Category Archives: Social

House Math

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Off-topic from most but here goes.  I wrote about a similar subject that hit the US during the market crash 5 years ago and while Canada is better protected (no sub-primes, no HELOCs for first buys, etc…) the market is near saturation.  Here’s why.

The average “big city” house is about $350,000.  A decent mortgage is say, 3.25%.  If you put $25,000 down, then your mortgage rate is about $1,500 a month.  A house payment (plus insurance, taxes, maintenance and utilities) shouldn’t be more than 35% of your net income.  So let’s get best picture here and say the extras cost you $500 a month.  $2,000 net rolls up to be about $35,000 gross.  That’s only for the house.  The other 65% means you need to bring in another $3,7000.  That’s right, a total of $5,700.  That means a gross income of $104,000.

The average Canadian salary is about $47,000 per year.  Even double that with dual income, you’re still short $10,000 a year.

So if in the best case, where your costs are low, the average couple is unable to purchase the average house and be financially secure in case of mortgage changes, market changes or job changes.  If you then follow the logic that you need an above average salary to buy an average house, the percentage of home ownership at any given time should be less than 50%.  We are at nearly 70%.

Granted, this includes everyone who purchased a house before this housing boom.  Home buyers today have less money and higher prices.  I’m not saying we’re on a bubble, but the upward trend of the market is not sustainable in the long term, especially if the house prices exceed the increases in salary (which are usually just below inflation).  The days of single person home ownership are gone unless you are willing to make some very significant sacrifices.

Aging Gamers

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First, the gushiness, I have two adorable children.  If you’re a parent, you have the same problem I do.  Children make you feel old and out of touch, like you’re 2 steps behind the pack.  It’s an effort to be at the same pace they are since every generation moves at a quicker pace than the last.  Which brings me to this post which has been simmering in the back of my mind for some time now.

In general, the blogging generation is older.  Few people take the time to sit down and write something down that has more than 140 characters or isn’t a cut and paste from somewhere else.  I tell people I write a blog and most think that’s quaint, as if I was writing an op-ed piece in the newspaper (which is my reaction to those who do just that).  Being older brings with it a sense of nostalgia and entitlement.  Things were better back then and gosh darn it, I put in my time and I deserve something better.  You know why they don’t make cars with carburetors anymore?  EFI is better.  It’s the same reason that you need to be 40+ to own any car with a carb, today’s generation simply never knew it existed.

Gaming isn’t much different.  There are quite a few blogs out there that mourn the loss of gaming of old and put out such amazing pieces of hyperbole that you’d think Chicken Little was at the keyboard.  While I appreciate dissenting views, sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder what planet these people are on.  Torchlight 2, Borderlands 2, Ni No Kuni and Tomb Raider are recent examples of near perfect gaming, each embodying a particular facet of their genre and shining it to golden luster.  The difference is that these games aren’t designed for us (the older folk), they are designed for the core gaming audience, the low to mid 20s.  They might have features we like but their targets are much different.

Ni No Kuni is a great example.  This is Pokémon meets JRPG/FF13 combat, with a sprinkle of Tales story telling.  The individual elements are all fairly recent, the cutesy characters aren’t meant for realism but the whole of the game, the final package, is just pure fun.

MMOs aren’t much different.  For the vast majority of MMO players, their first game was World of Warcraft.  UO, EQ, DAOC, AC – it all means bunk to them.  Bygones of a forgotten era.  Heck, I played AD&D for years before version 3 came out.  By the time 4 came out, no one really remembered what THAC0 meant anymore.  MMOs today are simply not designed for the people who played those first games.  The originals were not built on gameplay, they were built on social structures for people who had 4-6 hours to invest in one session.  You’re kidding yourself if you think there is an infinite pool of those types of players.  They are all already playing some game and invested in it.  You think Blood Legion (a hardcore WoW raiding guild) has the time to play another MMO for 30 hours a week?  You think they are going to drop years of investment in a game for another one with 10% of the content?

