Roger Ebert, less wrong, more misunderstood?

Roger Ebert, of whom I am a huge fan, has taken a lot of heat for his "Video Games aren't art" stance.  Chris Anderson of Wired, who I am also a huge fan, has published a clarification, which if accurate goes a long way to soothing the pain of Ebert's betrayal of all I hold dear (kidding.)

Tasty Choices! Is the plate you construct art?

Chris Anderson's Clarification

The crux of the issue is how Ebert defines art. His definition centers on the intent of the artist more than the experience the person engaged with the piece.  I still disagree, but can respect his view now that I understand it better.  When I read his original article for whatever reason I missed this point entirely.  I may have been reading with emotional blinders on.

Ebert: I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist...Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.

And there you go. The thing is, I still consider thought and emotion provoking games like Half Life 2 art, and I don't feel like I am the artist when I play them. Ebert may actually be giving games too much credit. Most allow choices, but the final results of the games are normally fixed, or a narrow set of fixed possibilities.  Games like Spore, where the player really does have a vast paint brush to play with, allow the player to be the artist, but the game itself is still, to my dismay, rather linear with a more or less inevitable conclusion.  Still art.

Adam!!!
http://gameguts.blogspot.com/

Free at Last

I've just finished the free audio-book version of Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price. While there is a fair amount of controversy regarding the book, free is the baseline price for most Web-based games, like ourWorld, Yoville, Club Penguin, and pretty much everything else in our category. In other words, we're neck deep in free, and living with the necessities, benefits, as well as the pitfalls of it.

Because free is the default base price for all of our games, the gaming public takes it for granted that the games will be free. In fact, we use the 'freemium' model, where the minority of players that do pay are supporting the vast majority who are playing for free.

The book relied most heavily on Maplestory for its gaming examples. In Maplestory's case, everything in the game could be achieved with effort. The non-free items save players time, but do not provide access to anything that the non-paying players can't achieve given time.

In ourWorld, we certainly sell items that save player time (subscribers level up 2x faster, and an assortment of non-free items can increase that multiplier even further.) In addition, there are items that the highest level players can earn with out paying, but players who don't mind paying can get whenever they choose. Unlike Maplestory, however, we have hundreds of items that only paying players have access to. These items don't do anything but impact how the avatar and living spaces look, but as looks and image is what ourWorld is all about, it's socially rewarding to have these "Gem-Only" premium items.

With free as the default price of online games like ourWorld, the challenge is really how to balance the free version of the game with the premium version. What should be free? What should cost money? When we started last year, almost everything was free. As the site matured, the ratio of free to non-free has shifted steadily toward the latter. As the players gaining benefits from this shift are supporting the site, this is not a problem at all. In addition, while growth is slower, the non-paying players still have more features than they did this time last year, even if glass-half-empty users only see the ever increasing number of features they 'unfairly' don't have access to.

I expect more and more aspects of ourWorld to become free as new non-free items are released. As non-free features age, the cost of giving them away gives way to the benefits. This happened with Condos (ourWorld living spaces) a few months ago, and the result has been totally positive for both the players as well as the bottom line of the site.

Free at last!

Adam!!!
Gameguts Blog

I said, he said, he said, he said.

This is funny to me, as Chris Anderson wrote a post basically saying the same thing. Essentially, "This is what I meant, and Seth said it better."

What I said. What Seth said. The best part of his post was:

"Great design is intuitive. Great design eliminates confusion. But not for everyone, not all the time. The words and interactions you use often have a sophistication that will confuse some portion of your audience.

Why not consider making it easy for the confused to ask for help? And treat them with respect when they do. If you don't create a little confusion, it's unlikely you've built something remarkable.

And to go one step further: sometimes it's okay to lose the n00bs. Not in an arrogant way (except for some brands) but in a way that says, "this might just not be for you..."

What Chris said was in his book, the Long Tail. What Seth said regarding that.

Good stuff, all around.

-Adam!!!