Doctorow’s For The Win is full of fun ideas

Posted on by Nimgimli

I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s For The Win last night. I wanted to talk a little bit about it, because Doctorow has some ideas about the future of MMO gaming that I found pretty interesting.

If you haven’t heard of it, For The Win is a book about a group of gold farmers and other young people fighting to bring about better working conditions for themselves, and for other ‘invisible’ workers who’re treated terribly and work for tiny wages (notably Chinese factory workers). The book couldn’t be more timely with all the Foxconn suicides in the news these days.

The plot of the book itself was ok, but it wasn’t what had me turning pages. What I was really enjoying was glimpsing the future through Doctorow’s eyes. If a specific date for the happenings in the book was mentioned I missed it, but World of Warcraft is considered ancient history (as described by the ~20 year old characters) so I’m going to guess the year is 2025 or thereabouts. Also a lot of the book takes place in Mumbai & Shenzhen, two places which would be totally foreign to me today, being an untraveled Westerner.

So there are a lot of MMOs running in this future world. Four are mentioned often. One is Mushroom Kingdom, run by Nintendo. The other three are all run by Coca-Cola! Implied but not seen are other games run by companies that we don’t think of as gaming companies today. In the future, as now, gold farming isn’t legal, but there isn’t a lot the companies can do to stop it. There are “Pinkertons” running around in games to kill gold farmers (all worlds seem to be full PvP in the future) but they aren’t paid by the companies normally.

In this way For The Win feels a bit retro. Reminded me of Ultima Online with the PKK guilds trying to maintain order.

Most of the gold farmers work for mobsters stationed in India, China or Indonesia. Farming is big business and the games have gotten so big that there are people who really know nothing about the games but who make a living out of investing in virtual goods. The bosses drive their workers relentlessly at times when a particular item is selling for a lot.

Anyway, it’s a fun read, my biggest problem with it is that it makes gold farming sound fun (I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek). These gold farmers don’t stand around in a field alone killing trash mobs over and over. Instead they farm instances, both for the gold and for items. Generally they work in a PC bang together, shouting back and forth between terminals. They tend to be very good players rather than the rather mindless semi-bots that our real gold farmers seem to be today.

So let’s get to some of the ideas I thought were interesting. First, one of the games is called Zombie Mecha (Mecha Zombie??). In it, players pilot giant robots in a post-zombie apocalypse world. It’s a full-on PVP world with two rival factions, plus the zombies who’re AI controlled. Zombies can’t generally hurt someone in a mech unless it gets damaged or stuck, then they swarm all over it. Tales of battle in Zombie Mecha were really fun and I found myself wanting to play that game!

Second, the games are a lot more ‘complete’ than today’s games are. Most things in-world can be interacted with. Of course the programmers can’t think of everything, so when a player tries to perform an action that there’s no scripting for, the game pulls in a Mechanical Turk to take over. These turks are players who get paid a few cents per interaction. They generally run a bunch of sessions at a time so they’re able to juggle interacting with a bunch of players all at the same time.

I think this is a brilliant idea and one game companies need to incorporate asap. It needn’t be as elaborate as in the book, but imagine if every 50th orc you fought was actually being controlled by a person? How much more interesting could the game become? The person running the orc would have a goal of providing you with an immersive experience, not necessarily beating you. You get a better experience so you keep playing, and someone can make a few dollars while they’re hanging out at home playing games.

The next idea is a technology one. When Coke (in the game) is ready to roll out a new server cluster, they build it in a shipping container. They burn it in at their HQ, then ship it to somewhere very cold, and preferably somewhere near a renewable energy source, like a wind farm or a geo-thermal vent. By using the ambient environment to keep the servers cool, they save a lot of money (and energy). Every so often they rotate out one of these containers to bring it back to HQ for refurbing. This might seem trivial if you’ve never been in a big data center but trust me, those places spend a LOT of money and energy on air conditioning.

I had some more examples but this has run long enough for now. You can download a free electronic copy of For The Win if you don’t feel like paying for it. You might encounter some typos and such, but the (ePub) version I picked was very readable; it isn’t like it’s a first draft or anything.

