To me, MMO writing seems tough. There's just so much text to take into account like menu text, quest text and dialogue trees (to say nothing of scripting actual cinema scenes and race- or class-specific flavor text). Keeping the tone and pace of a game consistent across all of that and actually crafting a basis for a story or an instance sounds especially daunting. So no wonder both Seamster and Danuser had tons of examples of writing gone wrong in MMOs.

Here's a good bit:

Writers should "get over themselves", [Danuser] stated plainly. Instead of trying to saddle any single player with an epic destiny, the gameworld itself should provide a backdrop for collaborative heroism. Framing the narrative to promote teamwork, and creating narrative events that challenge the playerbase as a whole, allows for the epic tales writers crave.

Check it out, if you've got the time or possibly the aspiration to become an MMO writer.

GDC Austin: Writing for MMOs: You're Doing it Wrong [Gamasutra]

Hoffman notes that subscriptions have a downside: When it looks like there's a fixed monthly price until eternity, even a game's most dedicated fans can eventually balk. Many publishers entice retention with discounts for longer commitments, but Hoffman also suggests that creating a demand for multiple subscriptions per user can prolong the average customer's lifetime value.

Games can also offer add-ons to the base subscription — Hoffman notes that these "allow more devoted and less price sensitive players to more routinely pay for more value and drive the ACLV higher."

Pure subscription models, by their very nature, keep out that portion of the player population who's not willing to pay that amount, however.

"So, while the modeling of the revenue equation is easier, there will always be inherent elasticity to the game," Hoffman says.

Tiered subscriptions wherein the first tier is free can also help a game reach price-sensitive players, but then it adds to the publisher's objectives the need to optimize conversion rates from free to paying — while still maintaining the value and integrity of the free experience.

I'll be trotting up to USC in a few weeks to attend a workshop on MMO design considerations and pricing structures in free to play versus subscription environments, and though it's nothing I have to worry about except as an end user, I'm always curious to see how and why companies arrive at the structures they do.

Analysis: Vindicia's Hoffman On MMO Billing Headaches [Gamasutra]

I estimate this year that you'll see EA enter this space for some of their games, and a few other big names are absolutely interested. In fact we're in final negotiations with a couple of recognizable names.

We tend to estimate the size of the total pre-paid gaming card business when we do our numbers, and this year we're looking to something between $75-100 million dollars in sales across North America. We see that going to $250-300million in 2009 and being in the region of a half-billion by 2010.

We see this market growing dramatically in the next two to five years.

The whole interview is an interesting look at how the industry deals with retailers via middlemen like GMG; it also points to the popularity of these models that many 'serious' gamers tend to ignore.

Some of the eighth graders and high school freshmen who signed up for the group couldn't have cared less about writing or reading in school. Yet those students have gone from barely stringing together two sentences to writing lengthy posts in their group's Web site forum, where they discuss detailed strategies for gearing up their virtual characters and figuring out tough quests.

"It has worked ridiculously well," Steinkuehler said. "It shouldn't be working as well as it is."

Video games are also being embraced by some advocates of "unschooling," a type of home schooling that puts kids more in charge of the curricula. Guess what — the kids want to play video games. But they also learn everything from math skills to social skills along the way.

The unschoolers' experiences, along with the early success of Steinkuehler's program, suggest that playing a video game set in a virtual online world can encourage students to learn valuable real-world skills. Steinkuehler's goal is to figure out when and how learning takes place in online games, and how popular games made for entertainment might become educational tools.

The article goes on to talk with 'unschooling' homeschooling parents and spends more time on Steinkuehler's research. It's an interesting, reasonably mainstreamed piece on the educational uses of popular games.

