newsplay.org

Sony has jumped into the free-to-play MMO model with their new game Free Realms.  I was expecting something a bit more kiddish when I first saw the style and game activities, but I find the gameplay friendly to a larger age range. The game is quite polished at the moment and downloads content for the user as needed. This allows for a rather low entry barrier for the new player (as compared with a several hundred mb initial download for other free-to-play games).

The game also launched with a wide range of in-game activities. There’s a World-o-Warcraft-lite fighting system for players who like traditional MMO activity, a match three and Cooking Momma style crafting system for the casual gamers, and some driving/racing games for the Mario Kart fans (which may be one of the most universal groups). Free Realms also rewards exploration, making a game out of exploring the world’s nooks and crannies. I haven’t played enough to say how this all holds up over time, but initially it seems extremely successful at accomplishing what it sets out to do. Though I’m basing that on the assumption that what they set out to do was create a decent MMO playground of sorts.

The payment scheme is the interesting part (though the ideas in it aren’t exclusive to Free Realms). Playing for free, gives the player access to a extremely large slice of content. However, some jobs (like being a ninja or wizard), some quests, some items, additional player slots and the chance to be listed on the leaderboards are exclusive to subscribers. Subscription fees are at an extremely low price point at around $5 (US) per month. The game includes micropayments as well. Some in-game content can only be bought with Sony Station Cash. This includes buying pets and there’s a whole pet training mini-game to level up in as well.

Station Cash can also be used for getting new cards in a Free Realms collectible card game. This game is played online and accessed through the Free Realms world. However, a physical card game is also being sold (by Topps) in parallel with the digital version. Physical cards have codes that can be entered online to receive a digital copy.

So, this game is being monetized upside and down and I think it may be the most wholistic incarnation of multiple revenue streams I’ve seen in an MMO yet. (Though I haven’t seen any in-game advertising). The fact that it’s coming from Sony is really interesting as well. Since Everquest, Sony has really struggled in the MMO market. Everquest 2 released in stride with World of Warcraft, but has only garnered a fraction of WoW’s population. Star Wars Galaxies was just sad in every way. Vanguard was a big risk in its attempts and has played out in an underwhelming fashion. However, Sony has run some very small online games for meager subscription rates as well as collectible card games. It feels like Sony may have finally taken its experience and designer talent and finally created something that matches what people have been saying about web-based, free-to-play, micropayment, casual, reward-flushed, color-rich games for a few years now. All in all, Free Realms really feels like a game made in a laboratory. At this point, I really doubt it could be a total flop (Reviews are positive and in the above average range) and I’m interested to see how many players it brings in and who they turn out to be.

Finally, how does this apply to journalism in any sort of way? Well, micropayments are still that controversial topic for sure. In situations like this, I think games like this are the perfect testbed to see what people will pay for when they are enjoying themselves and being rewarded. The news doesn’t always reward though. Sometimes, it’s quite discouraging and a bit grueling. One thing to note is that in games people are paying to contribute or interact, not just spectate or get preached to. I think if newspapers want people to pay, they need to offer greater interaction with that (though this can get into all kinds of sticky issues with money influencing news and would need hard and fast boundaries at some point).

Also, even though papers know this, multiple revenue streams is important. Papers have always had these, but they are getting quirky about which streams to jump into online. Do they take on craigslist with a better classified system (not sure if that’s possible), do they compete with Yelp on local reviews, do they go head to head with CafeMom and develop their own mom hangout they can advertise on? I think a lot of the angles they try seem safer to them, but can be just watered-down versions of better things out there (especially since a lot of the ideas revolve around getting eyeballs and just throwing up a bunch of ads, making for a worse experience than a better site with less anoying advertising or none at all). I think where Free Realms may come in is that you start to get really creative revenue streams when you start jump domains and look at what they’re doing.

For example, the idea of micropayments per article feels a little too hopeful to me. In this game, I wouldn’t make a micropayment for every battle or every cooking game. I’d just start to dread getting into another fight, because it’s going to cost me more money. In a paper, I’d dread running across a headline that’d make me curious since I’d have to pay for it. Instead, I’d just avoid the temptation (and the site) completely. In the game, micropayments are for a pet dog or a cool sword. These are things I get to keep and they live with me. An article doesn’t do that. So, I think the game gives a good lead in that, I’ll subscribe for access to a swath of content I can’t access otherwise. I might make micropayments for accompaniments that enhance the experience as I explore/enjoy the world you provide for me.

