One thing that I absolutely hate is having to alt+tab in games, or having to play in windowed mode. I’d imagine that many other people probably feel the same way. This happens most often in MMOs, mainly because there’s often need to get to browser windows and media players during extended periods of unbroken play. Just because of the nature of the online game, I find myself sacrificing optimal brightness/contrast and graphical quality for the ability to quickly alt+tab. It’s more important to have information at the tips of my fingers than to have 5 trillion more shaders on my in-game fingertips.

This is why I can’t understand why more MMOs don’t have these same capabilities in-game. Even EQLive had a media player capable of playing mp3s, if rudimentary. EVE is capable of playing the same, and I know that there are several other games with similar capabilities, but what about the big players? There’s not the slightest semblance of a media player in EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft, and the former is one of the biggest resource hogs known to man. Alt+tabbing EQ2 is like playing russian roulette.

To the game’s credit, though, after logging back in recently I was pleasantly surprised with the addition of a browser window. Given the open source nature of the Gecko browser engine and the prevalence of the firefox browser, I’m completely at a loss for why in-game browsers don’t come standard in games. I don’t want to imply that it would be a walk in the park to add that kind of capability, but clearly the tools are there. Standards-compliant browser rendering engines are available, for free, to whomever wants to use them. My cell phone has a browser, why not my game?

Being a student of economics, I realize that specialization of programs independently of each other will result in better software (that is, if a game company writes their own browsers and mp3 players in game, they’re taking time away from developing features in the game, etc), but in a world where music and the web are two of the most important components of daily life (ipod, iphone anyone?), I hardly see the harm in providing these to gamers. Maybe the innovators behind xfire will expand their aim to the media/browsing world in the near future. At least that’s my hope.

I feel like, at one point or another, most people are given the opportunity to skip an incredible amount of work or time investment by having a character or some other costly consideration passed to them freely. Whether it’s in a game completely new to you, or a game that you’ve been playing for years, this is a pretty common situation, and I’m curious to learn how other people feel about it.

I myself have inherited several EQ2 accounts with high level characters on them (well, high level at the time; this was before DoF), WoW accounts with high characters and valuables and, most recently, a high(er) level character in a MUD. In each of these cases I’ve felt empty and unclean at the prospect of reaping the benefits of someone else’s time. It doesn’t matter whether the thing in question cost money, either; there’s always the opportunity for anyone to log on to ebay or playerauctions and walk away with a “pimpin’ toon”.

Is there any sense of accomplishment felt after doing this? Even if you were to play that character for the rest of your days, is it truly yours? When people mess up in raids or act uncharacteristically in game, they’re often asked if they are from ebay, or if they just bought the account. Maybe the reason they get asked this is because everyone in their guild is a douchebag, or maybe it’s because it’s extremely difficult for most people to achieve a decent level of play with a character that isn’t their own. I feel rather strongly about this, because every time I’ve been given a character it’s always felt empty and pointless, more like a joke than a legit “transfer”. I feel more like a circus clown who’s learned a new trick and never really expect other players to take me seriously. Sure, you can transfer the character, but you can’t transfer the experience itself.

On the flipside, my view on RMT (real money transactions) in games (that is, buying in-game items for out-of-game money) is completely opposite. I really think there’s something fundamentally different between buying a character and buying something for your character, though.

I’m sure there are success stories of people switching characters. I’m also sure that there’s a difference between buying a new character to play permanently versus buying a new marginal character. I suppose my main personal gripe lies with buying a character to play as a main when that character is higher level than you’ve achieved yourself (meaning you skip content, the closest thing you can really do to cheating in an online game). How does everyone else feel about this? This seems like one of those taboo topics that everyone’s on the hush-hush about.

I’ve been on something of a wii-frenzy lately. It’s the only current-gen console I own (and the only 4th-gen console I will ever own) and I’m trying to “keep up” with the console by playing through all of the headliner games. So far I’ve played through several, the most notable being Super Paper Mario and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. These two games are very well placed on the wii, their controls complement the capabilities of the wiimote (and in the case of Zelda, the nunchuck) very well, and the story and gameplay are most excellent. Another thing I’ve noticed, independent of the console itself, is that these two games (in particular) are very long.

