The Game Crafter -

As you can read in my bio, for several years I worked on a project called “Digital Lore” (which created the Lorecrafter Game Publishing System). This project is aimed at bringing forth the concept you mention into reality.

What I plan with this BLOG, is not only to confirm the vision you have mentioned, but to provide the stepping stones on how to achieve that vision, not only from the design standpoint, but from the business standpoint.

For several years I created business plans, design documents and prototypes. I plan to make available that information to facilitate the success of someone who can take this concept forward.

Let me take a minute and describe the real problem.

The design stuff is fairly easy to be honest. All of what you describe has already been designed and all the problems solved.

It is building a sufficient business case and getting in front of the right person that can invest enough to get it started and then subsequently secure additional rounds of investment to bring forth this concept into reality. I will tell you now that from a business perspective, this look really risky. For people who do not have the knowledge that you (the commenter to whom I am primarily addressing) and I have, this seems bewildering. These folks do not talk the same language, to not live with the same understanding. The problem is how do we convince someone, demonstrate to them, four things.

1. That there is a need in the marketplace,
2. That this concept fills that need
3. That we can create development team that can bring that concept into reality.
4. That once created we can market a functional business and run it and be profitable
to give a healthy if not fabulous return on the investment.

Perhaps there is a fifth as well, and I will get into that later.

Just so you know the reality of this project, we are talking between 3 to 4 years of development time from scratch, and at least 20 Million dollars of incremental funding. If we want to add many more millions we can purchase or perhaps partner with some companies that can cut down on development time.

What I will show with this Blog is how to solve the design issues. Then the business model concept and prove how it works. Then the market research that shows the needs in the marketplace. Then talk about companies who are already half way there with their orientation and technology (But may not fully realize their potential).

Thanks for the feedback..and do not give up hope. As a side, David Weber, the originator of Paper Mayhem I am sure would be glad of the comment to his passion.

Jim

Lets start with a thank you to Dr. Paul Sincock. While the ideas and concepts herein are mine, when I shared them with Paul, he was able to refine them and add a great deal of meat to them that solidified these concepts. Thank you Paul for your work and insight.

The next step is a Definition:

Dynamic World:
A game environment that starts in a predetermined state, but then changes of it’s own accord based upon the random actions of the world, the actions and influence of the players upon the environment and the actions and influence of players towards each other.

This is so we know intellectually what we are discussing. Next, lets create a player vision on how this would work.

The Vision:
A game world where the actions of a player or a group of players alters the types of encounters, the feeling, the flavor, the personal abilities, influence, prices etc of the game world. Where what we do as players makes a difference not only to us, but also to other players and guilds and we can and often do, change the environment forever.

Next, lets take a look at the big concepts then work down into details on how this will work.

From a design standpoint we know about spawn points. For investors and others that may not understand this, these are the locations in the virtual world where the various critters that the players fight are created. In most games they are static locations that do not change, and the type and amount of these critters also do not change. From a players perspective they are where the “Orcs spawn” or where those “Skeletons” are located.

Some of this is good. I have seen and believe that it is important for most of these MMORPG’s that there needs to be a “training area” where players can get to know the game, controls, and what they are getting into. After that, is where everyone is having problems and what this concept is aimed at solving.

Now comes the shift in perspective, so pay attention. Lets take that concept of a “spawn point” and make it just that: a generic location where something will spawn. Not something specific, just something that will be determined. So as we look at the game map we see thousands of generic “spawn points”, or predetermined locations where something will spawn. Later we will expound upon this concept, but for now, it is a nice starting place.

The next shift in perspective, and this one is a bit trickier, is that we will employ something called “Spheres of Influence”. In the end, we will have many types of flavors of spheres of influence, but for now since we are human and can only handle a few things in our head at a time, lets keep it simple and temporarily define these spheres of influence as “race”. Spheres of influence literally influences what is possible to really spawn at a spawn point. If the spawn point has multiple spheres of racial influence, then it randomly picks from a probability table (discussed later), what will spawn in that location.

Stop at this point and take a breath. This is the point where some programmers like to tell me that we do not have the technology to do this.