If you’re an MMO player, you’ll probably get a kick out of the gaming aspects of the book. If you’re concerned about worker’s rights in Asia, then I think you’ll find the tale inspiring. Well worth a read.

Disturbed sleep. Thanks, RDR

Posted on by Nimgimli

I didn’t sleep well last night. I had disturbing, unhappy dreams. I suspected I would, so maybe I sub-consciously caused them to happen.

But I’m still blaming Red Dead Redemption. Something happened in the game last night that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand out. There were only a few second of fore-shadowing that something was Wrong. Not enough for me to prepare myself. And then, there it was.

And I was totally creeped out. After I quit playing the imagery and the event stuck with me; I couldn’t shake it.

This relates a bit to my last role-play post. I think 95% of people will bounce right over this event without a second thought, but I was so “in the world” that I bought into it hook, line and sinker.

I am role-play

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you know me at all, you probably don’t even remotely think of me as a role-player. I never sat around a table playing D&D, and in MMOs I’m pretty quiet as a general rule. I tend to keep to my own company, in games and in ‘real life’ as well.

But the truth is, I’m a pretty hardcore role-player. I just never externalize it.

What spurred (ha! watch this) this self-revelation was playing Red Dead Redemption last night. I’d been riding a horse that was divinely gifted to me (aka I saved my game while horseless and suddenly an equine companion appeared). These magic horses are better than walking it, but they’re not too fast. So I decided to get myself a better horse.

I rode up north of Armadillo where I knew there was a herd of wild horses. I choose one that seemed pretty fast. Really I can’t tell how fast they are, but in my mind’s eye, this beautiful mare seemed faster than the rest. I went after her. I was still fumbling with the lasso controls so it took me a long time to rope her. [The (now obvious to me) trick is to keep the left trigger held down… as soon as you let it up you ‘release’ the lasso and your quarry gets free.] I chased her all over the area. She almost got away a few times but eventually I got a rope around her neck and managed to break her. She settled down nicely, I gave her a reassuring pat on the neck.

At that point, I spotted some herbs, so I climbed down and picked them. When I looked up, it dawned on me that I now had two horses. My old faithful companion who wasn’t too fast, and this new speedy wild mare. I whistled and old faithful came running up. This horse had been with me a long time. He was loyal enough that he followed me around like a puppy. What was I to do with him?

I needed the faster horse, though. I climbed up on the mare and looked at my old companion, standing at the ready. Loyal as always, waiting to serve his master. Maybe get an apple as a reward.

I thought maybe I could lead him back to town. I took out my lasso and tossed it at him and missed. The lasso spooked him and he tore off across the prairie. I watched him go, a little bit relieved that he was no longer a problem, but a little bit worried about what would happen to him.

Then I chuckled at myself for being so silly… what would happened to him is that he’d de-spawn as soon as I left the area, of course. I headed back to town on my new horse..but still couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d betrayed a loyal companion. I found myself wishing Rockstar had given us a way to stable horses, or even to give them to a good home. I’m sure Miss MacFarlane would have room in her stables for a loyal, trustworthy steed!

So that’s my style of role-playing. Sometimes I wish I could turn it off, but I just can’t, even when I want to. It’s why I can’t often bring myself to play ‘evil’ in games; that feeling of malice clings to me long after I stop playing if I’m at all immersed in a game. If the game has anything to hang a role-play hook on, I stick to following my moral compass as much as possible.

Another reason I solo MMOs

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Yes! It’s yet another solo players and MMOs post! I’m gonna talk about something a little different this morning though.

So I’m playing Red Dead Redemption lately. Liking it a lot, but there are a few systems that are a bit wonky. Horses, for instance. Horses have various speeds as well as a loyalty stat. As you bond with a horse it becomes more loyal and gains stamina. That’s all well and good but… it’s really hard to tell horses apart. There’s no way to examine a horse to see if he’s yours, or how fast (or loyal) he is, and if your horse gets killed the next time you load (or save) a game you’ll magically have a horse again. The same horse? No, I don’t think so. But what horse is this? There’s no way to tell.

