It's been a little frustrating to watch as the term Social Gaming is being applied to practically everything on a social network - so much so that even single player games on Facebook are now "social games." The folks at GigaOm have been pinging me about writing an editorial for a while, and this topic seemed worth starting a wider dialog about, so here it is:
Game design is being applied to all manner of online life these days, from former game designers Catarina Fake and Stewart Butterfield designing Flickr, to Amy Jo Kim's talk on bringing the mechanics to the web, to Eric Marcoullier's MyBlogLog, to Jane McGonigal's great keynote at SXSW this year about how games are better than real life.
So with that in mind, and tongue firmly in cheek, Boing Boing tagged a piece from Metafilter that reviewed real life as a MMORPG. Remember being told to put down mario bros and go play Outside?
In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world...
Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.
Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it's extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.
(from Boing Boing)
Congrats! The news is out that
Seattle-based casual MMO Thinglefin has been acquired by casual games publisher Big Fish Games. Thinglefin was founded early this year by Asheron's Call Lead Designer Toby Ragaini, Jeremy Friesen and Ryan O’Rourke. Big Fish is a casual games publisher, and their President Jeremy Lewis runs it as one of those quiet companies that kicks ass month after month without having to scream about it at every conference.
They are still in stealth mode, but are working on a web-based casual MMO that obviously Big Fish thought highly of. With the huge number of casual MMOs in development right now, getting distribution is key to rise above the noise. With combination of the development team at Thinglefin, and the distribution muscle of casual games publisher Big Fish, they should be someone to closely watch.
I met Toby about a year ago as he was starting up Thinglefin, and he was nice enough to give me a couple-hour headstart in announcing their VC funding to the blogosphere. I will claim my very insignificant part in all of this, as I introduced Toby and Jeremy a few months back. Clearly, they got along. :)
October is definitely the month for conferences I'm leaving today for San Francisco and I'll be at a couple of events, so here's a little update on this month.
Virtual Worlds 2007 - Oct 10-11, San Jose, CA. Thursday, 3:00pm - 4:00pmWeb-based Virtual Worlds
This session of leading web-based virtual worlds experts will discuss the finer points of developing web-based virtual worlds. Attendees will gain valuable insight into best practices, techniques and technologies for implementing web-based virtual worlds. Find out why web-based virtual worlds are here to stay and how the technology roadmap will develop over time.- Daniel James, CEO, Three Rings
- Nabeel Hyatt, Founder & CEO, Conduit Labs
- Teemu Huuhtanen, President N.A., Sulake
- Toshitaka Jiku, EVP and CTO, 3Di Inc.
also I'll be in San Francisco next week at the Widget Summit and Web 2.0 Summit (Summit is the new conference, apparently). Then later in the month I'll be doing an event that is hosted by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe.
How are Blogs Changing the Way Technology is Covered?
Entrepreneurs, CEOs, VCs, journalists, and PR professionals are increasingly cranking out blogs, podcasts, and video dispatches. How does this change the way the tech sector gets covered? What does it mean for CEOs trying to get their stories out, PR firms trying to get coverage for their clients, VC firms touting their investments, journalists trying to cover important news, and customers tracking the market? (Not to mention the relationships between all of these players.)
We'll bring together representatives from all four camps for a wide-ranging conversation (definitely *not* a panel) about the way blogs are changing the game in the tech world.
- Don Dodge, Director of Business Development, Microsoft
- Jimmy Guterman, Editor of Release 2.0, O'Reilly Radar
- Barbara Heffner, partner at CHEN PR
- Nabeel Hyatt, CEO at Conduit Labs
- Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe "Innovation Economy" columnist
- Bijan Sabet, venture capitalist at Spark Capitalthere are only a few place left for this, and you can RSVP here. Hope to see you at one of these spots.
The NY Times did a piece on virtual goods, only it's actually just another damn piece about Second Life. I posted before about why Second Life gets so much coverage, but this is really going far past that point. This is a piece focused on the buying and selling of virtual items, yet there is no mention of Maplestory, Habbo, or even Facebook and Hot or Not. For the press to remain ignorant of this being an industry and not simply a single product is now journalistic irresponsibility and they should be ashamed.
This is a member of the mainstream press that has not even managed to type "virtual goods" into Google. If they did, they would see the first three stories currently point to:
1) Sony getting into the game.
2) Susan Wu's article on Techcrunch about Virtual Goods being the next big business model for the web.
3) A link to the friggin' Virtual Goods conference, which would have mentioned all the above companies and many more.
Instead we get a completely miopic puff piece about one person selling crap on Second Life. No context of how this might effect the reader as they navigate their digital lives. No background on the history of virtual transactions, their popularity in Asia, or the fact that the #2 prepaid content card in Target behind iTunes is the Nexon card. Not even a brief mention of the RMT market, despite the fact that there was piece on it in the (much better quality) NY Times Magazine a few weeks ago.
This is not a love affair with Second Life, this is journalism that is abdicating its responsibility to inform the public. This is the same as talking about the future of Blackberry's stock and neglecting to mention the iPhone or Google Phone. Or talking about the social networking phenomena and only focusing on one teenager on MySpace without even hinting that their might be an entire industry of competitors. Just to be clear, this was an article in the New York Times Business section.
