I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.

The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in multiplayer videogames. People discover little cheats in videogames that can advance their score but annoy everyone else. Whether to use them anyway is an example of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. According to Game Theory, the dominant strategy is to use these cheats.

[Explication: your opponent has the option to use the cheat as well. If they do, and you don’t, you lose. If you do, and they don’t, you win. If you both do, then it’s equal. The worst that can happen from using the cheat is that the stakes are even. On the other hand, if you don't use the cheat, then the worst that can happen is you losing. That's worse than the stakes being even: so use the cheat.]

However, the consequences of everyone using the cheats is mayhem and no fun for anyone, so it’s actually also an undesirable outcome, but less undesirable than losing. Everyone cheating rather than playing the game properly. But so long as the strategy exists and can be executed in a way that’s undetected, the rational decision is to continue the abuse. The way to counteract this for developers and publishers is to close down the cheat strategies or publically identify the abusers so that future potential opponents will either (a) avoid them or (b) use the same strategies as the abusers. Identification and iteration of the same game conditions turns the short-term gain into a long-term loss*. Creating a state of uncertainty over whether abusers will/can be identified can also work.

[*Actually, the maths says that continuing to cheat still remains dominant, even when the cards are on the table, but humans are rarely mathematical creatures. People are complicated and irrational: winning isn't always the overall goal for them. Some people don’t play the dominant strategy anyway, because of a sense of honour or fair-play. On the other hand, some people always will, despite the consequences, because they don’t care. (They’re ‘griefers’ in videogame jargon).]

The second post was by Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian website about the Firefox and Chrome extension Ad-Block. If you use Ad-Block, then it stops the advertising banners and MPUs on websites from loading. That makes for a faster and smoother browsing experience for you as an individual. However, the websites that you are looking at lose revenue, since they probably sell their advertising on a CPM basis – cost per thousand views – it doesn’t matter whether you click on the ads or not. Not all ads are intended to be clicked on anyway, such as branding campaigns.

If everyone Ad-Blocks, then the site you love goes out of business. If no-one does, then it thrives. The ‘cheat’ is the idea that Ad-Block is still pretty-much a secret, or that most other people are more honourable than you. That you can block advertisements, but because hardly anyone else is using it, then the sites will still be OK.

So here’s the obligatory 2×2 matrix:

The best outcome is that your favourite sites prosper and continue, and you don’t have to see the adverts. The worst – the ‘everyone cheats but me’ scenario -  is that they go bust despite you not filtering ads yourself. The dominant strategy is to Ad-Block and hope very few other people do that as well. It will continue to be dominant until enough of us perceive free web media as a long-term game, are identified as free-riders or learn the consequences to our short-term victory.

We want sites to prosper, yes? So what do they/we need to do? They need to make viewing and interacting with their content a long-term game. Part of that is achieved by Bobbie’s column – if Ad-Block is worthy of a column in the Guardian, then it’s certainly not some sort of hacker secret anymore. It is the most-downloaded Firefox Add-on and the leading Chrome Extension. Any certainty that ‘everyone else’ will play a dominated strategy ought to disappear. Thus, the ‘best’ outcome, where you get a free ride on sites that prosper has gone. Take that out of the picture and the game looks rather different: playing fairly together is the new best option. They should probably publish figures on the footer of every page of the revenue lost to filters; maybe scale that into an ‘articles we were unable to commission this month’ widget, if the loss is large enough. Arguably, it should be possible to identify the users of Ad-Block (if it isn’t already) and serve them altered content.

We need to switch off the extension, with the recognition that this is a long game, even if our identities remain masked: it’s the future of free media on the Web. Our best outcome is a free-ride, on sites that are free-to-access anyway. The worst outcome is our favourite sites going bust.

With long-termism brought to the front of our minds, the best outcome is removing a little inconvenience; the worst would be a disaster.

picture credit: HDR cafe

[As you might be tempted to point out: I used to use Ad-Block but I have stopped].

