Was a great success! Between 12 and 5 on Saturday dozens of people came to the Broadway in Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors glue and magazines to design bosses for our shmup. In the end we had 24 bosses to blast and they are wonderfully twisted: ranging from a vampire snail to a human/goat beast with wine bottle limbs. Thanks to everyone who came along and made it a really fun day and thanks to John Sear for helping out. Hopefully we’ll make the game available online soon and you’ll be able to dive in to the twisted psyche of the Nottingham public with laser guns blazing.

Tomorrow afternoon Screenplay will be at the Broadway in Nottingham putting on a number of events for children as part of the Radiator festival. I’ll be running a workshop which allows kids to collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with collage which we’ll scan and add to the "You’re The Boss!" game which will be running all afternoon. An early screenshot of the game is shown above, but by tomorrow evening the purple Screenplay monster will be replaced with brand new bosses designed by the kids.

Other events include a "Beat the Boss!" knockout tournament, a "Bounce Boss!" interactive playmat game and "You’re not the Boss of Me!" a selection of videogames for kids and
parents
to either play together co-operatively or against each other.
All events are free, so if you’re around Nottingham tomorrow afternoon come and join the fun!

Were two possible futures for online games outlined by Daniel James of Three Rings Design when he moderated the "User Created Content; Boom Or Bane?" panel that I participated in at the Austin Game Conference.

In one future, giant entertainment companies spend billions of dollars building palaces of fun which millions of people enjoy visiting and make healthy profits despite their huge cost. Although I was on another panel at the time, Damion Schubert talked about several lessons that "Vegas Can Teach MMO Designers"; using celebrities or running regular events to get people through the door; making important customers feel like rock stars; banning anyone who causes trouble from every casino in the world forever and carefully laying out games so that people can enjoy playing around each other even when playing something as tedious as a slot machine.

In the other future people gather together to build communities based on self expression and possibly burn things. This is, of course, the Second Life future that I advocated. In this future people can explore their abilities as well as engaging in the identity exploration that Richard Bartle talked about in his keynote. Visitors to these virtual world discover talents they didn’t know they had, learn new skills and create real or virtual careers as well as having fun. This future is also the only one possible for the companies which don’t have billions of dollars to build the content required by virtual casinos, but the scaling of content creation with population ensures that eventually a burning man world will grow so large that no virtual casino company would be able to compete with it.

A future between these two futures was described by Andy Tepper in which players advance by creating high quality content for each other. The difficulty with this approach is in creating rating systems that can’t be metagamed by friends rating each other’s content highly regardless of it’s quality. A possible solution might be to weight player’s ratings based on their voting history. If a player consistently rates in line with all other players and has voted a large number of times then their vote carries more weight.

A big concern with user created content from the virtual casino companies was the loss of control and potential for griefing. Walter Yarbrough from Mythic Entertainment described a feature in Dark Age Of Camelot which had to be removed when some players called their group Nazis even though most people were creating groups which fitted in with the Camelot world and enhanced it. In many cases these problems are the same as traditional griefing problems. Walter talked about players in Camelot grief healing each other. It seems that as long as players in virtual worlds can communicate griefing will remain and both virtual casinos or burning man worlds will both have to deal with it.

Where users create the virtual environment the potential for griefing is reduced as players can always avoid the areas they find offensive, so the problem here seems to be one of perceived responsibility and endorsement. If someone is running around shouting abuse then it is clear that the offense is caused by the player. If a user adds offensive content to an environment largely created by a virtual casino company the responsible party is less clear and the persistent nature of the content may be perceived as an endorsement. The issue of brand management is so key to companies like Sony Online that having their brand tarnished by offensive user created content cannot be allowed to happen regardless of the benefits.

A similar cause for concern was the issue of copyright infringement. One problem is that claiming to be a common carrier may be more difficult when a virtual world contains both published and user created content. There was also the fear that despite Second Life only receiving a couple of takedown notices in its history, eventually law suits would follow and enforcement would consume greater and greater resources. The CEO of There.com commented that it was only a matter of time.

It was a very interesting panel and despite their concerns it was clear that a lot of people are both excited by user created content and interested in incorporating it in existing or future worlds. Alongside Sony Online’s announcement that they plan to build subscription free online games it seems that whether the future is Burning Man or Vegas it will be closer to Second Life.

Crave Entertainment just released a press release announcing a November 2005 release date for Tringo onto the Game Boy Advance.  Congratulations to Kermitt Quirk for getting onto the most popular game platform in history.

[EDIT: Corrected spelling of Kermitt's name -- thanks Torley!]

The big news today is that Turbine have announced that Asheron’s Call 2 is going to close at the end of the year.

A few years ago, when I was working on Dragon Empires at Codemasters, I remember the whole team looking at screen shots from AC2 with a mixture of excitement and awe. At that time I was playing Asheron’s Call, which was still going strong, and AC2 promised to trump it in every way. At the time graphics were the big area of improvement for MMOs and AC2 looked stunning. At the time AC2 looked like it was going to be huge.

Except it didn’t quite work out like that. It’s sobering to think that even an MMO that showed such promise, that was built by experienced developers and that overcame all the development hurdles that we were struggling with at the time has now closed after only a couple of years.

In the end I didn’t even play AC2, but the impression I got speaking to other people was that features like the automatic conversion of loot to gold had streamlined the gameplay away to almost Progress Quest levels. It seemed as though Turbine had attempted to alleviate the infamous MMO grind by automating the process, whereas I think the key is to make sure the actual gameplay is interesting. If I’ve spent 20 minutes completing a challenging, engaging and exciting quest the 2 minute walk to town to sell my loot and talk about my achievements with friends is fine. If I have to spend 2 hours performing mindlessly repetitive tasks then automation that helps me get back to work sooner isn’t going to help.