World of Warcraft Video Game Succeeds in School [LiveScience via Pop Cosmopolitanism]

But as the concept of ownership becomes hazier - and companies more insistent on maintaining it by punishing their paying customers in the process - so are end-user rights more worthy of attention as a mass expression of consumer desire. A clickwrap agreement cannot supersede the basic tenets of property ownership. The tighter DRM grasps, the more legitimate customers will turn to piracy or other means of subverting oppressive license agreements. And the further DRM reaches into a consumer's fair use of a purchased product, the more likely a judge is to support the end-user and not the software company.

What's clear in all of this - in a field that is about as clear as pea soup - is that these issues aren't going away. Whether interpreted as a manifestation of player desires, or inalienable rights that form the bedrock of our online pursuit of happiness, these impassioned assertions are proof that games (and gamers) are evolving in fascinating ways. The declaration of rights has never been without conflict in human history. Games are no exception - and the stakes might be higher than you think.

I'm no lawyer, but this is one area I do follow pretty regularly — court cases are popping up ever more frequently, and some recent, high profile DRM blunders have been splashed everywhere. I think it's going to be quite some time before any of this gets ironed out to the satisfaction of players and companies, but it will make for an interesting ride in the meantime.

We the Gamers [Escapist]

It’s actually more of an opportunity than a problem. It’s rarely a problem. I’ve been a sort of creative person for a long time – in this business and then before that as a performer. And you always need some kind of boundary. Start with a blank canvas and say that you’re going to make stuff up in this big empty vac cum… it’s actually really hard to do. It’s good to have boundaries. The beauty of Tolkein is that he’s created these exquisitely detailed boundaries that have so much depth and richness inside them, and yet still have all kinds of things which are open for interpretation. I mean, we built Angmar basically from scratch, to our liking, based on very few clues… and yet it still feels as if it belongs in Middle Earth. There’s certain things – I can’t have flying cars or motorcycles or things like that. But I can have other things which are very exciting and it means, by definition, the world has a consistency, where it feels right. It all fits together. There’s not things which just don’t make sense.

Interesting interview with some great little tidbits, especially if you're interested in LOTRO specifically.

Jeffrey Steefel on LOTRO: Mines of Moria [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

The essential issue recognized by the "Avatar Rights" movement is that players ascribe substantial value to their game characters and virtual assets. The willful denial of this fact, in some sense, has helped enable the growth of gold farming and criminals who target online games.

Because developers don't consider the value that players put in their virtual "stuff", customer service is often not responsive to player complaints about lost items. Also, the game systems are not built to easily log, track, remove, and restore these items in case of loss or theft.

In some sense this is ironic, the same game companies that argue vigorously that the virtual items have no value, at the same time are extraordinarily reluctant to restore players characters or virtual items after alleged theft. The argument is typically made that the players are abusing the system by allowing their items to be stolen (or, actually, selling them) and then making a complaint to the game operator.

If the items have no value, then restore them.

Short, but interesting, musing — with references — on the 'avatar problem.'

The Quixotic Quest for Avatar Rights [PlayNoEvil]

Robert: F2P has a huge influence. But we have been based on subscriptions for years, with some games being around for 10+ years. Subscripitions hit a hardcore audience that is really embedded in those games. But as you expand your audience, they aren’t as hardcore anymore and F2P becomes more enticing as subs only wouldn’t appeal.

Nicolay: Both models work. Hardcore gamers are comfortable with sub model and most of the games with microtransactions have been casual games. But it is possible to have more than one biz model in a game.

Min: There is room in the market for both biz models. F2P in North America will make a large push as teenagers can’t commit to $15/month, so F2P will work well with them. Nexon saw lots of success when the market went beyond core to mass market.

Hilmar: Consumers are changing the business model of games - consumers making decisions. You can play Eve online through our trial program as a F2P program - users are able to “game” our trial system to play it as a F2P game. It’s a challenge for companies to adopt the needs of the market rather than keeping their head in sand. People will play the game how they want.

Min: We’re seeing in S Korea a lot of players have a subscription-based game that is their favourite, but have a secondary game that they play f2p with microtransactions.

