Qualities of Virtual Goods PDF Download

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I’ve gotten a lot of requests to release the slides from the Qualities of Virtual Goods presentation that Volker and I held at the Browsergames Forum 2010. So now that I’ve cleaned up the slides some I can make the available as a handy PDF download:

Qualities of Virtual Goods

The article is released for personal use only and it’s copyrighted by Gameforge Productions GmbH. The exception are the images licensed under Creative Commons and clearly attributed. If you have questions, need further information or plan to use the presentation for anything other than personal use, please get in touch with me.

“Qualities of Virtual Goods” @bgf2010

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Just got back from the Browsergames Forum 2010 and it seems like the presentation from Volker and me was a success:

We’ve had a packed room, even though it was too hard to find and not really in the schedule. The talk itself went really good, even though the handheld microphone was a bit of a bother. And then after the talk we got lot of positive feedback from the audience, through twitter and all through the rest of the forum. I’ve even had someone compliment me on the talk in the men’s room.

Right on.

As for the talk: I’ll be putting the slides up shortly. We’ll have to adjust a few things first. Watch this space for the download coming sometime in the next few days.

Meaningful Narrative Decisions in MMOs

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So I’ve been playing the Web Game Echo Bazaar a lot lately and this sparked some thoughts about narrative design & story in MMO Web Games and common game design standards.

First off let’s talk about classic Role-Playing Games for a minute here. The key thing in many tabletop RPGs is the story; they’re all about telling a story together. They’re at their best, when the individual player has to take meaningful choices that shape the ongoing story. What makes these decisions so strong is that they are irreversible. Whatever you chose you have to live with, which will make you think more about how you play and act.

This is something that’s usually lost in video games. With the (expected) ability to save and load previous states of the game, a story decision loses much of it’s weight. You can decide one way, see the consequences, then load and chose the other options. This somewhat “cheapens” the decision because it makes it possible to evade the results of your actions. Games can somewhat work around that by delaying the consequences of an action. That way, by the time you hit the consequences you’re not as likely to go load a very old save game.

However the persistent and shared worlds of MMOs can help here. Actually it’s both a boon and a curse when it comes to narration. A boon since load/save features don’t really work with persistent worlds (and aren’t expected) MMOs have the potential to have meaningful narrative decisions. It’s not quite that easy though. The curse of the persistent world is that with so many players sharing a space it is difficult to create a story that feels unique and that can have any impact on the world, since it shouldn’t inconvenience the other players and their story.

That’s where Web Games (and Echo Bazaar for that matter) come in though. Since these don’t represent a shared “physical” virtual space, the stories can feel a lot more intimate.

Echo Bazaar does quite a good job at this, presenting you with a wealth of narrative bits that you can choose to create what seems to be your own story. For example there are often options where you have multiple “tasks” leading up to one final decision.

Here the decision feels like it has much more narrative weight, since you can’t just go ahead and do it differently. Well at least that was what I thought when I first took one of these decisions. Unfortunately though this is greatly weakened by the fact that these composite tasks (multiple jobs leading to one decision) can be replayed for a while, allowing you to do the same thing over again.

So to put things in a nutshell: MMOs have the potential to present really meaningful narrative decisions to the player since decisions can be final.

Agree? Disagree? Debate!

Browsergames Forum Talk (+ more GDC)

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The Browsergames Forum in Frankfurt, Germany will be in a few weeks (on November 5th adn 6th to be precise) and I’ll be there with a short talk on the topic of monetization. I’ll be speaking with my MMO colleague Volker Boenigk and the title of our talk is “Qualities of Virtual Goods”. It’ll run for about 25 minutes and you will be able to catch us on Saturday, the 6th November at 10:30. I’ll use the opportunity to take one of the segments of my planned GDC 2011 talk and present it to an audience. To give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about, take a look at the abstract I’ve sent in to the conference organizers.

This talk will present the audience with a system of attributes that most Virtual Goods possess. The chosen properties are primarily responsible for the users’ perceived value of an item and can directly be affected by the game design and visuals. Knowing about this system and the attributes is the first step in systematically improving the value of your items and overall repository of premium services.

By examining how this system applies to our daily business at Gameforge we will give some practical advice on real world application. To top off the talk, we will be using the developed properties as a foundation for some tricks and methods to improve the monetization of your own free-to-play game.

And having mentioned the Game Developers Conference talk above here’s a small update on that topic: Unfortunately my submission for the Main Conference was declined (*sad face*). However I’ve resubmit my proposal for the Social & Online Games Summit and I’m hoping that there’ll be some room for me in there. (*happy face*) Wish me luck.

GDC Talk Submission

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I’ve just submitted my proposal for a lecture at 2011’s GDC in San Francisco. In line with my day-to-day work of consulting external studios, the talk will focus on how to monetize free-to-play games.

It’s titled “Big Bucks for Bits and Bytes“. Let’s hope they’ll green light it. I’d be thrilled to share my experiences and ideas with other game designers.

Gambling and Strategy

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I’ve been thinking a lot about strategy games lately, partially for work and partially for private stuff. And while thinking (and talking and listening) I’ve come to a conclusion that a big part of strategic or tactical decisions is a sort of “calculated gamble”. I just quickly wanted to put this out there and see if I can get a discussion and some other viewpoints.

What I mean when I say gamble is that you start out with some sort of finite resource, be it military units, goods, space or money. Then you’re presented with an option: You can risk some of your resources and attempt something that would gain you even more resources. Say you could attack your neighbor to raid his cities, risking your units to increase your resources. This risk is essential. If there’s no risk involved, no chance of losing something, then the decision becomes a no-brainer. Clearly you will take the riskless option to improve your situation, I mean who wouldn’t?

So about that risk… where does it come from? Well it’s simply there because the outcome of your decision is not known beforehand. Propably because you most do not possess perfect information about the situation. Maybe you don’t know how strong your target’s defenses are or if he’s got friends protecting him. Even if you do know all there is you might still not surely know the outcome since there’s a random element involved. So to get more information and to be better at gauging the risk you could try to spy out their units – or you could simply build the biggest army possible, going in blind in the hopes that you’ll just steamroll over your opponent.

So in essence strategy is: you are presented with a certain risk/reward option. You’ll first try to understand the risk, then if neccessary try to minimize it before striking. However in the end there should still be a certain sliver of insecurity before you make the gamble.