Play Money - Dibbell 2006

Play Money, Dibbell, 2006

Notes from the book, re-organized in sections by myself for easier summarizing and reading. Below, UO stands for Ultima Online, and OSI stands for Origin Systems Inc, the game company who developed and ran UO. OSI was owned by EA.

Playing

Players keep playing because they want to go up the player ladder the same way RL people want to go up the social ladder. At some point, you have to decide either to leave the game cold-turkey or to give the game a point: make it productive. Giving the game a point is easier because the game is addictive. Although flow happens 3 times more often at work than during leisure times, play makes flow more enjoyable.

Huizinga: play has always been part of society. Weber: the Protestant Ethic of Puritans considers productive activities as recommended by God, and sports and leisure as wastes of time. Capitalism principles come from Ethic of Puritans, hence a capitalist society considers play shameful. Dibbell: Games are symptoms of post-modern rampant abstraction and transformation of wealth creation. Marx: solidity melts into air. Dibbell about games: production is melting into play.

Troy Stolle is a RL carpenter who played a grandmaster blacksmith. When fired IRL, he decides to sell his 52-month old account on eBay for $500, when the account is going to be resold for $2k. He thinks it's all fake anyway and does not realize there is demand for virtual items.

Being part of UO's virtual economy

Virtual economies require and implement constraints and scarcity. Castronova: in MMOs, scarcity breeds market, and markets cross realities at their onset. Dibbell realizes there's a complex supply chain of warriors who drop, artisans who craft, hagglers who buy/sell IG, brokers who buy/sell on eBay or on their own website, and finally the clients. Example of a client: a Mum buys a $25 virtual item for her kid's Christmas. Why people sell for so low is the mystery that lies at the center of market economics: it generates profits at all levels of the chain.
Lesson: Theory of ludocapitalism, where play is a latent force waiting to be tamed the same way steam was the energy of the industrial revolution.

Julian Dibbell: born 1963, starts playing UO in early 2003. Weekly play time: 20 hours per week. First step in the economy: farming and selling batches of leather suits to another player. He Starts a blog in March 2003 to track his business adventures. A journalist VIP pass grants him earlier access to maps of the next update; he uses it to avoid the rush on new houses and buy 2 houses. Why keeping an uber house worth $600? I wanted to be envied. He accepts to share his house with a 17 year old kid, who sells IG some items for him and brings him a small profit. Unusual/weird "friendship". He plans to sell the other house for 30m gold, but a famous player on his shard asks for 20m and he accepts, honored and intimidated.

IG runebooks let players memorize places to teleport to them later on. Memorize all the mining spots in that book. Once the spots have been written in the first book, duplicating that book takes little time. Dibbell sells each book $3 on eBay. He quickly realizes this is too little profit for too much time spent. Some "rares", on the other hand, can sell on eBay for $75. Rares, along with other luxury items such as hair dyes or houses, are often only sold by NPCs to implement gold sinks.

Although virtual economies enable players to bond, when you get too deep into it, you're not a player anymore. The social aspects and the fusion with fiction disappear. Yet vendors of virtual gold are still immersed in some ways: Dibbell has no idea what he's doing at DiGRA or State of Play, talking about virtual economies and law, because he's more eager to live in [MMOs] than to understand them. He has self-doubt and wonders if the study of virtual economies has an intellectual substance about as substantive as pot smoke.

Scams and (lack of) protections:

• Kids buy from their Mum's PayPal or credit card and receive the item within 15 mins. After a day or two, Mum reverts the transaction, but the player still has the item in his inventory, or even sold it to someone else.
• Scammer advertises selling an item for half its market value. When buyer comes, the scammer sends him a link to a Paypal-looking phishing website in an email, and then empties the buyer's Paypal account.
• A seller advertises a rare item. Using a thief character, another player goes to the seller's house, steals the item, and sells it IG or on eBay. Dibbell knowingly buys from the thief: in-game robbery is part of the game.
• eBay and Paypal do not provide insurance over "intangible" goods. They provide insurance for soccer match tickets, presumably "tangible". Still, they say they can't insure a real paper ticket with a code written in real ink for virtual gold.