This is lazyness that borders on a lie.
[Note: The original title of this article was, "Idiots at NY Times write about virtual goods and miss the entire industry." After calming down a bit I felt that the use of idiots warranted a personal attack, which wasn't really my intent. I have left the rest of the article exactly as it was, as I think it accurately captures how viscerally I feel about this issue.]
Virtual Worlds News has good liveblogging coverage of the talks at the Austin Game Developers Conference, including the panel I was on, Startup Lessons from Recent Online Games (audio is available here, for a fee). There's also stuff at Gamasutra and Raph's site.
AGDC didn't have many overall themes, other than it feeling a bit like a bunch of MMO folks trying to ignore the social web crowd in their midst. So instead of a summary I'll do the same thing I did for GDC and give some snapshots of the last couple days.
On how teenagers live their lives online, and take that for granted.
"Fourteen year-olds playing our game were born in 1994, they've never not known the Internet. Pictures of them as a fetus could have been posted online before they were even born." - Sulka Haro (Habbo Hotel)
On user generated content, player control, and the feeling a player can effect the world.
"It turns out that a sense of autonomy is the single strongest relationship to sustained subscriptions [in an MMOG]." - Scott Rigby (Immersyve, Inc.)
On the dangers of not paying attention to the small percentage of hackers.
"Hacking is like a drug. If your whole guild is using it, you'll be pressured to use it too. Then, once our users try a hack tool they actually find it hard to get back into the game." - Minho Kim (Nexon America)
The end of August every year brings the descent of new Harvard and MIT students to Cambridge, the email inbox getting filled by VCs returning from vacation, and the start of the fall conference season. I don't particular like 90% of conferences, but every once and a while you get something like last year's Austin Games Conference and it makes it worth it. This year I'm a little more skeptical with the line-up but who knows.
Anyway, tomorrow I'm off to the Austin Game Developers Conference, below is info on the panel I'm on, drop me a line if you want to meet up.
Sept 5-7 - Austin Game Developer Conference, Austin TX. This has become the defacto massive multiplayer developer conference, with everyone from Bioware to Habbo Hotel showing up. Last year it was really great, small enough to be intimate, but large enough for variety. But they sold to CMP, so we'll see if that means it's on the same unfortunate trajectory as GDC.
Startup Lessons from Recent Online Games
Speaker/s: Daniel James, Raph Koster, Anthony Castoro and Nabeel Hyatt
Day / Time / Location: Thursday, Sept 6, 4:30 - 5:30 Room 1
Track / Format: Online Games - Business & Management / Panel
Overview: This august panel of the founders of recent hot MMO startups will get down and dirty with the details of how to do (and how not to do) the startup thing. Topics discussed will include: -Financing - how and where to get it, VC or publishing; -Licensing and IPs - build or buy? -Web 2oh - Bubble or basics? -Distribution -Revenue models -and trying to hire and recruit in boom times.
The rest of the fall sees the Flash Forward Conference in Boston Sept 19-20, Virtual Worlds 2007 in San Jose Oct 10-11, and the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Oct 17-19. I'll post my speaking gigs as the events get a little closer, and I always keep upcoming.org updated. Let me know if there are any conferences you're looking forward to that I might be missing.
Here at Conduit Labs we're announcing the closing of our $5.5m Series A round with Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. We're also using this occasion to launch the Conduit Labs blog and begin the dialog with everyone, so drop by and say hi. In the future we plan to give a pretty open and honest look at building this startup, everything from what fundraising was like to the technical hurdles we've hit dealing with Flash, and most anything else you guys are interested in chatting about.
The opening post is: How we started Conduit Labs
Video from the recent Virtual Goods Summit is up, so if you weren't able to make it you can catch up now. I'm so glad Charles did this, since I had to miss the afternoon panels, and I can clearly see I was in need of a haircut.
Above is the panel I moderated: Why Virtual Goods Matter . Another panel chock full of great facts was the first one, Virtual Goods Success Stories, where Susan Wu of CRV does a great run down of the industry, and you get good stats from Habbo, Nexon, Neopets, and Tencent.
Rest of the videos here.
Club Penguin, a casual MMO start-up that was rumored to be on the blocks to Sony for $500m, has sold to Disney for $350m, with an additional $350m on the table based on performance. The deal with Sony broke off in June, and Disney makes a much more natural acquirer in any case.
If you're keeping track at home
This should also serve as the irresistible siren call to VCs that will likely make 2008 the year of online gaming. I'm seeing a ridiculous number of business plans built around virtual worlds, virtual goods, and online games, and I'm not even a VC. This will help push even more VCs into funding, and in 6-18 months there will be a avalanche of new ideas in this space. If you thought just making an online multiplayer world, or virtual goods play, is enough to stand out then you might as well be releasing a new user generated video site.
Ah, one more thing.. Myspace went for $700m as well, in a deal that felt big at the time but then felt underpriced a few years later. I wonder who Facebook will be?