Today’s gaming generation plays short sessions with quick rewards.  Their lives move at an incredible pace and they have other things to do.  They certainly won’t sit for 4 hours a night in front of a computer and wipe continuously on a boss for 2 weeks.  I daresay they aren’t the crazy ones.  I certainly don’t have the time to commit to that with kids in the house.  I barely have time to commit to one 2 hour session a week, especially if it’s in my own house.

As aging gamers, perhaps it’s just time to take a backseat to the sky-is-falling attitudes and simply enjoy the fun games that we do get to play.  There are plenty of them out there and I bet for most of us, we don’t even have time to play half of them.

What’s in a Game

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Joystiq has finished their top 10 games of the year list and for the first time, I know what they are talking about. One of the site’s strong suits is that it covers all games, from the smallest to the largest and does it with blogging flair. Any given day can have 10-20 articles go up. Compare that to the big guns like Gamespot or IGN who can barely put out half that amount, plus fill your screen with more ads than content. The second good thing that comes from their format is the personal opinion pieces. While most sites will video chats (which is good) they have next to no text about their opinions. The Best of the Rest gives us an inside peek to writer’s minds, especially those we tend to align with.

There’s a saying that people go to the internet to find people that agree with them and while on the whole this is true, I like to read dissenting ideas. It makes me appreciate the medium as a whole rather than the specific flavours I am accustomed to. It’s like going to a restaurant and only every ordering the club sandwhich when there is a whole world that can be on your plate.

 Which brings me to the main topic for today, buying games. I’ll buy just about any game as long as the perceived value is there. I won’t pay full price for a game that I’m hesitant on but I will buy it if it comes on sale. The Secret World is a great example of this. I’ll dump money onto Torchlight 2 in a jiffy but Halo 4 needs to be on sale before I’ll touch it.

 This sort of puts a tiered structure for fun. I am willing to pay 1$ per hour of fun for a game I’m not so sure about but willing to spend 5$ per hour on a game I am very sure I’ll have fun with (Batman comes to mind). Other than multiplayer, which I don’t consider “fun” in terms of value, how many games pass the 10 hour mark, let alone the 20? FTL, a game I adore, already has over 20 hours into it and I got it on sale for under 10$. WoW has provided hundreds of hours of entertainment but also cost me hundreds of dollars. I stopped playing – and paying – when the fun value no longer matched the price value.

 In today’s day of Steam and Used game sales, we are all being taught to better value our entertainment dollars. While there will always be a mad rush to the door for CoD on launch day, other than 2-3 games a year, every other game needs to find the right balance and every gamer needs to do the same.

Happy New Year

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Boy was I sick over the holidays.  I think I’m the only one who lost weight eating turkey and cookies.  Still, friends and family make it worthwhile.  Plus, Steam is having a massive holiday sale, which I’ve sunk quite a few pennies into.  Go-go Gaben!

Best wishes to everyone in the new year!

Social Climate

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A bit of a deviation today, turning once again to the social climate of gaming.  I’ve been gaming for nearly 30 years now and across all that time there has been a definite progress in terms of social interaction and stigma.  We’re currently in a time where it’s “cool” to be geeky but not yet cool enough to game.  It’s getting better mind you.  When I first started writing guides/selling items online, people looked at my like I was a weirdo.  Nowdays, people simply talk to me about what I write.  I’ve been at parties where complete strangers walk up to me and talk about it, simply from reference.  There really isn’t much more to be said about this particular point as it’s generational.  Give it another 10-20 years and gaming will become more popular than sports (if it isn’t already).

My point for this post is the social interaction that exists within gaming culture.   This is no different than any sub-culture’s social growth in most respects.  It starts small, with a dedicated group and similar (if not identical) interests.  If you like to roleplay in real life, then the odds of you finding kindred spirits at a LARPing event are rather high.  In essence, you need two things: common interests and opportunity.