I’d love to see Rockstar re-write the ‘horse system’ to make it a bit more robust. Letting us name our horse would be a start, and letting us examine one to estimate how fast it is would be great too. Heck they could even make that some kind of skill you can learn. How many times has someone in a Western said of another character “That man knows his horses”?

If Red Dead Redemption were an MMO, I’d suggest these changes in the game’s forums or even via in-game tools, and I think a lot of other players would too. We’d have a reasonable chance of having the horse system get a revamp at some point over the years that the game’s “Live Team” worked on it.

It’s remotely possible that Rockstar will re-do the horse system in DLC for RDR, but such a sweeping change isn’t really likely. With the game having a shelf-life of a year or so, it just wouldn’t be worth them devoting the resources to a new horse system (and while I’m using horses as an example, there’re other systems that could really shine with an overhaul).

And that’s another reason I play MMOs even though I’m very much a soloer. MMOs evolve over time, generally improving (though for every change, there’s someone that sees it as a bad thing) or expanding. There’s always new content coming. And at least hope for improvements that you’d like to see.

As someone who has been playing MMOs for years and years, playing RDR is riddled with little pockets of disappointment as I go through a cycle of thinking to myself: “Oh, this feature is a little weak…maybe they’ll improve it in a patch.” followed by, for the umpteenth time, the recollection that I’m not playing an MMO and there’s not a great likelihood of big changes coming to the game. What I’m playing is what I’ll always be playing, and that makes me a little sad.

[Please don’t infer from this post that RDR is a bad game…I like it a LOT. If you’re considering it, I encourage you to give it a try. No game is perfect and I, as a player and armchair developer, am always thinking of ways every game I play can be improved.]

Holy Grail Redemption

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back in the day I played quite a bit of GTA IV, in spite of the fact that I don’t generally like playing bad guys. I tried to keep Niko on the straight and narrow but there were some scripted actions that were very unsavory to me. But I played because of the format.

This past week I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption. I’m loving it. Being a gunslinger in the Old West isn’t nearly as unpalatable to me as being a hit man in a realistic modern setting. And I’ve got a certain amount of nostalgia for Westerns anyway. Rockstar was brilliant in picking the setting… the tail end of the untamed west period, where we see influences of the much more modern eastern states. Some early cars and so forth.

Anyway, what keeps me playing RDR is, again, the format. I play it like an MMO (but then I play everything like an MMO if I can manage to). Sometimes I quest, sometimes I chase challenges (gather 5 coyote hides, shoot 5 birds), sometimes I just ride the range to see what me and my trusty steed come upon.

In a lot of ways, Red Dead Redemption is the best RPG I’ve played in a long time, in the most literal sense of the acronym. No, there aren’t levels or character stats (though there is gear, to some extent) but I just sink into the role of John Marsten and lose myself.

But as much as I like Westerns, I’m a fantasy guy at heart. I know everyone else is sick to death of fantasy, but I’m not.

And that’s why I want Rockstar’s next game to use this open world format for an Arthurian Grail Quest game. Imagine you play a knight. You might be a white knight or a black knight. You’re ultimately searching for the Grail, but along the way you could have all kinds of adventures. You could help out peasants who’re being mistreated by a cruel lord… or side with the lord to help him keep those pesky peasants in line. Hunting and fishing, of course.. a knight has to live off the land at times. Magical beasts, just to keep things fun. Random encounters with wizards, damsels, other knights, creatures… and this is Rockstar, so there’ll be some very dark things happening, too.

I could just get lost in a world like that… but I’m sure that’s much to geeky for Rockstar to take on. I hope someone ‘borrows’ this open world format and runs with it, though.

Playing with fonts

Posted on by Nimgimli

Google announced a new Font API for the web today. I found the idea intriguing. The problem is, I’m so so SO not a designer. I shouldn’t be allowed within 100 yards of a font.

