In their second annual survey on “Virtual Goods Market Penetration and Growth in North America,” the two firms found that the median of digital goods purchases grew 67 percent from $30 in 2009 to $50 in the current year. More than one-fifth, or 21 percent, of digital goods buyers said they intend to purchase more in the next 12 months, too.

Not only are women a major market in games using virtual goods, the spend on virtual goods has increased.

Research firm Frank N. Magid Associates and in-game commerce platform PlaySpan report that 13 percent of the North American population (12 to 64 years) with internet access purchase digital goods, and that those consumers spent an average of $99 on those items in 2010 — a 14 percent increase over the average of $87 spent in the previous year.

This strikes me as a measurable progress toward a long time goal of the games industry: Make games women are interested in playing (and thus paying for). For decades game developers in NA and EU have struggled to figure out how to engage women. For years, some would say, whole console generations, where interesting to a majority of teenage males. My position has been that for the game industry to survive it not only needs to broaden market appeal to both sexes, but also a much broader age bracket.

So, Is this report a sign of Victory(is this as good as it is going to get)? or a signpost on the road to a bigger and broader market?

An interesting new title is starting to show up in game companies. Chief Economist.

Virtual economies are becoming a foundational component of game design. Like when Storytelling and Music where added to games, virtual economies are expanding the appeal of games to broader audiences.

Games make strange cubefellows

Ok, that was a terrible play on Charls Dudly Warner’s quote “Politics makes strange bedfellows”, The point I’d like to make is that modern games draw from a very wide verity of skills and backgrounds. In a game company boardroom, if you don’t see a fohawk in tattered denim next to a receding hairline in a finely pressed business suit something is wrong. The diversity allows for the creation of experiences that appeal to a broad audience. Sometimes through depth, sometimes through simplicity.

It’s not like we haven’t done this before

Every time the industry adds a discipline to the standard game development team, the market for games expands. The experiences provided by games become more engaging, and meaningful.
The first computer games where created mostly by programmers and games appealed to a base audience.

Then came Writers, authors, storytellers. Text stories where adaped easily to the primitive computer systems used to develop and play computer games. Games started telling compelling stories and their appeal expanded (Zork). People who enjoyed an engaging story found a new medium, and the market for games

Visual artists entered games, and we got graphics. Games became visually appealing, then as graphics got better, visually compelling. Musicians entered games and we got sound and music. Recently community, social networks, and sociologists, in the form of community managers, have entered the industry. Games are creating tight feedback systems between players and developers (many times erasing the lines between the two). Games are appealing to a very broad market base (farmville? zynga’s games)

Each time the games industry adds a new discipline, the appeal of games broadens.

Hot Game executive title: Chief Economist

Companies like imvu and linden labs live and die on their virtual economy, it just makes sense that they have economists on staff. Only these folks don’t (or shouldn’t) work for the CFO (although the CFO may be the only one on staff who can comprehend much of their jargon). A chief economist has a lot to contribute to game design (also an economist can talk to a VC in ways that will nearly guarantee extra funding

Wait, something is not right here

Games have constantly challenged every new entrant discipline: Challenged their fundamentals. [editors note: English just does not have a comfortable, or elegant, way of dealing with the relations between compound, nested, or unbounded sets. I site as examples of my frustration the invention of "all y'all" and the use of "dudes"  in the US west or "y'all" in the US south]

Each time a discipline is added to games, a fundamental assumption about that discipline is discovered, sometimes painfully, to be invalid.  Games are non-linear, temporal, real time, collaborative, experiences, often involving not just an individual but groups of people large and small.

Writers entering the game industry encountered interactivity. Players play games. They are players are not a reader, listener, or viewer. And, unfortunately for the screenwriter, players are not actors.  Players (gleefully) refuse to respond to direction or do what they are told.  Interaction, choices, break the linearity many storytelling mediums are based on.Writers have learned to break stories up into little bytes that can be broken up into “missions”, “quests” or “levels”. Writers have learned to let stories unfold out of order, from multiple viewpoints, and write several alternate sequences that go beyond simple branching. Story telling games have become rich, and can appeal to both broad and narrow audiences.

