Recently in games Category

Over the past several years, I've been thinking a lot about the ways that game mechanics can be applied to day-to-day life-- giving the kinds of rewards that successful game environments offer, but for the "grind" of real life rather than virtual activity.

This week, I started listening to the book The Spark, by the guy who created the website sparkpeople.com, and I'm really impressed with how he designed his site to do exactly that. I'm also delighted to see how successful that implementation has been. (Generally I'm not a big fan of "change your life!" self-help books, but I found this one pretty engaging.)

If you haven't seen the site, it's worth taking a look at. It's based around a goal-setting and activity tracking model, but adds in the kind of point accumulation and leveling that can make games so addictive. It's also very focused on the social and community aspects of this process, another hallmark of good game environments.

In playing with it a bit today, I thought I'd try to accumulate points by clicking on emails I'd been sent since i first signed up a few weeks ago, and by reading some articles (which also generates points)--in Bartle's player categories, I'm a pretty typical "achiever." In the process, however, I actually ended up reading some excellent articles on "ideal" body weights (and body types), as well as watching an excellent video on how to peel, seed, and chop a tomato.

All in all, I'm very impressed--the site is useful to me both professionally (as an example of successful application of game mechanics to real-world activities), and personally (since I'm in the process of trying to lose weight and be healthier).

After months of work and worry, we launched Picture the Impossible yesterday. And we couldn't have asked for a smoother, more gratifying launch!

This weekend, my family and students and I spent hours hanging out in the Neighborhood of the Arts, giving out faction code cards to people walking the scavenger hunt route. It was so much fun to have a chance to talk with the people playing the game, hear their excitement, and get their feedback.

We had over 1000 people pre-registered by Friday night, and we've added nearly 400 more since then. My greatest fear all along has been "what if we threw a game and nobody came?", and that fear has been put to rest completely. Now I can focus on making sure we continue to put top-notch content out there for the next 6-1/2 weeks.

This week is all about the arts, and next week is local food and drink--with everything from a recipe contest to a coffeehouse crawl. The following week is a "Rochester firsts" theme, and I think people will be amazed by some of the things that they discover were invented or founded in Rochester.

If you haven't already signed up, it's not too late. Come join us as we explore the best parts of Rochester, past and present!

Over a year ago, the president of RIT and the publisher of our local Gannett paper (the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle) called a meeting with a few people from each organization to talk about ways that we could work together. Out of that meeting, and a few that followed, came the idea of a city-wide ARG that took advantage of RIT's strengths in interactive games & media, and the newspaper's strengths in community outreach.

Since then, I've been working with the newspaper and with my colleagues at RIT to design, develop, and (soon) deploy that game. It's called "Picture the Impossible":, and it will run for seven weeks this fall, from September 12th through October 31st.

The name Picture the Impossible is something we came up with working with Elan Lee. It's a reference to Rochester's incredible history related to photography and imaging (Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, and Pictometry were all founded here), as well as our even more incredible history of people accomplishing things everyone thought was impossible (like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, among many others). Each week game activities will focus on a different theme related to the history and culture of Rochester, including imaging, social justice, food, music, arts and crafts, and "Rochester firsts."

The game ends with a gala costume ball on October 31st, held at RIT's beautiful new Innovation Center, and 300 game players will win tickets to that event. Others who win individual challenges throughout the game will have the chance to win Kodak cameras and other gifts.

But what I love most about the game is that we've tied it directly to three local charities, each of which will be affiliated with a specific faction in the game. When you register, you'll choose a faction. Each week, the faction with the largest number of accumulated points will have a donation made to their affiliated charity.

How will players earn those points for their factions? For each of the seven weeks of the game, the following activities will be available:

Web Games: Monday-Friday casual Flash-based games will be updated with new content related to that week's theme. There will be five total games, rotating through the five days of the week, such as a slider image puzzle, and image matching activities.

Local Games: Each week at least one challenge will involve players going to specific locations throughout the city and gathering clues and/or codes. Other activities will involve participating in local events, festivals, and concerts. We're working with the awesome SCVNGR to build local scavenger hunts that will get people out and about in the most interesting and historically rich areas of the city.

Newspaper Games: Twice a week the newspaper will publish a puzzle or game, some of which will involve tangible aspects of the paper itself. And on Sundays, the entire back page of the Sports section will be devoted to the game--news coverage, narrative updates, featured players and photos, faction standings, and a weekly locally-created crossword puzzle.

So, how are we paying for all of this? Universities and newspapers aren't exactly rolling in extra cash these days. But what we do have is incredible talent and enthusiasm, and both organizations have put their very best people--students, professors, designers, reporters, photographers, programmers--to work on this project. In addition, Microsoft's bing search engine gave us a very generation donation to fund the basic infrastructure (web hosting, printing, prizes, etc). This game is a grand experiment--can we find the support from local businesses to fund the charitable donations and party? Stay tuned for more information! And do become a fan of our Facebook page, so you know about game-related news as soon as it happens!