I can't imagine the FTP model will ever overtake subscription models in the West, but there's no doubt that there are a lot of people playing FTPs — and spending way, way more than they would on a subscription — with an ever-increasing audience. I'm curious to see if we'll get any of the crazier FTP MMOs coming out of Asia in the coming years.

Evolving Business Models in MMOs - Panel [Free To Play]

At times it’s staggeringly beautiful. You’ll forgive the time it takes to travel between space stations as you watch the glowing nebulae glint off your ship’s hull. It’s impossibly slick.

Eve’s interface isn’t slick at all. It’s like falling down a waterfall of endless menus. Boxes of stuff will clutter up the screen as you play, and nothing is ever as simple as it should be. You’ll buy something in a space station, but buying it doesn’t actually give you the item, you have to open cargo hold, and then open your inventory and drag the item you’ve just bought into your ship. This is something we constantly forgot to do, which meant , once we had eventually figured out what was happening, that we had left a trail of forgotten ship upgrades in storage hangars in various space stations scattered across the galaxy. Much time was spent retrieving them. We upgraded our weapons to take on some tough space pirates, after much peering at tiny stat values trying to figure out what the difference was between a Laser Cannon and a Railgun, and whether or not our characters had the skill to use them or the money to buy them, we rolled into battle to find ourselves confused and really quite embarrassed when none of our weapons worked. My Laser Cannon had packed in because the energy grid on my ship couldn’t handle the new hardware, and Dante hadn’t bought any rockets for his rocket launcher. We warped the hell out of there to spend some more time menu-gazing at the nearest space station. All in all, it was a constantly frustrating experience with a near vertical difficulty curve.

The four-part series includes an entry for each game, plus a concluding section; go forth and conquer.

MMO Showdown [Man vs. Horse via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Multiplayer gamers (statistically speaking) tend to be challenge-oriented, and willing to be aroused to anger as this enhances their eventual reward in fiero when they attain victory. They are not only enjoying fiero, though, they are also enjoying the social element of multiplayer games such as the sense of belonging to a team, feelings of envy and gratitude, and the feeling of naches – the satisfaction of seeing someone you taught to play perform well.

Conversely, single player gamers (statistically speaking) are showing greater interest in having control over the space of their play. This is one way to interpret the lower interest in random elements – these add variety to play, but they also mean the player has less direct control over outcomes. The higher interest in sandbox play can also be interpreted as an increased interest in having complete control over the play space, although undoubtedly other interpretations are possible.

I've enjoyed and continue to enjoy certain types of 'multiplayer' experiences, but I'm certainly not a 'fiero' driven gamer. The rest of the article includes some other little tidbits; I'm curious to see the 'grander' essays on the findings promised.

Playing Together [Only a Game]

The concept has been well-tread in RPGs for years, but it was not until recently that action games started to employ loot theory for their own benefit. Call of Duty 4 introduced a weapon and rank system. As players gain points in matches, their rank goes up, and they earn new weapons and accessories. Levels are frequent enough to keep many players going, and many staunch fans of the game have admitted that they themselves would have quit playing several months before if not for the weapon unlockables and ranking.

Bungie attempted a ranking system with Halo 3, but players did not stick to it the way they stuck to Call of Duty. The reasoning is simple. Even with the initial rank increase and bragging rights, a complete lack of swag meant the rank was largely meaningless, as it offered no real benefit. it was initially motivating, but it didn’t last.

Is there any shame in baiting players to, well, play more? There's a fine line to walk in implementing 'loot theory,' but I can think of a number of games that strike that nice balance between giving you encouraging tidbits and not giving it all away. I'm a fan of loot, but it won't keep me playing unless the other parts of the design equation fall into place.