BBC News has a nice article up about the growing micropayment industry surrounding games. Maggie Shiels focuses more on the development in the mobile phone sector, which is definitely a place news should give as much attention to as it does the Web.

The biggest thought in the piece is whether North America will jump on board with micropayments as hardcore as Asia has once the friction of payment hassles is smoothed out. I think the technology definitely has something to do with it. However, I think North American gamers bring to the table an egalitarian notion that is more kneejerk in reaction to the spoils going to the one who forks over the most cash. Veteran gamers also tend to be upset by the idea of buying half a game and being nickled and dimed for the rest of the content (why free to play models are important). The article ends with the best note of how micropayment models may (negatively) affect good game design:

In a struggling economy, much is being made of the new payment models trying to take root. Some in the industry however are concerned there is too much focus on making money.

…

NGmoco’s Mr Young is also wary.

“As long as developers don’t prioritise greed over game play. You need to remember that at the end of the day, we are there to provide fun gaming experiences for people. Not something where they are constantly badgered to pay up for something.

Thanks to @oleschaper’s feed for tipping me off to the story.

I’m probably jumping into this with some assumed concepts about newspapers talking about micropayments moreso lately. Martin Langeveld’s article from the Nieman Lab and Clay Shirkey’s thoughts from 2000 are good background reading. (UPDATE: Journalism 101 - Accuracy - I had mistaken the identity of the author of the Nieman Lab article. It has since been corrected).

Motion-twin’s games quickly wore thin on me after I hit the wall of entertainment they’re willing to provide without me ponying up for better play. For example, my crabosaur in DinoRPG now has to rest 6 hours between every action. There are potions that eliminat this wait time, but they cost coins and the only serious way to get coins is to buy themwith real cash. About $6 gets you enough coins to take 30-some turns unhassled, which would work out to a few hours of entertainment probably. If I were younger, I definitely would have dropped some expendible income to find out what comes next.

I moved on to Civony last week as their ads showed up all over across game and news sites. After playing the game, their ad with the open-bodiced female is even more hilarious. The game couldn’t be more of a medieval strategy geek out. It’s one of those overly rule-oriented concoctions we have Northern Europeans to thank for.

With that said, I had way more fun building up my little village than I did training my dinosaur. Civony has a really good introduction in that it keeps giving you menial tasks early on and rewarding you for them. It follows the Sid Meier philosophy of “just one more turn.” You never quite quit when one thing completes, because you’ve set something in motion since that you want to see complete. By the time that completes, you have started other things in motion and the cycle perpetuates. Civony delivers this in spades. Early on, buildings are built in minutes, but eventually they take hours. By this time, however, the player will have a second city to take care of where building only take minutes again. Lots of things to start and lots of things to see completed.

If one is impatient, he can buy game items that speed things up or offer bonuses. This is where micropayments come into play. Beyond impatience, buying items for boosts eventually becomes important to hard-core competitors. The ultimate goal is pitting armies against other players and factions. This endless struggle creates a market for the invested gamers to throw a few bucks in here or there for that extra leg up.

Browser-based micropayment games aren’t new, but there seems to be a growing market judging by how many more ads are showing up lately (just started checking out The West). Civony itself went from a single server to three over the course of a week. Enough people showed up to cause massive slowdown. Whether those people stay and play isn’t for certain, but it’s not a bad start for reworking old BBS games into web models.

What does this mean for news? Not totally sure yet, but I believe familiarity with when people dole out change for fun will definitely have some crossover to when they’ll dole it out for news. I should have enough thoughts for a more organized list of concepts to borrow soon. For now, I’m thinking the main strengths are that I’m paying to do something rather than “consume” something and there’s an evolving narrative arc to my interaction.

Over the last couple days, I’ve really gotten into Motion-Twin’s games. They’re all web-based, flash-game-styled affairs meant to be quick diversions. You make a few quick choices and then take off until enough time passes for the game to allocate you some new actions. While a painful style for the kid at home for a lot to do, it’s perfect for the working man. 

My two favorites are My Brute and Dino RPG. My Brute is sort’ve like Street Fighter that plays itself. You get your own brute and he or she auto-tussles your friends’ brutes. As he wins and loses fights, your brute levels up and gains random armaments like stilletos, whips and caveman clubs. He can also level up by recruiting pupils to his dojo. This is done multi-level-marketing style as you send a URL to friends to create their own brute. Built-in marketing, but it’s fun this way.