Yesterday I received a Twitter DM (direct message) from my friend and colleague Constance Steinkuehler that read "Please join me. I'd like to recruit you as a spymaster to my spy ring - http://playspymaster.com". It looked a lot like spam, but I also noted that Constance and her husband both had a number of game-related tweets in their activity streams, so I clicked through out of curiosity, and signed up for the game. After less than 24 hours of play, and a lot of exploration of both the gamesite and the various responses to it around the web, I thought I'd write up my first impressions, good and bad.

First, let me preface this with the fact that I've been wishing for a long time for a way to filter out tweets from my friends that are on topics I'm uninterested in. Most often, these are tweets with hashtags relating to conferences. It's like being forced to read someone's live blogging or IRC chats for a conference that I don't care at all about. Unfortunately, the only way right now to avoid seeing them is to unsubscribe from the person, which is far too harsh a solution. It seems like a basic type of functionality, and one that I'd happily pay for in a twitter client. I mention this because almost all of the current complaints around the tech blogosphere relating to this game could be addressed with this simple feature.

If you read some of the recent rants regarding spymaster (like this TechCrunch article), you'll see that what people most object to, with good reason, is the littering of players' activity streams with automated updates about their game activities--from leveling up to purchasing new weapons. These updates are auto-generated, and look like this: "Just bought a Yarygin PYa “Grach” Pistol. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy"

A near-fatal design flaw of the game is that players are rewarded with more in-game income if they increase the number of events that trigger these auto-updates in their stream. Essentially, they're being paid to spam their social network, and that's generating justifiable resentment. I asked aloud in twitter why it is that the same people who regularly flood their own streams with conference and event related tweets resent these game tweets so much, and Christy Dena pointed out that the game tweets are auto-generated using templates, rather than user-created--and she's exactly right.

Similarly, the spymaster game uses the Facebook-like approach of asking you to recruit others in your network to play the game--the interface for sending invites is almost identical to that used by Facebook games. That triggers a twitter DM to your selected followers, and that DM cannot be personalized in any way. As a result, a large number of people I invited had the same "is this spam?" reaction that I initially had.

In terms of gameplay, your strength in the game is increased by the number of twitter followers you have, and even more so by the number of those twitter followers who join the game. You gain energy over time, and can use that energy to complete tasks (although the tasks require no skill; they're essentially games of chance), which in turn earn you money and experience. You can also attempt to assassinate other spymasters in order to gain still more money and experience. That's fun for a very short period of time, but the "now what?" ennui kicks in very quickly...there's no skill involved in any of the actions, and no rewards outside of leveling up and acquiring more money.

I play these games not only because I get a kick out of them, but also because there's a lot for me to learn as a game developer about what works and what doesn't work and why. So, that being said, here are the lessons I've learned thus far from watching spymaster play out:

1. If you're going to encourage people to send messages--public or private--in an existing social network site, you must give them the ability to personalize them. Otherwise it seems clear that most users will (quite reasonably) perceive the messages as spam rather than social updates. And rewarding users for doing more of this spam is a dangerous approach with serious long-term consequences; many people are already alienating friends and losing followers simply by accepting the default notification options in the game.
2. Spymaster asks you join a specific directorate--US, British, or Russian--when you first login, and warns you that the choice is a permanent one. Requiring a meaningful choice at the beginning of a game is a good thing, but making it permanent and not providing information on the implications of the choice (particularly socially) is very problematic and off-putting.
3. The game provides an activity stream on the main "dashboard" page to let you know what's happening with your spy ring, but there's no way to get information on other spymasters, compare your progress with others, etc. Without a leaderboard or comparable tool, much of the joy of competition and comparison is removed.
4. There's not enough to do, and more importantly nothing that requires actual skill. That means that once the novelty wears off, and you get through the first few easy-to-achieve levels, there's not much to engage players. I suspect there will be precipitous drop-off in player engagement after the first 24-48 hours.
5. While you're encouraged to recruit your friends, there's no way to see at a glance which of them have accepted your invitation, or who was already in the game. You do get DM notifications, but there's no in-game way to see your social network. That's a serious failure.
6. On the plus side, Spymaster is utilizing Twitter's new OAuth authorization, which means you can authorize them to do these actions under your account without actually providing your login credentials, and you can also easily revoke those privileges (although you need to know to go to Twitter settings->connections to do so, something many users won't know).
7. There are some nice touches in the UI in terms of updating and availability of tasks and resources. Nothing spectacular, but definitely some ideas worth looking at and adapting.
8. If Spymaster does nothing else, perhaps it will finally push Twitter client developers to provide an option for masking specific hashtag posts, something that's been badly needed for a long time.