Loot Theory: The Tale of the Donkey and the Carrot [High Dynamic Range Lying via GameSetWatch]

MMOs aren’t like other games. They’re closer to a lifestyle choice, for a lot of people defining how their spare time is spent, how their lives are lived. So if you criticise the game, you criticise the player. God knows there are plenty of non-MMO games that people treat as though they’re bound to their very souls - witness the pile-on for Eurogamer’s MGS4 review, or even the outrage about various RPS writers being down on Stalker: Clear Sky - but it’s even worse with MMOs. Telling a WAR player that his game is similar to WoW is like telling a goth that he’s emo. No-one wants to be told they’re not unique and interesting, to be dismissed as a stereotype they’re not.

WAR is not WoW. But it is a lot like it in a number of crucial ways, and for one essential reason: money. I suspect Mythic and EA aren’t too concerned about the comparison themselves - they might disagree with the sweeping generalisation, but if they didn’t want to be compared they would have gone for an entirely different interface and art approach. Saying WAR is like WoW is not the same as saying it’s a bad or a lazy game, but unfortunately there are guys who do intentionally make the comparison unfavourably, and that’s perhaps understandably made a lot of WAR fans very touchy.

Personally, I'm fascinated by the fan communities generated by MMOs, popular ones and not — not being much of an MMO player, I find 'people watching' to be more entertaining than the game in a lot of cases. I don't have the patience to wade through the original comment thread, but I'm pretty sure I could rattle off the general reaction with little prompting. Meer's thoughts, however, are deserving of a read.

A Dirty Word [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

So, as LALAa the 17-year-old human female entered the world of Mabinogi, I braced myself for whatever the game had in store for me.

Three hours later, I logged off feeling slightly like Gilligan and the Skipper - completely and irrevocably lost. I'd picked up the game's point-and-click interface fairly quickly (so I thought), but my confusion ran deeper than that. It wasn't even what I was being asked to do - the standard "go kill 10 (enemies)" or "bring me five (items)" are old hat to any MMOG player - as much as how I was being asked to do it.

While running aimlessly around the starting area, an owl suddenly flew by and dropped off a quest to bring five berries to a local NPC. I was baffled; what had I done to earn this quest? As far as I could tell, nothing, but a quest is a quest. The best way to gather berries in the world of Mabinogi, it turns out, is to attack bushes and trees over and over until they drop them - of course, they can also drop branches instead, I mercilessly clicked the local foliage in search of berries, unsure if I was doing this properly. What made me get a branch instead of a berry - was it random? Should I be focusing on bushes instead of trees? Upon gathering the berries and locating the NPC, I was informed that I'd taken too long to complete the quest, and it had expired. Naturally, I hadn't realized that the task was time-sensitive.

It felt like I was still in the tutorial phase, only they weren't explaining anything to me

After speaking to some avid Mabinogi players, Funk comes to the conclusion that he had approached the game in the wrong manner: it wasn't so much a Mabinogi problem as a problem of expectations. It's a funny look at getting outside your gaming comfort zone.

My Korean Fantasy Life [The Escapist]

Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) is being sued for RMB 11,000 in emotional damages by a gamer of its licensed MMORPG "Legend of Mir" for freezing the player's game account, reports West China City Daily. In addition to monetary compensation, the gamer is asking for the return of his virtual items. The Chengdu Jinniu District People's Court began hearing the case on Sunday, said the report. The9 (Nasdaq: NCTY) was ordered to pay court fees and return game characters and tools to World of Warcraft gamer by the Shanghai Pudong New District People's Court on August 13.

I know people are attached to their MMOs, but really. Emotional distress? Really? This sounds like one of those ridiculous lawsuits people always use to point out the flaws of the US legal system — clearly, China is not immune either. I'll be curious to see the outcome; as Steve at PlayNoEvil notes, this type of precedent could be really injurious to game operators.