In 2004, the IRS said:

• Declare as income anything you receive IRL, be it work of art, real dollars, or virtual gold. Illegal income such as stolen or embezzled funds must be included [...] if from your self-employment activity
• For normal players, prizes won in lucky number drawing must be included in your income at their fair market value
• Organizations that facilitate the trading of goods and services, such as OSI with virtual gold, should send tax forms to and withheld taxes from its players.

In 2005, an IRS specialist on the phone said there's no legislation yet on Internet barters or virtual economies.

UO vendors

IRL, dozens of monetary startups create "fake" money. E-gold backs their virtual currency with real gold stored in private vaults. An artist draws custom dollars and sells them, as art pieces, for more than their face value. Dibbell: We live in an age of money hackers. Make-believe [is] required to establish monetary value.

Blacksnow Interactive is located in Orange County. Business model: gold farm of 8 Mexicans in Tijuana, Mexico, paid $19/day, generate $30k profits per month. They play according to scripts given to them daily by their on-site supervisor. $800k sitting in inventory. Blacksnow trialed Mythic after they asked eBay to shut down Blacksnow's DAoC's gold auctions. Too bad Blacksnow vanished after being trialed by another game company, because justice would have had to determine who owns the IG wealth: players who spend the time, or companies who make and own the games?

Bob Kiblinger used to work as a chemist with decent pay. After playing UO nights and weekend, his wife divorced him. He bought and resold Troy Stolle's tower to Dibbell. Bob is a popular broker with 10k+ ratings on eBay. Has list of furnishers for each shard on IM. Spends 14 hours per day trading accounts and items. Belongs to the Markee Dragon conglomerate of the top 7 UO brokers. Markee Dragon provides server transfer, lets you pay your game time by gold instead of real dollars (they own the account and pay it for you), and brokers IG gold. Markee Dragon's ethics say: don't buy from bot farmers because they cheat. In 3 months of 2003, Dibbell bought $3700 of discounted gold from bot farmers, so he felt kind of unethical. Later, Rich the bot farmer gave him the list of his top 10 clients for 2003: Dibbell is 10th, all Markee Dragons belong to the top10, and number one is Bob who bought a total of $35k of gold in 2003.
Lesson: you need to buy from bot farmers to make a living in the US as a gold broker.

Using DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool, gives the market state and the list of vendors in a particular eBay category:

• Weekly sales of UO items and accounts: $160k
• Yearly sales of UO items and accounts: $4.2M
• Change rate: $16 for 1M gold

And there are other sources of revenue for vendors that are not visible on eBay:

• buy whole accounts for $300 and sell all the items in them for a total of $1200 = 400% profit
• IG gold suppliers run big malls
• A Guild has the monopoly on mining spots in a shard. Its guild leader sells gold to his broker.
• Camp houses that will soon be re-opened for sale because their owner has not logged in for a long time. Can be done with a bot. Then resell houses for a lot of gold or dollars.

Working for Bob, in a solitary and obsessive interlude of 3 weeks in mid 2003, Dibbell made $1100 of sales by taking his share on buying and delivering suits on his shard. In the next 3 weeks, he only dedicated 2h/day selling packs of 100k or 1m gold and suits on eBay or to Bob. His sales remained around $850 per week. On average, brokers make 20% profit from their sales. After 3 months, Dibbell made $800 profits and ranked 65th out of 800 in terms of sales of eBay UO vendors. Bob is ranked first with $8k sales and $2k profits per week. Dibbell compiled those results thanks to the DeepAnalysis tool.

