Category: Academia (Page 2 of 4)

Nine Ways To Misuse Bartle’s Four

October 11, 2007 / Damion Schubert

There are a whole bunch of people who reach for the Bartle’s Four when discussing MMO concepts. Frequently, they are talking about it as if it is gospel and all design should respond to it, whereas others believe that the whole thing is old and busted, and we should move on.

That being said, I see both advocates and detractors often use Richard’s paper in ways that conflicts with my own experience. Here are some of the ways I would suggest reconsidering how you use this important paper (and note, this is solely my point of view, and even Richard’s may vary). Continue reading

Is the Bartle’s Four Important?

September 13, 2007 / Damion Schubert

So Brandon keeps grilling me on the Bartle’s Four. Is it still important? Is it relevant?

One viewpoint.

At AGDC this year, Erik Bethke talked about data mining the GoPets experience. GoPets was originally designed to be a purely social game. They ‘carpet bombed’ the social quarter of Bartle’s grid, in Erik’s words. They did okay. Continue reading

The Station Exchange White Paper

February 8, 2007 / Damion Schubert

I found the Station Exchange paper to be of great interest. I remember first thinking that somebody should do something like the Exchange back when I was working on UO2 nearly ten years ago, but even so, I’m glad that someone else took the slings and bullets for the idea.

Sara and Raph both have good commentary. My own thoughts: I’m surprised the revenue earned was so low. Less than $300K in revenue earned in a year is a significant amount of cash if you’re a small company, but it risks being mistaken for a financial error in an organization with the revenue streams of Sony (and SOE in particular). After all, a game that has 100K subscribers and charges 10 bucks a month brings in a million bucks a month in revenue, and both EQ and EQ2 are higher on both counts. Continue reading

Who Says Academics Are Dull?

November 27, 2006 / Damion Schubert

Ren Reynolds has started a research project.

Then it struck me that there might be at lest one comparator that could be common across worlds which might cast a slightly different light on in-world currency values, and that’s sex. More specifically paid for in-world sex, and potentially the ultimate unit of measure may be the ’15 min quickie blowjob’, giving us the QBJ index.

More Cool Graphs from PARC

September 11, 2006 / Damion Schubert

I love the PlayOn guys. Even though I find myself frequently questioning their methodology, they always ask interesting questions which makes me think about the games I’m building. Here’s a really simple one, based on levelling time in WoW. Take a look.

The shape of the graph is really interesting, with a slight dip at level 39, followed by a huge spike at 40. This, most likely, is caused by mounts. People grind through 39 as fast as they can to get the mount, then afterwards enjoy an emotional release. Perhaps they are relaxing after slavishly grinding, perhaps they’re focusing on earning cash to buy the mount, or possibly they’re just joyously exploring the world with their new speed buff. At any rate, it shows how powerful strong ‘threshold’ rewards can be in motivating players.

Also of interest: a lot of battlegrounds players will choose not to level up once they hit the highest level in a battleground level band (i.e. staying at level 29 so they can rule the 20-29 battleground). As such, you’d expect to see some spikes at the -9s. This doesn’t appear to be evident at all, although I note that their samples are on PvE servers. It would be interesting to see the same graph on a PvP servers, where players might be more likely to min-max for the battleground experience.

Validating the Corner Bar Mentality

August 21, 2006 / Damion Schubert

A lot of people have been poking fun at this study, which is if you read it carefully, pretty close to my corner bar theory, only with academic citations.

The researchers, Constance Steinkuehler and Dmitri Williams, claim that MMOs function not like solitary dungeon cells, but more like virtual coffee shops or pubs where something called “social bridging” takes place. They even liken playing such games as “Asheron’s Call” and “Lineage” to dropping in at “Cheers,” the fictional TV bar “where everybody knows your name.” “By providing places for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function much like the hangouts of old,” they said.

XBox TrueSkill System Reinvents 65 Year Old Wheel

November 4, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The XBox 360 team was able to borrow the Microsoft Research team, in order to create the TrueSkill player ranking system.

It’s a more interesting problem than it seems. The gold standard for player ranking systems over the years has been the chess ranking system (the ELO system), which compares players and the opponents they defeat to rank them against each other. Beating up on newbies doesn’t help your ELO ranking if you’re high up – you have to play other high level players to improve. ELO is used by most 2 player game federations, including Chess and Scrabble. Continue reading

That Thar Ludium Thing

October 3, 2005 / Damion Schubert

So I spent half of last week in Bloomington, Indiana (which was very lovely, I might add) attending a Ludium. Now you might be asking what a Ludium is. That’s okay. Dictionary.com doesn’t know either. Hell, I didn’t even really know when I signed up. But here is what the Ludium was meant to be, as written up by Edward Castranova of Terranova, who was the brainchild of the event:

What’s a Ludium? It’s an academic conference built as a live-action game. At this one, a mixed group of academics, MMORPG designers, and experts with funding contacts will compete to come up with the best ways to use avatars in university research. Anyone who reads this page knows that basic research using the technology of multiplayer persistent gaming will open countless new approaches to the exploration of human sociality. That’s valuable in and of itself, but there are all kinds of spinoffs that advance the agendas of others. There’s IP for businesses in this; information-spreading tools for foundations; policy levers for government. There are so many good research ideas that the question is not whether we should do anything, but where do we start? This conference will try to pick out the five best ideas and lay down, concretely, the pragmatics of working on them. Who benefits? How deep is the impact? What will this kind of work cost? Who will fund it? How quickly will the results be available?