Creating Games: Labyrinth 2
Weeks ago, I wandered into an Apple store to pick up an iPad for the first time. Naturally, I dragged my son along, just to round out the playtesting. He had a great time playing Labyrinth 2, a beautifully-rendered marble-maze game by Illusion Labs. (Labyrinth is also available for the iPhone.) When I got my shiny new iPad, that was the first thing he wanted to play. I liked it too so I got the free one and then eventually bought the game. After we’d taken turns playing a few levels, David said, “I wish I could make a level. That would be COOL!”

Guess what? You can.

On the main screen, there’s a little button labeled “Create.” If you tap it, you get a URL, an ID code, and a password. Put ‘em together and you get a drag-and-drop editor that lets you make all the levels you want — and then they magically appear on your iPad! I gather that the gaming community is disappointed that editing can’t be done right on the iPad, and I can see their point, but I was delighted to find out you can make levels at all. David was thrilled and immediately created a very challenging level. I playtested it and he made some adjustments, and now it’s tough but doable.

Conanza, Level 1

Maybe you can’t create all the same kinds of content on an iPad that you can create on a traditional computer, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe the kinds of content that you can create on (or for) an iPad or similar devices are sometimes things that you couldn’t create on any other kind of platform, like my visual notes or David’s latest Labyrinth 2 level, which was instantly delivered to my iPad all the way up in Vancouver, where I was stuck in the airport for a few hours last Sunday:

the Mom level

Best. Mother’s Day. Card. EVER. How cool is that?

3D Virtual Worlds: Avatar
I found Avatar (the game) while looking for Avatar (the movie) in the iTunes store. Created by Gameloft, it’s an actual 3D world, right there on the iPad. It’s pretty good, and I really admire what they’ve done with the controls given that you have to hold the iPad while you play it so you can really only use your thumbs. There are a few issues, but I expect those will be ironed out quickly. The premise is that you’re controlling an avatar and you have to go on missions. It’s a fancy levels game, kind of like Donkey Kong on steroids, where you run and jump and touch things and fight things.

Avatar, by Gameloft

The controls are very clever. There’s a thumb pad to move around with, and jump/shoot/other functions are handy buttons under the other thumb. The graphics are quite nice — not as stunning as the movie, but very pleasing — and the motion is smooth. And the fact that something like this can be played on a computer I can hold in my hands just blows my mind.

I do have a few issues with it. First, you can’t turn the camera around, at least not that I’ve seen, so if you have to retrace your steps you have to do it blind. Second, when you’re working on a quest (bring me 8 shrubberies*, for instance), the game doesn’t indicate how many shrubberies you’ve found. And dangit, I want to be able to pick a female avatar. Would that be so hard? And I want her to look like Neytiri, not like Barb Wire, please.

More 3D, plus Flying: Nanosaur II
I have Nanosaur II (by Pangea Software) on my iPhone, but it’s hard to play because the screen is so tiny and visual cues matter a great deal, and also because it chews through the phone battery. It’s much sweeter on the iPad. I can actually see where the little eggs are, and I can at last distinguish between mounted guns (that fire at me) and eye gate switches (that don’t) before getting close enough for an empirical test.

Nanosaur II

There are hundreds of games for the iPad, of course. These are just three that I like. Gameloft makes a whole set of action/adventure games (and others), as do Illusion Labs and Pangea Software. The games that are being developed for in-between devices are going to have qualities not found on games designed for other platforms, either larger or smaller ones. At first, a lot of them will look like games we already play, but gamers and game developers are wonderfully ingenious. Even the three I mention here are beginning to push the boundaries; I can’t wait to see what’s coming in the next several months.

The relative scarcity of tanks and healers in this new system means that they can often afford to be jerks, and unfortunately many are. Something about the combination of being in demand, being anonymous, and in some cases being good at playing the game tends to bring out the worst in some people. I’ve known tanks and healers to quit a group, leaving the other players waiting around for a replacement, because they didn’t like the gear other players were wearing, or the way they talked in chat, or the method they used to move through the dungeon. Some of the ones that don’t quit feel that it’s okay to insult the other players, tell them how to play their toons, or just be generally rude. This behavior isn’t limited to tanks and healers; DPS classes are very easy to replace, though, and tend not to get away with it as much.