Gordon, a Cantonese exec, just opened a 10-man gold farm. He asks for partnership with Dibbell and Bob: his farmers would bring items that Dibbell and Bob sell to clients, and they all share profits. Predictions of $1600 sales per week. Gordon says he pays his farmers $1.5/hour and they can generate $5/hour. However, a NYTimes article in 2005 revealed that Chinese farmers are usually paid $75/months in 12-hour shifts, ie less than 30 cents/hour. Anyway, Gordon never generated the profits he mentioned. However, Dibbell, on a road-trip from Indiana to California, reached a max of $1k/week of profit for 4 weeks, mostly only selling 1m gold packs.

Bot Farmers

The game allows the use of a macro API provided players stay in front of the screen. Bots use macros on exploits such as 1) buy clothes from NPC 2) tear down clothes into tissue using basic tailoring skill and macro 3) sell tissue for more than the clothes. This technique generates 350k gold per hour. A Georgia man used it and amassed 20b gold, ie $300k. The total wealth of UO on all English shards was estimated at 35b, hence huge inflation wave coming up and detected by GMs. OSI fixed the exploit and wiped the extra gold by banning the bots.

Richard Thurman: 30 year-old software engineer. Leads the hacker group who developed EasyUO, a UO bot program. Rich's bots on 20 machines brought him 60k gold per hour using cartography exploits. Competitors denounced him to GMs and he was banned. Came up with a more defensive strategy: 1) eBay is too risky, hence build network of IG wholesale gold buyers. They get gold for 40% less than the eBay price. 2) to check for bots, GM wear a colored stick and ask the player "what's the color?". The bots would IM or SMS Rich when they were faced with a GM, and receive text to say to the GM by IM or SMS from Rich. 3) Plug A.L.I.C.E so that bots talk by themselves.

Blacksnow's leader and Rich meet in October 2003. Blacksnow proposes to agree on gold prices in return of receiving a dll used by EasyUO. Rich says it belongs to his group and refuses. Blacksnow discovers the hacker group had been blackmailed in the past by a player and had had to give the dll to the blackmailer. Pissed, Blacksnow reports Rich's bots to GMs.

An updtate from OSI on the merchant NPCs implements an offer-and-demand scheme, but assumes that players won't buy more than 500 items. Rich and another bot farmer find the glitch: buy 2k items at a time, the NPC believes you only bought 500 so the price does not increase as much, then resell the 2k items for small profit. Bot farmers use the exploit for a while, making millions of gold per hour. Blacksnow finds out they're making a lot and blackmails them for their technique against not denouncing them to GMs. The 2 farmers decide to stop their scheme and tell OSI about the exploit so that no other benefits from it. They made a total of $150k profit from 20b gold.

PS: Dibbell thinks that designing a single-shard MMO for 100k players is an impossible dream, and that's why MMOs stay sharded.

[Literature] Game Balance ch3 - Transitive Mechanics and Cost Curves

My notes from course 3 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

An intransitive game is like Rock-Paper-Scissors, where everything is better than something else and there is no single “best” move. In contrast, in transitive games, some elements are just flat out better than others, and we balance that by giving them different costs.

The cost is expressed in terms of game resource(s) (eg money, wood, existing units, items, technology, skills, ...) but can also consist of temporal restrictions (eg single-use constraint on a particular item, or a bonus being limited in time). A player wil pay a cost if she can see benefits to her situation (eg better stats, bonus skill). The goal for the game designer is to reach benefits = cost. In other words, if the weapon is overpowered, then either decrease its power (or any benefit) or increase its price (or any cost). Overpowered <=> undercosted.

A cost curve is a game balance technique designed to put everything in terms of the resource cost. In some games, you can choose to make an increasing, linear or decreasing curve, all of them might be balanced, but they have different effects on the gameplay. In Magic: the Gathering you get one Mana per turn. If you were the designer and you made a cost curve that was increasing, so that each additional point of mana gives you more benefit than the last, you’ll have a game where late-game cards are really powerful and early-game cards are pretty weak, so you’ll have a game that is heavily weighted towards late-game play. If the cost curve is decreasing, it puts more of a focus on the early game. The curve depends on the game duration you expect.

How to build or reverse-engineer a cost curve?

