006-06:00

Here's another take on why the rules have changed. Most people didn't notice on Tuesday that something even bigger than expected Obama/McCain wins was happening. But the congress critters did:

No, the seismic bump was further down the trenches and it is sending shock waves through the elected folk in Washington: Two long-serving members of the House of Representatives were defeated by ideological activists within their own party.

[...]

You must understand that defeat of an incumbent in his or her party's primary is virtually unheard of anymore. For two to go down in the same year happens with about the same regularity as Haley's Comet.

In fact, it has been nearly 30 years since something like this last occurred.

As the CBC reporter said, it's extremely rare for an incumbent to lose the primary in the House. Congressional districts are gerrymandered into safe democratic or republican leaning strongholds, and the advantages of inertia, name recognition, and access to lobbyist cash makes them pretty much impregnable afterwards. Representatives have retained their seats even while being prosecuted (and even after being convicted) for bribery or other crimes.

In this case, two Representatives whose only crime was being "too moderate" (which mostly means they "crossed the aisle" for their contributors), one R and one D, were driven out by more ideologically pure candidates. Both are in districts so heavily gerrymandered that the general election is effectively a rubberstamp. Now, either or both *might* "do a Lieberman" and run as independants against token or non-existent Republican opposition.

But the ability of both sides to reach out into local contests with pressure drawn from extremists all across the country will reshape federal politics forever.

I can tell you one thing, on Capitol Hill following the Maryland primary, the elected officials and their staff members that I spoke with spent more time talking about Wynn and Gilchrist, than they did about Obama and McCain.

They're scared.

It's a whole new game.

Raph (and the NYT) Gets It Almost Right

2008-02-14T17:19:00.004-06:00

Raph Koster points to an NYT article about the changing dynamic of the games market. The NYT article points out that:

And perhaps it is not a coincidence that BioShock, Mass Effect and God of War II are all purely single-player games. You can’t play any of them with friends, either over the Internet or on the couch. Nine of the 10 top-selling games of 2007 include a significant multiplayer component. The only exclusively single-player game that made the list was Assassin’s Creed, an adventure set in the Crusades.

If new acceptance by the masses is one pillar of gaming’s future, gaming’s emergence as a social phenomenon is the other. Hard-core gamers are still willing to spend 30 hours playing alone through a single-player story line, but most people want more human contact in their entertainment.

That is why World of Warcraft, the king of online games, now has more than 10 million users. That is why Guitar Hero is now a fixture on campus. That is why Nintendo has become the dominant mass-market game company.

And even a gamer can admit that there’s nothing wrong with a little human contact once in a while.

Now, the reason why they get it "almost right" is that it is true that multiplayer has become a must-have feature for a topselling game. This is not particularly because of the move of the market away from the hardcore, but because game-playing was *always* primarily a social event. The single-player game was a temporary abberration, an accident of technology.

Look at any pre-computer game. Try to find examples of single-player games. You're basically left with Solitaire and a constant trickle of "brain teaser" geometric/kinetic puzzles. Gaming was always a group social activity. So arguing that "core gamers" were anti-social and are being left behind, and putting forward as evidence the fact that Halo 3 and WoW (the biggest games ever) have strong multiplayer components is ignoring the fact that both games also have strong *solo* components. One of the traditional "hardcore gamer" objections to WoW is that you can solo it right up until the maximum level, where you have to start raiding for equipment.

What we are seeing is a split between games that concentrate on "bite sized gameplay", and those that require a longer term investment in game play. The fact that the best rated single-player games didn't make it into the top ten is a distraction from that, the single-player game was doomed from birth, and only technological barriers (basically the failure of consoles to have built-in networking until this generation) kept it alive as long as it did.

The Dirtiest Game

2008-02-10T00:07:00.003-06:00

Tiny splinters are in your soul (and they remain there)
Darkest life in the deepest hole (you sit and pray there)
All the deals from the things you've done (you wouldn't ever work for)
What you thought was so much fun (you have to pay for)

Don't want to talk about politics
Don't preach or talk about politics
Don't make me talk about politics
Don't give a s**t about politics
--Korn, Politics

So why have I been posting about politics? Because I've become convinced that the success of online games is just one aspect of a more fundamental social shift, and that shift is going to change a lot more than just entertainment.

I've written in the past about how Social Network Theory shows that we are, compared to most peoples of the world, or even the Americans of an earlier era, a very disconnected people. We move more, we make fewer connections, we are less bound by geography in determining our social circle. It's the Urbanite disaffection kicked up a notch.

The internet reverses that trend to a great extent. We are more free than ever to pick out people who are more like us, people we can choose to associate with based on choice, rather than mere happenstance of physical proximity. This has side effects.

One of them is the "Echo Chamber", we associate only with people who think like we do, have the interests we do, follow the poltical ideology we do. Left to our own devices, we block out contrary views, refuse to give them a fair hearing, and drive their adherents away, or at least into silence.

This effect leads to "groupthink", the group hashes out a set of positions that have ideological consistancy (or collectively ignores the inconsistancies) and enforces uniformity of thought on them. This can eventually lead to completely delusional behaviour, acting as if a disproven position is still valid by ignoring the facts.

But above all, it turns it into a game. Karl Rove and Frank Luntz were noteworthy precisely because they figured out ahead of everyone else that politics wasn't about ideology, it was about marketing, manipulation, and the details of the rules. Where there were exact rules, you could dive into them and pull out tactical victories. Where there weren't any rules, it was all about marketing and manipulation.

Even now, in the Democratic party we are seeing this dynamic play out. The Obama campaign studied the rules and realized that if you contested every state against a candidate with high name recognition but equally high "negatives", you could rack up big wins in the small states that would offset your narrow losses in the big ones. The Clinton campaign, in contrast, has focused on the "metagame" of superdelegates and procedural victory.

Politics is indeed the dirtiest game, played for the highest stakes. My belief is that the paradigm of politics as a game grows stronger, games are going to start playing a part in politics. Not just as propaganda vehicles, but as organizing principles for the campaigns.

For example, the Bush campaign's system of granting special titles and giving special meet-and-greets for those who reach out into their social network to bring in campaign contributions is drawn from tactics of the evangelical community, but it has many gamelike scoring properties. The Obama campaign currently makes heavy use of volunteer phone-banking to swing close and strategically important congressional districts (generally those with an odd number of delegates, where winning by even one vote means taking a 1 delegate advantage out of it).

I've been thinking a lot about how this could be systematized, given gamelike properties. For example, what if there was a scoreboard? What if there were prizes for having made the most calls to or from a particular state, district, etc.?

Ultimately MMO design is the shaping of group behaviour, and so is politics. It is inevitable that the two will become intermingled.