As I said in my recent post Buying Things in Games, there is a brisk trade in online games that typically operates outside the official rules of the game. This trade continues even though various companies make an effort to stop it. A few make it “legal” and provide infrastructure for it.

Many game companies, especially Blizzard, seem to be run by purists. A purist (my contextual definition) is someone that thinks that the game is the game is the game and nothing should interfere, in particular that there should be no “special privleges” or any bias. IE: you cannot buy gold, you cannot cut any corners. This is fine in many games, but MMORPGs have various characteristics which make this point-of-view suck.

I’ll generalize them into one bucket: The Grind. Anyone that has played an MMORPG is familiar with the grind. You grind for money. You grind for experience points (to level). You grind for honor. You grind to get items (repeat the same dungeon over and over and over until your eyes bleed to get that one item you need). Sometimes the grind is fun. Most of the time it sucks, but you do it because you are addicted, your friends need your help, you just have to have that item, you want to keep up with your friends, etc.

Sometimes though, you have real life. Real life interferes with the grind. Wouldn’t it be great if somehow you could skip the grind? Especially when it sucks. Well thanks to eBay, the web, and money, you can in many cases. You can buy gold, you can pay someone to play your character, etc. But some people view this as cheating. (And lazy, which, well that’s probably true.)

I have a different view. We’ll call it the Prince and the Pauper.

In real life, some people have rich parents and/or trust funds. Others don’t. The second group has to do everything the hard way. The first group gets through all the hard, boring, mundane crap with ease not due to skill or hard work, but due to the chance circumstances of their birth.

The same thing is true in most fantasy novels. (I use fantasy novels because that is the genre of many MMORPGs and everyone is familiar with at least some fantasy novels even if in many cases it is Harry Potter.) In virtually every fantasy novel one of the characters has some great advantage due to their birth – they were blessed by the gods, they have some special magical abilities, etc. Harry Potter is an obvious example. Somehow we love those characters even though they are not necessarily successful because of hard work and effort but because of luck (of their lineage).

So, how does this apply to games?

In games, the circumstance of your “birth” is really who the character’s player/owner is. Many characters in MMORPGs are played by high school and college kids. They have lots of free time and not lots of money. To get the things they want, they just play a lot and work really hard at the game. To them, the grind is ok. It doesn’t have a natural trade-off.

If you have a job, you might not be the prince, but you are further up the scale. You probably have some disposable income and you have at least one big time sink (your job). So you can’t play as much as you might like and you also don’t want to be playing a game that feels like a job (the grind often feels like a job). So you think, rather than doing something that I don’t want to do for 20-30 hours (roughly the time it would take to accumulate enough gold to acquire your level 60 mount in WoW) you might decide that spending $150 is better. On the other hand, you might think throwing that much money into a virtual item is a waste and instead grind out gold for 20-30 hours. The answer to this is pretty much determined by how you value your time. If you have a ton of money and not a lot of time it is an easy choice, the reverse is also true. In the middle it is fuzzy.

Getting to the point: this is not cheating or bad or evil. It is just like reality and fantasy (novels). Some characters/people are blessed with a lucky birth. Others are not. Some view it as unfair, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t reality.

This type of reality is certainly the case in social environments like Second Life. If I want to go spend a million dollars buying virtual real estate or anything else I want, that’s great. Other people might make a million dollars starting from virtually nothing by developing premium properties (which has already happened: you can read about Anshe Chung becoming a virtual millionaire.) I point this out only as a contrast to the generally held POV of this activity in games. I think game companies should remove that stigma and embrace it. Some are starting to do that, but not all of them yet.

This is an interesting article: IRS taxation of online game virtual assets inevitable.

