Mike Stein

Werewolf
Werewolf is a fantasy game, but a weakly themed one. Players aren't asked to speak in a particular dialect, or given werewolf masks to use. They are just told "there are werewolves, find them".

This supports the use of Werewolf as a social game. The theme is just strange enough to allow for humor in the game, which is a great way to break the ice. The theme isn't strong enough to scare people away - preventing the game from becoming playable by only werewolf fanatics.

The theme doesn't add to the mechanics of the game, but it doesn't detract, either. I've seen werewolf played with a Mafia theme. It could easily be skinned with any number of themes. Given this, I'd say the theme to Werewolf is actually not important, so long as there is a theme.

Set
Set is a great example of abstract theming. As such, there is very little to write about SETs use of theming. If I were to apply a theme to SET, I'd choose something that involves careful examination - such as examining virus. In SET: CDC edition, players are trying to track and cataloge dangerous viruses. A virus is composed of 3 bacteria. Bacteria can vary in shape, color, fill, and number of cells. A virus is created when 3 bacteria get together, and all the traits of the bacteria are all the same, or all different.

This theme works with the SET mechanic, since SET is about careful observation and grouping.

Cranium
Cranium, like Set, has no theme. But, it is a weakly themed, no themed game.
The art style of all the pieces of the game convey a feeling of light hearted competition. It's not a specific theme, but it definitely influences how people play the game.

It does mesh with the mechanics of the game very well. While Cranium is a progress game, it's not a serious progress game. All the activities a player may do are funny challenges - while some may be hard, nobody gets upset because they're also ridiculous.

Cranium is Trivial Pursuit for idiots. While this has nothing to do with the assignment, I'm going to point it out anyway.

Sissy Fight
Sissy Fight is a themed as a school yard fight between girls. It's not about punching each other behind the jungle gym, it's about teasing each other, and tattling to the teacher.

I've played a couple Sissy Fight games, and I found that most people don't actually talk during the game. When they do, it's usually to organize strategy. To me, this means that people who are playing Sissy Fight aren't getting hooked on the theme - nobody is talking in character, or making jokes about the situation. Sissy Fight is decidedly a non-serious game, but the people playing it seemed to be taking it a bit too seriously.

The mechanics of Sissy Fight detail a strategy game. That's where the game mechanics conflict with the game theme. The mechanics call for thinking about each move, analyzing possible counter-moves from your oponents, and then coming up with your own counter-counter moves. The theming of the game asks you to be an 8 year old girl during recess. The two don't necessarily mash up, which explains why people seemed to drop the theme when playing the game.

Casablanca
Casablanca puts you in either "The Resistance" or "The Occupation", in a war torn city. Without expressly saying so, the theme feels like you're supposed to be doing this during the 1940s. This is due to the very title of the game, as well as some of the areas you can visit in the game.

Players in the resistance are trying to build their resistance cells up, and players in the occupation are trying to infiltrate the resistance cells. Everything is accomplished through conversation.

The theme of the game does match the mechanics. When I was playing the game, I got in to the roll of pretending to be an ordinary citizen with something to hide. Because the game is meant to help people get to know each other, the focus on meeting each other as part of the game mechanic is greatly re-enforced.

Posted by Michael Stein at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just met Heather Ellertson and Thomas Valentino, from the Entertainment Consumers Association. Check them out here : www.theeca.com

The ECA is an advocacy group for video game players. The simplest way to describe them is as the pimp hand of logic to Jack Thompson's out of line lunacy.

And yes, I just used the phrase "pimp hand" on the blog.

Anyway, they're looking to sign up members at campuses all across the US. They're at the Business of Games conference tomorrow, before 1:00 PM. I'd encourage anybody who likes things like the artistic freedom to make the games they want, changing the negative stereotypical image of games and gamers, and puppies, to check them out.

Posted by Michael Stein at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

www.yelp.com
Yelp is a Web 2.0 version of citysearch – a peer reviewed method of finding interesting, or useful, things in a city. Founded as a means of getting a recommendation for local dentists in the San Francisco area, it has social interaction baked into it from the ground up. Its very purpose is to get people to talk about what they like and don’t like in a city, in order to help others navigate.