But the geek in me had to try it. Not every browser is supported, but if yours is, you’re looking at ‘Molengo’ for the body of posts, and ‘Vollkorn’ for the titles. When you load the page, your browser is loading the font off of Google’s api servers. On a slow connection you might see an annoying flash as the font loads in…sorry about that. There’s a more sophisticated way to use them but I’m just screwing around, so…

There’re 18 fonts available initially, and you can see the list here. And Google has a nice primer up on how to implement them; it’s dead easy.

A farewell to LOTRO, and other musings

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I took some time tonight to pack up my housing items in LOTRO. It’s silly for me to log in every 5 or so weeks to pay 55 silver/week rent to keep the house. I just don’t have time to play MMOs anymore, and don’t see that changing while I’m working two jobs. I have a Lifetime sub to LOTRO so I can still pop in and dabble when I do find a few spare minutes, but for now it’s a game, not a world. I don’t need a house in a game. I need houses in worlds.

I have to confess, it all felt really melancholy. I miss the days of escaping to another world, a virtual world. But those days have passed me by in a number of ways. There’s my personal situation: no time and all that. But today’s MMOs just seem to be games and not worlds. EVE is the only exception that I really know about, and damn would I love to have the free time needed to play EVE seriously.

Packing up my LOTRO house had me thinking back to our guild halls and my houses in Ultima Online. That was a real world, at least to me and my guildies. There was a society in that game. There were good people and bad people. There was a dynamic economy. Towns sprang up and faded away over time. Inns would appear and be the ‘in’ (ha! See what I did there?) place to hang out for a while, until they went out of fashion and some new place sprang up.

We’d hang out, throw parties, do battle, make alliances, corner markets, have weddings… we did all kinds of things back then. It was more than a game, it was a place.

Back then, cyberspace was coming, and my then-girlfriend and I would kid about being an elderly couple sitting on the front porch in rocking chairs, jacked in via implants. But cyberspace fizzled, the same way virtual reality and the space program did. Cyberspace seemed like it’d become a place. But that never happened and now the very term seems silly.

I also saw that the beta for WOW Cataclysm is coming soon, or maybe has even started. That has me wanting to reinstall WOW to take one last look at those places where I used to hang out so much, before Blizzard plows them under to build anew.

But then I realized, you can’t go home again. Sitting out in Westfall in the wee hours, chatting with friends, having a beer or three in real life while I did so, watching the lighthouse’s beam sweep across the sea… if I went back now, it wouldn’t be the same as what it was; it’d just be depressing. Like when I go to visit my mom in my home town and pop into my old haunts and realize I’m just another tourist weekending in The Hamptons. I’m not the only one who moved on, and there’s no longer a “there” there.

Anyway, enough of being maudlin.

So LOTRO is packed away. Life is crazy hectic and unpleasant. And I keep buying (mostly single player) games. I mentioned this on Twitter today and got a few people who said they do the same thing. The busier I get, the more games I buy. Not the more games I play, mind you. I get them home, find 20 minutes to tear off the shrinkwrap and fire them up, then never get back to them.

So why do I keep buying them? I guess it’s the only way I have to feel connected to this hobby that used to be such a huge part of my life. I want to play, but can’t. Somehow the retail therapy of buying a new game scratches that itch for a few moments. I bought Monster Hunter Tri the week it came out. Played it once. 3D Dot Heroes this week. Booted it up, looked at it, haven’t had time to go back. Red Dead Redemption is coming next week. Bought the Humble Bundle of Indie games and never even got around to downloading it. Bought the Civ IV collection from Steam last night…those I did install but never booted up. And so on and on… so much wasted money!

The one bright spot right now is the iPad. I’m still playing that silly Godfinger game; it’s something I can spend 5 minutes on 3 times a day and feel like I’m making some progress, though towards what, I don’t know. When I hit level 50 I’ll just stop playing probably. Ditto We Rule. Log in a few times a day for 2-3 minutes…it’s a nice break. And a bunch of other simple fun games that I can play for a couple minutes in bed before lights out.