What is funny is that people seem to jump over all the wrong things in these discussions.  I am firmly of the belief that virtual items (including currency) will legally be equivalent to physical property in the not so distant future.  I think you can write all the crazy EULAs (End-User License Agreements) that you want saying that the company owns it, but one lawsuit will put all that into question.  If you spend 100 days of actual time – ie: 2400 hours – accumulating stuff in a game and the publisher takes it away, you are going to be mad.  Right now, if you aren’t a serious gamer you are probably thinking 100 days? that’s impossible.  But it’s not, I know tons of people that have well over 100 days (in the game – 2400+ hours) played in World of Warcraft. 

Technically Blizzard owns all the stuff you do, according to their EULA.  But there is a brisk market for WoW stuff (most of which is against the rules of the EULA):

• RMT (Real Money Trading):  This is buying game currency for real dollars.  Right now in WoW the exchange rate is roughly 7 gold per dollar.  (This can vary some by server and faction, which servers.  Gold can be transferred between factions on the same server [with a non-trivial percentage take by the system] but not between servers [unless you transfer a character for $25].) 
• OSCD (Out-Sourced Character Development):  This is hiring someone to play your character for you.  (I can again here all the non-gamers going “why the hell would you do that?”.)  In MMORPGs like WoW there are a lot of things that just take a lot of repetition to complete.  Like gold – anyone can get 20-50 gold an hour – but if your time is worth more than $5/hr you are better off to buy it.  Especially since it is boring as hell.  But say you want a new level 60 character built to your specifications – you can do that too.  There are plenty of services that will do this for you and they typically cost around $2/hr and basically have someone in China (or a similar location) play your character to accomplish whatever goals you want them to accomplish. 
• CRR (Character Resale and Recycling):  This is someone selling there character on eBay or IGE because they either quit the game (broke their crack addiction, got a girlfriend, had a nearly flunking out experience, etc.) or because they need some cash (some people build characters up, sell them, start over, etc.).  If you search for World of Warcraft charcters you’ll see a bunch going for anything from $50 to $3000. 

BTW, I made up the term OSCD and CRR since I haven’t seen much talk about this.  If there are terms already in use, let me know.

 All of these things would seem, at least to me, to indicate all this virtual stuff is worth real money to people.  I mean, how is this any different than owning a digital copy of a song you bought on iTunes?  That is a virtual asset too.  I paid for it because I wanted it, but have nothing physical to prove it.  I’m also at the mercy of Apple since their DRM traps me in their world (not unlike games).  So clearly, Apple is paying taxes on the sale of these virtual assets.

The same will happen in games, but there are two distinct differences:

• In RMT and OSCD most of the commerce is transacted overseas via various instant payment mechanisms (like PayPal).  The work is done overseas.  I’m not sure what there is for the U.S. to tax here.
• in CRR and very rare RMT cases (like people I know sometimes sell a few hundred gold, but most of the transactions are through farming services that accumulate large amounts of gold – again overseas) are small.  Most people aren’t selling a $500 character every month, it is usually a single transaction.  If it were taxed you could exclude the costs (subscribtion, probably broadband, maybe computer depreciation) from the income and you would probably get to $0 profit pretty quick.  ($15 month subscription, $35 month broadband = $50/month x 10 months = $500 and there aren’t many characters selling for $500 that don’t have ten months of time into them.)  So there isn’t much to tax there.  Besides if this were taxed they’d need to go chase the tons of other people who have eBay businesses that are shirking taxes – all of these things (including the sales of WoW related stuff) really should be taxed already, people just don’t report them in many cases.

I’m sure now this will become some big political issue now and we’ll have to read about it all the time.  Someone who is a big Second Life player will die and there will be some feud over their virtual estate and the IRS will get involved.  It will be interesting to see it play out. 

So I don’t think my parents or sister are going to read this and now I won’t be able to tell them about it until after Christmas.  (NOTE TO FAMILY:  If you read this, pretend you didn’t.  ;-))  I was at Compusa the other day and they had a stack of these 7″ LCD picture frames (link goes to Amazon) with SD/CompactFlash card readers by the check-out for $99.  I was like, hey that’s cool.  I have followed Ceiva, the original digital picture frame maker (sounds like a cheesy tagline, but it’s also true as far as I know), but never bought one because they always required some whacky service plan (more on that in a minute).  But I always wanted one.  So when I saw this stack of digital picture frames with card readers for $99 I bought one.  I wanted to play with it and I thought it might make a great Christmas gift for some members of my family.  I took a trip to Cairo and Luxor in Egypt for Memorial Day and have some great pictures to show off. 

