Here we go, day two of the serious games summit.

Keynote - Designing for Behavior in Massive Multiplayer Games
Jack Emmert

The Challenge Map for Serious Games
Howard Phillips, Roger Smith

Is it Cheating, Learning, or Both? Exploring the Boundaries in Videogames
Mia Consalvo

Designing for Behavior in Massive Multiplayer Games
Jack Emmert

As a graduate student in Greek and Latin, Jack wrote for pen and paper role-playing games. After his friend sold a chip company, the two decided to do a massively multiplayer game about superheroes. As an avid comics reader (Jack reads 90 titles a month), the match was perfect. They met up with a small studio and founded Cryptic Studios in 2000. The game was hard to pitch. NCSoft was opening an office in the U.S., and they signed Cryptic as their first third party. It was released in April 2004. In the game, you play a superhero in a persistent universe, with updated content 3-4 times a year. City of Villains followed in 2005. They are now working on a Marvel online game for Xbox 360 and PC.

Jack covered the history of MMORPGs, includiing "the canon" of Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, and World of Warcraft. City of Heros released about 4 months before WoW. Most MMOs fail, including EA's online division EA.com.

Challenges for this sort of development:

Technology for an MMMO is non-trivial
Designing an MMO is more like designing 5-6 games together with a world standing between them
Managing an MMO is a big process, with at least 70 people in charge of the process
Money for an MMO is huge, with a minimum investment of $30mm and more like $50. WoW's budget was $100

From a research perspective, the commercial industry doesn't really use it or know where to look for it. Most design is done from "knows and aphorisms." For example, make players own stuff so they don't want to leave. Jack also mentioned Bartle's player types and explained other types too: builder, for example.

Game design as a practice is arguably new, perhaps 10 years old. Games became bigger and bigger, and you could no longer do them with a programmer and an artist. Making the quality better requires specific roles. But, game designers have "no identifiable talents" -- you can't look at something physical like you can for programing or art.

Jack then discussed grouping in MMOs. If people are playing online and they meet other friends, they'll continue playing. When people stop playing City of Heros, they quit because their friends do (based on exit surveys). One way of accomplishing this is based on D&D: everyone plays a specific role. No one person can accomplish these games' complex tasks, so you have to work with others. City of Heros and WoW changed this idea.

Jack described the "Halloween Effect." We now trick or treat in malls rather than on streets. The movie Halloween expressed a fear about the day. At the same time there was the scare about poisoned candies and razor blades, even though there were only 3 cases. The urban myth is destroying the event itself. So, as we become more transitory, we have a harder time knowing our neighbors. Other, previous cultures had stronger social ties.

So, when people go online, their greatest fear is talking to another person. In an MMO, the design must circumvent this situation. Most people who bought EverQuest wouldn't convert from the free month to the paid month. Sidekicks in MMOs were one solution for this in City of Heroes. Higher level players could work with lower-level ones, which increased commitment. In addition, there is no need for "guilds" or other large groups to work together in raids. City of Heroes also introduced tutorials that helped transition the player into a comfortable space with not too many people. Space also became a comfortable socialization factor in the game. The first NPC the player encounters is Miss Liberty, a friendly, open, colorful character who gives you some tips. Jack showed a sort of vigil in the game for Christopher Reeve. City of Heros also offered a detailed costume creation tool. This is unlike other MMOs, in which characters of the same class basically look the same. In City of Heros, people should be able to create any character they want.

The costume creator allowed players to make costumes that looked like different "real" superheros, or to use an extra costume slot to have a kind of group uniform. Players also started holding costume contests to show off the costumes they'd made. As a hero did more in the city he gained Influence, the equivalent of money, and the player could use a very small amount of this to create new costumes. This proved important for players.

Other grouping behavior didn't work so well. Three minions come at a time in a spawn, so a solo player could handle it relatively easy. In "safe zones" this would be the case, but "hazard zones" and "trial zones" would have more, requiring larger groupings. But players didn't want to feel forced to group. Another problem was Bases. Bases allowed players to contribute to a community and to build things as a group. Bases failed because people don't want to contribute money to a group and to lose individuality.

Jack also discussed the metagame. The game was intended to feel like a comic book. They extended the game into comics and other aspects of the non-game, offline world, not because the company makes much money from licensing, but because they wanted the players to be able to touch the game in any part of their lives.

