Today I saw a link to this blog up on Slashdot:

http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html

Over the years I have heard the loud echoes of this sort of sentiment. Just look at the headline on Slashdot

“How Warcraft really does wreck lives”

Reading this guy’s personal experience does make it sound as though it was the game itself that lead to him gaining 30 pounds, not playing the guitar anymore or doing Kung Fu.

“It’s the game’s fault.” “It’s not my fault”. “The game made me do it.” “Games encourage kids to go out on murdering sprees”… and on and on and on.

At what point do personal choices come into the picture here? This gentleman clearly made life choices about what he wanted to do with his time. I respect that. I even can respect the position that some people play these games too much, because I personally think that’s true. But the game isn’t making them do anything. The game isn’t designed to keep people playing. It’s only designed to entertain them.

I actually think it’s the other way around. People are designed that way.

When we as humans find something we like to do, we want to keep doing it.

It really is that simple.

It’s in our DNA. Are some people more prone then others to getting “hooked” on these kinds of games? Maybe. But there are plenty of people who are hooked on NFL Football and don’t want to hear from their family on Sunday’s because they are busy watching the game.

In my younger days I can say I was hooked on Dungeons and Dragons. It was an obsession. The same was true of my first online game (Simutronic’s Cyberstrike)… and Magic: The Gathering was a bigtime passion of mine and many of my friends for a long long time. I spent way too much money on buying those cards. To some of you maybe these were obsessions of yours too. I certainly don’t blame any of those games for the time I “lost” to them. They were some of the best times I had with my friends and also contributed greatly to the kinds of things I like to do now.

I think it’s all the same in the end. We all have to make our own choices. I don’t believe for a second that WoW (or any other MMO including our own) is designed to get people hooked.

It’s a game. 

It’s supposed to be fun and it is.

If it becomes an obsession for some people, that’s something they need to think about changing for themselves. As gamemakers our job is to make great, fun and challenging games. This isn’t the moral equivalent of the Manhattan Project where we have game designers saying “this is just too fun… the world will be a worse off place if we make it too fun”.

It’s a game.

Smed

I came across a Microsoft blogger this morning that had some thoughts on our just announced deal with Xfire

http://www.gametab.com/news/707581/

There is some bad information in there that I’ll get to in a sec, but it was interesting to me because it highlights some pretty core differences in the approach that the Playstation folks have taken.

From the very beginning the team at Sony Computer Entertainment has always had a very open view of the the networked Playstation 3. This is showcased in our game Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom. We’ve been able to integrate Xfire’s new PS3 API into the game very easily (I should also point out that this API is absolutely free… no clue where Ozymandias got that info but it’s just plain wrong). What this is going to do is allow an already huge network of online gamers on the PC continue to track their Xfire friends already as they play our (and other games in the future) PS3 game.

This is not a replacement for the PS3 friends list.

This is something over and above that. In this day and age many people are members of different communities. For example, I belong to a Battlefield 2 team and a guild for MMO’s. The two are very different and I enjoy them both. Since people spend their time multi-tasking and switching between their computers and consoles, it just seems to make a lot of sense to me that it’s inevitable that people are going to be a part of many different communities.

This open approach that allows licensed middleware providers to put hooks in PS3 games (assuming that’s what the publisher wants to do) really opens a lot of doors that a more closed approach just wouldn’t allow.

To me that’s just plain common sense.

Online console games are going to be huge. They’re growing at an extremely rapid rate and we already have several MMO’s in development for the PS3 that are cross platform with the PC. We’re working on cool new ways to allow people to communicate (online keyboard interfaces, voice-to-text and other ideas). The power of the PS3 is going to allow us to bring a lot of computing power to bear on the challenges of communicating with other players. To me the idea of an online universe of gamers as large as 100 Million or more is really exciting and is going to end up really allowing all kinds of awesome games.

Smed

Today Next Generation ran an opinion piece about the ESRB. Next Generation is a great website for the gaming industry and the opinion pieces are often thought provoking. This one caught my eye.