Since Yelp’s usefulness depends on members being socially active, it uses numerous methods to encourage socializing.

The most easily used, and therefore the most common, of these methods are compliment badges. When reading any review on Yelp, a user can easily leave a compliment badge for the reviewer. By clicking on the “compliment” link in a review, a small box opens up with compliment badges to choose from. These are little icons that express a sentiment about the reviewer, or the review - things like “you’re cool”, “thank you”, “good writer”, etc. Each one has a little message field where the complimenter can write their own message, or use the pre-written message.

By making it incredibly easy to leave these compliments for people (you don’t need to navigate to a separate page to do so, which doesn’t interrupt what you’re doing), users don’t have to think much about making a connection with somebody. The pre-written messages in the text boxes are generally funny enough to be used without changing, so the complimenter doesn’t need to take time to come up with their own words. From personal experience, a decently written review receives compliments quickly, which encourages more reviewing.

Another highly effective means of encouraging social interaction is the Elite Status. Prolific members of the Yelp community are rewarded with “Elite” status. Elite status carries with it 3 perks – a special “Elite” badge that is visible on the member’s profile, a Yelp Elite shirt, and invitations to Yelp Elite parties. The last is by far the most important of the rewards. Yelp takes it’s most prolific members, gives them free food and booze, and puts them in a room to socialize. At these events, members get to know each other in person. When they leave these events, they keep in touch with each other – through Yelp.

Elite status is rewarded based on a number of criteria, including how helpful the member has been to other members. This system directly rewards members who’ve reached out to contact others.

A third trick Yelp uses to encourage socializing is local fame. The best example of this is the Review Of The Day. Every day, one review is selected to be the Review of The Day. This is posted front and center on the main page of the site, and is guaranteed to attract attention and compliments to the reviewer’s profile. The potential to receive Review Of The Day, and the fame that comes with it, encourages members to write more reviews, and to write more entertaining reviews.

Local fame is also evident in the weekly newsletter emails that Yelp sends out. Each one has a theme (last weeks was “hotdogs around L.A.”, the week before was “best places to buy used clothes”). These are filled with names of members, such as “Yelper BabyFace prefers to get his hot dogs at Pinks”, so an active member may find themselves being specifically mentioned in front of the yelp community. This has the same effect as the Review Of The Day.

Yelp also has a standard message board set up, with various categories for members to post in. It’s a very active board, but the most surprising are the Unofficial Yelp Events, or UYE, postings. These are calls for Yelpers to get together in real life, but aren’t being organized by the Yelp site. This means that the socializing that has begun on the Yelp site with casual compliments has spilled over in to real life relationships.

The previously mentioned means of social encouragement are all obvious, active methods – they’re noticeable to the user as methods to encourage socializing, and they require some form of special action to use. Yelp has an incredibly powerful passive method to encourage socializing, too - It is an incredibly useful site with a self selecting community. The first means that there is a reason beyond socializing to use the site. The second means that that the reviews that people read are generally well written, and encourage people to stick around the site.

The community is self selecting because, in order to be active in Yelp, you have to be willing to write a review that is going to be publicly visible. I have yet to find a Yelp review that is mired in “L33t SP34K”. By maintaining this level of discourse, people aren’t scared away by idiosyncratic language.

If I wanted to increase the socializing aspects of yelp, I would more directly link the forums with what’s happening elsewhere on the site. Currently, the forums are completely disjoint, other than the link to them on the front page. I’ve found that I have to consciously make a decision to go there, which means that the socializing aspect isn’t as natural as it could be. To fix this, I might add a ticker tape somewhere on the yelp page, which displays headers from recent forum posts. If this were active everywhere on the site, it’d be a great invitation to jump from the review section to the talk section. To make it useful (and to not compromise the reason for the site’s existence), the ticker could be key worded to whatever review I was looking at, similar to the way gmail serves up ads based around the email contact. So, if I were looking at a review of a bar, I’d see headlines from posts like “Where’s the best place to drink on the West Side”, and so on.