We tend to imagine computer gaming as being about fantasy, but the really important thing that this new, commercially successful breed of games all have in common is the way they blur the boundaries between fantasy/online and meat-space. Farmville is about your real-life friends helping you out; Wii Fit is physical as well as virtual; Achievements is a meta-game about social status. Then we have Nectar points; Club Card points; Caffe Nero points; Petrol points; Alcohol Units (what? you’re not supposed to collect them?). Gaming is becoming ubiquitous.

The video’s URL is http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/ in case it doesn’t show. (Internet Explorer users. tssk).

From completely the opposite direction, the desire for authenticity in a world that is becoming increasingly more virtual is a theme Schell touches upon and has been a frequently mentioned topic on this blog. 

My key piece of recent evidence: the renaissance of the ukelele. What’s that about if it isn’t a deep hunger for something (a) physical; (b) crafty and (c) nostalgic? More seriously, there’s so much stuff all over the place about hand-crafted this and authentic that. Crafting communities. Photowalks. Meetups. We’re mad for a spot of reality, an oasis of organic in the desert of digital.

Schell invokes this – and I really must get this book about it that he mentions – but then somehow segues between that and this approaching world order in which everything you do potentially scores you points. I’d agree that ‘gaming everywhere’ seems a likely future – one that’s already partially arrived, but I’m not sure that this will satisfy any of these other desires for a more real, visceral experience of life. So some sleight-of-hand there, I think. Brilliant presentation, nonetheless.

Like other media owners, computer games publishers have a hard time with piracy and other unauthorised distribution. You know this is true because you were a teenager once yourself and you copied disks and downloaded cracks. In my case, it was copying cassette tapes of Spectrum games. It’s really quite a big problem: 2DBoy, the publishers of indie puzzle game World of Goo, had a built-in mechanism for tracking every copy of the game in circulation. They discovered that 90% of those copies were unauthorised, and that’s discounting any versions whose distributors had found a way to circumvent the tracking. While that doesn’t mean that game publishers only get 10% of the revenue they would in a world without piracy, I think we’re likely to agree that it’s probably a fair chunk.

Distribution

When Dragon Age came out, I had several options for getting hold of it.

I could go to a shop

• advantages: I get a box, a disc and a printed manual.
• disadvantages: I have to go to the shop. I might scratch or lose the disks. I have to put the disk in the machine to play. Costs £40.

Or I could buy it through a digital distribution service like Steam (it’s like iTunes for games, basically).

• advantages: I get it right now; Steam looks after the installation and any patches; can’t lose or scratch the disk.
• disadvantage: need to be connected to the Net to play; no printed manual; costs £40.

Or I could download an illegal, cracked copy through PirateBay or similar.

• advantages: I get it right now. No need to jump through copy protection hoops. Costs nothing.
• disadvantages: err… might get caught.

So, the method that earns EA no money is, in many respects, the most convenient. They should probably try to dissuade me from doing that somehow. Here’s what they’ve done and what they might have done.

Digital-Rights Management

Games publishers have traditionally responded to the threat of unauthorised copying by introducing more and more sophisticated forms of copy protection and DRM. You have to have the DVD in your drive to start the game. The game requires you to enter a unique serial number. It might check this number against an internal algorithm. More recently, it’s likely to check the number against a database on the publisher’s server – a key that’s used more than a few times will be blacklisted. It might check that key every time you play. Dragon Age employs all these methods. But it doesn’t really work very well as a means of protection.

First, it’s a pain in the neck for legitimate customers. Why should I have to go hunting through my discs every time I want to play the game? What’s with this trillion-character serial number? Hang on, my Internet connection is a bit flakey – what do you mean I can’t play? These methods aren’t just inconvenient; they are also disrespectful. They treat paying customers like potential criminals.

Second, the pirates appear to be really rather good at thwarting copy protection. Cracks to make a game playable without any of the above are easily obtained. So it turns out that the only people who are inconvenienced are genuine customers. Nice work!

Score: 1/5

Enrich the Genuine Copies

In recent years, the idea of giving ‘extras’ to paying customers has gone by the board somewhat. I recall buying games in the nineties that came with 2-3 different manuals, a map of the in-game world, a poster, occasionally novelties like a metal figurine or a sound track disk. Nowadays, games come in DVD-style boxes and so the possibilities for novelties are rather limited.