You can find it here: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3919&Itemid=2

In it, the author Aaron Ruby essentially comes to the conclusion that the ESRB is broken. I strongly disagree. Here are some of his assertions and my thoughts on each:

Aaron writes:

“I find it alarming that the ESRB does not bother to base its ratings on the entire experience of playing a game, instead relying far too much on submitted clips—not even complete gameplay run-throughs, mind you. Even if you think the idea is unnecessary or even absurd, there’s no getting around that failing to do so lends an impression of incompleteness and an ad hoc quality to the system that invites skepticism. It’s like rating movies based on storyboards.”

This statement doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. In our business it’s impossible in many cases to completely play through a game. The ESRB requires that the submitted clips represent all extremes of gameplay. How are they ever going to be able to completely play through online games like EQ II or WoW for example? I would argue that there’s no such thing in this day and age. Take Grand Theft Auto for example - sure you can play through all of the missions, but there are often many side games that aren’t core to finishing the game. Often times this is where the content that gets a game an M rating in the first place resides.

In another part of the article, he writes:

“But the ratings system, as it stands, is surely a case of ‘more is less.’ What is the point of having a system that requires consumers to be fluent in so many subtle and often arbitrary distinctions? One of the fundamental flaws of the ESRB system, and why I believe it is so vulnerable to attack, for example, is not that it doesn’t do it’s job, but, really, that it makes little sense. And its lack of coherence makes the whole thing seem ginned up.”

Here again I strongly disagree. Parents are used to the TV system that has many descriptors. I’m a fan of the FX show “Nip/Tuck” and before every episode they have an absolute ton of descriptors. Even in the movie industry you’ll notice specific descriptors now that clearly show exactly why the movie has the rating it does. It’s simple - the core rating is there to clearly show what the rating is, and the descriptors are there to explain in more detail. As a parent of 4 kids, I often times have to decide specifically whether or not I’m going to let my kids watch a PG movie. It comes down to exactly why the movie got that rating in the first place. The same is true of descriptors for the ESRB rating system.

He does make one interesting point:

“It is from the cynical view of a ratings system as a PR tool designed to fend off regulatory encroachment from outside the industry, that the ESRB has perhaps most stunningly stumbled, of which the introduction of the Truth In Videogame Ratings Act is only the most recent evidence.”

In my view this is not a failure in any way on the part of the ESRB. It is a failure by our industry to lobby effectively. Mr. Ruby does make this point:

“But the fact remains that for a $25 billion dollar entertainment industry that wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with television, movies and music, it certainly is quiet. When was the last time you saw a prime-time commercial campaign or even a magazine or newspaper campaign aimed at educating the vast market the industry hopes to capture. Games are still viewed as a shadowy pastime in many cultures and it’s a shame the industry hasn’t stepped forward with so much as a flashlight in hand.”

And here I wholeheartedly agree with him. We do a lousy job as an industry at both lobbying and effectively messaging to consumers about games in general and the proactive steps we as an industry are taking. I’d certainly like to see a lot more of this approach. The ESA and the ESRB should be taking out TV ads educating consumers about the rating system we have in place and encouraging parents to follow it. This is the responsible approach and I suspect it would blunt the attacks that legislators are constantly sending our way. Let’s get proactive about this and stop letting the Jack Thompson’s of the world be the only messengers about our business.

The ESRB certainly isn’t the problem here. It’s the lazy reactive approach we as an industry have taken. For too long we have sat on the sidelines and reacted to events rather than taking a proactive and positive message about the ratings system to consumers. The ESRB may not be perfect, but they do a good job and are effective. We just need to realize that they are only as successful as our industry enables them to be. Let’s focus on spreading the message about our industry’s rating system and take the words right out of Senator’s Brownback and Clinton’s mouths.

Smed

I find myself in very strong disagreement yet again with Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm.