This patch will ease up eventually. I took the whole week of E3 off, to follow all the news and to recharge my batteries. So that, at least, I have to look forward to. And come hell or high water I’m going to find some time for Red Dead Redemption next week! I’m about at the limit of what I’m willing to do for my day job. We’ve all been doing ~12 hour days for a couple weeks (and then I have my blogging job once that’s done) and at this point it’s just starting to feel like management is taking advantage of us. Getting through an unexpected crunch is one thing, but those can’t be permanent hours (at least not without a juicy raise or some fat bonuses!)

Anyway, that’s what’s going on at Dragonchasers HQ. If you’re someone I used to chat with on Twitter or in blog comments, please forgive my disappearance. It just can’t be helped. I do miss my social networking chums, though. Hope everyone is doing well out there!

GodFinger (iPad, coming soon to iPhone/iPod Touch)

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[At the time of this writing, GodFinger for iPhone/iPod Touch is available in some places but not others. You can find out if it’s available at your app store here.]

GodFinger is an odd mash-up of casual game, Populous and a splash of social gaming. The idea here is that you rule over a small 2D world. Kind of a cute Flatland place. When you start the game you’ll find a fairly barren world with a few people wondering aimlessly, and clouds and sun drifting overhead. Your job is to bend the people to your will and modify the world to suit your whims.

Luckily you have a GodFinger! By touching and ‘charging’ a cloud or the sun, you can call down rain or sunshine. Doing so causes vegetation to sprout up and these little people to start worshipping you. You can also terraform the planet, raising and lowering land to form mountains and lakes. If you cause it to rain a lot in one area a jungle will slowly form. Avoid raining on an area, and apply plenty of sun, and soon you’ll have a desert. This is all mostly for fun, although if you create a lake your followers can fish out of it, and gain a trickle of energy that way.

All of these actions costs you mana, one of 3 resources. Mana recharges over time, and your mana pool increases as you level up. The mana limitation means GodFinger is a ‘short session’ game; the kind of thing you’ll play for a few minutes, several times a day. There is a totem on your world that you can order followers to worship at, and this will increase your mana recharge rate somewhat, but running out of Mana is the normal cause for a sesion to end.

The next resource is gold. You have a starting pool of gold which you’ll use to buy some buildings. Buying a building just lays a foundation; you then drop some followers onto it and they’ll complete the structure over time. In order to earn gold from the building, it’ll need workers (again, drop followers onto it) and some kind of power source. Power comes from sun, rain or lightning, and you call each of these down from the heavens, spending your mana to do so.

The last resource is Awe. You get this by spending real-world cash, or building it up via leveling and generally playing the game. I’ve yet to feel any need to buy Awe. You can spend Awe on gold, automatic building completion and other ‘miracles.’

So now you have some buildings staffed by followers and you’ve used your mana to power up the buildings. It’s time to sit back and relax for a while. The buildings will produce stacks of gold. Tap on these to collect them. Leave them laying around too long and they’ll rust away. As your followers work, they lose energy, and finally will just shut down from exhaustion.

As a mostly benevolent GodFinger, you can refresh your followers in several ways. You can build them tents to rest in. Tents require no power but take a while to work their magic. Alternatively you can build fountains for your followers to drink from. These need to be powered by rain, but they revive your followers much more swiftly. These little guys and gals love to drink, farting and belching constantly while they do so.

Almost everything you do in GodFinger earns you experience. Using a power, collecting gold, sometimes even from growing an unusual plant… experience comes in at a slow but steady pace. As you level up you unlock new & improved buildings, more potent powers, more followers and your world even grows.

As for the social aspect, if you have friends playing you can add their worlds to your universe. You can zoom out of your planet until you can see others. Interactions between friends’ planets are fairly spartan. You can “Enchant” one of their followers and once your friend accepts the enchantment you’ll get a trickle of gold from them. And once a day you can send a (pre-set) gift to a single friend. And that’s about the extent of the social stuff at this point. Basically if you don’t have any friends playing, don’t worry that you’re missing out.

