Not too long ago a single item almost brought economic havoc to the MMORPG EVE Online and the makers of the game, CCP, did what they had to do to ensure economic stability. A player found a brilliant way to game the trading algorithms used in the game and got himself a ton of in-game cash (ISK). The PA Report explains what happened.

The ship contained that “useless” item, but the game thought it was worth half a billion ISK. “You get loads of loyalty points, and you cash those in for something good. He completely manipulated the market, and it started having this massive effect on our economy,” Lander said.

This got me thinking more about how the economy of EVE allows for perfect monitoring of transactions and great statistical analysis. Working on a digital economy must be every economists dream as the irregularities and lack of tracking makes real-world economic data hard to capture (and trust).

Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson is the economist in charge at CCP and he sat down with RPS to talk about the general economic policies of EVE Online. They talk about game design issues and how the economy is interconnected with the game play experience; particularly how they’ve learned from prior games.

Dr Eyjó: So with ‘mudflation’, [the term] relates to the old MUD games – multi-user dungeons – that were just text-based games. If you were coming into the game as a new player after other people had played it for a long while, you would never catch up to them. It was just ridiculous because it just kept growing and growing and it was difficult to get there. In EVE we are very much aware that new players need a path in order for them to participate – they don’t need to be the best right away – but they need to participate in the game. So we designed the game in such a way so that it’s beneficial for old players to get new players with them because they can use them as scouts or they can use them as foot soldiers in bigger battles. And that’s really why we don’t think we would have ‘mudflation’ in EVE.

The interview also goes into how how things in game are inspired from the physical world, particularly the economy of Iceland (just look at ISK and ISK), and the economic hilarity that occurred in the past decade:

Dr Eyjó: So, in 2004 to 2007 Iceland was able to acquire a lot of international loans from foreign countries. A lot of money. Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, they were all willing to lend Icelanders Euros or Dollars and different kinds of currencies, because everybody believed that Iceland would just flourish forever. And the money supply in Iceland – because that’s money from the outside pumped into Iceland – just sky-rocketed. And having a sky-rocketing money supply means there’s more money in the system but there’s still the same economic value. So the joke that I was making was very simple: That system blew up. And they should have known it was going to blow up. EVE has a lot of ISK in it because of ten years of history. A lot of ISK in EVE can mean a hell of a lot coming to Dust. And we don’t want that money to move too fast into the [new] game because it will ruin the economy of ‘slow growth’, so we have to know the balance before we completely open it up.

Dekko is a new company that is trying to create an operating system (OS) for augmented reality (AR) glasses and other devices. Importantly, they don’t seem to be working on hardware and are focused on software; similar to Microsoft’s approach with Windows. Gamasutra has a good introduction to Dekko and their plans. They seem to understand the current limits of AR and are directly addressing them:

By the time the technology is released, the aim is to provide the OS with the capability to map surrounding rooms, streets and wherever else you choose to go in full 3D, and use this information to potentially reconstruct surroundings to suit each particular app.

“If a physical marker/image is needed to use the app, no one will use it twice,” explains Miesnieks. “Dekko works anywhere that your camera can see something.”

“The content needs to be truly in the world, not floating on the screen,” he continues. “Dekko’s 3D tracking and reconstruction allows game content to truly be part of the 3D world with occlusion & collisions between digital content and real structures.”

In Canada, there are some efforts to improve the world of AR. In Edmonton there is a company focused on modifying the Moverio (Andriod-based wearable tech) to be used for a training device. Being Edmonton-based they are looking into ways the AR can be used for companies working in the tar sands. Similarly, Vuzix has the same plan to go after industrial training – neither company is looking into gaming.

While we wait for this AR tech to become more accessible, the CBC has a good rundown on what’s going on in Canada when it comes to AR companies.

Thanks to Dave! Who is working a neat AR game (more on that in a couple months).

Without further ado, here’s a hodgepodge of fashion and games stuff:

Console to Closet is a website that catalogs the blending of fashion and video games into stylish and wearable outfits. Pictured is the outfit inspired by Legion from Mass Effect.

There are some fashion elements in video games that make no sense whatsoever like female body armour. Recently, there was a post on TOR.com on the ridiculous design of protective breast plating in games (and other media). Here’s a snippet from the piece which is worth a read.

But that’s not all! Let’s say you even fall onto your boob-conscious armor. The divet separating each breast will dig into your chest, doing you injury. It might even break your breastbone. With a strong enough blow to the chest, it could fracture your sternum entirely, destroying your heart and lungs, instantly killing you. It is literally a death trap—you are wearing armor that acts as a perpetual spear directed at some of your most vulnerable body parts. It’s just not smart.

Back to the physical world, we see change there too. With new fabrics being created one can use clothing as a controller interface for digital games with Woven.

The Perfect Suit is a one hour BBC documentary thing into what makes a suit good (or bad).

Ozwald Boateng – Why Style Matters

Not really related to games, but just so you know: yes you can judge a woman by her shoes, it took a scientific study to prove it.

The Flea’s site helped me quite a bit in this process.

This is the first gambling-related post I’ve made and I’m usually hesitant to cover gambling issues as most time this issue comes up there is a poorly-framed debate on gambling versus other types of gaming. Still, the way the shows below talk about what they are doing with slot machines is fascinating and there are indeed similarities to other kinds of game design.

Like most things, it’s all about pattern recognition and flow.

The guest on the episode was Natasha Dow Schüll, and here is one of her talks:

The second show was from Cool Hunting and it’s a nice short video on game design from Bally Technologies.

Cool Hunting Video Presents: Bally Technologies from Cool Hunting on Vimeo.