So I ran this thing in my living room for a week and it is actually pretty cool.  It’s widescreen so I’m going to have to crop my pictures to make them look right.  For my starter experiment I just popped the SD card with all my pictures out of my camera (a Canon SD700 if you must know) and into the frame.  Worked great, except for the black bars (because of the widescreen). 

To turn this into a great gift I bought some 1GB SD cards for about $30.  I’ll then load a nice selection of pictures from my various travels.  And walaa, a customized, unique, fun Christmast gift.  It’s like making a scrapbook, except cooler and more appealing to the inner geek.  So if you are looking for a really cool Christmas gift with that personal touch and a shiny tech component there it is.

Looking around online reveals this must be the year of the digital picture frame.  There are bunches of options.  There are all sorts of cool things, like this: Digital Picture Keychain.  Here is a list from Amazonwith some of their picture frame choices.  I’m kind of having picture frame envy.  I might have to get a 4:3 aspect ratio one so I don’t have to spend as much time editing the pictures.

I like this hsow a lot.  For a long time I thought Showtime’s attempts at original programming well, sucked.  But I was sick at home one day and I stumbled across Sleeper Cell.  It’s a show about an FBI agent who infiltrates a terrorist cell in Los Angeles.  That show was pretty amazing, definitely not some HBO wannabe, so I gave a few other shows a chance.  (BTW a new season of Sleeper Cell starts soon, it’s definitely worth checking out.)  I’m not a big fan of Weeds, but I think it’s production values are strong. 

But, I’m here to talk about Dexter.  Dexter Morgan is a blood spatter expert (which is basically a CSI type of thing) and a serial killer.  But his father, a police detective, discovered his sociopathic tendencies early and channeled him.  So he kills only bad people.  He investigates them, verifies they are guilty, then kills them.  In the location where he kills them he puts up exhibits showing their guilt.  It’s all-in-all pretty clever.  What makes it more interesting is the interwoven tail of another serial killer, whom Dexter is tracking.  I can’t really say any more without a major spoiler, but suffice it to say it is well done.  Watch this series.  There are only two episodes left, but you can watch the old ones on Showtime-on-Demand.  (Or at least I can on Time-Warner.)

HBO still made (makes) the two best series of all time though:  Entourage and the Sopranos.  I’m really looking forward to the next Entourage season.  Of course if there is no triumphant return of Ari, I’ll be pissed.

[ Buy it on Amazon ] [ Official Site ] [ Gamespot: 5.5 Users: 7.2 ]

I almost didn’t buy this game after the mediocre (read bad) rating that Gamespot gave it (it’s a really well done review, definitely worth checking it out).  After playing it, I kind of agree with a lot of their issues.  But it grew on me a little.  I haven’t played it through yet, or even racked up a ton of hours.  That isn’t going to stop me from posting my thoughts though.

My biggest issue with this game is probably more of a general Wii issue.  The motion sensing controller is core to the whole Wii model so most of the games I’ve checked out try to make good use of it.  However, I can’t help but feel that the controls seem to oscillate between not very sensitive and hyper sensitive.  For example, in a sword fight in Red Steel the sword strokes don’t seem particularly natural or responsive.  In my opinion the response should be instantaneous and should follow the motion you make.  This doesn’t seem to be the case – maybe its a limitation of either the game or the controller, I can’t say.  I hope that future games do a better job of this.  The other end of the spectrum, hyper sensitive (or sometimes eratic) response is also illustrated by Red Steel.  You have to keep the Wii remote pretty stationary or you’ll find yourself constantly looking at the floor.  This causes you (well at least me) to overreact and shit up.  It takes a while to get this under control and constantly holding the controller in the right position is kind of a hassle.