And of course not all tanks and healers act like jerks just because they can. I’d say the majority just quietly do the dungeon, and if they are annoyed, they keep it to themselves. The runs usually end in about 20 minutes anyway. But recently I actually met a nice one, which was rare enough that it caught my attention. This person was helpful without being pushy or rude, and when someone in the party made an error, he or she (the toon was female, but I don’t know about the player) was very forgiving and actually tried to make the person feel better. It got me thinking about behavior in a largely anonymous virtual space, especially where there is a different value placed on different players not because of their personal ability to play the game well, but because of the abilities of the class they are playing (tank, healer, or DPS).

It’s not really possible to find out who a player is, unless they have connected their character name with their RL identity elsewhere on the web (as I have by naming some of my toons here on my blog). A player’s identity within the game is persistent — that is, your character always has the same name in the game, short of paying for a name change, which is not common. But you can’t generally find out who someone really is. With the new dungeon system, it’s possible to be in a group with players that you will never encounter again, because the new system pulls people together from different servers, and you can only communicate with people on your own server (outside of random groups like these). You’d have to set up a new character on that player’s server in order to talk to them, and you may never get grouped randomly with that same person again. So the level of anonymity is really high.

The goals of the people in these random dungeon groups are related to moving as quickly as possible through the dungeon and moving on. You get rewards for completing them, and there are penalties for ditching a group in the middle, so there is an incentive to stay even if there are unpleasant people in the party. Most of the groups operate in near or total silence, without text chat (voice chat isn’t really a viable option and no one ever uses it in random groups). Yet there are still a few people who feel compelled to be insulting. It’s interesting to me that in the midst of what must be a cooperative activity — even the best tank or healer isn’t going to be able to solo these instances — some people are still willing to be rude. I’m curious about the characteristics these folks have in common; are they all young, and just don’t know any better? Are they all very good players, or do they all perceive themselves to be good? Is it a personality trait, and they’d be just as annoying if they weren’t anonymous, and were labeled with RL names or were in a face-to-face group? Mostly one gender or the other? Just like having a captive audience?

And in such a system, what personal characteristics make someone behave as well as the tank I met? There’s no special reward for being helpful. It’s easier to just keep quiet. What makes someone go out of their way to be nice to someone they may never run into again? Lucky for me, this tank plays on my server, and is now added to my friends list. But that’s not a “reward” from his or her point of view (especially if s/he doesn’t feel the same about grouping with me!). What makes people be nice in an anonymous environment?

Flash forward 15 or so years, and the situation is totally different. Instead of “You have a web page? Are you a geek?” you hear “You don’t have a web page? Have you been living under a rock?” You can do all kinds of useful and fun things online, like banking and gaming and shopping and keeping in touch with faraway people. But 15 years ago, we were still trying to work out what the heck to use this web thing for.

Right now is the 1993 of virtual worlds. They’ve been around for a while, but people are now beginning to notice them. A lot of people have a presence in a virtual world, but it’s still (for many) the equivalent of “Hello, world!” or a pet page (some people ARE their pets in virtual worlds; who am I to throw stones?). Companies that have a presence there are in the virtual storefront stage: they maybe build a replica of their building or campus, maybe duplicate their existing online shopping experience, maybe staff an in-world help desk. The metaphor we all understand right now is comprised of two parts: we understand buildings, and we understand the dynamic 2.0 web, so that’s what virtual worlds look like at the moment, mostly.

That’s not the end of the road. Just like the web right now is a completely different space than it was in 1993, virtual worlds will be completely different in 5, 10, 15 years. People are starting to experiment with what makes virtual worlds different from physical spaces and different from the flat web. When I talk about virtual worlds, I almost always get the question, “What can you do on a virtual campus that you can’t do just as well on a physical one?” My answer — still — is I don’t know.