DinoRPG can be a bit tedious, but it keeps me engaged for some reason. You basically buy a pet dinosaur and train it as you click your way across all creation. You get 1 turn every so many hours (though I still haven’t figured out the scheme for making you wait). Their sales model lets you buy coins with which you can buy extra turns and mitigate the patience required to wait 6-9 hours to finish a fedex quest to a town only two moves away. It’s another approach to micropayments and you can pony up through credit card, SMS, or phone.

Motion-Twin’s game that originally got me thinking is MyMiniCity. Basically you create a city that starts out with a population of 1: you. Like MyBrute, the player must recruit her friends to the game by sending out the pages URL. Every unique visitor (IP-wise) adds another person to the city’s population and a picture of the city begins adding roads and houses. I created a town called Cronkberg after the namesake of my grad program. So far, we have 11 people. The game alludes to new stages opening up after hitting certain population requirements. This mystery is part of the appeal. The page also features a simple message board to post thoughts to the other visitors.

If anything, MyMiniCity could serve as an excellent model for a Coming Soon page for a new community news site. I think there are other ideas here as well. I think a good community journalism site would take note of unique visits andrepresent that back to the community in some way. I think a lot of sites just rely on sign-ups to represent unique, invested participants, but I like MyMiniCity’s way of sidestepping the need for a login. MyBrute does this too and I think it is a strength of some of Motion-Twin’s creations. In addition, I could see a site that allows real-life neighborhoods to initiate a digital neighborhood the same way. All you would need is a map, a message area, and some fun stats to create a reward for people coming back.

Journalism.co.uk tipped me off to a game-like news project/concept by David Johnson. Johnson’s an assistant prof at American University and his idea is called “For the People.” He pitched it to the Knight News Challenge and it goes something like this:

Using Microsoft’s XNA framework, he wants to develop a Sim City-style game based on the politics of Washington DC with avatars of real, elected officials placed inside federal buildings. Topical information, for example from news organisations, could then be streamed into the system.

The article doesn’t dip into what makes it a game (i.e. is there a goal, can it be won or lost, etc.). So, it may be more of a sim or toy (in a non-trivial sense of the word).

Back when Lively and Vivaty Scenes were first launching, I had a similar idea of building a house where users could drop in and attach tips for being more energy efficient to household objects. For example, the dishwasher could bring up a note about turning off the heat drying or windows could be linked to videos about caulking seams. However, the jury is out on the adoption rate of online, 3-D social spaces like this. Lively was shuttered at the end of ‘08 and I haven’t heard a lot of chatter about Vivaty (though, I should check that one out again. You should, too).

Anyhow, journalism.co.uk’s article foregoes game detail and plunges back into points that shouldn’t be news. For example: 

With ‘For The People’ he hopes to engage a younger audience in current affairs through gaming and reach out beyond the stereotypical male, computer-lover.

The ESA released statistics a couple years ago that said the average gamer is 33 years old and more women over 18 play games than boys under 17.

CC-licensed on flickr by morganglines

I feel Johnson’s pain here. He can’t just pitch a cool idea. Instead he has to backtrack to defending the validity of a new medium and pander to the fact that it could bring in those non-newspaper-buying young people that newsrooms have been dying (quite literally) to reach. Last year, I worked on a game concept with a news organization and every time we talked about players, they were assumed to be college age or younger. So weird.

Johnson articulates his criticism for a lack of media vision much better here:

“Executives didn’t see that games were immersive storytelling platforms and failed to recognise that, writing them off as fanboy entertainment was akin to leaving film to the keystone cops instead of using it for documentary journalism,” he said.

In the end, producing a solid, recognizable game for the purpose of news lies squarely in the realm of new territory. You better be ready to defend criticism from all angles.

Returning to newsPlay after some downtime. I had honestly wained in my interest in covering specifically journalistic games. The topic was narrow and the limited number of projects made for an awkward pace.

However, the two domains involved comprise a lot of my thinking and time. Those domains being Journalism and Games. I’m gonna loosen my focus a bit to the things I find interesting in both.

I’m going to rework the Essential Playing section and welcome comments on what would be good to include. I want to direct people to games that expand ideas on what games can convey. As well, I would like to offer books and articles that guide my thinking when it comes to true story telling.

I just got back from a very cool event called NewsTools2008, which consisted of 3.5 days of geeks and journalists figuring out how technology can make the news better for people. While there, I had a chance to talk to two guys who helped make a cool newsgame app for facebook.