So moving on, I think you’ll find my biggest gripe is tied to control.  I found it difficult to get used to waving the remote around in one hand to control where I looked and using the nunchaku in the other hand to move (or dodge in a sword fight).  It is possible that I’m just not twitchy enough for this, but it took me a long time to get used to it.  In fact, I’m still not used to it.  I did, however, find that over time I got a little more used to it and started to have fun.

My other complaint is something that Gamespot also pointed out.  The cut-scenes and dialog pretty much sucks.  I wish there was a mode where I could just go sword fight and not have to deal with the story, I’d use that all the time and give the game a much better review if it had that feature.  This would at least let me escape the annoying aspects of the game and have fun.  Like a Wii sword fight workout… that would be cool.

I also wasn’t blown away by the graphics.  I’m not sure if this is a Red Steel issue or a Wii issue.  In an FPS the expectations for graphics are just a lot higher and this didn’t get there – it pales in comparison to games like Gears of War on Xbox 360.  This may be due to the fact that the Wii is not HD, which seems like a weird choice.

So in summary:  This game is fun to mess around with and does do some interesting stuff with the Wii controller, but relative to other games in this genre it’s not very good.  I would only recommend it if you want to try out some interesting new games on your Wii.  I give the game a few kudos for the cool sword fight model and for doing some pretty cool motion sensing stuff in the interface.  I just wish they had done a little better on the quality.

My hope:  That someone comes out with a sword fight game that is really cool for the Wii.  I think the basic idea of the sword fights in Red Steel are really compelling and I would love to see a game that does a spectacular job of delivering on that concept. 

I’ll preface this with the fact that I have no kids.  But I read a lot of stuff about people whining about different things that I find really annoying and wasteful.  We have a professional class of politicians that have to always be making noise about something.  We have a professional class of whiners who constantly have to be complaining about something.  And we have a billion 24/7 news outlets on TV, the web, and everywhere else that need something to talk about.  Whiners and politicians are good that way.

BTW, the irony of the fact that I’m whining about whiners is not lost on me.  And I don’t think all politicians are bad.  Just most of them.

So this article:  Court rejects Illinois video game law is short, but good.  And I love this quote they pull from the ruling:

 “As we have suggested in the past, there is serious reason to believe that a statute sweeps too broadly when it prohibits a game that is essentially an interactive, digital version of The Odyssey.“

Brilliant!  I’m glad a rational judge got a hold of this.  Personally, I think trying to legislate taste is a really bad idea.  Parents should decide, or even better help their kids make informed decisions, what their kids look at.  There are movies, books, etc. that some might find inappropriate for kids.  I’m sure there are a ton of parents that think Catcher in the Rye is bad for kids.  And Amazon.com or the brick and mortar Barnes and Noble don’t card people before they buy it.  In fact, I wonder if Best Buy or Circuit City has to card kids before they buy R movies – I doubt it, but I’ll check.  There are a lot of R movies that are a hell of a lot more disturbing than most games.  Things like The Ring.

Anyway, I guess I just get frustrated seeing all these articles about people legislating what people can and can’t do.  And I’m pretty sure (at least in hindsight it seems this way to me) that at about 16 people should be able to make their own decisions.  I mean if we trust them enough to go 70 miles per hour in several tons of steal we should be able to trust them to make other choices. 

/diatribe

I love it when people tell it like it is.  And this article from Fortune titled Seagate CEO: I help people “watch porn” is great.  Some interesting perspectives and definitely worth the read.  You know it’s going to be an interesting article when it starts:

Sitting at the arm of a tech CEO during a corporate dinner is rarely as interesting as you might imagine. Usually, the CEO stays on message throughout the meal as a PR flak hovers, smiles, nods and prods the conversation along. Just keep the drinks coming, guys.