I don’t know what all you can do there, but I know that what you can do there now isn’t the whole answer. I don’t know what it will look like. All I know is it won’t look like it does now, and it will make now look like flatland in 1993. But the only way for us to get there (and find out if there is a place we want to be) is to play around, experiment, try it out, learn new things. Fail a little, succeed a little more. Connect with educators, students, coders, librarians, museums, designers. Start with what you know: make an avatar, fiddle around until you are pleased with the look. (How many times did you redesign your first web page in the first week you had it? Identity is important.) Make a building. Make a cup of coffee. Discover scripting and create an object that does something. As more people do this, and as our expectations of what is possible expand, so will the technology.

So party on: it’s early days, and we’re inventing as we go.

Holy cow, what a great conversation. I’ll just leap right in the middle, shall I? As Mike points out, the griefing issue is a big deal in virtual worlds, and it will always be there, as it always is in any social gathering other than a private party. That’s just people; if you don’t take tickets at the door, you’ll get all kinds of folks, and some of them have the agenda of messing up whatever you are trying to do. In the real world we use laws and police and peer pressure to limit this, but those tactics are less effective in virtual worlds, where laws don’t work and no one can afford to pay the policemen. The peer pressure angle doesn’t work for at least two reasons: first, too many people feel that their avatar is somehow a wholly other entity who can adhere to any moral code (or lack thereof) without consequence; and second, because it’s hard to figure out what exactly constitutes appropriate behavior in a world where you can drop in on a conversation out of the sky, copy and paste other people’s words without their knowing, or represent yourself as something entirely other than what you are. Note that I’m not saying any of these acts are necessarily bad; just that the moral code is still under development, and peer pressure depends on having a lot of people who all agree on the basics of interaction.

I don’t think you can have an unwalled garden without any weeds. It’s true that some MMOGs have gone a long way toward solving that problem, but they are not unwalled by any means, and they have access to tactics similar to the real world ones. In World of Warcraft, for instance, the game is built in such a way as to prevent most griefing from being possible, but that goes hand in hand with the fact that the players can’t fundamentally change the world in any way. For the situations where it is still possible to get in someone’s way, they have police: there are invisible game masters who could be anywhere, and who can take away your account permanently (think of it as being incarcerated, it’s basically the same; you have to start from scratch to rebuild yourself if you still want to play). Second Life, and the Third Life vision we’re talking about here, can’t resort to those methods. It’s too limiting and restrictive to forbid people from changing the world, and it goes against the purpose of the world in the first place.

This is one of the tougher problems that will need to be worked out. If we create invitation-only spaces, we are missing out on one of the best features of massively multiplayer worlds: the masses of players (or people, if you object to the term “player”). If you have a world where only 30 people have the keys to the door, you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for people to show up, and the serendipitous aspect of discovering what’s happened in your absence will be greatly diminished. You can’t lock out the griefers without also locking out a whole lot of smart, creative people who would contribute to the world in meaningful ways.

With respect to Bryan’s comparisons between virtual worlds and text-based social spaces, I want to point out that the difference between meeting people on a wiki and meeting them in a virtual world is a lot like the difference between seeing fox tracks in the snow and seeing the actual fox. The tracks are great—someone’s been here, they were here a few minutes ago, maybe they are still somewhere nearby—but it’s a different experience to be right there with the fox, see how it behaves, maybe chat with it a little and feel the connection of being in the same place at the same time. (Okay, I transmogrified the fox into the online person there, but you get the point.) I’m not sure yet whether there is direct benefit for education in the second kind of interaction, but I think there is. I think it might turn out to justify the effort.