Wonder what I’m talking about? Here’s the link: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060911/wen_02.shtml

This is my favorite quote from the article:

“The digital distribution model is probably going to be extremely limited, and packaged products will likely rule for a long time. Digital downloads are not portable (you can’t take [them] over to your friend’s house), can’t be sold at garage sales, are limited to broadband households, and take up a disproportionate amount of disk space. I think that this will not approach more than 20% of the market for the next ten years or so.”

Here’s a great quote from back in 2005

“I don’t think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month,” said Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm.

(source link )

And another one:

“At the end of the day, we don’t play games for social interaction … We play games to escape.” Microsoft’s strategy is “absolutely flawed,” he said.

(source link )

A couple of things are crystal clear to me:

1. Michael Pachter has not analyzed the gaming audience outside of the United States. In many countries (most notably Korea and China) PC based online gaming (which is effectively piracy proof) is where the action’s at, and it’s growing at a very substantial rate each year.
   
2. He has not seen the heavy growth of digital distribution in both console and PC based gaming. Xbox Live and the PS3’s upcoming network service are both focused squarely at the next generation of digital downloading. To say it’s not going to go over more than 20% of the market is simply to ignore the realities of the online gaming space and where games are going in general. It’s also ignoring gaming on a worldwide basis. In China and Korea, getting games digitally is the predominant method. Even here in the US we’re doing around 3x that 20% for our own games, and if you look at the broader PC gaming space more and more first-run games are coming out day and date digital with retail. Even with the large file sizes, broadband speeds are increasing at a very rapid rate and you’re going to see console games making the same leap. To say it’s not going to be more than 20% of the market 10 years from now just strikes me as dead wrong.

He’s a very smart guy and I don’t want to say he’s off on a lot of his comments regarding the gaming space. In fact, for traditional retail channels.. he know’s where it’s at. But in the online space, he’s horribly off mark and I would encourage him to look at the worldwide trends and especially to just simply go online to look around a little more.

And one final thing - Michael, I’ll be happy to make a $1000 bet to be given to the charity of your choice that you’re wrong on digital distribution. I’ll even say it’s going to happen within the next 2 years and I’ll make that bet on both console and PC.

Smed

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from players on the idea of a chat log as a part of parental controls. Some people have had some terrific ideas which we’re going to consider. Some of the emails I’ve received have pointed out “Hey asking someone their age isn’t necessarily a bad thing”… and these people are absolutely correct. In fact, I play in a BF2 clan and we specifically ask that people under 18 not join our Teamspeak chat. There obviously need to be guilds and clans that want to be over 18 only and perhaps have a more M rated chat. I certainly respect that.

A lot of people thought I perhaps overreacted because the only fact I mentioned was that someone had asked her age. Well that isn’t all that happened. This person also asked my 9-year old daughter to be his (and I can only assume it was a guy) “girlfriend”. I’m sure you can understand why I wasn’t so cool with this. Could it have been innocent? Sure.

Hopefully it was.

I’m not about to take that chance though and I’m sure any parent of a 9-year old girl would likely feel similar.

Smed

Since I put the blog up earlier today, I’ve received a lot of emails. I wanted to share one with you as well as add some commentary about it. I did want to add that I have received this person’s permission to post this email (without their identity).

———————————————————————

Greetings,

I’ve just read your latest post on your Station blog and I’ve found it really quite interesting. It’s nice to hear the thoughts on social aspects of online gaming, considering yours and SOE’s position in the online gaming industry and I’m really glad to see a responsible father.

I live in Greece and, unfortunately, the vast majority of parents are technologically illiterate. The fact that broadband connectivity was quite delayed in Greece (and still at a considerably high cost) attributed to the inexperience of the average family with the Internet, thus creating a great chasm between parents who are afraid of using technology and children or teens who are eager to explore the prospects of modern communications. As to this, parents rarely bother trying to inspect or understand what their kids actually do when they spend time online.

What compelled me to write to you was your idea of e-mailing the chat logs of their kids and my objection to it. I am not a father but I understand that parents are very worried about their kids safety (which is justifiable, of course), however we should consider the side-effects of such an action.