Shanda Gamer Sues For Emotional Damages After Game Account Sealed [Pacific Epoch via PlayNoEvil]

A universal game design wouldn’t just stop with action games or titles where you’re directly in control of the protagonist. It could extend out to strategy, space combat, anything really. What else is Starcraft but an action game where you hover high above the battlefield? The concept has been experimented with before in games, but with the kind of refinement we’re talking about it’d be possible to mix completely unrelated players in one game. Take Left 4 Dead. One player controls all of the zombies, the others are all playing characters trapped in the fray. One is engaged in a strategic battle, the other is having a frantic shoot-out. A player who isn’t a huge fan of playing Halo may nevertheless buy a game where they get to control the battlefield while skilled players opt for FPS mode and try to take them out while they control armies overhead. Beyond the always promising broad economic perks of such a game, there’s the co-mingling of different players and preferences in one Universal Design. It’s not a game within the game, it’s a game that has every means of interaction possible in it.

It's an interesting thought, though the old 'jack of all trades, master of none' warning seems like it would come into play pretty easily. Co-mingling, though, is certainly intriguing. It's an interesting piece on choice and game design choices.

Universal Game Design [PopMatters via GameSetWatch]

These are real economies. In fact, they get much closer to the raw creation of economic growth than many national economies as these "virtual" economies prove quite convincingly that wealth isn't capital or labor but instead knowledge and creativity. Building a working infrastructure to support capital inflows and outflows in a trustworthy manner is very much a core problem we want to address.

In many ways we're facing the merging of intellectual property and "cash" into one entangled entity. When someone steals a virtual thing they've stolen real value. Cash was created in many ways because barter was hard, and cash creates prices. However if prices are now known in some exchange rate, the virtual good that was stolen is a bill denominated in the exchange value of that good in the first place.

With credit card fraud, stolen card numbers, chargebacks, and other security breeches an increasing problem, we'll no doubt see more and more focus on what can be done to prevent fraud in its many forms (though Steve at PlayNoEvil seems to harbor doubts that companies really pay enough attention to security and fraud issues, especially when it comes to implementing successful and cost-effective solutions that don't cripple usability for the consumer).

Vindicia's Hoffman On The Science Of MMO Fraud [Gamasutra]

I’d like to conduct in-depth interviews with all types of people involved in the creation process, from programmers and testers to visual artists and music composers, as well as game developers, producers and visionaries ....

Another part of my research is to collect oral histories from gamers and game developers regarding their experiences playing games, specifically during "epochal" moments, like when Lord British was assassinated in Ultima Online. Some people also happened to record those moments, and it would be very interesting to collect those artifacts for the cultural record.

I'll be curious to see how this project develops, since it could potentially be very influential in how other collections begin organizing and preserving new media and video games more specifically. The idea of oral history is a particularly good one — the historian in me is glad people are working on things like this now, as opposed to scrambling when it's almost too late.

University of Texas at Austin Looks at MMO Preservation [Game Culture] & LJ Talks to Megan Winget, Who Studies Preservation of Online Games [Library Journal] [via GameSetWatch]

Described as an "eternal struggle between two sisters: Little Bo Peep and Little Red Riding Hood," the new MMO Secondhand Lands has just been announced and is currently in closed beta. The game, developed by Austin-based Callipygian, will be distributed Pixel Mind and will utilize their microtransaction system:

Said Callipygian founder and Secondhand Lands lead, "We chose to work with Pixel Mine because they offered us the best value for our company and our players. As an independent developer it is very difficult to find a distribution deal that gives us a package with everything we need to manage accounts and handle payments. Also, we are excited to be working with another Austin company; this town is rich with talent and services tailored for game creation."

From the website:

Secondhand Lands is the massively multiplayer online game set in a parody fairytale world. There will be none of those pansy elves or cantankerous dwarves in this land. Our heroes are comprised of the Wolves and the Sheep who have pledged their undying allegiance to Bo Peep or Little Red Riding Hood. Well, perhaps not undying...

Both the jaded MMOG veteran and new player will quickly find a place among the followers of the rival sisters (or perhaps as a Black Sheep or one the nefarious Wolves in Sheep's Clothing). Secondhand Lands boasts those features players have come to expect of the "big AAA" games along with a few surprises.

