The world through my eyes…
Stream @ Breakneck Lake Trail, originally uploaded by jasonrr.
Jillian and I hiked a very familiar trail today in an effort to get us back into shape for the hiking season. This particular shot was taken along the Red trail on the Cold Spring side of Breakneck ridge. I can’t wait until school is over so that we can take some extended hikes through this area.
Arden Point Bridge, originally uploaded by jasonrr.
I took this photo last week on a hike to Arden Point in Garrison. The trail leaves from the Garrison train station, and follows the tracks This is the first photo I have posted from my 50mm f/1.8 lens.
Over the past decade, the popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) has led to an incredible amount of development by major game producers. With revenues in the billions of dollars each year, over $1.7B for Blizzard/Vivendi’s World of Warcraft alone (Boyer), this industry has grown to include hundreds of titles. These numbers have game producers hurrying to figure out the best way to capitalize on this fast growing source of revenue. As with other high growth markets, secondary markets have developed to satisfy the needs of customers in the primary market that either can’t or won’t be met by primary market makers. Not surprisingly, a market this large, approximately $1B (Brightman), has attracted the attention of entrepreneurs looking for opportunities to support or supplement the primary activities in these markets with products and services that enhance the gamers’ experience.
There are many different forms of secondary markets in the gaming world, some legitimate and legal, and others which have been deemed by game developers to be illegitimate, or even illegal. An example of legitimate secondary market is the host of gaming magazines and websites that offer strategies, content guides, and communities where gamers exchange ideas. An illegitimate market is generally defined as one where people exchange real world currency for characters (avatars), items, or in game currency in ways that violate the Terms of Service defined by the game developers. I will examine how the nature, and implicit goals of a game, affects its interactions with secondary markets. Further, I will argue that the “illegitimate” markets have had a direct impact on primary innovation, shaping current and future game design very quickly to account for these markets’ impact on the value of in-game assets.
I will focus primarily on Vivendi’s The World of Warcraft (WoW) and use Linden Research’s Second Life (SL) as an example of a vastly different approach. In order to effectively explain the impact, and resulting strategies of the game developers, I will detail how value is created and measured in MMOGs , a brief history of secondary markets in MMOGs, their current revenue models and legal concerns, the vastly different responses from Vivendi and Linden Research, the role and impact of secondary markets on design innovations WoW and SL and , finally, my prediction of the impact these markets will have on future game development.
Continue reading ‘The Effects of Secondary Markets on Primary Innovation in MMOGs’
Well, shortly after my last post this happened:
Yes, that is me, and yes I am that lucky [sic]. It was a lot of fun to have my friends and family around for this, and the location was really amazing. If you are at all interested, you can see more of the photos here. In addition, I am one semester through my Masters degree. My next series of posts will focus on some of the work that I have been doing for those classes, including a term paper that I wrote on the impact of secondary markets on massively multiplayer online games.
In the early part of this year, I read Joel’s 7 Steps to remarkable customer service. The piece resonated with me, and it was one of the reasons that I applied to the SMTP program. Customer service in the world of technology is, generally speaking, an embarrassing and dehumanizing process. Here was a person who believed that there was a better way to do it.
Shortly after joining the company, I asked the question “Why do we give this information away freely? Aren’t we concerned that our competitors are bound to read it, see the wisdom of it, and emulate it?” At that point, I had about 4 weeks of customer service duty under my belt and was confident that this model could be scaled and replicated. Now, after 6 months and lots of conversations with customers, I understand why it is to our advantage to let people know that this is the way we do things.
It is hard work.
Real customer service is emotional labor. You have to dance between being truly empathetic to a frustrated customer’s problem and self preserving as a customer, pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, takes out their frustrations on you directly. The former is the norm and the latter the exception, but both efforts take a lot of energy. Add to that the fact that the problems I am asked to solve are frequently subtly complex technical issues, and I am spent at the end of the day. The payback comes in the form of a tremendous sense of satisfaction from seeing Joel’s suggestions work to make not just satisfied but fanatical customers.