The feelings of the child should be taken into account, when he knows that his actions are monitored by their parents in such an invasive fashion, as they do need their own space of privacy. More importantly, a kid needs to learn to build its own communication skills in the Internet as much as in real life. When they know they’re being monitored, they feel that they are restricted and cannot express themselves sincerely.

That situation may create insecurities towards social interaction over the Internet. Even more seriously, could it stand as an obstacle in parent-child communication?

What I really liked in your post and what I consider a sign of very good parenting is that your daughter immediately came to talk to you on her own will (and in a way she has learnt to deal with a problem, even if the solution means calling an adult for help). She behaved in a very responsible manner and she wasn’t ashamed to talking to you about that incident, i.e. there were no feelings of guilt. What I wonder is if actively monitoring a kid’s chat log would actually have the opposite effect, causing them guilt for their actions. Because that’s what I see in a lot of families here in Greece, children who are afraid to talk about a problem in their personal lives, especially when they feel their parents are too invasive or judgmental. Even if they’re not the ones at fault, they feel guilty and afraid of any consequences when a parent finds out.

In any case, I hope that, as a firm, you continue to examine new ways of improving the safety of your games for the younger audiences, however I really hope that you take my thoughts on the side effects it could have on a kid’s social skills under consideration.

Best regards,

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

———————————————————————

Here are some excerpts from my response:

Dear XXXXXXXX,

Thanks for taking the time to both read the blog and write me this email. It’s through dialogue like this that we’re going to come to some kind of consensus on the right way to go about making kids safe online.

I have to say that I am on the fence about the idea of emailing chat logs myself. I can say with absolute certainty that I would use it for my 11 year old and my 9 year old. When my son is 14 would I?

Probably not.

At some point there has to be an element of trust in that relationship. As a parent I absolutely have to raise my kids right and instill them with the right values and make sure that they are equipped to spot the dangers of the online world themselves.

What I would use this tool for is to help them spot dangers that they may not realize right now. I can’t possibly cover every situation in my conversations with my daughter. I also can’t be there to see every word she types in. Until I’ve seen more examples of questionable behavior reading an email log would help me spot stuff I need to point out to her.

Smed

I had an interesting experience this weekend. My oldest daughter (she’s 9) was playing an online game (not one of ours and not WoW) and someone asked her how old she was. As I had taught her she immediately put this person on the ignore list, reported them via an in-game command and came to me and let me know what had happened. Since this had happened one previous time in this particular game (with the exact same response from her) I immediately cancelled the account.I’m a parent with 4 kids ranging in age from 5 to 11. All 4 of them play games. I actively game with my son (the 11 year old). My youngest 2 kids (ages 5 and 6) also play games (Disney’s ToonTown which I highly recommend as a VERY SAFE game).

Why am I talking about this? Very simple - online games are great for kids. My son is a lighting fast typist and absolutely loves online games. We have a set time he’s allowed to play and I actively use parental controls in all of the games that make them available.

My wife and I have sat down with each of the older kids and discussed what is and isn’t ok in the online gaming world. They know never to give out private information of any kind, and they know to immediately come to us if someone asks for it. In each of the games they play I have personally checked out their friends list to make sure the only people on them are people they know in real life. We also only let them play games that we feel are age appropriate.

We’ve all seen the stories about kids being contacted by older strangers and trying to lure them into doing some dangerous and bad things. I’m here to tell you to be extremely vigilant. Make sure as parents you are very aware of what games your kids are playing and exactly how communication happens in these games.

Just like the real world there are some bad people out there. It is our job as parents to make sure that kids understand what safe playing is all about.

It’s been interesting to be running an online gaming company at the same time my kids are old enough to play some of these games. It’s given me a very strong opinion about online safety. I cannot stress enough how important it is for parents to be involved in what their kids are doing and playing online. Recently one of the things I’ve been seriously considering here at SOE is allowing parents to have other tools as part of their checking up on just what their kids are doing online.