I posted some first thoughts on StartupMedia.org and I’m cross-posting them below:

Deadline is a fun game. It’s actually really fun, and at the same time, it’s about the news. Well, it’s not just about the news, it is the news. It’s just delivered differently.

Deadline is a game played through facebook that tests the player’s knowledge of the news. The first time I encountered it, I was knee deep in school work. Yet, this facebook app managed to steal over an hour of my time. It was a fair trade though as I found myself thoroughly caught up on recent events when I finally managed to quit.

At NewsTools2008 yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit down with Tony Kuttner of NewzWag.com. He’s on the team that created Deadline and shared his thoughts on

Here are the highlights:

-Other news quiz applications have relied on the player knowing trivia (what was the general’s name that…) rather than knowing about the story. Someone who just quotes trivia when talking makes for a dull conversationalist. Delivering more of the story and what’s interesting about that story makes for better conversations and therefore a better game.

-Regular, new content is key. They aim to get 15-20 new stories up every weekday and 10 each day on weekends.

-Aesthetics were important to the team. It had to look good. It’s hard to test exactly how much of an effect this has on whether people play, but it seems important. (Anecdotaly, I think the design makes me more prone to stick around.)

-Including interesting, sometimes offbeat, stories and making it easy to share with your friends is important to the community aspect.

-The application was created as part of a team that included 3 developers. None were game developers, but some members of the team were avid gamers. (Avid gaming seems important as they get a lot of little things right).

I covered Play the News at another blog I’m currently contributing to for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. It’s self-described as “fantasy sports meets the evening news” and encourages news readers to jump in as event forecasters.

Some of the reviewers have been underwhelmed by the site or critical of what kind of game it isn’t. However, the game is an interesting step in applying some game mechanics to a news follower community. Even if it’s not the Holy Grail, I’m all for encouraging more of this kind of experimentation.

In it’s favor, the delivery is clean and polished. Though, I think the level polish could be a slow down on consistent coverage. In my other post, I talk about how crowd sourcing could be a boon here if an effective way to do it can be figured out. Quoting myself is obviously obnoxious, but here’s a clip:

Over time, crowd sourcing could be an effective way to diffuse the unavoidable agenda setting nature of Play the News. While Play the News offers a great variety of stories already, their method of delivery limits their choices in the news they deliver. The site doesn’t tell the player what to think, but it does tell the player what to think about. Creating a system that allowed the crowd to assist in creating the content could greatly increase the number of stories offered.

For a class, I was assigned the task of editing a Wikipedia page. Looking for something related to this blog, I found a possibly dated definition of newsgames on the page about Serious Games.

On the page, the author(s) had begun a list of types of games that would fit into the serious game category. This list includes things like advergaming and edutainment, and the list itself consists of a rather controversial taxonomy as I’ve seen discussions on quite a few of the terms themselves.

The definition for newsgames left me wanting as they were defined this way:

These games discuss, in a direct way, political or geopolitical problems. Examples include ”September 12th”

I’m doubtful of my own ability to arrive at an ideal definition any time soon, but I really felt this one was too narrow. Newsgames can deal with much more than political or geopolitical problems, just as news delivered through other media. So, here’s my attempt to broaden the definition a bit to be more consistent with at least a generic definition of news:

Journalistic games that report on recent events or deliver an editorial comment

I like it so far, but it needs to be bounced off the crowd. There will probably be exceptions to this that still count as a newsgame. Also, the discussion of whether a clean definition needs to be realized at this point could also be worthwhile.

I do think this does begin to separate newsgames from advergames and tabloid games. A newsgame could stray into the territory of either of these and I plan on committing an entire post to the gray areas.

Over dinner the other night, my friend Robin told me about a goofy work meeting where the boss asked everyone born since 1977 to stand up. In a deep-voiced, boss tone, she mimicked her boss’s announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, look around. These are our digital natives.”

Now, I understand that digital natives is a useful way to describe those born into digital technology and I’m sure that has some sort of important effect on “getting it” when it comes to technology. However, as this term enters the mainstream, I’m already starting to see it take on some cop out undertones by those who want an easy out for their inability to “get it” when it comes to technology.

I just have two things to say on this. One, I may have grown up with a PC, but I spent a lot of time surfing, troubleshooting and gaming instead of watching King of Queens. Two, the people I know who “get it” most were born before 1977.