Some may argue that good story tellers jump back and forth in time, but the reader will still turn to page 56 when they finish page 55.  The live theater goer will still see act 3 right after act 2. One of my favorite debates still rage: are games a story telling form or a sport (with no real story context). There are those that will argue that sports are a form of story telling. (personally: those folks need some mind expanding experiences)

Music encountered similar challenges when added to games. The time it takes a player to do something is unknown. “How many measures does that combat sequence take” is not a question a composer can ask in a game setting.  For a composer this represents a huge challenge, how long do you know how long your score is supposed to be? When is it exciting? when is it contemplative? How much time to I have to transition? If I make loops, short loops become irritating, long loops never get heard and get cut off in awkward and jarring manners.  Musicians have  very little information up front, they don’t even known when the mood in a game is going to change. An exciting combat situation is often defined by the mood changing from dire to victorious in an instant.

Music systems have been created that can help dynamically compose and change the mood of music during game play. With the application of these technologies games became more fun, and music games became an audience expanding genre unto themselves. Games gained a richness and depth that added mood and tone.

Enter the Economists

So enter the dire breach my dear, the unsuspecting economists.

Lionel Robbins in his  1932 essay he defines economics as:

“the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”^[3] Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs.  The subject thus defined involves the study of choices as they are affected by incentives and resources.

In virtual economies there is no scarcity. Alternative uses are often a null concept. Lionel Robbins concludes that

Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem.

There is no relevant cost of goods within virtual economies. Virtual items do not “wear out” so there is no loss of value of an item over time due to diminished capacity. There is an excellent article in venture beat about this.

I find I must take issue with one point repeatedly brought up(this was also mentioned in the VGS09 summit). A point keeps being made that “real” economies do not have sinks and sources. I postulate that real economies DO have sinks and sources. In a real economy a source would be the controlled addition of new resources, or the ability to exchange currency. That is, if I go out and dig up some gold, I have a choice of exchanging that gold for US dollars, Euros, rupees or what have you. I am adding a new resource to that economy. If I play the part of a government, as such I have the ability to print money, and have the ability to take money out of circulation.

I learned at a very tender age that money is not real, it not even a measure, it is merely a means of standardizing units of work to allow for and easy and uniform exchange of goods and services. (there is a certain type of genius when a mother can make a concept like this obvious to a 5 year old. If your curious, ask and I’ll tell you the anecdote she used)

Most governments have fairly broad simple mechanisms to source and synch money into and out of the economy, and these mechanisms are balanced by some very subtle and complex mechanisms to measure and control the value of that money when compared to goods and services.

This exactly the role a game 0perator takes on when running their own virtual economy.

Real economists are green, with envy

A huge benefit economists have in virtual economies, as pointed out by Bill Grosso, is that virtual economists can see EVERYTHING. Every transaction in a virtual economy is known, and all the meta data about that transaction is also known. Bill calls it “perfect knowledge”. Virtual economists are the envy of “real” economists. In reality we can not know fundamental facts about what is being spent on what by whom, we can only really guess.

New shiny thing: same old shiny result

Now we have games that have virtual economies as a fundamental part of game play. What has the industry gained from it?

A whole lot.

Some of the fastest growing games of 2009, and some of the more profitable new game companies <zynga> use virtual economies.

Virtual economies are used to lower the barrier to entry into games, and to allow players, community members, to spend as much as they want.

So when games added Music, Physics, Graphics their appeal broadened to new audiences, economics in games is expanding the appeal and relevance of games to more and broader audiences.

Some References:

Another option is to upload the web page that Unity 3d creates when you build a web project. If you upload both the file and the page. you can insert the web page as a link into your blog using the wordpress “Add Media” feature

Now That is Slick

And here is how you do it.

First you need to collect some things.

1. make a picture of your project. Run your project in Unity, alt+printscreen to capture an image of the project. Paste that into your favorite image editor. Even use Paint if you have to (yuck).
2. After you do a web build in Unity you’ll need to upload BOTH the web page Unity creates, as well as the .unity3d file
3. So that’s 3 uploads total

Here is why I upload them into the WordPress media library rather than directly into the post. You need the file URL for the web page. You’ll need to feed that as a link in your post.

Now assuming you have the shadowbox plugin installed simply do the following:

1. Insert picture into your blog using WordPress’s “Add an Image” or “Add Media” feature
2. Open the media library Either by clicking on the star icon, or opening the media library link in a new tab.  NOT by clicking on the media link on wordpress menu. we just need a link from the media library, not actual media.
3. “show” the .html page you uploaded, then select and copy the file URL for your media. If you used the “insert media” function, simply click the show link, then click the “file url” button, select and copy the URL.
4. Now go back to your blog post,  click on the picture you uploaded
5. hit the “link” button
6. In the URL text entry box, paste the URL you selected
7. Close the link box
8. Now switch over to HTML view because you need to add the tag rel=”shadowbox” to the URL
9. In HTML view go find the code for the link in the image, just after the opening “<a” insert the following: rel="shadowbox"
10. Preview your post,  make some other additions and publish your work!