The problem is, I honestly don’t think most of the people that apply for customer service jobs could do it. Either they don’t have the people skills, but are excellent technically, or they don’t have the technical skills. This is not to say that I am a phenom, by any means. It is proof positive of the draw of the promised career advancement once the customer service stint is over. I am willing and motivated to work hard because these are the same customers that I hope to be serving as I move on to QA and Marketing and, eventually, to management. Understanding them, and their needs, gives me the information I need to make decisions and trades-offs about the products on which they rely. If you ask most customer service people what they do, I bet they would say “I answer email and telephone calls”. Customer advocacy is my job. It is the best way to keep customers happy and continue to increase our revenue
You have to get the environment right.
To get people motivated and give them the tools they need to do the job of customer management takes real effort. While Joel’s steps are conveniently broken up to make them more understandable, combined they create the environment necessary to make my daily efforts possible. The entire company is oriented toward the customer. We are constantly evaluating how what we do and what we say will affect our customers.
This is hard to believe for some customers because they have been asking for this one feature (or that one) for 2 years, and we haven’t implemented it. Although it is easy to imagine us in our ivory tower laughing with scorn at your feature request, I can honestly say that we agonize over our decisions as to which features to implement when. We honestly feel badly about not getting to your suggestion, but we can’t cloister ourselves for 10 years writing the next version, so we need to choose.
Our incredibly lenient return policy allows me the freedom to say to someone “Try it, if you don’t like it you get your money back immediately, no questions asked” and “I can’t recommend that you buy FogBugz because it isn’t going to do everything you want” and “I am really sorry that we couldn’t get you connected, here is your money back and a free pass for your next connection”. All of this is intended to show that the second reason we aren’t at risk is that it is almost impossible to replicate this environment without tremendous effort, and true belief that it is worth it.
By telling customers that this is how we do business, and actually sticking to it, we make our customers confident in our ability to make them happy. We get more risk takers and advocates that push our products into markets where they might otherwise go unnoticed. And my life is better because when customers call or email, they (mostly) treat me like a human being that wants to help them, instead of their worst enemy.
We aren’t at risk at all; we have a distinct advantage, a differentiator. While other service organizations understand that these are good ideas, they aren’t able to implement them (the environment isn’t right) or they won’t implement them (don’t want to do the hard work). In the rare cases that I come across one that is able and willing, dealing with the company is such a pleasant departure that I find myself liking them, even if they are one of our competitors.
I have been reading about the process of interaction design, and I have come to recognize many of the seemingly innocuous decisions that I made during past efforts that resulted in simply awful design. The scary part is that it is very hard to tell the difference between an harmless design decision and a very harmful one until you have invested a lot of effort in implementing it. Furthermore, good design thrives on a detailed understanding of your users’ desires and expectations.
In this last statement lies a cornerstone of Cooper’s methodology for creating software that really works. I believe that the innate desire of developers and managers alike is to believe they know the user. Therein exists a dangerous pitfall according Cooper. What I am thinking when I say “user” and what you are thinking are most certainly different. Instead, he recommends that people take the time to make up detailed personas that very specifically describe the users.
Doris is a stay-at-home mother with 2 children, ages 2 and 5. She is passionate about mountain biking, and therefore, covets her time to ensure that she can get to the Mountain Biking Club meet-up each week. She is a big fan of Martha Stewart’s style magazine and buys much of her home decor based on the suggestions she finds there.
It is pretty easy to imagine how this kind of description would help to inform design decisions in the software you are making. And when the nearly inevitable feature negotiations start, anyone can say “Doris wouldn’t use this because…” or “This wouldn’t make sense to Doris. She would expect…”. Conceptually simple, it helps to eliminate the ambiguity of the “user”.
The model goes further to suggest that often developers and their managers forget that the user is a person, with feelings. One of the primary goals of every user of technology (who doesn’t think like a computer already) is to not look stupid. Feelings? In software? It makes a lot of sense. Who hasn’t been frustrated when the ATM machine spits your card out unexpectedly admonishing you with a blinking “Transaction Terminated”? If you are like me, you get annoyed every time you hit the print button and the computer seems to forget that you print with the exact same settings 99.995% of the time, and proceeds to present you with a bunch of options that are completely meaningless to you. I am reasonably sure I know how to use a computer, and the process of printing a document makes me question myself. It certainly feels wrong.