Please consider this interesting concept. Every week or so we must take down our servers for a period of hours to clean up and fine tune them for optimal performance. If we do this on a regular basis, the same time every week then what we have effectively is a measurement of time. A regular measurement of time that we can use as a game “Heartbeat”, where we can review and total the player and game actions and make changes to those spawn points. Imagine that during this time we delve into a database and compute the effective changes and resolve what will spawn during the spheres of influence and modify those very same spheres. Please note something important here. This is all done when the players are OFF-LINE, and behind the scenes. What is done ON-LINE is only capturing counts of when key things are done, such as when a building is constructed, a key NPC killed, or one of a thousand different actions that can modify (or in some cases, create) a sphere of influence. (I will get much more detailed into this in the following posts.)

So, what the hell does this mean? Lets look at this simple example: Imagine that we have a base race of “Nature”. Nature supports “wolves”, “Deer”, “Mountain Lions”, and “Bear” as spawns. Thus if we had a spawn point and the only influence on it was the racial sphere of influence of “nature”, one of these four (as per this example), types of creatures would spawn.

Then imagine that a player decides to make a nearby Elven village his home and starts to invest in the local economy, or builds a small fortress nearby. The elven village also has a sphere of influence around it and the more things that happen in favor of the village (new buildings, guilds basing themselves here, player positive actions) the stronger the racial sphere of influence of “Elf” will be around the village. When the sphere of influence reaches out to our spawn point as discussed above, then we may see “Elven Hunters”, or “Elven woodcutters” instead of “Wolves”. Note also, that the more things that happen to the Elven village that are negative (such as the guards killed, the buildings burned, civllians killed etc), the less influence it will have. Lets move forward here with the Elven Village growing in influence for our example.

During the “Heartbeat”, we determine what is possible to spawn here, assign relatively strengths to the various spheres of influence, then randomly pick which “Race” will be predominant here, then again, randomly pick what sort of spawn will occur from that influence.

That is the basic concept, now the next several post, we will examine how to make it useable in a dynamic environment. We will be exploring different types of “Spheres of influence”, and different types of “Spawn Points”. Together with a couple of other concepts these will come together and show how a game world can be sustained by creating its own content.

Best,

Jim

Thank you to the person who made the comment on July 12, 2008.  While I see the log of page hits on the site, the interactivity helps me to keep writing.

There are a few more large design aspects that I want to bring forth and illuminate before I tie all of this up into a package that has astounded every gamer who has had the opportunity to discuss this with me.  If you have read to this point, keep checking back and this should all be tied up by mid August.

The next step is talking about what these MMORPG are for the provider.  Key point.. these are NOT products.  We in the PBM world figured this out 20 years or more ago.  Once you have released an offering to the public where they pay a fee on a monthly basis, the offering becomes a Service.   Yes, a service with a capital “S”.

 The important takeaway is that a service has different deliverables and key points and orientation to the customer than from a product.  Stop here.  Think about this for a moment.  So often we read the words, without savoring the deep meaning.  So often I meet folks, both in and out of gaming who pay lip service to this concept, but have not the slightest inkling what this means.

Lets do a little exercise, think of it as a little challenge.  Take out a pen and paper and list out three differentiators between a product and a service.   Go ahead.  Once you have completed this, then please continue reading.
 

Now that you have put some brain power behind this concept for a few minutes, something should pop out at you. 

A product offering is all based upon point of sale.  You sell the product, then move on to create “XYZ II”.   In the past this has been done with better graphics, different content etc.  Key point: You cannot retain subscribers by providing a product.  Products are transactional: you buy them then consume them then you are done.  Almost all gamed today are created from the perspective of a Product.  The prevailing concept is to add more “content” and that somehow makes it a wonderful service!!  Bah!  If you believe this then you are not thinking.

A service offering is based upon meeting customer needs over a long period of time.  The longer you can meet their needs, the longer they will keep with your service.  This means that they must have a constant stream of unique challenges, situations, problems to be solved and most importantly “Questions than need to be answered”, and just as importantly, that what they are doing MUST have some form of personal meaning.

“HA!” you say!  “I knew that!”  Really?  If you knew it, and designed with this philosophy, then why are there hundreds of thousands if not millions of posts by gamers around the world begging for designs that incorporate this ideology?

My next entry I will tell you, in detail, how to create a dynamic game environment.  Yes we have the technology, Yes it has been put into a prototype, yes it works, and yes, it is amazing.  No, no main line game publisher has tripped over this concept successfully yet.