Super Paper Mario, when it was all said and done, took about 17 hours to beat. Of course 17 hours isn’t really too great a time investment for someone with hundreds of days locked up in MMOs, but I don’t think anyone would disagree that for a console game aimed at a younger audience, 17 hours is about the threshold, at least as far as attention-span is concerned. The game was engaging, witty, and oh-so-loveable for the entire 17 hours, to the point where I didn’t even realize how long I’d been sitting in my chair playing. That, in my opinion, is a good measure of a game’s quality.

In Twilight Princess, however, I’ve already spent a good 35+ hours adventuring non-stop (my gameplay says 44 hours, but I’m not sure if it counts up while the game is paused, etc, so this is adjusted a bit) with the strategy guide. I mention the guide just because I’ll finish the game with every heart piece, poe, bug, and special item, so this may be a fairly bloated number. Just running through the temples and everything may be fairly shorter. Sitting down and playing for 5-6 hour sessions in Twilight Princess doesn’t seem weird at all. The game is so fluid and continuous that I hardly flinch when presented with a new series of temples to grind through at 2-3 hours each.

My conclusion, and the point of this article, doesn’t really have anything to do with these two games in particular. The reason I wrote this article is because I’m high on that feeling, the one you get after you beat a really long game. To me, it also feels a bit like the feeling you get when you loot a really freakin’ sick item in an MMO that you’ve been playing 40+ hours just to get. The thing that intrigues me, though, is which feeling is stronger? Which feeling has a more lasting effect? Maybe the answer to this seems obvious to a lot of people reading this. I wonder, however, how many people would continue raiding and playing MMO games full time if they realized that the feeling that comes from multiple days of raiding and the feeling that comes from playing through a single-player game are similar?

In an MMO, you are rewarded with a permanent upgrade to your character (permanent, at least, until the next expansion comes out). In a single-player game, you’re rewarded by being “released” from the game itself. You probably no longer have the urge to play as much. In addition, you’re rewarded socially to, in my opinion, a greater extent than you are in an MMO.

Think about it this way: when you hear people talk about EverQuest, or any MMO they’ve played in the past, there are many people who can relate, because there are many people who played. At the same time, even people who never breached level 20 in EverQuest are still able to talk nostalgically about the game, simply because playing and getting somewhere was an achievement in and of itself. Even if the person talking spent years raiding, they can still level with you on some topics: “omg jboots quest”. Here, so many years later, the newb is on the same level as the pro raider in terms of their endearment toward the game. In a single player, game, however, people can talk about their experiences with beating the game. It seems like there’s a far greater difference between someone who’s beat a game talking about it and someone who hasn’t. “dude, ocarina of time was so awesome, remember how hard the ganondorf fight was when we were little?”

Maybe part of it is that the likelihood of a person beating 10 single-player games is higher relative to the likelihood of a person playing an MMO for 10 times as long as it takes to beat a single-player game.

So, and this is the essence of this article, why would you spend the same amount of time achieving a marginal upgrade for your character when you can get the same social feeling from beating a game on your own? I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean that everyone shouldn’t. I’ve done both, and don’t regret either choice. It does give an interesting, new interpretation of time, though.

Anyone who’s ever played a roleplaying game for any amount of time will tell you stories about their money. Maybe it’s how they had to grind 500 sewer rats to pay for their new wooden sword, or maybe they were up for 9 days solid in some obscure part of the world where “no one’s ever been” collecting a rare harvested material to price gouge in the marketplace to fund that new mount. Whatever the details are, it becomes very obvious that people treat their in-game money just as defensively (or even more defensively for the younger age groups who don’t have as much experience with earned “real”-life currency) as they treat the money they earn in their real jobs. Many players don’t even realize that they’re actively contributing to an economy that lives, breaths, and behaves just as one would expect under “real”-world conditions; they just want that new piece of gear, or to repair the gear that they’ve been fighting in for the last 12 hours solid.

Virtual money, just like the currencies used to fund nations in the “real” world, can be explained using extremely rudimentary economic concepts. The models of markets, of supply and demand shocks, of counterfeiters and others can all be used with some accuracy to predict (with varying accuracy) fluctuations in the economic conditions of a game world. However, there are several things which are markedly missing from today’s role-playing environments that any real, sustainable, thriving economy should have, and this does much to undermine the day-to-day reality of the game itself.