The Challenge Map for Serious Games
Howard Phillips, Roger Smith

The two explored a roadmap to move serious games further toward specific audiences. Smith talked about the military simulation industry. There is a whole industry that just serves the military. The government isn't going to adapt, because the provider has to adapt to the customer. The military buys things the way you buy a car: they want to keep a tank for 20 years. If you're there the day they want to buy a tank, they'll buy one. The same is true for simulations and training systems for a long period. The military moved from Marine DOOM to America's Army to Full Spectrum Warrior, to specialty products. Now, there's a focus on specialty products. The things that the military wants aren't the same as what they can buy at the corner game store. Instead, the military wants providers to take the technologies inside and put them together in the specific way that the military needs. The pieces need to be severable -- the 3d engine, the networking system, the physics system -- and put them together in a new way. The military can't use only the Unreal engine.

Eventually, the people who make serious games are going to specialize. They will soon become traditional defense contractors, from the military's perspective. Then many of these companies will probably be acquired by bigger defense contractors like Northrop Grumman.

Phillips discussed the challenges more broadly. Things holding us up:

Limited results so far on effectiveness
No one to follow with the right solutions
Breakthroughs are still rare

The expectations are also wacky. Everyone has a personalized expectation for what we can get out of games. It's almost guaranteed that disappointment will ensue. Talking about practical goals up front is important. There is also no service ecosystem ... There is no YouTube or iPod for serious games. There is thus little leverage of previous work like the commercial games leverage previous design successes and failures. There is a need for more entrepreneurship and leadership to create these vehicles. There is also no serious games specific middleware, including solutions that stand between the very expensive and the very simple. In particular, connections to learning systems are missing. There are too many profiteers and pretenders. Not everyone is in this to create customer value (no matter your industry); a lot of developers are still not focused on long-term advancement. It's also unclear who does what and what design responsibilities lie with what roles. More collaboration is required. Finally, focus on solving core problems for end users rather than creating cool stuff or solving technical problems. Distraction is an easy trap.

Is it Cheating, Learning, or Both? Exploring the Boundaries in Videogames
Mia Consalvo

Mia has been researching cheating for five years. She conducted studies of game players and how they define cheating, rather than working from a predefined notion of cheating. In single-player games or offline multiplayer games, you can go online and get lots of cheat codes and walkthroughs for games -- detailed explanations up to several hundred pages about how to successfully complete the game. Ostensibly, players do this to gain credibility.

In Mia's study, she saw a common notion of cheating: cheating gives you an unfair advantage. Types of groups:

The Purist: anything other than getting through a game all on your own. Anything outside your own head is cheating, including strategy guides, talking to other players, and so forth.

Code is Law: The code is actually altered to assist a certain player or using a cheat code. It's in the code already.

The Cheaters: You can only cheat another player, not a machine. I like to have any possible advantage against people and don't necessarily want to play fair. Cheating levels the playing field.

They cheat, but they still argue that cheating is wrong. Cheating is impossible to prevent, but it can also be a good thing, and can teach you things about your game and your players.

Most people cheat because they get stuck. There's a mismatch between experience and the game's design
Some cheat because they want to play God in the game environment. They want to see parts of the game that they didn't otherwise see.
Some cheat because they got bored. Cheating allows them to fast forward through parts of the game they don't want to see. These players want a sense of completion.
Some cheat to be an ass. So-called griefers are an example -- they play the game not to advance but to make play miserable for others. They enjoy lording power over others. Typically though, griefers gain some advantage from cheating.

Mia suggested that despite the temptation of gendering cheating (male power, etc.), but this is not really the case. Social engineering (girls trying to bilk other players in Whyville, e.g.) is an example of a gender-neutral type of cheating.

Players are an active, thoughtful and diverse group accepting and resisting various forms of guidance, help and cheats. Their activity indicates the complexity of the gameplay experience.

How does that relate to serious games? Many (most?) players are more like Bart Simpson than like the earnest, happy learner. Educational games don't fall from the sky, learning takes place, and everyone goes home. As a part of this process, cheating has potential relevance. Walkthroughs, for example, demonstrate a mastery of the system that might be considered a demonstrable performance of their learning. Mia discussed a "universal hint system" in which players can include hints about games during play. This helps narrow the range of possibilities while still allowing the player to discover a solution.

Playing God and using unlockables might allow learning games to reward or re-engage players. This might also allow a teacher to even the playing field in a particular game for a particular player.

For fast-forwarders, different progressions through a game might allow different strategies to accomplish a goal. Offering multiple ways to succeed allows players to find their own route.

For people who want to be an ass, formal prevention is one option, anti-cheat software prevents cheating just as classroom policies might do. On a smaller scale, you might consider "gaming capital" as a way of rewarding or discouraging behavior that runs counter to a value system the game playing community adopts, or that the learning community wants to excise.