1. Start with objects that have only one little effect: is their effect cost linear, exponential or log?
2. then, combine effects; does having +2atk AND +5def in the same item more expensive than having them separately?
3. then, look at limited or random effects
4. then, keep in mind the metagame (ex: all goblins in the battlefield get a bonus => full goblin deck gets OP)

"Reverse-engineering" the transitive costs and benefits from an existing game means solving (mostly) linear equations. Ex: 2HP+1atk=5po and 3HP+2atk=10po => Xpo/HP and Ypo/atk. There might be inconsistencies/exceptions for elements "manually" balanced. Creating from scratch a cost curve = intuition + playtesting, then maths with later additions to the game. Guidelines to create a cost-curve:

• A limited benefit is always worth something.
• If an item gives the player the choice between benefit X or benefit Y, then the cost of this item is more than the cost of X + the cost of Y. Choice has a price.
• Too weak is better than too powerful.

There is an "escalation of power" problem for CCG or MMO (mudflation), or any game which elements are persistent. When some elements are slightly overpowered, players find them after a while and these items become the standard. For the next expansion, the cost curve has to raise to adapt to these OP items, and the new set of items is balanced in this new higher curve. It forces players to buy things at each update, but it should not be too obvious, otherwise players will see it and leave the game. => Do it VERY slowly.

[Literature] A theory of Fun for Game Design

Raph Koster. 2004. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph Press.

Quotes taken from Koster's book. I did not try to put them together in a meaningful way, I just copy-pasted those I found most interesting.

ch3: What games are

The only real difference between games and reality is that the stakes are lower with games.
The more formally constructed your game is, the more limited it will be. Long-lasting games integrate variables from outside the magic circle.
Fun from games arises out of mastery.
With games, learning is the drug. Fun is just another word for learning.

ch4: What games teach us

Most of the game designers working professionally today are self-taught.
Games are viewed as frivolity.
Games almost always teach us tools for being the top monkey.
Most games encourage demonizing the opponent. Can we create games that instead offer us greater insight into how the modern world works?
There has not been a topologically different 2d shooter since [the first 2d shooter to have power ups and bosses and scrolling]. Unsurprisingly, the shooter genre has stagnated and lost market share.
Algorithm for innovation: find a new dimension to add to the gameplay

ch5: What games are not

One of the most self-defeating rallying cry in history: "it's just a game"
The part of games that is least understood is the formal abstract system portion of it, the mathematical part of it. Games need to develop this formal aspect of themselves in order to improve.
This is why gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games. They do not see "get a blowjob from a hooker then run her over", they see a power up.
Since games are generally about power, control, and those other primitive things, the stories tend to be so as well.
When games and stories are good, you can come back to them repeatedly and keep learning something new.
Getting emotional effects out of games may be the wrong approach. Perhaps a better question is whether stories can be fun in the way games can.
Different kinds of enjoyment:

• fun is the act of mastering a problem mentally
• aesthetic appreciation
• visceral reactions are generally physical and relate to the physical mastery of a problem
• social status maneuvers, intrinsic to our self-image and our standing in a community

Aesthetics is about recognizing patterns, not learning new ones.
Delight does not last. Recognition is not an extended process.
Fun is the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes. Real fun comes from challenges that are always at the margin of our ability.
Fun is contextual. The reason why we are engaging in an activity matter a lot.

ch6: Different fun for different folks

Since brains have different strengths and weaknesses, different people will have different ideal games.
People will usually choose to play the games they are good at, that reflect their strength.

ch7: The problem with learning

Players try to find the optimal path to getting to the ultimate goal.
Exploiters are often the most expert players of a game.
Since we dislike tedium, we'll allow unpredictability, but only in the confines of predictable boxes, like games or TV shows. Unpredictability means new patterns to learn, therefore unpredictability is fun.
Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.
If there is not a quantifiable advantage to doing something [reward], the brain will discard it.
Successful games incorporate:

• preparation [choices made before a given challenge], otherwise it's chance. Can the player prepare in different ways and still succeed?
• a sense of space, otherwise it's trivial. Does the environment affect the challenge?
• core mechanics
• challenges [= content] otherwise it's too short. Can the rule set support multiple types of challenges?
• a range of abilities (otherwise it's simplistic). Can the player bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge? At high levels of difficulty, does the player have to bring multiple abilities?
• abilities should require skill. Not requiring skill from a player should be considered a cardinal sin in game design.