From the video description:

Slot machines—games of purely random chance—are often seen as mechanical gambling devices and not much more. During a visit to Las Vegas, Nevada we got the opportunity to dig a little deeper with Bally Technologies’ Director of Game Development, Brett Jackson. He gave us some insight into the surprisingly complex innovation, psychology and design behind the slot machines that illuminate so many casino floors.

Here’s what I sent out to the team prior to the jam so that we’ll all be on the same page:

So in sum, here’s the basics of the game:

• Single player (1st person perspective)
• Escape a procedurally generated room. Over and over again; like Groundhog Day but meant to scare.
• Gameplay: Player starts with the camera locked on the statue then they have to navigate to the doorway to escape the statue without physically blinking. If the player blinks then the statue teleports to right in front of them, they are granted only three blinks. Too much blinking = death.
• Art: all we need is furniture and a statue. I think dim lighting will allow us to get away with lame textures and stuff.

After that email one of the team members suggested we make the game playable without monitoring physical blinks, so we’d have a version everyone can play and a “hardcore” version. The core mechanics then should be similar in concept to how Slender Man games function.

In short, we didn’t finish the game but we did make something playable. We blinked.

Here’s what happened:

First some context, TOJam is a fantastic annual game jam held in Toronto and it gets bigger and better every year. The event has hundreds of people all descend on George Brown College to make games starting on Friday and having something playable by Sunday evening.

Reading minds

We wanted to use an entry-level EEG device the MindWave because I have previously seen it used for other games built on Unity. It was more complicated than anticipated to use the MindWave with Unity. We spent a good chunk of the first day trying to get the device to work.

This is after some time spent on Thursday trying by myself to connect Unity and MindWave. The image below shows that the device is connected, the connection software (ThinkGear) knows it there, but the application claims the device is not there. I didn’t know if I should’ve directed my anger at MindWave or Bluetooth. Overall, this was frustrating and I was hoping that the talented programers would know where I went wrong.

After some struggle we figured out how to connect the MindWave and rewarded with this screen (enlarge to see what the MindWave records):

Fantastic! Now we can really make this game interesting.:)

Then we discovered that the blink mechanic we wanted to use in the game was actually hard to read with the MindWave. They have a blink detection system but it’s not clear and requires some educated guessing. A lot of this effort could have been avoided if the company behind MindWave released some Unity project files and demos (they have one but the download link was broken).

Even though we successfully had Unity and the MindWave talking to one another we decided to put it aside because of Bluetooth chaos. It was time to make the rest of the game.

The room

For the atmospehre of the game we originally envisioned something that seemed OK, but then got creepy like a museum after opening hours. When looking for reference pictures, I chanced across a great series of photos from the decaying Prince Edward Hotel in Brandon Manitoba (of all places) and it looked perfect.

Saturday saw the game go from primarily creepy to something more typically found in the horror genre: the abandoned building. It wasn’t a big change and was decided upon before most of the modelling was started.

Getting the room to procedural generate wasn’t too complicated and we got that working. As the code was being written we had a statue constructed and then built all the furniture that will be placed around the room. Things were going smoothly. We had all the pieces of the game being built separately and by the end of Saturday it looked like all we had to do was put the pieces together.

It looked like we’d even have time to get the blink working. Even if couldn’t get blink functioning we had other mind-reading functions we could incorporate.

Here’s an early screenshot from the game:

It’s so dark and gloomy to make the game hard without the MindWave.

It’s worth mentioning that we had off-site support for our audio and the fellow behind it made some insanely freighting sounds. The audio was done on time and, oddly, was the last thing we added to the game (just because it’s so easy).

The final day

After a late start, we got all the code from six separate computers on to one. We didn’t use Dropbox at the behest of the organizers, but in retrospect we should have broken that rule. Then we ensured that all the pieces would fit together.

I know it says 8:04, the Windows build was first.

This last days was the most hectic as it now relied mainly on the back of one of the programmers. We got the most important parts of the game working and some of the room elements working as well. We didn’t bother putting in all the assets we created as with what little time we had left we opted for function over form.

With that in mind, we decided not to incorporate the physical blink detection at all. It came down to a functioning game or a game that would probably break during the evening play sessions. One programmer went so far as to figure out some more of the MindWave but, due to too much going on, we didn’t incorporate it.

We figured we can easily add in the rest of the assets afterwards.

Around us other teams were play testing and celebrating their complete games. We, on the other hand, didn’t even have a chance to play test. TOJam game-building ends at 8pm and at 7:50 we tried our first complete build…and it worked!

This was particularly exciting for me as it was the first time at TOJam that I was part of a playable game by the end of the weekend. Of course, other games there were far better than ours, I was still pleased.

Next steps:

We will continue to work on the game to make it more playable and a better experience. By better I mean scarier. With luck, this will be playable for the TOJam Arcade for everyone to play.

Some stuff is obvious from what we ran out of time for:

• More assets for the room and for the player to bump into.
• Audio to accompany all the objects that move.
• MindWave integration.
• More early rooms to train the player before they get to the procedureally-generated rooms.

From play testing at the jam I noticed we need:

• A way to end the madness as both “win” and “fail” states are the same – you end up in a new room. This was always intended but we never gave the player a stop button.
• Better training levels to cue the player as to what’s going on.
• The exit needs to be more visible.
• We need a better way for the player to figure out where the statue initially is.

Thanks!
A BIG thank you to all of team Oh My Glob!

And thanks to all the wonderful people who made TOJam happen from the organizers to the sponsors to the volunteers! Without all their combined efforts we never would’ve had this game this far along.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I felt the need to write all this down. Thanks for reading!