Nonetheless, EA have actually done quite well with Dragon Age on this score. Rather than physical extras, they come in a virtual form. My box came with a coupon with two extra serial numbers I could enter into the game. These added new content to the game: a couple of extra adventures and unique items and powers to make my character stronger.

I had to register my game with the publisher in order to unlock this content and so there’s no way for pirates to get hold of it. I really like this idea: the illegal copy is impoverished while legitimate buyers are rewarded. And thinking about gamer psychology, I believe it acts as a strong motivation to get the real thing. Those using unauthorised versions will know that their character isn’t as strong and hasn’t got the same resources as those belonging to users who bought it. Gamers hate having a ‘lame’ character.

Unfortunately, Bioware slightly botched the execution. Using the premium content requires the game to check in with the server every time it is run, spoiling the experience for those with a flakey internet connection or wanting to play the game on the move.

On a more positive note, the title is being actively maintained by the developers. Two patches have already been released with a third in the works. Once again, it’s unlikely pirates will be able to use these, again making their copies inferior.

Score: 3/5

Sell a Platform

But EA did more with add-on idea than simply providing bonuses for registered customers. It has built Dragon Age as a platform as well as a game. You can go onto the site and purchase Bioware points to spend on extra chunks of content, such as the Return to Ostagar expansion. Again, you need to be registered to buy and use this content, which once again devalues the pirated releases. Since the game’s launch, there’s only been one piece of additional content to purchase, with a further expansion due in March.

The developers also released a toolset for the game allowing users to create their own tweaks and content for the game that can be distributed and installed in a similar fashion to the official add-ons.

Score 4/5

Build Community

The toolkit is just a small part of the ways that the publishers have attempted to foster a community around the game. Registering the game automatically creates a MySpace-style profile page for every user which automatically records achievements within the game and your character’s progress. You can add comments and screengrabs, and the site comes with the normal tools to twitter/facebook/tell others about what you’ve managed to achieve.

While I think this is useful for games, it’s not especially so in this case. Dragon Age is a resolutely single-player game so there is no particular reason why anyone should be remotely interested in another player’s progress, unlike, say, multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Eve Online. Oh well – I’ll still give points for good intentions.

Score 2.5/5

Conclusions

A mixed score overall, then, with overly zealous DRM casting a shadow over some more insightful ideas to make piracy a poor option for users. Nonetheless, it appears to have been relatively palatable to users, with over 3.2mn copies shipped by the beginning of February. At £40 a unit, not including any after-sales of extra content, that equals um… squillions in revenue.

The key to good practice here is giving customers more than they expected, rewarding their patronage, hooking them in as they experience the game and up-selling them with extra content to extend the experience. These sorts of ideas might easily be applied to other media forms, such as a music CD or a magazine subscription. If I pay, give me more, exclusive extras that add a lot more value to the legitimate edition than the unauthorised copies. Make it easy for me to use it as a want to. As we all know, the bits and bytes of any digital product can and will be copied by people who are determined to do so. However, if you make those ones and zeroes just a fraction of the whole product experience, then there is still a business in making media.

I just read this from Brian Mitsoda (ex-Troika) on fave gaming site rockpapershotgun in an article about ‘which games made you the gamer you are’ and I agreed so furiously that a little bit of wee came out:

It’s impossible to separate my childhood from Pac-Man. If you were alive in the early 80s, you knew who Pac-Man was and like it or not, you were surrounded by Pac-Man. It’s the first game I remember being ubiquitous to the point that over a decade later, bars and restaurants still had their Pac-Man cabinets or tables neglected in a corner somewhere. Not only could the game be found everywhere, but so could the Pac-merchandise – stickers, sheets, cereal, Christmas ornaments, t-shirts, novelty songs, defibrillators – to the point that even someone who couldn’t tell a videogame machine from a digital clock perched atop a brick knew who Pac-Man was. Luckily, the game was fantastic – no, it was glorious – a thing that was unexplainable and unrelated to the natural world, simple enough to make sense to anyone who studied it for a few seconds but addictive enough to keep people glued to it for hours, even lifetimes for some. To this day, I find it incredible that some people’s entire gaming career consists of Pac-Man, maybe Galaga or Tetris. As a kid, I wasn’t very good at it, and I couldn’t put a finger on just what made me so fond of it, but I just wanted to play it. I was in awe of people who could last more than ten minutes and who had eaten more than mere strawberries and cherries and I probably bugged the shit out of a fair share while trying to watch them play. [emphasis mine]