A learning experience require:

• variable feedback (a greater skill should lead to better reward). Are there multiple success states (ie no guaranteed result)?
• high-level players can not get benefits from easy encounters or they will bottom feed.
• failure must have a cost. Player should have the ability to try again (with another preparation round).

ch8: The problem with people

Particular problems and solutions appeal to particular brain types.
Games are not there to fulfill power fantasies.
[The increasing complexity of games within a genre] has led to a priesthood of those who can master the intricacies. Newcomers can not get into them - the barrier for entry is too high.
Designeritis [= being] hypersensitive to patterns in games.
Given the lack of codification and critique of what games are, game designers have instead operated under the more guild-like model of apprenticeship. They do what they have seen work.

ch9: Games in context

The following chart can be applied to any medium.

User goal	Collaborative	Competitive	Solo
Constructive	Community Team game design	Job Commercial game development	Hobby Modding
Experiential	Performance PVE	Sport PVP	Audience Single player games
Deconstructive	Teaching Strategy guide writing	Criticism Hack and cheats	Analysis Writing this book

It's a lot easier to fail to respond to a painting than to fail to respond to a game.
The closer we get to understand the basic building blocks of games (...) the more likely we are to achieve the height of art.

ch10: The ethics of entertainment

For games to really develop as a medium, they need to further develop the ludemes, not just the dressing. By and large, however, the industry has spent its time improving the dressing [...] It's just easy relative to the true challenge.
The best test of a game's fun [is] playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, no nothing.
Ethical questions [in games] are aimed at the dressing.
The ludemes themselves can have social values.
As a medium, we have to earn the right to be taken seriously.

ch11: Where games should go

For games to really step up to the plate, they need to provide us with insights into ourselves.
When you feed a player [with a game], right now, we only know "fun" and "boring". Mastery of the medium of games will have to imply authorial intent. The formal systems must be capable of invoking desired learning patterns.

ch12: Taking their rightful place

Games need to develop a critical vocabulary so that understanding of our field can be shared.
Games will never be mature so long as designers create them with complete answers to their own puzzles in mind.

Epilogue

The challenge game designers face is "how do we create games that do not have one right answer?"
[Game designers] are not geeks in the basement rolling funny-shaped dice. Games deserve respect.

Bosses and game mechanics

In a previous post I explained bosses often have a special appearance or atmosphere surrounding them in order to make the player understand the encounter moment is particular. The game mechanics part of a boss is as unique and special as its appearance: there is an extra-ordinary strategy to follow in order to win the fight, but the player keeps his/her ordinary abilities : run, jump, throw/shoot, smash, etc.

Taxonomy

According to en.allexperts.com, a boss can be:

Adjective	Description	Example
strong	more life, more damage, usually has a weakness revealed from time to time	Mushihime-sama: this boss
stylish	medium-sized but faster than the player, more skilled, nearly perfect, often the antagonist seen as a better protagonist	Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth
giant	big, single weak point or simply a bigger version of a normal monster	Final Fantasy X: Sin
stealthy	hidden or invisible, need to be revealed	MGS: The Fear
final	the antagonist, the bad guy behind the plot, has at least several phases/battles	Mystic Quest: Dark King
mini boss	weaker than "normal" boss, special strategy which has to be learnt but can become common	Doom II: Hell Knight
non-antagonist	not a fight but rather a competition/challenge to win	Super Mario 64: racing versus Koopa the Quick
stalker	repeatedly seen in different stages of the game, getting stronger at each new encounter, troublemakers, the hero and him/her may become friends after the last encounter	Pokémon Red/Blue: Giovanni or the Rival
hidden	fought just before or just after the supposedly-final boss, needs a task to be done before, might sometimes be totally unbalanced so that the player keeps trying to finish the game	Golden Sun: Deadbeard
team	multiple normal or a bit better than normal monsters acting together, combos	Tales of Symphonia: Defense System, Zelda Ocarina of Time: Twinrova
puzzle	invulnerable unless a puzzle is solved; the puzzle grants the player a super weapon, lowers the boss' defense or traps the boss	God of War: Minotaur
tricky	can not be defeated with the current abilities, but a special item can be used to kill the boss instantly	Warcraft III: the Mannoroth blood fountain where Grom Hellscream drinks to kill Cenarius
timed	player-independent, wait for the boss to die or kill him before a certain time	Final Fantasy VII: Emerald Weapon
multistage	change depending on how heavily damaged	Wario Land II: Captain Syrup
unbeatable	invincible or way too powerful, it is written in the storyline that the player has to loose, the boss becomes defeatable later in the story	Baldur's Gate II: first encounter with Jon Irenicus
easy	after a hard lvl, surprise!	Incredible Hulk: The Leader

In practice

Bosses combine multiple of the aspects mentioned above (you can use the checkboxes to determine in which categories your favorite boss fit). In MGS for instance, Snake, the hero, can fake death to kill The Fear. The Fear is supposedly a stealth boss, but this secret way to kill him makes him a trick boss. Similarly, Ugh Zan III, the very last bost in Serious Sam, combines strength, a puzzle, a giant shape, multistage and it is the final boss (killing it ends the story). I find the Croteam studio has done a very good work on Ugh Zan III, whether about the plot leading to the boss encounter, the 3D design or the puzzle the player has to solve to kill it. This is worth a video :-)

A boss is an opportunity for the game designer to be creative and try new things. The innovation can sometimes be really appreciated by the plaers, and become new standards for boss startegies. For instance, in MGS, if the player does not wish to struggle through this battle [against The End], the player [...] can simply turn off the console and wait for seven days (or set the system clock a week ahead). This will result in a secret cutscene in which The End has died of old age (according to wikipedia about The End). Another boss in MGS, Psycho Mantis, breaks the fourth wall, according to destructoid:

Psycho Mantis begins showing off and bragging about his telekinetic powers.
First off, Psycho Mantis proceeds to read the actual memory card you have in your system. If you have played any other popular Konami game at the time (particularly Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) Psycho Mantis will remind you how much you like “Castlevania,” eventually even commenting on how much you have saved during the game.
After displaying this impressive (and pretty darn innovative) feat, he asks you, the actual player (!), to place your controller on the floor so he can show you how powerful he really is. Upon your abiding to the creepy video game boss’s wish, Psycho Mantis grabs his head and, using the built in rumble of the DualShock, has the controller shake uncontrollably, even, if you happen to have to set it on a high table, making it fly in the air and tumble to the ground below.
If that weren’t already enough, once the battle begins you realize that there is no way to beat Mantis. Since he can read minds, he manages to dodge every single attack you throw at him.
Through trial and error (and most likely a guide), you eventually figure out that, in order to beat him, you must unhook your controller from port #1 and attach it to port #2. Once this is accomplished, Psycho Mantis will actually comment how he can’t read your mind anymore.