GodFinger is free to play (aside from optionally purchasing Awe). I actually think the developers misjudged things here. There are a few inconspicuous ads in various parts of the game, and presumably they make some money from those, but I just see no reason to buy Awe, which I assume is intended to be the main revenue stream.

GodFinger is a lot of fun to play for a while. I’m currently level 26 (of 50) and sadly I’ve more or less run out of content. I have every building unlocked and I’ve got more gold than I know what to do with. As I keep leveling my powers will grow stronger but I’m not convinced I need them to be stronger.

I’d like to think the devs will keep adding content, but presumably that would depend on a solid revenue stream. Maybe I’m an anomaly and other people are buying lots of Awe. I hope so.

Still, free is free and it’s well worth a download, even if you ultimately decide it isn’t for you. Just messing around with your planet, creating floods and deserts and seeing what you can get to grow, can be fun.

Small Worlds (Browser/Flash)

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is another one of those “How’d I miss this?” posts.

Small Worlds is a flash game described by designer David Shute as “A short atmospheric game about exploring.” You may have already played it; if so, why didn’t you tell me about it!?

It takes a few minutes to hook you, but once it does (if you’re anything like me) you won’t be able to stop playing until you’ve explored everything (which doesn’t take very long). There a very retro vibe and you won’t be shooting or fighting or even dying. Just jumping and exploring.

Meh, don’t waste time reading my ramblings about it, just go play it.

Why I don’t like Like

Posted on by Nimgimli

Warning: This is very much a preliminary post, based on my current understanding of Facebook’s new “LIKE” buttons. But since the feature is live now, I feel like I need to warn people about the ‘potential’ issues sooner rather than later.

So without further ado.

We used to see Share on Facebook buttons on various sites. These were pretty straightforward. You’d click them and it’d stick a link on your Facebook “Wall” so your friends could see that you liked that link and potentially follow it.

Now we have the Facebook Like button. On the surface, it does the same thing. But behind the scenes it’s doing more. It sends not only the link to your wall, but certain meta data that the content producer has tagged the page with. You can, of course, view the source of the page and see what this meta data is, but many people won’t think to do that.

Let me give an example of why this could be problematic. Say you love Guild Wars, but you always play it alone or with one particular friend. You don’t think of it as an MMO, and you don’t like MMOs. In fact you hate WOW and EQ2 and LOTRO and all the other MMOs. They just aren’t your thing.

But Guild Wars you love, so you’re on a page about Guild Wars and you click the LIKE button.

But the site owner considers Guild Wars an MMO, and there’s meta data tagging this page as ‘MMO’ so when you click that LIKE button, you’re telling Facebook that you like Guild Wars and that you like MMOs. That data goes into your account.

The next week you go over to Steam to see what good deals there are. Steam queries Facebook and sees that, according to the data stored with your account, you like MMOs. So it shows you all the great sales on MMOs, and doesn’t show you the sales on single player RPGs, which is exactly what you’re in the mood to buy.

Facebook has misrepresented you. Or rather, you’ve misrepresented yourself because you don’t agree with the meta data on a site you clicked a LIKE button on.

Clearly this example is pretty trivial. But there are other situations where it could matter more. Worse, meta data could be set up to be deliberately misleading. There’s the potential for some pretty ugly shenanigans going on behind the scenes. Think of a political candidate’s page that’s been tampered with so that it has meta data saying you like the opposing party.

If this Like business takes off and lots of sites start polling your Facebook data, this could become a problem.

So I urge you, until we learn more about this system, to avoid using any “Like” buttons you encounter. Maybe Facebook has checks in place to prevent bad things from happening, but maybe not. And it still isn’t clear to me who can, and can’t, query the data associated with your account.

BTW, I put a LIKE button on Dragonchasers last night to see how it worked. I just want to be clear that I put no meta-data behind it, and I thank the folks who helped me test it.

And one last time, this is my understanding of the system as of right now. I could have some or all of this wrong. But just in case I’m right, I wanted to get people thinking about these issues.

I wrote more generally about Facebook’s new features at ITWorld this morning. You might find that post interesting as well.