2 Sourcery: Transparency for Stuff Posted: 6/27/2009

Today I want to talk to you about stuff. Real stuff, products you buy and use every day in life. In specific I want to talk about where it comes from and how its made. Let's start this off with a little exercise.

Look around you and identify/pick up something in your proximity. In my case it's a wireless USB mouse. If it's name-brand, then you should be able to identify the company that made it with relative ease. My mouse is made by Logitech, a company whose products I've traditionally trusted but recently I've become frustrated with. Now for some this name-brand identification is enough, but let's dig deeper. If your object contains more than one piece, its fair to say that someone made those pieces. Its also fair to assume that in a complex object like a wireless mouse, that the pieces were made by different companies, using different materials and methods. In turn the materials used to make these components While we can know this truth, for most this is where our knowledge ends. for instance, I don't know who made the plastic casing on my mouse, or even what its made out of. Similarly, I don't know anything about the methods used to make these pieces, what company made them, and what their practices as a company might be. For all I know, I'm using a mouse that is powered by the soul of a baby seal clubbed over the head with a rod of plutonium. While I certainly hope this is hyperbole, it illustrates my point.

Shouldn't we, in a world of connected and relational data, be able to easily discover what is in our products so that we can buy intelligently? As a informed and concerned consumer I would love to be able to know with relative confidence where everything in my mouse has come from, whether it contains any materials I would rather avoid, and that it is indeed radioactive-baby-seal free. For granola-munching progressives like myself there are obvious advantages to this system, as it allows people to truly see what goes into the making of the things they buy should they chose to do so. However this kind of system would be of utility of anyone concerned about the how, what, and where. For example, informed parents would be far less likely to buy a product for their child if they knew that one of the manufacturers of one of the components used a chemical in the process that has been clinically proven to negatively impact children. Someone with hometown pride may favor a one product over another if they knew that it contained a component made in their home town. This concept may seem like a bit of a stretch, but its worth noting that there are several forward thinking companies which have already begun self-reporting on their sourcing. Their logic is that by being transparent to their customers, they not only hold themselves accountable as to what goes into their products, but also establish a trusted relationship with customers who will in turn reward them with brand loyalty.

So what would this system (lets call it Sourcery, because it makes me feel clever) look like Clearly this is too much data for one company to maintain with any semblence of agility or accuracy. A single edition of such a report would take years to compile and would be woefully out of date from its release date onward. So instead I look towards the Wikipedia model. Like Wikipedia, Sourcery has to be agile and decentralized, self-editing, and contain a tolerable level of credibility. Entries in Sourcery would be divided into three categories: products, companies, and materials. Product entries would list materials used in their manufacture, other sub-component products, and the company of manufacture. Company entries would contain a list of products produced by the company. Material entries would contain basic information on the properties of the material, and a description of how the material is created. Sourcery should be open enough that anyone willing to contribute knowledge can, but also allow companies the ability to officially confirm and validate the information contained on entries pertaining to their products. Herein lies the largest challenge of the entire system. Individuals should have the power to openly participate, as with Wikipedia, yet in order to be fair the system must allow companies to differentiate between factual information and baseless claims. At the same time, companies must be limited in their power to censure information, otherwise the system completely loses its utility. Perhaps the method lies in differentiating the powers of users and company representatives. Anyone can sign up to edit the articles, thus allowing the company the same level of access as everyone else. Companies can sign up for a official representative account, which adds the power to tag various information as officially confirmed or contested by the company. The official account would not allow for the deletion or wholesale censoring of information, but would instead simply allow for the company to add its position to any claims contained in regards to their products. Occasionally a company will want to protect its intellectual property, especially when it comes to proprietary materials. They should be allowed to do this, but with the understanding that the more which is withheld, the less inherent trust will be placed in the product.