So, those are my initial thoughts on the game. My apologies to those in my Twitter followers who were aggravated by either my initial invitation or the ongoing updates.

Last year, Jane McGonigal gave a wonderful talk at the 2008 New Yorker Conference on "Saving the World Through Game Design." Here at RIT, we're about to try to save a small piece of the world...specifically our local newspaper, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.

Over the past few months, several RIT faculty and newspaper editors have been meeting together to start the planning of a city-wide alternate reality game (ARG) that will draw on the rich history of innovation and risk-taking here in the Rochester area. At the beginning of the year we worked with the amazing Elan Lee of Fourth Wall Studios to help kickstart our planning process, and this quarter I'm teaching a project class with 14 students who share my enthusiasm for generating the structure, content, and infrastructure of the game. Over the summer I'll be hiring some students to work on the final implementation, and the game is tentatively scheduled to run through September and October.

I can't share too many details of the game here, obviously, or we'll ruin the fun of it. But I can say that all of us at RIT and D&C who are working on it are really excited. We won't be saving the world, but I think we stand a pretty good chance of improving our little corner of it.

This quarter I'm teaching a graduate seminar on online identity, community, and group behavior. I taught it last year for the first time, but now that it's not all new prep I'm able to have a bit more fun with it.

This week we're just starting with identity concepts, and I was trying to think of an engaging way to get them doing something related to identity issues. When I woke up this morning, I had the idea of having them play Werewolf, which is at its core all about knowing/deducing identity based on contextual clues.

I hand-wrote roles onto pieces of postcard stock, and handed them out to the sixteen students after a very brief overview of the rules. (One or two of them had played before, but most were new to the concept.) We played a very simple version of the game--for those of you familiar with werewolf, we had no healer and those "killed" did reveal their identity upon death.

It was spectacularly successful. Most of the students were game design & development students, and listening to them process all the game theory issues out loud was fascinating and immensely entertaining. Best of all, it forced even the quietest and most introverted students to engage in discussion (and misdirection), required everyone to learn each others' names, and created a sense of engagement and fun that's so often lacking in grad theory classes.

In other words, today was full of win. :)

Some useful links for people wanting to try werewolf themselves:

• Rules for "Are You a Werewolf?" (wunderland.com)
• Werewolf: A Mind Game (basic rules from Zarf)
• Printable Rule Book
• Memories of a Dead Seer (great article by Jane McGonigal on werewolf at FooCamp, and strategic aspects of the game)
• Advanced Werewolf Rules (variations to speed up and/or complicate gameplay)

If you've been thinking about trying out WoW, now's the time to do it. Blizzard is running a new promotion that will allow you to start playing with a friend who already has an account--the friend with an existing account will get a really nice in-game gift, and both of you will be able to level your characters 3x as fast when you're grouped together.

This addresses a long-standing problem with the game, which is the lack of a "sidekick" mode to allow people with high level characters to engage with friends whose characters are newer.

If this is the thing that "turns" you, I'd be very grateful if you'd let me be your referrer; in return, I'll happily quest with you to get you leveled up quickly. Just let me know which email you want the referral code sent to.

• responding to the slew of last-minute messages from students panicked about exams and projects* grading final exams and projects
• restarting the afghan for Lila Rose, because I didn't like the yarn I was using and the way it wouldn't lie flat
• dealing with the chaos of kids home all day because of February break
• reading and reviewing grant proposals for a meeting later this week
• catching up on Battlestar Galactica episodes that were on the verge of being deleted from our list of recordings
• leveling my troll priest in WoW--I expect she'll be 70 by the end of this week

I don't expect blogging to resume with any regularity until grading, proposal reviewing, and leveling are all finished.

At Foo Camp last month, I finally had an opportunity to play the game werewolf--something I've heard a lot about, but hadn't participated in. It's not a technology-intensive activity, by any means. No computers, just a deck of cards. For details on the game (and its sibling game, Mafia), see the link above. For those of you too lazy to click through, here are the basics:

A group of people gather around a table. We had around 20 people starting each round, but you could have fewer. The game master (in our case it was danah boyd) hands out cards to each player--on the card is the role you'll play for that game. The roles in our games were villager, werewolf, healer, and seer. For some of our games we had four werewolves, for others there were three. There's always one seer and one healer. Nobody knows what anyone else's role is when the game begins. The game master tells everyone to "go to sleep," which means you close your eyes and make some kind of noise--humming, etc--so that you can't hear what's going on. The GM tells the werewolves to open to their eyes, and to acknowledge each other with eye contact; then the GM tells the werewolves to silently agree on someone in the village that they want to kill off. The werewolves then are told to close their eyes, and the healer is told to open his or her eyes, and to indicate silently to the GM who s/he would like to heal for that round. Then the healer closes his or her eyes, and the seer is allowed to wake up. The seer can point to one person in the circle and have the GM tell them if that person is or isn't a werewolf. After that, the GM announces it's morning, and that everyone can wake up. If the person the werewolves picked to kill was not healed by the healer, the GM tells the deceased of their fate, and they have to leave the circle. Then comes the fun part. The remaining players try to determine as a group which players are werewolves. The players can vote to lynch someone if they believe they're a werewolf, or can choose to do nothing. Then the cycle repeats. The game ends at the point where either all the werewolves are dead (villagers win!) or there are more werewolves than villagers (werewolves win!).