The really good MMOs provide a sense of accomplishment that is incredibly rewarding. Having to work to earn a level is fine as long as the work itself is varied and interesting and when gaining a level feels like an accomplishment. The last MMO i played which seemed to provide this seductive feeling of accomplishment was WoW, to the extent that I craved the feelings of accomplishment even after I started resenting the time I was spending playing. It was slightly scary that even though I’m lucky to have a really rewarding RL I craved the feelings of accomplishment that WoW provided on tap. I can imagine that the game is much harder to put down for people who rarely feel that accomplishment in real life.

Maybe that is why the Chinese have introduced fatigue regulations, that AC2 is closing and that WoW has become so enormously successful. Although WoW asks people to try it’s very good at making everyone feel like they succeed and that feels great.

Screenplay is the UK’s only independent games festival and is held just down the road from me in Nottingham. I went along to explore all the weird and wonderful nooks and cranies that Screenplay is always stuffed with and to talk about some of the weird and wonderful things in Second Life.

The first session I made it to on Saturday was an interview with Matt Smith complete with run throughs of his classics Manic Minor and Jet Set Willy on the big screen. They were 2 of the first games I played and I remember them being rock hard as a kid, so it was amazing to see the levels I’d struggled with for hours raced through in seconds. The interview got of to a slow start with Matt struggling to find his words, but he soon got in to his stride and told his story from learning to code in Tandy to writing best selling games on the Spectrum. It was the classic lone coder makes good story which continues to inspire, but is rarely heard in these days of huge teams and budgets, except maybe in SL.

Next up was an enjoyable session exploring the bonkers excess of modern shmups, which left me wanting to fill entire screens with explosions. Then Ricard Gras presented a selection of machinima - films shot inside game worlds. The selection included the hilarious first episode of Red Vs Blue, in which Simmons and Grif talk about their purpose in Blood Gulch, a look in to the job satisfaction of Vice City pimps and Bloody Mary. Later in the festival Richard gave a machinima how-to, discussed p2p networks as ideal distribution channels and also talked about the copyright uncertainty surrounding machinima. His productions are made using Vice City and it is unclear whether Rock Star will one day stop him distributing his work. This provided the ideal opportunity to point out that Bloody Mary has no such problems because it was shot in SL, Linden grants IP ownership to residents and it uses a Creative Commons licensed soundtrack. Everyone wanted to hear more about SL, so I invited them to my presentation the next day.

After a frantic morning actually throwing some slides together for my talk, the first presentation I made it to on Sunday was the end of David Hayward’s talk about moding. 2 things which came up in the discussion afterwards is it’s very difficult to make mods more than FPSs with different graphics and that it’s difficult to keep a big team together to make an ambitious mod. Similar issues were raised at Screenplay 2004 where there was also a lot of talk about how hard it is to develop and distribute original games. At the time I argued that web distribution was the way to go. This year I decided to go a step further and present SL as “A Sandbox for Game Design Experiments�.
As most people hadn’t heard about Second Life, I introduced it as a user built world in which people socialize, explore, play, learn and create before emphasizing SL’s strengths as a platform for independent game development: there is always someone around in the sandboxes to help out or collaboratively create with; while you’re building the community can provide continuous feedback and once you’ve finished SL provides an automatic distribution channel and ownership of your work. The talk was well attended and went down really well. Since then Cory has echoed a lot of my sentiments in his call to arms response to the GDC “Burning down the House� session.

Next up was a presentation by my friend Martin Flintham from the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University where I did my PhD research. He talked about the Mixed Reality games that the lab has been working on with Blast Theory. The games can be played either using a web interface, or by moving around the real world location which mirrors the virtual world. "Can You See Me Now?" had the web players being chased by runners in the real world while "Uncle Roy All Around You" puts members of the public on the streets. Since I left the lab, they have run the games in cities all around the world and are looking at ways to make the game scale economically. Since Screenplay, Matt, Ju and Nick from Blast Theory have also won the IGDA Maverick award, very cool.

After the presentations, everyone moved to the bar for the traditional Difficult Questions About Videogames quiz and music. Martin and a few others asked me about SL, so I got a ticket for the WiFi network, got out the laptop and gave them a tour. I started taking requests and so we went to Spitoonie when someone asked to see a theme park, played some Tringo to show off an SL game and then ended up clubbing while listening to Little Boy Blue playing his Gameboy generated music in RL. It was a very cool way to end the festival and Martin commented that navigating the metaverse wirelessly in a bar while listening to techno felt like the future.

After diving out for a curry there was just enough time for a game of pavement pong before heading home. Chris Evans was inspired by people stumbling around drunk and the game was certainly fun played in an advanced state of refreshment. The game tracks players running up and down a projected pong game to move the paddles. It works best tracking white shoes or socks, items which were in short supply amongst the cool Screenplay art festival crowd, but it was possible to make up for a lack of white with an excess of movement, which made it even more fun. I found that MC Hammer running man moves were particularly effective; I knew they would come in handy again.

So, Screenplay was a lot of fun. The machinima session, my presentation and the demo in the bar gave SL lots of coverage and generated a lot of interest. A number of people I met at Screenplay are now SL residents and one is talking to Foxy Xevious about an exciting new project in SL. Hopefully we’ll see lots of exciting new developments in the months to come.

Spent the weekend at a fascinating conference - Accelerating Change 2004. For those who haven’t heard of it before, the Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change is an educational nonprofit base in LA that focuses on creating an “informed, optimistic, and empowered world community.” The tautological nature of that mission might give you pause, but after meeting the volunteers, speakers, and participants, you come away with the realization that this is a group of very technologically minded folks who are want to make the world a better place.

So, the Linden Lab folks got along with them famously!
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