Ignoring the sensibilities and emotions may not be a recipe for disaster, but it is almost certainly setting you up for obscurity in the not to distant future. There are numerous counter examples. Try setting up a MySpace account. If you don’t feel at least mildly stupid by the end of that, you are either and actual dolt or so smart that you should apply for a job as a developer where I work. And yet, they have millions of avid users. The space that their application occupies in peoples’ lives is so important, that they are willing to put up with the horror that is myspace page customization. What is interesting to me is that the writing is on the wall for myspace already. Competitor Facebook took the approach of limiting customizations but making sign-up and account management much easier, and people are noticing. It remains to be seen if this will affect the long term viability of the myspace application, but I have a very strong suspicion that it will. I measure this by the fact that I have never met a single fan of myspace (the web application). They like being in touch with their friends, they like being able to post all sorts of embarrassing personal information, but they don’t ever mention actually liking the process by which they do it. In fact, several complain about it.
Ultimately, my point is that design matters. For relatively recent proof, see the iPod that every other person on the street is carrying. It is hard to get it right, and oh so easy to get it wrong. Anecdotally, I can’t think of one product that I love that I would also consider poorly designed. The way most people react to this realization is that they think they need to hire artists, when they really need a social psychologist. When developing new technology we need to think first of Doris. Artists can come along later and make our targeted functional designs pretty.
Management acumen is a oft sought after but rarely found talent in all industries. The lack of available talent makes companies desperate and leaves many vulnerable to the shills. The company I work for decided to do something about this by creating a management training program. An expensive endeavor, it seeks to give the participants all of the relevant experience required for management in the real world of technology. Much of the “training” has to do with understanding customer needs, learning to manage laterally and vertically, and making rational trade-offs between features, design, and income. What is much more difficult to come by, in a company full of very smart and dedicated people, are the hardcore people management skills.
Enter World of Warcaft. A well know international phenomenon, WoW has gotten attention for being an addictive money making machine. You may have also seen it appear in Wired when, in an interview, it became a source of common ground and led (indirectly?) to a job offer. For outsiders, even with the well written explanation, it is difficult to conceive just how this game could really help you develop relevant skills for business. The Wired article compares Warcraft to other simulation games that have been used explicitly to train people (e.g. flight simulators). What interests me is something a little more subtle in the virtual world that Blizzard/Vivendi have created. They have created a virtual reality in which organizations (guilds) of upwards of 40 people are required for continued success, and simultaneously remove most of the barriers impeding an individual’s ability to change organizations (or quit altogether).
By way of confession, I have over 200 days played (200×24hours) in the world of WoW. I have two maximum level characters, and I am a member and officer of Bad Blood (a guild in the top 300 in terms of progression in the US). To get where we are, we raid 4 hours a night 5 days a week. In addition, to give us the best chance of success we have to put in additional time each week gathering materials and completing activities that give us access to progressively more difficult content. We are challenge junkies. A group of geeks who get their kicks from figuring out just how much additional damage, to the tenth of percent, they will be able to do if they pick up a particular piece of digital gear. For an idea of the level of complexity and coordination take a look at this video, prepared by another guild, designed to help people understand one of the encounters we recently mastered. At our level of play it takes 25 people, acting in unison, to get things done. If one person screws up, everyone fails. And we do this, without ever meeting each other.
Imagine for a moment, that you never had to meet any of the people that you work with. You have no opportunities to share passing conversations about the kids, your favorite sports team, or what you did last weekend. All of those informal measures of the quality of your co-workers being masked by anonymity. I know many of my colleagues, who have had experience with consultants, have an idea how difficult it is to get work done in this type of environment. Now take away the friction created by your, and your colleagues’, dependence on a salary, and reduce the cost of switching organizations to almost zero. It starts to give new clarity to the phrase “herding cats“.
It makes every moment that we spend together important. It means that frustrations and outbursts need to be managed carefully. It requires an increased sense of unity of purpose. It applies in immense amount of pressure to leadership, and forces them to identify and jealously guard talent. My experience has given me insight into the true value of positive feedback. When a kind word, spoken honestly, is basically the only currency that you have, other than success (which is unpredictable), you are forced to use it carefully. I have had to learn to listen carefully to what people mean, and not what they say, or type. I have been forced to learn to express myself clearly and concisely under pressure. If I can’t get an important message across quickly, it can mean hours of wasted effort. It is effectively the equivalent of condensing weeks or years of people management experience into 20 hours a week.
As remarkably unlikely as it may seem, I have tried to avoid exaggeration and hyperbole wherever possible. Still, I can imagine my readers’ incredulity. To that end, I will leave you with one more question that may help to highlight the value of this experience: how long does it take to explain a difficult concept to an audience of people you work with on a tele-conference, and how many people retain it afterwards? The limitations placed on communication on WoW make those skills extraordinarily important, and ultimately, a key factor to your organization’s success.