Owen’s comment about the incongruity of holding a professional conversation with someone representing as Flighty Moonsparks or something similar is right on the money. I think LL made an error in assigning a limited number of surnames, and I think our Third Life will have to be a little more flexible. There’s a very real feeling of identity that comes from customizing one’s online presence—from name to appearance—and if virtual worlds are to be successful, that needs to be as flexible as possible. On the other hand, we also need to be willing to accept that someone may choose to be (to pick an entirely random example) Ninmah while online even if her real name is, say, Rachel. Names are just convention, after all.

I have to disagree with Alan a little about how easy it was to make web pages in the beginning. It was technically simple to create a web page, yes, but it was conceptually incredibly difficult for many people, much in the way that it’s really easy to set up a Second Life account but it’s conceptually very hard to work out what to do next. I do think that virtual worlds are going to become easier to access, prettier to look at, and more common to be in. I think there are huge obstacles to work out before they are everything we want them to be, but I think that we’re on the road to get there, just by playing around with the ones that we have now, and by having conversations like these.

The name’s gotta go, though. “Second Life” is bad enough—you only get one life, period. Spend it online, offline, or both, it’s the same life.

Talk about a revelation! There are a dozen little numbers you can play with, and if I had paid more attention in geometry I might have glommed on earlier. In any event, after examining some very well-made prim jewelry, I made my first set. Well, my first wearable set, anyway. Here’s a picture of me in my new gold and pearl jewelry.

The earrings came out very well. The necklace needs a little tweaking — I’m not entirely happy with the chain, and if your avatar is taller than mine (very likely, since my avi’s height mimics my RL height) the necklace will rez invisibly inside your chest. I made a “tall” version, but I need to find out how to attach a necklace so that it automatically finds the avatar’s neck. The earrings work on any height.

What do you think? The birth of a new jewelry line? Do I have that kind of time?

And the RL (that's "real life") conference BarCamp now has a SL analog; here's a write-up on Laughing Squid: http://laughingsquid.com/2006/05/18/barcamp-second-life/

Granted, BarCamp's pretty geeky to begin with. But the BBC? A delightful surprise.

It's important to me that for the activities that we choose, it actually makes a difference to have them in SL versus, say, having them on the phone, or using Writely, or Learning Times. I realize that at first we will spend a lot of time getting people used to the space, but we do that with every online tool that we use, so that doesn't bug me. I'm puzzling about what happens next, and whether there are advantages to having an avatar, and what those advantages might be.

One of the things that I do at face-to-face meetings is graphic facilitation. Maybe you've seen this; there's a giant sheet of paper, 4' high by 8 or 14 or 16 feet long, mounted on a whiteboard or a wall or foamcore boards or whatever, and while the meeting goes on, someone (me in many cases) records the discussion visually using colored markers on the large paper. It's really impressive to watch — I can say this because I've seen other people do it — and it's also fun to do. I want to be able to do this in Second Life.

It shouldn't be that hard, right? Imagine I'm sitting at my desk, logged in to SL, and I've got a graphics tablet with a pen. I've got my headset on and I'm connected via Skype or phone bridge or whatever audio technology, so I can hear what people are saying. My avatar is standing in front of a whiteboard in SL, and when I move my pen on my tablet, the marks appear on the whiteboard. (My avatar doesn't have to look like she's drawing; I'm not asking for the moon here.) The other avatars in the room can see what I'm writing as I write it, just as if we were doing it face to face. Then when I'm done, I can save the contents of the whiteboard as a jpg (or whatever, I'm not picky) so we have a record of the visuals.

I'd need to be able to switch "pens" — choose a different color — quickly and easily, maybe by tapping a square on a palette. The pens all have the same tip, so I don't need a huge variety of Photoshoplike brushes. It would be nice to have a softer tip to emulate the chalks I use for emphasis, but I can wait for that.

So, who's bored? Someone want to write me one of these? I'll help with the requirements and testing.

I also had two business meetings in Second Life. No, really. My boss, who is a digital immigrant (don't get the reference? Here's the PDF) with all the right stamps on his passport, gave me a tour. The role-reversal was a little surreal, but I'm looking forward to working more in Second Life.

Today, on the other hand, is a perfectly normal day. . . so far . . .