So, the bit I bolded is about the birth of digital. Experiences and objects and real things that had no relationship with the estwhile real world whatsoever. Pacman was/is a new thing. There is no sense to it at all, judged from the perspective of everything you know about the physical world. But it created its own internal logic. It has goals and rewards and creates a state of mind that gives real pleasure, work and frustration.

Our recent emphasis on social media (‘our’ meaning people who write and/or think about the web) forgets some things. It tries to marry web experiences with understood social transactions. It proposes that the best of the web mirrors or augments things that already exist in the world. That’s good – it helps more people understand digital. Helps businesses in the sector be more profitable and successful.

But it helps us forget that this is still a new world, still being created. It maybe stunts our imagination. ‘Every new website has to have social elements,’ one highly respected speaker said at an event we ran last year. Does it? What about bodingers, reshfrops and zingies? What about stuff that’s totally alien to the offline experience of life yet completely changes that?

There are still no rules – we are still faced with a big box of LEGO and only imagination as the limit. Social may be easier to sell than zingies. But the person who finally invents zingies will be remembered for a lot longer than the people behind yet another social network.

[play Pacman again here.]

Every social media destination has some sort of scoring mechanism:

• Twitter followers
• Linked-In contacts
• Facebook friends
• Blog subscribers/comments

Those are the four I personally use most consistently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s happening. They all have an equivalent.

What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is better always seems to be the suggested case: something that’s very deliberately designed into the UI is your score. Other people’s scores are almost always a click away.

For the owners of those products, it’s absolutely the case that bigger scores are great. The more people you’re connected with, the more time you’ll spend on the site, the more likely you’ll eventually click an advert or buy into the premium features, and the more trouble it is to move. For me, moving from Linked-In to a rival business network like E-cademy or Xing or Ryze would be a major pain.

The quality of the product doesn’t really matter, either, when the score’s at stake. Why do we use Twitter? It’s flakey and restrictive. Jaiku was way better than Twitter; there are up-and-coming competitors like identi.ca that offer way better features. Not to mention already dead competitors like Plurk. But my people are on Twitter and that’s why I put up with it. I have X followers there and X/5 on its closest competitor.

The ludic (playful or game-like) element of social sites provide a massive incentive to stay and play. I was delighted to beat my high-score on Twitter yesterday. That’s pretty childish, in most people’s estimation. No, actually it is childish: I should be ashamed of myself. And so it’s something that sounds gauche when we admit to it. By-and-large, we don’t, unless we have no embarrassment reflex.

But let’s talk about it.

I want to beat you at Twitter, Facebook and the rest. If your score is higher than mine, then I am jealous. If it is lower, then I scorn you. Why? Ummm dunno. Because it’s there. Frankly, because it’s designed like a game and in the same way I want to win our chess game that we might have one day, I want to win our Linked-In/etc. game.

This is the secret dashboard on Linked-In/Twitter/&c:

So what would happen if I stopped playing? My rank on the killboard would decline rapidly.

What does stopping playing mean on these sites? Not visiting; not accepting any friend requests that simply boost the friend count; not joining in on discussions where I know – or suspect – there’s no real challenge to established points of view.

Would I have fewer friends? – possibly. Would the things I said and did be less right? No. [My job role as a publisher clearly means that reach is a KPI. That kind of taints what I might do as a real human being. ;-) ]

The other consequence of the ludic nature of social sites is the effect of that on people’s behaviour, as I’ve talked about over the last couple of posts. If it looks like a game, and playing it like a game offers some rewards, then of course people will do that. If the game is approval, and it is in many cases, then that will lead to approved behaviour. Scoring systems on social media destinations are nearly always linked to approval in some way. The other part of the game is competition – you have to have a better comment than the other guy. That’s really great in some ways, because it makes people reach for ideas. Really terrible in other ways, because destroying the opposition becomes the focus. Thus the phenomenon of the Angry Internet Man – a great phrase possibly coined but definitely popularised by the awesome gaming site RockPaperShotgun.