I’d like us to implement a parental control that would allow parents to receive an email once a day of every piece of chat that their child was able to see that particular day.

Now I haven’t vetted this idea with our general counsel or with our technical team. It’s possible that this could be a lot of work to implement and it’s also possible that doing this might not be something that’s entirely smart from a legal perspective. I just know as a parent this sure is something I’d like to see.

I welcome your thoughts on this. Feel free to email me at jsmedley@soe.sony.com

Recently on one of the SWG servers (Sunrunner to be exact) we had to ban a person for interrupting a “same-sex” in game marriage with some nastiness (I put that in quotes because in these games you never know who’s really male or female). So we ban this idiot, and then we catch a lot of flack for interfering with someone’s “free speech”. Guess what, this kind of speech can be free in someone else’s games.. because it’s not ok in our games.For once I wanted you all to see EXACTLY why we banned someone.Here’s the most recent outburst…

2006-08-05 17:16:49 [ 31] 17:08:29 [] HATEMONGER: Allright scumbags

2006-08-05 17:16:49 [ 34] 17:08:35 [] HATEMONGER: This event is going to be shut down

2006-08-05 17:16:49 [ 40] 17:08:44 [] HATEMONGER: We will not tolerate homosexual marriage on Sunrunner

2006-08-05 17:16:49 [ 43] 17:08:51 [] HATEMONGER: Californian hippies might, but not us

2006-08-05 17:16:49 [ 60] 17:09:08 [] HATEMONGER: Bunch of liberal, hippie, homo lovin’ scum in here.

2006-08-05 17:16:49 [ 63] 17:09:31 [] HATEMONGER: The organizers of this event are anti-Patriotic! Theyre the scum of society, and a burden on this nation, and on the Empire.

And here’s a little sample from a few years back.. same guy (different character but the same person).

11/19/2004 22:43:04  HATEMONGER: Zig heil, alien! Bow to the superior master race, the Humans!

11/19/2004 22:44:29  HATEMONGER: HALT!

11/19/2004 22:44:58  HATEMONGER: No negros can walk this street by order of the furher!

11/19/2004 22:45:51  HATEMONGER: Silence! Or you’ll receive the butt of my MP40

11/19/2004 22:48:42  HATEMONGER: halt! -Gefhrlich ist wer Schmerzen kennt! Kneel, jewdi!

11/19/2004 22:48:53  HATEMONGER: vom Feuer das den Geist verbrennt

11/19/2004 22:49:27  HATEMONGER: HALT!

11/19/2004 22:49:44  HATEMONGER: By order of the furher negros are not allowed to walk the street of Coronet!

11/19/2004 22:49:52  HATEMONGER: vom Feuer das den Geist verbrennt!

11/19/2004 22:50:15  HATEMONGER: Silence!

11/19/2004 23:21:31  HATEMONGER: New guild recruiting. Wulfausen SS. We’re dedicated to sending jedi to the gas chamber! Send a tell!

11/19/2004 23:21:36  HATEMONGER: Zieg Heil!

11/19/2004 23:21:40  HATEMONGER: vom Feuer das den Geist verbrennt!

11/19/2004 23:25:04  HATEMONGER: spanks Abagail

11/19/2004 23:25:24  HATEMONGER: Halt! Jewdi!

11/19/2004 23:26:00  HATEMONGER: New guild recruiting. Wulfausen SS. We’re dedicated to sending jedi to the gas chamber! Send a tell!

11/19/2004 23:27:06  HATEMONGER: Silence! Jewdi!

11/19/2004 23:27:11  HATEMONGER: vom Feuer das den Geist verbrennt!

11/19/2004 23:27:53  HATEMONGER: Silence!

11/19/2004 23:27:57  HATEMONGER: Zieg heil!

11/19/2004 23:28:35  HATEMONGER: Silence! The Furher has ordered no negros within 50m of the Starport!