Another critical component of Sourcery should be the linking of materials and companies to related data. For example, I should be able to see clinical studies related to a material, or a report on human rights conditions at a company. This is where the true usefulness of Sourcery would really reside. Without it, I may know a product contains a certain material, but without the context that this is something I may want to avoid the system loses its meaning. With it, it creates a climate where through disclosure, companies can be petitioned to make their products safer/better/more sustainable. Companies that would fight against such a change would inherently be at a disadvantage when competing against companies with less qualms about being honest with their customers. A feature that would certainly be a technical challenge to create, but a boon to utility would be ability to extract high level summaries. The feature would take a request for a summary on a product based on search parameters and dig through the web of sourcing data and return a summary based on anything matching the parameters. For example, lets say I want to know if anything in my mouse was made by a certain company, or made in a certain country. Doing this search by hand would take some time, but could be easily discovered by the feature and returned quickly. This functionality could lead to a whole new dimension of comparison shopping, allowing consumers to quickly get a summary on several similar products and make a decision accordingly.

Undoubtedly, if Sourcery was ever created, there would be those who would decry it as unfair, but to my mind it is the essence of fairness. When we buy a product, we are in essence voting for a supply chain and a method of production which we may or may not actually desire or approve of. By being informed, we can make better choices, what ever those choices may be.

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0 Clearwire, Backlog, and other Mumblings Posted: 6/19/2009

I will honestly admit to a case of literary blue-balls from the past two weeks. I wanted dearly to finish the second part of my rant on MMO structure, and perhaps there was a bit of stage fright which came along with it. Meanwhile, ideas and thoughts kept piling up in notepads and in the back of my mind, which has only added to the frustration over the incomplete status of the posting. Now that its out, I can finally update briefly on several fronts.

First, I am most excited to report that I have freed myself from the shackles of AT&T's DSL morass and have happily switched to Clearwire, a budding WiMax broadband Internet service. Every negative assumption I had prior to taking the plunge (due mostly to bad experiences with DSL and Cable net) happily turned out to be wrong. It was affordable, offering the same bandwidth for half the price, easy to order, dead easy to set up (quite literally plug and surf), and so far rock solid in terms of stability. As someone who is not a land line phone user nor a TV watcher, the ability to have simple, effective, reliable Internet access without the need for other services is a absolute boon. But enough gushing, undoubtedly I will have something to eventually grouse about.

I've finally made the plunge and got myself a YouTube account (gasp!) which I have noticed gives me a subtle motivator to produce new work, now that I have a venue in which to display it. For your viewing pleasure, here is my demo reel, updated slightly to include some additions which should have been included long ago.

Rest assured you'll be seeing a lot more articles soon, I have a couple big ideas that will all naturally clump together which I will hopefully begin on shortly. These won't be art related as they have more to do with some of my thoughts regarding technology and innovation. But those posts are for another night, and it's nearly 1AM. Goodnight folks!

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0 The Currencies of the Realm, Part 2 Posted: 6/05/2009

Ok, so it took a little prodding, two weeks of procrastination, and a weekend obsessing over the nightmare in Iran, but here we go with part two.

In part one I made much mockery of what could be called the standard MMO formula, and especially at issue was the ever present mechanic of grind, which exists for the dual purposes of leveling the players' character and providing a method of generating income. More often than not, this income is used to purchase gear to grind more efficiently. At the center of all of this is the imperative to gain experience in order for the player to be admitted into the next major segment of the games story narrative. Yet at the end of the day, experience seems to a somewhat awkward way to measure someones inherent immersion and affluence in a MMO. Its used as a one-size fits all metric for battle-prowess, story progression, social sway, and worldliness. All its really measuring, however, is how many hoops you've jumped through thus far. But enough ranting, you get my drift.