Original

Chad Concelmo, the destructoid game critique for the encounter with Psycho Mantis, wonders why more game designers have not experimented with this innovative and ridiculously original gameplay technique. I think the reason is playing with the fourth wall might become dangerous as the player is not immersed in the game anymore. A boss should not be taken only as a punctual challenge to the player, it is also, as I explained a situation of narratic climax. The encounters with The End, The Fear or other Psycho Mantis in MGS are memorable (this word appears 8 times in Conselmo's article) because each of them is unique. These humans with super powers and weird physical particularities (The End was born in the early 1860s and can summon the spirits of the "holy forest" he waits in to revive his stamina through directed sunlight according to wikipedia, The Fear has a 20-cm long tongue, Psycho Mantis' has mental powers and a mask covering his horrible face) are beaten by Snake, a normal-looking soldier with exceptional capacities, not weird powers. Psycho Mantis predicting the player's moves seemed previously unfair, but the fight becomes more achievable when the player learns how to kill him. And when the boss is finally killed by the player, the first reaction is "I did it!". Thus, breaking the fourth wall seems to work fine if the aim is to make the player solve himself the puzzle boss he/she is fighting. It is like boxing in Wii sports: the fight occurs also outside of the game, and that immerses the player even more.

Breaking the fourth wall "the other side" could consist of a mise en abyme. In a PS3 game for instance, it could be funny to play the same or another console game. Beating the boss at this console game inside the PS3 game could be the only way to defeat him/her/it. You could think about playing GTA 2 versus Jimmy Pegorino in GTA IV. In all Pokémon games, the protagonist's bedroom contains a console (Nes, SNES, Game Cube, Wii) but I do not think the protagonist can use them to play actual games.

Don'ts

Repetitive bosses always following the same strategies in a game are boring. Creativity matters.

Players can cheat often in boss battles. For instance, in Mystic Quest, casting Heal on the Dark King deals ridiculous damage (more than 20K while the boss has 40K HP) on the boss, ending the fight in 2 or 3 turns. In Mega Man 1, when fighting against the Yellow Devil the player can exploit the Pause Button/Thunder Beam glitch. This glitch seems to be known from many players. use Pause with a special gun to shoot each time the game starts again. In repeating Pause/Start, the player can shoot without being shot. To my mind, this is a bad design (or a bug) that should have been addressed when conceiving the weapon behaviors.

You have to burn the rope is a concept-game in which the player only faces a boss. The strategy to kill it is obvious and reminded to the player. I think easy bosses should not appear too often, otherwise players get bored of the lack of challenge. Anyway, I wonder which percentage of players go directly to burn the rope, and which percentage try to kill it by other means (eg throwing axes or jumping above).

[Cinema] A few common aspects in the Matrix, eXistenZ and Avalon movies

These 3 closely-related sci-fi movies deal with the virtual reality theme:

• The Matrix (all of the 3 movies) from the Wachowski brothers, 1999. A “steampunk” rusty-metal reality and black-and-green virtual world where machines use humans to generate electricity. Slave humans are permanently connected to the Matrix to keep their mind busy.
• eXistenZ from Cronenberg, 1999. A game designer introduces and tests his new game with a dozen of people. The game content changes with the participants’ state of mind. A very interesting idea is a series of virtual reality game inside a virtual reality game inside a virtual reality game. In the end, some of the players do not know what is real and what is virtual.
• Avalon from Oshii, 2001. In a dark, gloomy and uninteresting world, an FPS-like game called Avalon gathers many players. One gifted player makes her way into the levels to reach the legendary “class Real” level.

The interface to connect to the game slightly differ from one movie to another. Humans can connect to the Matrix if they sit on a dental chair and are plugged hard-metal sharp-ended wires at the top of their spinal column. In eXistenZ, the player connects to the game station called pod through an umbilical cord plugged in the lowest part of their back (spinal column again). These two movies depict a very intrusive and violent way to connect to the game. Indeed, the first time Neo logs in the Matrix, his convulsed face makes the spectator feel the pain of the connection. However, in Avalon players just stay peacefully on a dental chair and only wear a helmet that covers their entire face. Logging off the game can be done in putting off the helmet. To my mind, external user interfaces for virtual games should stay “outside” of the body for people to accept the game. I choose to play the game, and I am free to push the “log off” button at any time. Similarly, computers have more and more complex pieces of software to manage the energy they consume, make them sleep, shut down when this task is done, etc. but it is unimaginable that our computers do not have any physical power-on/off button. Same idea for virtual reality games.