Hats off to Will Goldstone and his learn unity 3d site

Alas it is just another opportunity to

Make a fool out of myself

by “predicting” some future elements of MMOs. And since I orignally developed this presentation in 2008, it is waaaayy out of date.

Anatomy of the MMO 1.7.6 Futures

If you read this series, I hope you found it worth reading. I would be excited if you found it interesting, and even comment worthy.

How many servers, how much will bandwidth cost, where should I put my stuff. Oh, geeze all this stuff sounds soo expensive and I just want to launch my game, and I barely have enough Capitol (read:Money) to complete development. is’nt there a simple way to figure out all the stuff that I need, and are’nt there thousands of companies willing to give this stuff away?

NO

Bite the bullet and tuff it out soldier. The game industry is War,  and this battleground is littered with broken bodies and bank accounts of the caviler and ill prepared. MMOs are the biggest guns in the Armory, and it takes a-forethought to deploy them, otherwise it’s more likely to kill you than be a killer in the market.

MMOs are some of the most technologically complex creations in the history of Human kind. there are more moving parts in a single MMORPG Shard than in the shuttle, 747, and a deep sea oil drilling rig combined. Don’t forget that each shard runs on dozens or hundreds of servers, each running operating systems, each connected to storage, databases, network servers, firewalls, billing systems, administrative and support systems not to mention all the gorp that is in that great cloud we call the Internet before it even get’s to whatever you are running the game on. PCs and modern consoles are the peak of computer technology these days.

But like any good Gunnery Seargent I’ve been looking out for you. (P.S. hats off to real soldiers! I only play one on the PC)

Here are some suggestions on how to get your arms around how much of what you need to get it done.

Anatomy of the MMO 1.7.5 How

No presentation would be complete without, well, an ending.

So you are interested in what makes up an MMO. In general Online games are not simple things. It’s a game, but it is also an internet service, it is a business, it is software, hardware, networks. Consider all the technology that has to be in place to run even the most seemingly simple flash based online game, it’s a huge collection of stuff.

It takes Guts to make an MMO

This section of the presentation walks through the 3 major organ systems that function together to make up the modern commercial online game.

But don’t be daunted. If all this stuff seems like a barrier to a concept, there are ways to get an idea off the ground quicly, and cheaply. Unity 3d, Torque, and Flash can be backended by some easy to own and use technology, like Smart Fox, and Electrotank. Also there are plenty of AAA commercial high function  end to end MMO solutions, like Big World, Hero Engine, Icarus

When designing an online game, first understand your business model, then your market,  next you will need to know what kind of MMO you are building, then you can start thinking of what techical components you need.

Anatomy of the MMO 1.7.4 Guts

Once you have figured out what you need, you will be happy and filled with satisfaction of a job well done

For about 90 seconds

Then it will hit you. You have no figured out all the stuff, but now you have to buy networking gear, and software packages, and rent space in a datacenter, on the internet. Gaa you need to spend money!

That leads to the question HOW MUCH… How much is a complicated question. Answering that question is one of the things I do for a living. I was challenged to break it down into something simple. The next Post in this series is my suggestion on how to start sizing your next online games project without breaking the bank, your brain, or your heart.

Ever ask yourself

“What kind of MMO is that?” “How is that MMO put together and how is it different from others?” “What kind of MMO am I (building)”?

I thought not.

MMOs come in all shapes and sizes. From a players perspective the experiences range from flash based games that allow players to talk to eachother, to fully immersive interactive 3d real time simulations.

From the inside, looking out there are some similarities all of these games have in common. It turns out online games share a set of technical challenges with systems like financial trading desk systems, and high scale web systems like ebay and amazon. Only different.

Because all online games have to solve some basic common challenges of providing an internet connected shared space, there have emerged some common patterns to developing the games, and solving the technical challenges.

In the work I have done on MMOs and online systems I, and the people I work with, have discovered 3 patterns. The slides that follow describe those patterns, and provide a high level compare/contras of the features and benifits of each pattern.

Step through these slides slowly,  give PPT a second to get the animation right or the slides will jump around and not make much sense.