Sounds interesting, at the very least. I'm always up for clever parodies.

Pixel Mine To Debut Parody Fairy Tale MMO Secondhand Lands [Gamasutra]

Back in April, Dan Rubenfield (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, etc.) ranted, raved, and put MMO developers 'on notice.' And, at the end, admonished developers to "quit making PC games. It’s a waste of time and money." Unsurprisingly, people hit back, and now over at GameSetWatch, Joe Ludwig (producer of Pirates of the Burning Sea) has a snappy little response detailing six reasons why MMOs are just plain harder to develop for consoles versus PCs. Does that mean it won't start happening in greater numbers? Of course not:

There is enough money to be made in console games that future MMO releases there are inevitable. It's just a question of when they arrive.

Several console MMOs have already launched. The most successful of these by far is Final Fantasy XI on the PlayStation 2. Everquest Online Adventures and Phantasy Star Universe (and Phantasy Star Online before it) are two more examples. There are probably more that I'm not coming up with. All of these games have seen some modest success, but none of them are either major console hits or major MMO hits.

... Eventually MMOs are going to come to consoles. It's just going to take them a while to get there, and they will probably never emerge in the same numbers as they do on PCs. Buck up, Dan. We'll get there some day.

He also points out that according to NPD, developing for PCs is anything but a waste of money. Overall, it's a really reasonable response to a sometimes reasonable, sometimes really not rant.

Why Aren't There More Console MMOs? [GameSetWatch]

He covers the widespread competitive game scene in Korea, looks into Quake's evolving role in the London game scene, and visits Iceland to see the birthplace of EVE Online, to develop what he says is a story of "how games change the lives of gamers."

I thought the idea of a "travelogue" of game culture was interesting, so I asked Jim a few questions about the book, and his experiences.

How did the book come to be, and why did you want to write it?

Jim Rossignol: It started because of some interest around a feature I wrote on the gaming culture in Korea. PC Gamer UK was commissioning some pretty interesting and aggressive material in 2006, and it came out of that.

I was keen to lay out some of the ideas I'd been collecting in longform - there's only so much you can do when writing disconnected reviews and features. To come up with a wider perspective, and a wider take, on any given subject still requires a book.

What are the ideas that the book deals with, primarily?

JR: It's a book about how games change the lives of gamers. It starts out with a couple of specific cases - my own life and that of some people I know - and moves on to more general instances. The themes the book deal with are pretty diverse - boredom, propaganda, human computation, the nature of games as a medium - but they all tie into the idea that people are changed by gaming, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Can you give a brief example of one of the instances in the story?

JR: Well, one of the more specific instances is the story of a friend of mine who now works in the games industry, but grew up escaping into games as a fairly unhappy child. He's a living instance of the kinds of traits and trends I want to talk about, because he's a person for whom some of the greatest moments in life have been to do with gaming.

Games were a way of escaping boredom and domestic discomfort, but ended up being an incredible life-defining force. He ended up playing Guitar Hero in front of thousands of rock fans at the Donnington Rock Festival in the UK, effectively opening the show for Guns & Roses. (Or so he likes to tell the tale.)

For whom is this book intended, and what kinds of readers do you hope will pick it up?

JR: Well everyone can read it, and will love it, obviously... but in all seriousness, it's an approachable book. Pop documentary, if that's a genre. I suspect there's a way to present any niche subject so that everyone finds it digestible and interesting, and I hope I've done that. It's more like chatty travel literature than dry academia, I feel.

What do you hope people will learn or take away from it?

I hope it helps people to figure out what they really think about video games. I don't want to lecture anyone, just offer some descriptions and examples that might be useful in making up your mind. One of the key tensions in the book is whether video games are fundamentally a waste of time, and what that even means. I'd like to think that both people who don't play games, and the gamers themselves, will find that they're able to discuss the pros and cons of being a habitual gamer a little more fluently once they've read it.