This is a little way off from the Foucault post, in some ways, but it leads to the same conclusion. Social media may well be a force for good, creativity, innovation. But at the same time it is also exerting control and perverting behaviours.

PS. I think last.fm and similar taste-based networks have different dynamics, but that’s one for another day.

When you have this sort of team on your side.

Only about 20 months late on this.

(And yes – I wish I could shut off that frickin’ tweeting from the Cooking Mama post below. I’ll replace the widget with a link v.soon.

What I imagine many readers are looking for from an English social media and technology blogger is an overdue Thanksgiving treat. So here you are:

<(delme)embed src="http://www.peta.org/cooking-mama/swf/cooking-mama.swf" width="300" height="219" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> Widget deleted for noise pollution!

This is a cheeky bit of social media from US animal rights organisation PETA (full size and downloadable versions here). It’s a sort-of protest that plays on and satirises the Cooking Mama games from Majesco Entertainment. You might come across the latest instalment on the Wii over the Christmas period. As you’ll see if you play the game, you prepare a thanksgiving dinner with an emphasis on the unpleasantness of it all – it emphasises the visceral elements of cooking meat and was thus intended to draw attention to the sad plight of turkeys and prompt people to give up meat.

Sadly (for the animals, I guess, and also PETA’s marketing gurus) reaction to the game doesn’t suggest that it’s created a lot of hard-core vegetarians with this release:

(from the digg comment thread)

This game is AWESOME!!!
Can we have Slaughterhouse Mama next? I wanna bash some cows IN THE HEAD on my DS!
Seriously, PETA. Nintendo’s gonna sue you, Majesco’s gonna sue you and all you did was make the game more awesomer.
EPIC FAIL FTW!!!

(from the thread on Kotaku)

To be honest, this just makes me hungry, and reminds me I need to buy meat

(from the thread on Rampant Coyote)

Not only did the game miss the mark in inspiring the gross-out they wanted to achieve, but doesn’t that message miss the point entirely in the first place?
I mean… “Don’t kill animals… it’s gross!” Is that what PETA’s message is now… not kindness or concern or humanity… no. It’s about keeping clean now, cause you know, don’t wanna do anything that’s gross.
I could have respected something like, a cute little turkey with big eyes pleads with you not to kill it or something, and if you do so you end up feeling evil or something. This is nothing like that. So yeah, even from a crazed PETA-freak perspective, it still misses the mark, I thought.

The web makes ideological interventions tricky for organisations because you can’t be sure who the audience is going to be. If you follow current trends and make your game bloggable and portable through a widget, you increase the reach of what you’ve done, but also increase the chances of a very different reaction to the one you had planned. While Cooking Mama is a kids game, the parody was launched in the adult market, and its widget-ness helps it spread in that demographic. Adult gamers are generally used to pretty good gore, while this offers nothing more gory than Wolfenstein 3D. It would be equally tricky if they produced something photorealistic and considerably more graphic, in which case they’d be accused of attempting to shock, terrify and traumatise children.

Food for thought, one way or another.

If you start a job as an oil rigger, then there’s a 50% chance you’ll have a reportable accident within the next six months. After that period, the risk drops to 5% or less, as you get to know the ropes.

That’s quite frightening for potential oil-riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry who hire such folk.

I was lucky enough to be at a presentation from Kevin McNulty from Coole Immersive yesterday, part of the Visual Web Convention. They’ve made a simulation game that allows new oil-riggers to get that first six months’ experience for free. That’s to say, the likelihood they’ll have a reportable accident drops to <5% if they’ve used the game. That’s a fairly cast-iron case for games in the workplace, if you ask me.