The most obvious thing that the roleplaying and other massively multiplayer games are missing are banks and other financial institutions. Banks in today’s games are a joke: most of the time they’re simply a geographically separated version of your wallet. Some games opt to not even offer this wallet service and instead find it O.K. to specialize only in providing a lock-box service for in-game items.

The ironic part of this whole mess is that even in the time periods during which some of these games are taking place (think: medieval, feudal) there were strong banking implements in place. Why is it that we have an auction-house or a broker that will take a certain percentage of your profits, but we don’t have a bank or money market that will pay a nominal rate of interest? Why is there magic, and the ability to have thriving cities and metropolitan areas in some of these worlds, but yet we have no means through which to invest our hard-earned money? Clearly there are people playing these games who have enough time invested such that their banking contributions would be non-negligible; for every workaholic you show me, I can show you a gamer who spends just as much time in front of their character.

Think of these possibilities: Guild, faction, or city banks. Guilds, factions, businesses and individuals within a city or region need natural resources to grow their empire. Buildings need wood, castles need bricks and mortar, and these two things need tools with which to be built. Who will provide this for them? Why not set up a faction banking system? Members of the guild deposit their funds in the short- or long-term to fund the project at a certain interest rate (a fair market rate of return based on what marginal value the newly funded resource will bring), the faction can use the funds in the interim for their benefit, and then will have to pay back the principal and the interest when the term expires. It works every day in real life, why not in the role-playing world? The entire financial infrastructure could be implemented on the server side (meaning that players wouldn’t have to keep track of what it is that they owed) and would have no less chance of failure than today’s modern auctioning systems.

Currently, the primary way to expand one’s own resources is to lend to other players (and collect interest), which may or may not work since online worlds are distinctly lacking legal systems as well (another day, another topic). Another way is to perform arbitrage within regional markets: that is, to buy something from someone low in one area, and sell it to someone else high without adding any value to it somewhere else. This is the meat-and-potatoes of the entire World of Warcraft economy, and it’s no secret. A third way, popular mostly to those with rare patterns, etc, is to buy the materials or required ingredients for a low price, craft them into usable resources (thereby adding value to the items) and reselling them for more than the sum of their parts.

Furthermore, a good financial intermediation system could allow new players to get up and running more quickly. Imagine being able to deposit your funds in a bank as an experienced player. This benefits you, as you’re now earning a nominal amount of interest on your money, rather than just keeping it in your inventory. Now, say Mr. Newbie comes along, and he really wants to buy that horse. He’s just the slightest bit short. So, he takes out a loan from the bank, buys the horse, and pays back the money he borrowed plus a little bit of interested when things are going better for him. Now we have three parties benefiting from this situation: First, the lender is earning interest on his money, so he’s happy. Second, the bank is earning interest on the money they loan out, so they’re happy. Third, Mr. Newbie gets his horse (because he’s willing to pay the bank back), so he’s happy. Without a good financial intermediation system like a bank, this situation would never arise. Simple in-game implementations of this could include taking a percentage of every unit of currency Mr. Newbie makes until his loan is paid off, as well as giving our original lender (the one earning interest by depositing in the bank) a slightly increased amount of money for each kill he makes.

Now, there’s nothing here that says the banks themselves have to be completely controlled by the players; that would leave to extremely ill-founded practices in some instances (praying on new players, among other things). It seems like it would be a safe assumption to say that the game designers, or the controllers of the game itself would have very in-depth knowledge of the inner-workings of their game’s monetary system. Even now, when dupes are found with currency, the problems are retracted relatively quickly. This hints at a monetary system which is at least somewhat secure (or, if not secure, prepared for the worst). Why not expand this?

Consider the scenario where the player above defaults on his loan. Well, in the real world, the bank would be out the money. The original investor would be shielded from this event by the bank and the FDIC, so the bank would take the hit. However, game companies are very good at filling out the details of certain situations. We now have extremely complicated PvP systems, extremely detailed and complicated raid zones for drones of mindless raiders to waste away in at night. Could not some of this energy be applied to creating a strong financial system? If done in a black-box fashion, a defaulted loan could simply result in a lower interest rate for future investors (in the short run), causing the bank to recoup its losses in a relatively quick manner (though there would likely be many defaults and thus many interest rate fluctuations in a given time period).