Posted by Michael Stein at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After playing Toon Town and Sissy fights it was obvious to me that those games are similar to our activity in some interesting ways. Toon Town tries to build social interaction the way MMOs usually try and that is by having a quest that forces you to make a friend. Most people on there are generally pretty accepting [how can you not be, it's Toon Town]. Toon Town felt like Cranium felt in that the graphical style sort of lends itself to the playful social interaction type atmosphere.

Sissy Fight on the other hand indirectly forces you to be social with the other players in the room. Although not always the best of conversations, people were interacting. There is a lot of down time in Sissy Fight depending on who you play with and also depending on who you play with, Set can be the same way. While playing Set, social interaction was mixed into the down time and there was a decent amount of it since 5 of the 6 players were getting destroyed. Sissy fight, however, didn't directly force players to interact with each other unless you're counting the actions against the other players. The game does encourage chatting by having an interface that is conducive to doing so.

Posted by Michael Stein at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the first assignment in MMO class, I've decided to compare the social experiences between Sissy Fight and Casablanca.

Sissy Fight's in-game messaging system (the speach balloons over a character's head) allowed players to communicate with each other in real time. The caveat here is that players can only do this with up to 5 other people. In the games I played, this lead to easy, meandering conversations.

The choices a player can make in sissy fight are fairly limited. No matter how much scheming and psychological mind games I'd like to play, everything must be filtered through 6 choices. By doing this, I found the game encouraged me to make use of the in-game messaging system : Since I didn't have to do a lot of work to make my next move, I could do it quickly, and chat with other people.

The drawback of the messaging system is that the game itself doesn't encourage me to use it. Lots of the people I played with didn't say a single thing during the game, and were able to play just as well. A player who used the messaging system to direct actions (e.g. "everybody attack Scott Gillies!") had an advantage, but using the messaging system wasn't required for game play.

Casablanca, on the other hand, had a messaging system that was inherant to it's gameplay. Straight from their website: "It's a mobile social networking game. Like a cross between Facebook and the game 'Mafia'....The more people you meet, the more powerful you become".

In Casablanca, you play as either the resistance or the occupation. The Resistance is meant to create as large a network as possilbe, without any occupation members infiltrating it. The Occupation is meant to infiltrate as many resistance networks as possible. In other words, make as many friends as possible, just make sure they're the right kind of friends.

In this case, people were far more willing to talk in game. The communication system was a bulletin board site, where messages could be left for somebody, and read later. The turn based messaging system was more encouraging to me than sissy fight's real time system. I didn't have to be logged on for somebody to communicate, so I didn't have to spend my time at the comptuer in order to build networks. I could come and go as I pleased.

As an Occupation player, I kept striking up conversations with members of the dirty, stinking Resistance. I enjoyed the conversations - every single one was themed to the game, and was light hearted beacuse of it. The second I was discovered to be the cold, hard fist of the Occupation, though, that conversation slammed shut. So while I was meeting people, relationships were also abruptly severed. The co-operation and communication between Occupation members, however, grew as we thought of new strategies to use in game. In order to effectively infiltrate the Resistance, multiple Occupation agents had to try at once. This required communication between us.

One thing to note in the social dynamic of Casablanca was that it was a very focused experience. Since there was so much thought that went in to orchestrating a successfull infiltration, all the posts made in the game were focused on doing just that. It's not a meandering chat game, while Sissy Fight's simple choice system encouraged it.

I liked how Casablanca's game design required social interaction in order to progress, but prefered Sissy Fight's ability to sustain conversations that didn't directly involve the game. It seemed like Casablanca's system was great for starting a relationship, and Sissy Fight's was great for allowing it to grow beyond the game world.

Posted by Michael Stein at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I read through the back channel after class, and saw a lot of people got stuck on the insider trading aspect.

I didn't want to get too far in to game design, since it's really early on, but the SEC will be used as a mitigating force in the game, and there are other avenues for information gathering other than illegal stock tips.

Of course, if somebody had asked me about it during seminar, I could have answered this in class. Instead, here's the blog answer.

Posted by Michael Stein at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)