We read so much canned “on message” stuff these days in articles I just thought it was worth mentioning this article because it’s different.

Ah, see you think I’m going to talk about something that isn’t really what I’m going to talk about.  I said that to confuse you.

In the Web 2.0 world user generated content generally means blogs, comments, photos, videos, etc.  Basically, stuff users create and then other users look at… consume. What is particularly interesting about this is that it means the site owner doesn’t have to produce all that content – they just give users the tools to create it, browse it, look at it, consume it. The sites themselves are basically facilitators.

I’m going to make a distinction before I get to the point.  My view of what a game is might be different than other peoples.  In fact, I’m sure it is.  For example, I don’t consider Second Life to be a game.  I consider it to be a social environment.  In a social environment, like Second Life, user generated content is pretty much the same as the user generated content I mentioned above.  It may be more difficult to create, have to adhere to more complex rules, and/or it may have a larger aspect of commercialization, but it’s not meaningfully different.  (That’s not to demean it, I think Second Life is a great model.)

Every example like this seems to have that ambigous case though. I’ll call the Sims that ambigious case.  In many ways it is a social environment.  But there are more game mechanics there, but still I would argue that it doesn’t past my game test because it is pretty much voyeuristic.

So moving on to games, user generated content could mean users make swords or armor or other in game items.  Unfortuantely, this concept won’t work to well in games though.  Why you ask?  Because of balance issues.  See, if users create their own swords they might be overpowered, because that’s what people will tend to create.  Users could of course be allowed to create graphics but not attributes, but that would create oversight issues and linkage issues.

In certain types of games, this issue can be skirted.  Games like Neverwinter Nights and Warcraft 3 (not World of Warcraft) allow users to generate modules and maps (respectively).  This is not uncommon.  It is good.  It is also traditional user generated content.

So, finally, to the point.  What is different in games?  What is this user generated content in games?  It is the actual game itself. Many games are delivered in beautiful worlds, populated by beautiful avatars, and controlled by complex rules.  This is just like those Web 2.0 sites I mentioned above – the game is facilitating an exchange, but without users creating content they’re not very interesitng. In games this is also critically important because what makes them fun and interesting is also the user generated content:  competition.  The things all the other players do – the one difference is that it is not persistent.

Take two examples:

• World of Warcraft:  In many cases, this is a traditional game and relies on content generated by Blizzard.  But in the PvP arenas (Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Alterac Valley) much of the “content” is generated by the players (users). Once you are in these areas your goal is to beat your opponent, who is another human.  So all the “action” is generated by other users.
• Battlefield 2142:  I think this game has a single player mode, but I’ve never played it. The fun of this game is massive (32v32) player vs. player team battles.  On each team, a commander is selected, squads are created, orders are issued – all by the players.  Now that’s user generated content in games!

[ Buy from Amazon] [ Official Site ] [ Gamespot: 8.1 Users: 8.0 ]

This is a cool PC game, probably the best since World of Warcraft.  I’m sure it will also make a great console game at some point as well. It is also a better sequel, at least IMO.  Of course, that wouldn’t have been hard in Battlefield series, since the other one wouldn’t run on my computer, which I now realize is a shame since this is a good game and I think its predecessor was probably good too.  (BTW, the reason it didn’t run wasn’t because my computer wasn’t powerful enough, it had some weird issues with the resolutions I use.)

Battlefield 2142 is a first person shooter that simulates military combat.  It allows games of up to 64 players (32 per team) in opposing factions.  (The EU vs. PAC). 

You can choose one of four options:

• Recon:  This is basically a sniper.  They get sniper rifles, explosives, and camouflage.
• Assault:  Basic infrantry.  They get assault rifles and med packs.
• Engineer:  Good at killing armor and air.  They get something akin to a stinger missle launcher.  They can also repair armor, cars, air, etc.  They also get mines, which are quite nice.
• Support:  These are heavy machine gunners.  They can also resupply (provide more ammo).