Of course even then there are downsides to all of this, but: aren’t there downsides to any aspect of any game? A simple implementation of this kind in a future game could set a trend that would make it a norm in online games. Money could grow, and it could encourage new players and the younger masses to not only use it to their advantage, but, in so doing, teach them valuable lessons about money and banking. That way, next time Mr. Newbie’s mom is screaming at him to get off of the computer and go to bed, instead of screaming back he can say “O.K., mom, just let me make this last deposit!”

In a time when making a PC game without online capabilities is suicide, having a generous pool of out-of-house testers is an invaluable asset to a company. Any gaming company with enough skill in marketing to create the slightest amount of buzz about their upcoming game is sure to have more than enough hands to make quick work of the network and non-ai testable features of the game. For a given game beta, who knows how many will apply? Certainly more than are needed. So who gets to play, and who gets the shaft? More importantly, why?

Personally, I’ve filled out so many applications for game betas that it doesn’t even phase me any more: I probably won’t win, but at least I can show my support for the game. I know that the person who will win in my stead likely has more hours per day to devote to the game, more background in beta testing games in general, and has probably even played through far more games than me in his lifetime. However, in all likelihood, this person will probably have a smaller social network, and will thus not be able to market the game as effectively as I could if I were chosen. So who is the right person to pick in this (somewhat polar, contrived) situation? Do you want someone to find bugs in the game, someone who will ceaselessly play the game for you so you can log his every move and figure out where the bugs are?

This person basically serves the same purpose as any well-scripted bot that the company can produce themselves; the only difference is that the human can be used to balance more aspects of the game, since it’s terribly difficult to script intelligence in bots to the point where weapons, maps, and other niche aspects can be balanced effectively. They’ll raise their own skill in the game and be better at it when it releases, and maybe even discourage some new players from continuing their patronage. This last scenario doesn’t matter in a one-time-fee game, but for online subscriptions it matters a great deal. Most subscription games, however, don’t allow persistence of your character from beta to release anyway.

On the other hand, there is the semi-hardcore gamer who will spend enough time playing your game to have made it worth your while in ways other than finding bugs. He still might find a bug or two, or at least get himself into a strange situation which will give you a good enough stack trace to figure out where the bug is. But, more importantly, and perhaps more valuably, he will talk with his friends about the game, raise hype, network socially with others online (and in person) and probably do more to promote the game in general than the introvert in the first example. To me, this seems a more valuable person to choose.

I say all of this because of a trend that seems to happen in gaming these days. Too many times, on too many beta applications there are so many small, finicky, nit-picky questions that are clearly there to weed out those who haven’t already beta-tested for 10 games in the past. How many games do you play in a given week? How many of those games are online? If this is an MMO/RPG, how many MMO/RPGs have you played in the past? Which ones have you spend more than 100 days playing? It’s questions like these which make it very obvious exactly what the company is looking for. However, none of these questions will yield anyone like the person from the second example, the socialite. If you want someone to actually test your game, fine. If you think your company is strong enough that it can’t use some free marketing (and really, who is so big that they can say that? if they can say that, then they probably won’t be staying big for very long).

In my opinion, the “beta test” marketing scheme is one of the best, as it gets people excited about your upcoming game. It gets people talking. If it’s a bad game, then bad news and reviews will come out before you’re even done. So what? For those who remember, the upcoming game Tabula Rasa was completely different in it’s first phase than it is now. It was so bad, so bland, so generic that the team actually listened to the people who would be playing the game and re-did it in it’s entirety. Now, that’s what I call useful beta test information. Alternatively, a game getting strongly positive hype in beta (a la, WoW, Halo 3, FFXI, EverQuest, need I go on?) will produce (I predict) a far greater stream of revenue in the beginning of the game’s life cycle than would a game without this same hype.

I’m not saying that game companies shouldn’t try their best to get the best candidates for the job; all I’m saying is that sometimes the best candidate for the job isn’t the introverted, downward-spiral game “g33k” who skips his own wedding for a raid. Sometimes, the best person for the job is the person who will make you the most money. Bugs can be fixed, but a game never releases twice.