Experience points are really a holdover from tabletop role playing, a system where the player count is inherently limited and you are constantly under the vigilant guidance (be that helpful or not) of the GM. The job of a good GM is to provide a custom tailored role play experience that fits the current skill level of their players. In a MMO, the presence of literally thousands of players makes the task of such personalized story telling at this point completely impractical. So in order to compensate, the process is abstracted into a framework of preset quests and a environment full of generic beasts and enemies which act as a proxy to the personalized experiences a GM would provide. The core difference of course is that the GM is providing you with encounters as a method of furthering the player narrative, whereas in a MMO its really just used as a placeholder. A excellent example of the kind of bland game play experience this can breed can be found here in a excellent post by Eric Heimburg. Because of this fact, something has to rise in importance to fill the holes in the narrative. It needs to be something that you are striving towards, something that comes with a promise of more. Therefore, experience and level are elevated from their simple clerical function in tabletop systems where it is used primarily by the GM as a method of scaling the difficulty of the encounters. Instead, it becomes the driving force behind player action and in doing so loses what was fun about the system to start with. In some cases it is been taken to ludicrous extremes, such as Jade Dynasty (snarkily call AFK Dynasty) in which you can literally pay real money to have the computer grind for you. Colin Brennan of Massively.com has a amusing article on this, one which begs the question what is even the point of having a experience system if you are literally giving players every means possible to avoid confronting it?

So how do we create a system that meets the needs of a MMO? What would a system that promoted player interaction, the shifting needs of players, and accurately reflected all aspects of a character's influence? Ironically, the answer is to utilize some good old arbitrary metrics, but to do it more intelligently. Experience points aren't a problem because they are arbitrary, they are a problem because it is a metric ill-suited to the task at hand. So what do we want to measure? To my mind there are three metrics which really encapsulate a MMO experience: Economic Capital, Social Affluence, and Battle/Competition Effectiveness.

Economic capital is an obvious and already implemented feature in the vast majority of MMOs, be it coins, credits, very small rocks, etc. Aside from experience points, economic capital is probably the biggest motivators driving grind. However, its a essential part of any system where a capitalist framework exists. It would certainly be interesting to see a MMO or virtual world attempt to build a system without economic coinage.

Social Affluence is a feature which has at times been used by MMO's, but generally in a secondary role and most commonly only as a penalty system against greifers and trolls. However, such a metric could be used as a reward system for participation in social events, pro-social behavior, and generally any activity deemed to enrich the player community. In many ways this metric seeks to quantify a players contribute and inherent value to the continuing vitality of a community. A few posts ago I mentioned Cory Doctrow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , a tale which featured a economy based completely of a social capital currency called "Whuffie." Whether a economy based exclusively on such a system is feasible or even desirable is a point of debate, and certainly one Doctrow explores in the book. But there is a definite utility in such a metric.

Battle or Competition Effectiveness is often the most common attribute associated with our old friend experience points. In simplest terms this is simply a metric for determining, well, your effectiveness in a competitive or combat related scenario. Often these are broken down into sub-categories of health, energy, stamina, armor, etc. There's nothing inherently wrong with this system either, but often in games there is a sense of inevitability and linearity that its association with experience imparts.

So up to this point, what's actually new? Not really that much, as all three metrics have seen some use in games. So why bother spell it all out? Because by abandoning the notion of experience points we can get to a core truism of the MMO: all three are really currencies. We don't generally think about them this way, but in fact that's what they are. The reason we don't think about them this way is with the exclusion of coinage, developers and designers tend to treat them in a very non-currency fashion. We can think of the game as a central bank with the power to print its own currency. This currency is handed put arbitrarily and incrementally to players for achieving certain goals, a meritocracy-based pay structure. Its at this point however, once the player has been given possession over their currency, that developers cease to treat it like currency. Players can seldom redeem their experience for anything aside from the promise of increased access.

So what if we did treat each as a full fledged currency from start to finish? What if a player could one day decide to cash in their battle-efficiency and purchase social affluence instead, allowing them to move from a play style centered on battle to one centered on socializing. As long as the developer finds clever and compelling services and products for each currency to be spent on, the market will for the most part balance itself. For a developer concerned about exploitation of the system, all they have to remember is that they control the spigots that allow each currency to flow into the system, and they control the cost of the goods and services. They can even control the exchange rates, should they choose to do so.