Earlier in the day, Lord Puttnam gave a challenging keynote suggesting that this field – serious games – was a potential answer to the work he was doing with the climate change commission in the House of Lords. Briefly, his argument was that younger people are more likely to engage with games than any other media – I’d agree with this but suggest that older people are also gamers. Games are also blessed with the ability to offer experiential learning unlike any other pedagogic technique currently available – I think the oil rigger case study shows that’s true. Communicating the things that all of us need to do to avoid the looming disaster that climate change will bring is a tough problem for all professional communicators. We held a private event this week for advertising professionals called Can Advertising Save the Planet? The answer is probably ‘no’, but as communicators, we have the ability and responsibility to make things a little easier and better – the disaster is imminent, after all, but even the lowest of the low can do something to help.

If we are to steer society away from catastrophe and into education, games will have a key part to play.

Unfortunately, as Puttnam admitted, as soon as something is called a ‘game’ then bureaucracy and government recoils. The idea of our government lending public support, and ultimately money, to games, is stymied by its vocabulary. Games are trivial and a social harm in the minds of most bureaucrats and, sadly, most newspaper editors (see the press about the recent Byron Review which, while admitting a need for some governance over which titles were available to younger gamers, was overwhelmingly in favour of video games as a learning resource, if you bother to read the whole thing).

Flipping back to climate change and the emergency we face communicating the facts about it and what needs to be done, then games provide an excellent opportunity. But the flip-side of the problem with bureaucrats then sets in – entertainment providers are terrified of being associated with anything remotely ‘worthy’. Being ethical is, apparently, uncool.  There have already been a few brave attempts – World without Oil, the BBC’s Climate Challenge and others. But the likes of Sony, EA and Microsoft aren’t developing or promoting these sorts of titles. What needs to happen to make the big games publishers alert to their power to change the future?

[Update - Robin Blandford has some videos of what this looks like and a challenge for the rescue industry]

As is customary at top-end press-conferences, there was a schwag-bag for all attendees containing various branded giveaways. Mouse mats, mugs and stuff – it saves having to buy Xmas presents for a lot of journos. *cough*

(As an aside – Yay! that more bloggers and vocal fans are getting their hands on this stuff.)

But the cleverest bit (for me) was that this also included an online keycode for WoW that would allow players of that game to gain a new companion for their online avatars – the characters they play in the game. Remember, they invited guild leaders and fanatical WoW bloggers along**.

The pet itself will be a miniature version of the Archangel Tyrael of Diablo 2 fame who will travel with you on all your grand adventures in Azeroth! Pictures of this amazing new pet will be available on the official website soon for everybody to check out.

Get it? The WoW pet is a viral promo-item for Diablo III! It’s limited edition, so it’s sought-after; it’s a sign of prestige in the community; and it’s constantly in the face of relevant audiences.

Pure genius. Or evil.

________________________________

*World of Warcraft – or WoW to its friends – an online roleplaying game which charges a monthly subscription – to around 10mn people.

**WoW players organise themselves into ‘guilds’ to assemble teams for online combat and for social reasons – their leaders are the most visible, longstanding and respected players.

Via. Kotaku

Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly the bitchiest thing I’ve ever seen, in a good way. In other people’s houses I was subjected to seemingly dozens of TV talent shows and shouty soaps.

Books: Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre is an excellent read, though not quite up to the standard of Vernon God Little, IMHO. The book has two separate threads which are well-created but then brought together rather clumsily in the finale. Imperium – Robert Harris – his worst book to date, sadly, though still a good read for a train journey. For self-improvement, I managed to get through a few more chapters of Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, too. I’ve got his book about the Thames lined up once that’s finished, some time in 2009.

Papers: My normal diet is freesheets – the Metro and the London Shite. Staying at relatives’ houses meant a shock switch to The Torygraph and the Daily Mail. How do people find the time? And why do they bother? Also enjoyed my regular doses of Uncut, Private Eye and the Economist.

Online: I’ve been offline for most of the time over the last two weeks, which was a very good idea and means I’m keen to get stuck into those 300 unread feeds.

Games: do these count? Anyway, much of my break was spent with The Witcher, which I can thoroughly recommend to old-school CRPG fans. Also developed a crippling addiction to fab puzzler The Lost Treasures of Montezuma.