The other interesting thing about this game is that you can get in vehicles such as tanks, mechs (large, heavily armed and armored robot looking things), cars (little dune buggie type vehicles with a machine gun turret), and various helicopters.  Tanks and mechs are really fun.  You can see the list of vehicles here.

The commander can also issue orders to people and squads (up to six players per squad).   A commander can also launch a UAV to monitor enemy troop positions and movement and can bombard them with an orbital strike. 

GOOD:  It’s fun to play.  32v32 is a blast.  It seems to be relatively easy to find game servers that are popular.  You can play a game pretty quickly, often around 30 minutes, and they are a blast.  You usually get some good adrenaline rushes.  I also admit to have a significant bias towards games where you play against or with other people as opposed to alone.  This is one of only three games I’ve found myself playing for any reasonable amount of time in the last few years (the other two are World of Warcraft and Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne – I’ll discuss them later).

BAD:  The game doesn’t handle Alt-Tabbing very well which I find really annoying.  It also could have better game finding and matching features, sometimes joining with a friend is a royal pain because you have to keep hitting refresh until a slot on a server opens up and then sometimes it puts you on a different team.  Finally, the documentation pretty much sucks, but hey it’s a game and you’ll figure it out.

COOL BONUS:  It does have a pretty cool webpage showing your ranks and stuff.  Ranks that you get from playing and badges/awards (which are cool) lead to unlocks (better gear).   This is probably makes the game ten times more interesting.

SEE:  LokiTX (that’s me!)

Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3.  (BTW, XBox wins for best and easiest to find website.  Googling PS3 doesn’t even get you the official site as the top result and ps3.com and playstation3.com don’t go there either…. and it takes 2 clicks from playstation.com.)  They are all finally here and the battle is engaged.  It’s funny, when I set this blog up I went back and grabbed my favorite posts from my old blog and posted them on here with their original dates.  When I did that, I noticed a post from November 28th, 2005 – exactly one year ago – discussing the Xbox 360 launch.  That was the only one of the consoles that I made a half-assed attempt to buy on launch day, but I wasn’t there early enough so I missed out.  I later bought an Xbox 360.  At first I wasn’t blown away by the few games I tried.  Perfect Dark sucked, for example.  Halo 2 was fun to play in higher res, but not a big change.

Then my friend, Adam, introduced me to Call of Duty 2 (buy) and it was the first Xbox 360 game that I thought was really cool.  That was fun to play for a while, but I never really became a junky.  Probably because I was too busy playing World of Warcraft (which still, in my opinion, beats any console game).  But I did keep paying attention to the coming next gen console wars and followed that story with interest.

The outcome is one I never really expected.  First off, Microsoft really did a good job of throwing a monkey wrench into the PS3.  Gears of War (buy) is a great game (it has already sold one million copies) and it launched just before the PS3, accomplishing two things:

• Keeping all the Xbox 360 owners interested and excited about the Xbox 360.  It’s much easier to run out and buy Gears of War than it is to wait in line to get a PS3.  And a lot cheaper than paying a premium.    So I think it was a powerful mechanism for keeping the existing base excited about the X360 platform.
• It is a powerful, and cheaper, consolation prize for the people that wanted a PS3.  Microsoft got a bit of a boost since the PS3 got some bad reviews early on.  Everyone already knew it would be hard to get, but a few bad reviews, a lack of good games, and the general plethora of negative Sony news (exploding batteries anyone), wasn’t good.  The only really interesting PS3 game (IMO) that isn’t on another platform is Resistance:  Fall of Man (Gamespot: 8.6).  But it looks pretty similar to Gears of War (Gamespot 9.6).   And you can get an X360 and Gears of War, and still have almost $800 left over (given eBay’s PS3 resale price averages of $1,186).  So what would you choose?  I have chosen to think about buying a PS3 in the spring when they are plentiful, not marked up, and maybe have some games I am interested in.  Although if Microsoft feeds enough Halo 3 info before then, I might never buy one.