By making all these transactional, it allows developers to create activities which give rewards accurate and pertinent to the actual activity, and allows them to create self sustaining player dynamics by balancing the supply, demand, input and output of these currencies through the system. Admittedly, it seems counter intuitive to be able to trade ones physical attributes for money or social capital, but in many ways it fits better than the experience points model. For example, I could go to a blood bank tomorrow and depending on the blood bank, either donate my blood, thus gaining social capital, or sell it. Compare that to the notion that somehow by squishing 30,000 rats that a player is somehow qualified to slay demons. The only real world analogy which works here is that of muscle-building (which might as well be a form of real-world grinding).

This system need not spell doom for storytelling, which is still a vital part of any form of entertainment. Quite to the contrary it gives developers a greater power to influence player action and participation in the storyline. A story could very well roam from the battlefield to situations where social clout is necessary, to sections in which monetary wealth would be of great importance. By granting players the ability to trade between these three currencies, they are granted the flexibility for their character to evolve and grow over time. But as always, with great power comes great responsibility, and developers and storytellers will be harder pressed to create more rich and compelling worlds and story lines should they choose to use such a model. Perhaps for some developers the answer would lie in smaller linear narratives, much in the same way World of Warcraft includes new dungeons with patches. Others may be more ambitious and choose a branching open ended universe model, in which the narrative is defined by a constant set of conflicting choices presented by compelling NPC's and informed by a rich explorable world (Deus Ex was a early masterpiece in this regard). Still others may abandon developer dictated storytelling altogether in favor of creating game play mechanics which cause player-driven interactions to create stories of their own. The possibilities are nearly endless. It really boils down to the needs and desires of the developer. Some storytelling methods inherently are more developer intensive, and each carries with it a set of strengths and weaknesses which should be carefully considered.

After I wrote the first part of this article, a coworker who follows me online commented I was long winded. In retrospect I would have to agree, and hopefully this has been at least a tolerable read. I don't pretend that this system isn't without its problems, nor do I view it as a panacea to cure all the ills of MMOGs. This very well may be completely off base, but my hunch is that the MMO scene is looking for something fundamentally new, and this might be a good place to start.

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0 Random Thought of the Night Posted: 6/03/2009

I promise to continue my crusade against vanilla flavored MMOG's shortly, but before I crawl off to bed I thought I'd share some musings about everyones favorite animation platform that no one knows about; Blender.

So I've decided to give learning Blender another go. It's become powerful enough and the industry is finally starting to catch wind, so its a good time to get reacquainted. I have to admit that while I'm finding some parts of the interface natural and intuitive, other things are just leaving me scratching my head.  Why, for instance, is it that when I'm deleting a obiviously redundant edge, I cannot simply remove the edge itself without completely obliterating the face upon which it rests? The other big thing that bugs me is the camera.  I want to orbit around the object of interest with a camera without the camera randomly beginning to keel over like a drunk penguin.  Its not exactly conducive to a rapid production pipeline.  Am I just being thick here? Do I simply not posess the knowledge of some painfully obvious preferences which would make my life easier?  Probably.  I hear the next release is slated to have all manner of UI improvements, which I welcome wholeheartedly.  Now all of this might simply be the grousings of a modeler who has invested a good chunk of brainmeat to conforming to Maya's similarly eccentric workflow.  But it sure as hell feels easier to do simple things like rerouting a edge loop flow in Maya while in Blender I feel like I'm asking it to fly to the Moon using only a peice of tinfoil and a q-tip.

Meh. Maybe I'll actually look at a tutorial for once tomorrow.

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0 The Currencies of the Realm Part 1 Posted: 5/31/2009

This was going to be a single post, but as I've typed it, I've realized that no one in their right mind would read all of this at once.  So therefor, for your sake, here is part one of my rant on MMOG's.