11/19/2004 23:28:43  HATEMONGER: Kneel, blackie!

11/19/2004 23:29:20  HATEMONGER: Dont make me hit you with the butt of my MP40!

To be clear – HATEMONGER is what I’m calling this person.. not their actual character name. Of course it would be wrong to give that out..

I hope you get the point.

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog. I’m going to try and do this more often, but I’ve been traveling quite a bit.

I just got back from the China Joy show in Shanghai. That show is very, very cool. The noise from the booths is deafening. You will literally see two companies with full-on bands on stages 30 feet from one another, both going at a volume that will blow out your eardrums. All of this is taking place in one of the most amazing cities on this planet — Shanghai. Imagine taking the Manhattan skyline and expanding it to the square mileage of Los Angeles and it’s a good start. It’s pretty hot there this time of year — it felt like what the surface of Venus must feel like — but it didn’t stop the masses from visiting this show. I’ve never seen more people packed into a convention in my life.

As an American, it really is quite a sight to see how big online gaming is in the Asian market. The closest comparison is probably E3 for online games - with Chinese style. There were three very large exhibit halls filled with online games from all over the world.

We were there showing a new game we’re developing in our Taiwanese studio, SOGA. We’re not quite ready to announce it just yet, but let’s just say there’s a whole lot of Kung Fu fighting going on in it!  I played the latest rev when we visited the SOGA team in Taipei after China Joy, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

One of the things I like best about SOE’s overall development direction is that we’re creating a wide variety of new games. We have four diverse MMO titles in internal development, not counting the five MMOs we currently have live, or our partnership with Sigil for Vanguard.

Each of these new games is aimed at a very different market and all of them are in different genres. From our perspective, it’s time to shake things up a bit in the online gaming space. We’re aiming for very high production values that will bring us (and gamers) into completely new places. We’re bringing mercenaries, spies, super-heroes and a new whimsical world to life as I write this. We’re also concentrating on bringing each of these games to you on both the PC and the upcoming PlayStation 3.

With the exception of the DC Comics game we’re working on, each of these games is an original IP. Our teams in San Diego, Austin, Seattle and Taiwan are excited about working on game worlds that we’re developing ourselves. It’s often frustrating to work with third party IP. There’s a constant battle over what the right direction is for the game, and from our own recent experience, it’s not something we enjoy. It very often puts handcuffs on what we can and can’t do and, frankly speaking, it’s a lot harder to make great games when the IP holders don’t understand the online gaming market.

The exception to this rule has been our relationship with the team at DC Comics. I have to say they are indeed a pleasure to work with. Jim Lee’s involvement as the Executive Creative Director has been a hell of a lot of fun. I just saw the latest build, and the team has come up with a combat system that I think is hands down the best I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t remotely feel like today’s MMOs. It’s all about the action.

One last thing:  In the near future, you’re going to read about another big development here at SOE. We recently acquired a game developer that is going to take us into a new space entirely. We’re really excited about it and I think when you hear what it’s about and see what they’re working on you’ll agree!

This past week we heard about IGE buying up Allakhazam, one of the best MMO-related sites out there. I have to say, this trend bothers me. On the one hand, I’m happy for the people that built that site up, and I certainly understand why “selling out” happens. They have a lot to be proud of. 

Seeing one company buy up a lot of fansites really concerns me though (especially IGE, a company that IMO encourages people to break the EULA’s of many games in the MMO space). I think it slows down the natural growth of the online gaming business. I will say that the sites themselves appear to be left alone from an editorial perspective. In fact, it’s likely that some centralized hosting and bigger financial backing can actually help grow these sites. This is America, and capitalism is a good thing. But when I see something impressive like Thottbot, which is the pinnacle of fan-supported utilities, get sold to IGE, it does give me some pause.

I like seeing the little guys build up fantastic websites over time and seeing them succeed. We’ve made a huge effort to support fansites over the years. And we’ll continue to do so, particularly the smaller ones – the ones that are really doing it for the love of the game.

Smed