All of the current-generation consoles (with the exception of the Wii, but that’s no surprise) are capable of producing an HDTV-quality video signal, helping to promote High-def in all of it’s un-standardized glory. This means bleeding-edge corpse explosions, pixel-by-pixel cleavage, and of course, extremely realistic terrain of a caliber previously unavailable. Or, at least that’s what they hope you’ll think so you go out and buy that $2,000 HDTV you’ve “had your eye on” for the last 7 minutes at Best Buy. Of course the image quality will be better on a High-definition TV; there’s no question that a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will look better with twice (or higher) the resolution of your standard TV. The question is: With a $600 gaming console, and at 50% or higher prices on these High-definition DVDs, is the amount of extra money you’re paying for those pixels really giving you any advantage or status? Further, how much of the demand for High-definition entertainment equipment comes from “your buds” who need to see those extra pixels with their NFL Sunday-Ticket package versus gamers who want some illustrious “competitive edge” supposedly offered by being able to see an opponent from farther away?

Clearly this is a blog article and not an academic paper, so I don’t have the necessary data to back up my claims, but most people reading this article can likely understand where I’m coming from. We all know people who’ve gone out and dropped ridiculous amounts of money in order to make their games look better, to make their gaming experience more immersive. Everyone has a friend who found a “great deal” on some multiple-thousand dollar piece of equipment which still cost multiple-thousands of dollars. The tech industry must be loving it. If they aren’t already, there are a ton of ways these industries could capitalize off of the fleeting needs of the average gamer.

First: Re-release a High-def TV with one new feature and label it the “ultimate Halo 3 experience”. Mom’s basement would love another one of these, and there must be millions of kids nationwide who’d do anything for that new LCD screen with the 1ms-lower refresh rate.

Second: Re-release all of your old, poorly-rated (are there even any good movies that have been released on Blu-Ray/HDDVD? I think maybe the closest I’ve seen was Blue Crush or X-Men 12) movies with slightly higher quality and charge 50% more for them. This is the perfect match to step number 1, and will be highly complemented by the audio equipment you can get from step number 3.

Third: Take out some features from your $20,000 theater-quality speakers and audio subsystem and sell them in a premium audio store (since they’ve still got the brand name) for a large discount. For some reason, hearing Dolby 5.1 from five-thousand dollar speakers in 2007 sounds better than listening to Dolby 5.1 from five-hundred dollar speakers in 2000 when they introduced it. Has audio recording technology improved much since then?

While it’s hard to be sure what the actual percent of demand for these new technologies is, it’s a safe bet to say that a non-negligible portion of it is coming from today’s up-and-coming gamer generation. As long as you can make someone think that a technology will make them a little bit better playing their video games, or if you can convince them that going way past the marginal optimal spending levels for these technologies is a good then, then, well, I guess there’s no new information here.

I’d first of all like to file myself away among the millions of gamers who have (mis?)invested hundreds of days of playtime into the eternal timesink that the modern webosphere likes to call the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). There, I said it.

For me, as with most people, it started with an innocent-enough looking game: EverQuest. Originally, a friend suggested it to me in a casual conversation at work. I told him I’d been playing Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast and was thoroughly enjoying it and he guessed (correctly) that EverQuest would probably be right up my alley. Though my time playing EverQuest was short, I spent ungodly amounts of time on it’s sequel, as well as equally monstrous amounts of time on everyone’s favorite online game: World of Warcraft. Toss in a dash of Guild Wars, Dungeons and Dragons Online, City of Heroes and Silk Road Online and we’ve got a recipe for horrendous grades and social atrophy.

The unfortunate part of this story is that all of the games I listed are, in essence, exactly the same! Do away with the differences in graphics, network support and fees, and the silly user interfaces and you’re left with exactly what all of the multi-user dungeon (MUD, those gnarly text-only games only those with stomachs of steel can tolerate) players have had for decades. I target you, I cast spell, server calculates resistances and diminishes the usefulness of my spell, spell hits you… ad naseum. These newer, graphics-based games all have their slight spin on this theme, but when it comes down to it, they’re all the same at heart. When we look at these games with eyes as objective as we can possibly have, when we really look at these games at the “meta” level, we can see that all of the small differences between them are different manifestations of the same thing!

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