Anatomy of the MMO 1.7.3 Patterns

Once you know what types of  MMOs there are you can then move on to the next posting that describes all the pice parts of MMOs

First part,  a brief introduction of, who I am and what the presentation will cover (feel free to skip this part, it does not traslate well to web presentations)

Note: some of the content on The final slide in this section is courtesy of CCP from 2006/2007 I hosted a presentation with CCP on the technology of EVE OnLine at the GDC in 2007.

Anatomy of the MMO 1.7.1 Intro

The next section is a brief history of the MMO. MMOs in one form or another Predate the PC era, and even for the earliest game designers, the power of a computer to communicate with multipule people simultaniously was a key factor of game design and the use of technology in entertainment.

Anatomy of the MMO 1.7.2 History

Next posting, MMO patterns.

NOTE: These presentation’s are provided in .pps format. Power Point slide show

As I was doing research for a presentation I gave at the Login conference earlier this year, I discovered a bit of information that even put a quizzical look on my children’s faces.

how many cows go into the running of an MMO?

It sounds bizarre, but this is what I found out. In 2007, the top 60 MMOs had about 27 million players(globally). And using information I can’t share I came up with a, reasonably good, estimate that it took just over 100,000 servers to support those people. (by the way, that number has shot up about 10x between 2007 and 2009).

Using an industry average power consumption per server, on the average pizzabox server, I calculated those servers consumed about 75,000 kilowatts per hour. Using the metric that coal creates 2460 KW hours per ton gave me an estimate that the top 60 MMOs produced about 103 tons of equivalent CO2 emissions in 2007.

It turns out that a US Dairy farmer can claim that a lactating cow produces 5 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. The simple math shows that amount is produced by just over 20 mil cows.

About 1/3

Meaning, that in 2007 at least, each MMO produced about the same amount of pollution as a Tillamook Holstein produces in 4 months.

(Note: Yes I left out lots of facts and calculation steps. Some of the info is “owned IP” and most of it was just too boaring to put into a blog post)

After waiting for the umpteenth time for my system to finish twiddeling it’s disk drive, I had a wayback,

a flashback, Way back in the day, one of my  my first jobs was managing a network of Sun diskful and diskless workstations, all connected to a Sun 4110.

diskless install and boot was easy

To install a new diskless node all I had to do was create a couple of new NFS directories, fiddle with a couple files (hostname & IP Ethernet address). Set the eeprom boot parameters on the new workstation, boot and Poof, a new node on the network was up and running.

Workstations with a new disk? Well that was another matter all together. Partitioning and Setting up and installing the local hard drive was a pain, especially back in that day. At that time you still had to do low lvl SCSI formatting before you could do a high lvl format, then you had to create the file systems, all several hours worth of work BEFORE you could start installing the OS, and apps. IF you had a master image on a spare disk drive you could DD one image to another, but that was still a pain compared to network boot setup.

A new day, a new disk

Fast forward a few years, I was working in the largest commercial UNIX production datacenter at the time (hey it was 1989 and we had well over 1000 employees trying to do their jobs on our systems, which was HUGE in the commercial world that was still dominated by mainframes and minicomputers). We where upgrading our systems to the new   Swallow 4 disk drive, which had a whopping 2241 sectors in each cylinder. The down side is that a 3 U rack mounted tray could only hold 2 drives. (In comparison the same amount of space can hold over 100 drives see www.atrato.com). Those two drives, plus power supply, weighed over 50 pounds, and they where HOT, I stall have a scar on my left hand from accidentally touching one during maintenance. I wish I could find the original specifications, but those buggers consumed a lot of power.

Why are we here, again?

What do these two barely related barely relevant reminiscences of an old geek have to do with MMOs and modern systems?

Well guess what, whey you are managing an MMO, the issues I had to deal with 20 friggen years ago are still valid today. Thanks to drive density we can get a lot more storage space per rack unit, but heat and power haven’t really changed that much for storage. What has improved is performance, and not just I/O performance of the drives, but also their performance over the wire. Also with the introduction of iSCSI and the ability to boot Linux and Windows off of iSCSI volumes through software imitators, it’s even easier to do diskless booting now than it ever was.

Modern experiences

Not having disk drives in each system is a big deal for running MMOs.  It means you can get your game online faster, it also means you can recover from node failures faster. It also means a lower power profile, you don’t have as many disks spinning and taking up heat. Bottom line you never have to “install” or “copy images” over the network.