One variant of the game allows deceased players to inform the group of their role, so that the village knows if a werewolf (or healer, or seer) has been killed. We didn't play with that rule, so we never knew for sure who'd just been killed off.

So, what's the point? You learn a lot about people from the subtle clues they give off. This is all about deception and perception, about how to read the "tells" from the people around you. The better you know people, I've heard, the easier it is to tell if they're lying.

It is incredibly addictive. And it's fun not just to play, but also to watch the game. Once you've been killed off, you get to see what everyone's real roles are, and to see who's most effective in convincing the others of their innocence (whether or not they really are innocent).

Tom Coates, danah boyd, and Jane McGonigal all have excellent accounts of the gameplay at Foo, and observations on the game itself, on their blogs. (Jane also talks about the fabulous "reverse scavenger hunt" that she ran at Foo, which was a great exercise in creative thinking and improvisational acting!)

So, this got me to thinking...are there werewolf players at RIT? If not, there totally should be. I'm thinking of proposing a monthly RIT werewolf game...time and place to be determined. Who wants to play?

I had invited T. L. Taylor to participate in the social computing symposium, but she had a prior E3 commitment. Much to my delight, Tamara Pesik snagged her to speak in the MSR speaker series this week, so I get a chance to hear a presentation from her today about her research! Yay!

There's a good turnout, which is nice to see.

She starts by painting a basic picture of MMOG environments, including the software and service model associated with them, noting "breakthrough" titles such as Ultima Online (1997), EverQuest (1999), and World of Warcraft (2004).

Shows an excellent chart from mmogchart.com showing subscription data (how does he get this?). The WoW curve is pretty astounding (and it's six months out of date, showing 5 million rather than 6.5 millions WoW subscribers).

She's interested generally in the relationship between social and technological artifacts, and sees games as an excellent context in which to "unpack" that relationship.

Becoming a player involves a great deal of socialization--norms, practices, social regulation. There's a lot of 'indeterminacy' -- things that aren't specified in the manual, that users have to make sense of and create through social practice. She uses "trains" in EverQuest as an example of how practice and lore develop around technical phenomenon. (She mentions use of trains for grief play, and this spurs an interesting side discussion, one that I refrain from responding to because this is a particularly sore spot for me in WoW right now.) Excellent point here -- "you can't look at a train and figure out what it means; you need to look at the context to understand it."

Next she talks about guilds, and points out how different they are. Family guilds, professional guilds, raiding guilds, casual guilds, age-based guilds, and many others. Most involve trust, responsibility, accountability, and reputation. At the highest levels of most games, it's almost impossible to play without having been socialized into a guild structure.

Shows a social network graph showing relationships among members of a family guild, differentiating between RL and RP (role playing) relationships. (Nice line: "Friends are the ultimate exploit.") Notes the extent to which people share characters, which is technically a bannable offense--but an example of how users co-opt aspects of a system in ways devs may not expect or want.

Some discussion of the external databases of player-created information about the game. The examples she shows require explicit input by users, but many of the WoW sites now use add-ons to automatically update (like thottbot.com, or auctioneer).

Interesting question from the audience--how much of the reward for playing comes from system-based rewards (levels, xp, honor) and how much comes from social interaction (reputation, etc).

Shows a raid-leader's screen, with mods everywhere. Wow. I've not seen this before. It does change the experience. She notes the social impact, as well, since these mods often show explicitly the micro-level contributions of each player.

Talks about some "persistent critical issues." She mentions a variety of RMT issues--selling accounts, buying gold, etc. Public vs private sources of control. She shows the warrior protest in IronForge, and the "bullhorn-like" response by Blizzard. (Found the story and the screenshots; scroll down to bottom for system message.) Talks about the GLBT-friendly guild issue, as well, and the whole "should real life come into gaming environments" issue.

Discussion (as is typical at MSR talks) is intelligent and wide-ranging, so I'm not going to try to distill it. The most interesting surrounds the issue of "addiction." This is clearly a divisive issue, and TL handles it quite well. She reminds people of the moral panic over the introduction of childrens' literature, and talks about the increasing number of people playing with their kids.

Interesting question--"is there a takeaway from your book for designers of social spaces?" Makes me think there's a hunger for this right now, for lessons we can bring from these increasingly important and influential spaces of play into other contexts.