I had a rather shocking realization recently. My parents were visiting, and after dinner I was fiddling around on this blog when my dad rather innocently asked if he could turn on American Idol. I was shocked. The last I knew my dad liked classic rock. What did he get out of watching Idol? My mom went on to explain that he watches it every week, without fail. He talks about it, and he is even concerned that one of his favorites is the winner. Though she insisted that she didn’t really watch the show, she knew all of the contestants and certainly had an opinion about who should win. I have spoken with others since this event who have had similar epiphanies about their own parents or friends. It got me thinking about the people and ultimately the market that is happily consuming what is in my opinion, total rubbish.
After performing an informal research project, my conclusion is that the music that most people seem to love comes from a developmentally important part of their lives ( youth, adolescence, college, birth of a child ). Although this thought isn’t terribly original I think it is a provocative idea that people make a connection to music that lasts throughout their lives. Some scientists believe that appreciation for music is something that developed during evolution as a way to create and maintain communities. In addition, there is evidence that music stimulates the same highly sensitive part of our brain that reacts to food and sex. It is easy to understand people becoming very attached to music given all of the biological and pyschological force that it carries. If Idol were about the music, then this might — might! — explain my parents strange behavior.
What are the producers behind a show like American Idol tapping into that is getting my dad to watch it? It is the complete package, it is reinforcing and creating community AND playing up the chills factor by having contestants perform already beloved songs. Original content is an afterthought because it is unnecessary and might actually hinder audience adhesion.
There is a life span on the fame that comes as a result of something like American Idol. The results are too immediate. Producers and record companies are tapping too directly into the ethos of the competition and the community; not capitalizing on new found talent. The interest and the talent lose their luster as the memory of the choosing fades from public consciousness. Ultimately, it isn’t about the artist or the music. It is about the temporary community which is created, and if the science is to be believed, viewers are acting out programming that was designed to encourage group understanding. The problem is the community that it is creating has no survival value and it is, therefore, a manipulation that shouldn’t be tolerated.
I wonder if my parents were to read this, would they even care? It seems likely that the, as Chialdini suggests, the commitment and consistency principles would have them defending the show. This despite the fact that neither of them have closely followed the career of their chosen Idol. The music is truly not as important to them as being involved in the process. Money has changed hands, however. After a little digging, I found past idol albums in my parents’ music library. I just never hear them play it.
The weather today reminded me, somehow, of this photograph that I took a few years ago.
I spent the morning in literally bone numbing cold at my sister’s college graduation at SUNY Purchase. I will keep this short as I am still trying to restore feeling to my left hand, but I was simply aghast at the total lack of organization and horrendous “motivational” speakers.
The president of the school attempted, in vain, to make a point about how events in one’s life that seem inconsequential may in fact be consequential. He attempted to do this, apparently, without the aid of a thesaurus. This resulted in a speech nearly 10 minutes in length of which fully 4 minutes were devoted to the repetition of the words “consequential” and “inconsequential”. He made some allusion to the Vietnam War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but made no obvious connection between those events and the rest of his speech other than a vague and depressing one about how they represented the “real world”.
This masterful oration gave way to the introduction of NY State Senator Chuck Schumer who delivered an amazingly trite and self aggrandizing speech about the world and his contributions to NY State voters. The highlights of the speech were, as the title of the post suggests, a slip of the tongue which lead him to call the “Avian” or “Asiatic Bird” flu the “Asian flu” ( an ailment believed to cause the insatiable desire for General Tso’s Chicken ) and a completely ridiculous compound sentence which referred to “Rapid change”, “global warming” and “terrorism” as examples of things caused by technology. While there is probably a very erudite argument to be made for the relationship between technology and the activities of terrorism, I would doubt very highly that Chuck could either a) elaborate upon it or even less likely b) prove a causal relationship. This is representative voice of the people of New York? I refuse, at my young age, to believe that people in this state are truly that stupid and clumsy.
I seem to be able to move the small finger on my left hand again, so I am off to rejoice in a warm cup tea. I am left to wonder if the gradual numbing of my entire body was actually due to the cold, or the result of my brain shutting down in protest to the day’s barrage of banality.