Today I want to share with you something I came to realize while killing time at a Starbucks in the middle of rural Georgia (yes, I appreciate the irony too).  I've been giving MMOG design a lot of thought in recent weeks.  This may be due to the fact I've got a pet project in the wings that I'll share with you when the time is right, but for now allow me to continue.  I'm fairly certain I am not the only person in the world currently frustrated by the homogenous nature of the MMOG scene as it stands today.  With only slight variation and with rare exceptions, every MMOG released to date seems to simply be a repackaging of the same tried and true swords and sorcery formula which has changed little since our parents used to play it and it was called Dungeons and Dragons. This even goes for games which aren't high fantasy but are instead repackaged in a science fiction or "modern day".  That is merely different window dressing on what is essentially the same freaking window.  So what kind of a formula are we talking about here? Mostof us could probably rattle it off in our sleep, but for redundancy's sake lets spell it out:   

You are (insert character name here) a young and promising (insert gender, race, and profession here). You have arrived in (world name here) to find it a place full of danger, strip malls selling armor and weapons, and a seemingly endless supply of weak creatures to pillage and plunder.  Early on you are informed of the grave impending danger of (antagonistic power here) and are inevitably given a unavoidable quest which will surely lead to more unavoidable quests which will unquestionably set you on a collision course to go head to head against the dreaded (antagonistic power here).  But before you can Save the World (just like the guy who signed up right after you) you must prove your unswaying dedication to your goal and complete submission to the Powers the Be (the game devs) by grinding.  What is grinding you ask? Grinding is what game developers stick between Meaningful Content when they want to slow their players down. Its what makes MMO's financially feasible and it's what keeps the story team from absolute nervous breakdowns.  

But as a lowly player you're not supposed to remember any of that and focus on the task at hand.  In specific, you must plow your way through the faceless and oft nameless hordes of Slightly Weaker Beings in persuit of the coveted Experience Points.  Nowhere is it explained why on earth experience points(and their much more easily recitable cousin level points) are so damn important to everyone in (world name here) or even who in the world is even keeping trak of such a arbitrary statistic but its commonly accepted that they are Very Important indeed.  Provided you are a persistant and easily baited player, you will inevitably not only accumulate the sacred XP, but also a small landfill worth of Marginally Valueable Stuff which for some unexplained reason,  was being toted around at random by members of the faceless hordes you slaughter. 

Through your travels you learn that some of these items can combined together through some arbitrary process to create Expendable Items of Average Utility. They're always expendable, becuase if they weren't you might start to realize what a absolute drag grinding is.  Every blue moon or so, one of the faceless horde will drop the highly prized Rare and Obscure Item of Great Value, which of course can be used to either further your genocidal spree or to create a Very Expendable Item of High Utility. So you play on, as the quests begin to blur into each other, the story line lurching along in syrupy hiccups between hours of grind.  Then, just when you've fallen into the groove, the plot reaches its inevitable climax and you, the (gender, race, profession here) must summon your greatest effort and several friends with questionable attention spans and bad internet connections to defeat the One True Evil.  

Then its over.  You've reached the top and suddenly the grind has lost its meaning because now your experience points and your level suddenly seem so arbitrary.  After all, what does the person who has defeated the ultimate evil do after?  You hope that the developers will hurry up with that promised expansion, the one which will unlock a whole new world of faceless creatures and a extension to the plot, and along with it a reason to start grinding again.  But until then you are a lost soul, wandering about the world fighting the few surviving Very Difficult Creatures in the hope they will provide a challenge and more rare items.  But there's never enough of them, and even when you do defeat them, you've only joined the swelling ranks of the Players Who Have Done Everything, and you realize you look a awful lot like all the others. Depression sets in, and you stop playing, vowing to never play a MMO again.  Yet before long you find yourself sitting at your computer excitedly, with the brand new and highly marketed (game name here), hoping that this one is somehow different from the last.

I nearly fell asleep typing that.

 Now as I said there are exceptions, as there are to any sweeping generalization.  Games like Planetside and to an extent EVE Online try to mix things up by making it about PvP territory control. Some get more serious with their content creation tools, others try and mix it up with encouraging socialization.  But the truth of the matter is the sheer rank and file of the MMO scene follows the same pattern, and frankly as a gamer and as someone with game design aspirations, it's getting a bit old.  

Up next in part two of this rambling diatribe: I'll attempt to describe the beginnings of a system that actually lives up to the stratospheric expectations I've just set for myself.  

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