Players can be trapped IG. Traps are illustrated by the same example in Avalon and the Matrix: bricked up windows. Players do not know they are imprisoned until they try to draw the curtains and discover a wall instead of a glassed window.

As for the IG characters, the Matrix contain NPC (agents and “programs”) and actual humans who can change into agents at any time because they are plugged into the Matrix from the machine world. The “program” characters such as the Oracle or the Merovingian lead me to compare the Matrix to a Massively Multi-player Online Game (MMOG) where players have to accomplish quests: the Oracle said that freeing the Key-maker will let Neo enter the secret back-door to end the war between humans and machines. In Avalon, the “Ghost” is the NPC to kill to access the secret levels. Some mercenaries are used by a GM to help Ash, the heroine, destroy a huge war machine but all the other characters are actual players. Avalon reminds me more of a First-Person Shooter (FPS) game as we never see huge groups of people connected at the same time in the same level of the game (a dozen players in the “Ruins C66” level and half a dozen players in the “Flak Tower 22”). In eXistenZ, all the 10 connected players have a role and the story evolves around these roles. NPC are seen very rarely and players never talk to them. eXistenZ is actually just a virtual role-play game, but the GM usually in charge of organizing the story in table role-play games has been replaced by a computer.

In the three movies, pets have minor background roles which most of the time make the spectator raise an eyebrow. In Avalon for instance, in one reality, the heroine feeds a dog she has. When she goes in another reality, a portrait of the exact same dog hangs on her wall, but she can not find the dog. Another time, she prepares food for her dog, but suddenly realizes she has no dog. It took me some time to figure out that maybe the “realities” she thinks she lives in are actually other levels of the game where some parameters change from time to time. In the Matrix, Neo has a déjà-vu when he sees the same black cat doing the same actions twice in a row. The other members of the team explain that a déjà-vu happens when the Matrix is being modified dynamically. Indeed, they shortly realize that they have been trapped inside a building as the windows have been bricked-up. A dog was seen inside the eXistenZ game, and this dog happens to be the dog of the winner of the game. I think the message conveyed by the 3 movies is that pets follow us in all the worlds we can be. They are life partners and therefore stay permanently in our minds, whatever the reality we are in.

The death of players is implemented differently in the 3 virtual worlds. In eXistenZ, the player is simply kicked-out of the game while in the Matrix, dying IG means dying In Real Life (IRL). Unlike Avalon, in both the Matrix and eXistenZ, we never see bodies disappearing after their owner has been killed. In Avalon, a player asks the heroine to kill him and see if his body vanishes to check if the “Class Real” level they are currently in is actually the real world: “if you kill me and my body does not vanish, then this world is the real one”. Following this discussion, Ash shoots the other player and the corpse disappears as usually happens in game levels, leaving her astonished.

In the 3 movies, exploits, cheats and bugs keep reminding the spectator that the action occurs in a computer game and underline the fact that all of these incredible events remain virtual, they are not real. At the end of the eXistenZ movie, the game designer reaction about the winning couple is “there was such a non-fair-play and anti-game atmosphere inside the game”. In the Matrix, Neo’s unique superman powers “break” the Matrix rules (ie stopping bullets with a gesture of his hand) while normal humans can only try to “bend” these rules (ie try to dodge bullets). Breaking rules is nothing more in the Matrix than an exploit. The cat deja-vu happening when the Matrix is dynamically changed to trap the group is an obvious bug. Killing the Ghost NPC in Avalon brings a ridiculously huge number of points to the player, letting her connect to the higher levels. I feel like that this huge number of points is an exploit in the game design of the level. Moreover, a Game Master intervenes to make the heroine reach the Ghost: this intervention can be seen as cheating. Finally, a character in a fish shop of eXistenZ repeats the same words until the players say the appropriate words that launch the discussion with the NPC. Such a not flexible dialog feature in NPC made me think of the underlying code:
while(input != “blabla I expect you to say”)
{
print(“what do you want?”);
}
print(“here is your quest”);