Transcribe that to gaming.  In the early days of BBS, the player pool was miniscule and the interests common.  You could make friends rather easily.  The first MMOs came out and with a lack of competition, again, simple to make social pairings.  In UO, I ran the largest anti-PK group on the server and made good friends with most of the PKs.  Vanilla WoW had server limitation, so that at the top end of any server, you had a pool of perhaps 100 players.  It was rather easy to make groups.  As the game moved forward and “casualized” the content, more and more people fit into that player pool.  Borders broke down and LFD/LFR came into play.  Now, when you play the game, you have better odds of finding a bad with 1000 gold than seeing the same person 2 days in a row.  The player pool has been massively diluted.

This is one reason why the more niche games have a better social grasp on their players.  The games serve a specific need – which attracts a specific individual.  Since those are smaller groupings, it’s somewhat easier to make the social connection.  EvE is a superb example of how a game goes from social-hive to wild-west.  Over 80% of the player base never touches the social aspect of the game (minus the core mechanics of the game).  However, EvE is still partially controlled by the original player base, through the CSM.  Where WoW is categorically aimed at a different market than launch, EvE is headed in the exact same direction as day 1.

There’s an additional topic on about how EvE’s social atmosphere is actually negative and WoW’s is a positive one from a psychological aspect.  By keeping a small social group that never changes, you become isolated and xenophobic.  WoW’s idea to expose all players to all sorts of different social stimuli is a net positive for social integration.  How both of these games actually integrate these ideas through game mechanics is a completely different topic.

Social Repercussions

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What happens when someone can say something online that they would never say in person?  What if they couldn’t say that in person or face legal consequences?

In Canada we have free speech up until the point of hate speech.  You can say pretty much anything unless it causes direct harm to a group of individual.  The US 1st amendment is a bit different in that you can say pretty much anything to anyone, with no consequence.  In the EU in general, there are laws to combat this sort of behavior.  You can be a bully if you want but if you get caught, jail time.  We don’t have that in North America.  (I realize some people don’t think we need those laws.  I prefer to think that in terms of social reform, the countries that have been around ~1500 years longer have a better grasp.  The US is especially divided, making it a rather poor example as a whole.)

Back to the online presence.  A few people are aware of the GIF Theory.  A simple theory in that given anonymity to everyone can lead to bad things.  WoW tried to combat this with their RealID fisco a few years back, where you could only post with your real name.  The irony is that would have led to more harassment that it would have prevented.  No word of a lie, WoW random groups can be cesspits of society.  F2P games, League of Legends in particular, has the same problem.  Random groups of people, with no investment and low odds of meeting each other again, have no restrictions on behavior.  Heck, play any XBOX Live game.

The UK comes into the news spotlight from time to time for giving forum trollers prison sentences.  Not a lot, only a few weeks, but it’s enough deterrent to make people think twice.  Imagine explaining to your employer that you have to go away for 3-4 weeks.  I rather like this model as the punishment is social and economical but with restrictions.  Having 4chan or reddit go after someone (which they’ve done multiple times) usually means a destroyed business and personal life.  Rarely do they go after anyone where there is legal precedent.  Nearly all the time, it’s someone in the US that has done something asinine.  Sometimes they get it wrong though, and that’s where I have issue.  The person being targeted has no escape or recourse to recoup the losses.

I think that the current responsibility for managing this problem is within the hands of game developers.  They aren’t selling a singular experience, they are selling a group experience.  It’ll take 1 company to put in some system (LoL is trying) that curbs this activity and then the rest will be liable to do the same.  Heck, the majority of privacy changes that Facebook has had to implement are because of Canadian law.

Sooner or later, the legal systems across the world will catch up.  The internet and games as a whole, will have to mature.

 

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Massively has a “soapbox-like” post about SWTOR and its target audience. I think the argument applies to the MMORPG realm as a whole to be frank. The crux of it all is that gamer demographics and player audiences do not match up against paying subscribers. The perceived benefit for designing to your vocal playerbase is often at odds with who is actually paying to play your game.

A referenced study points to younger players aspiring to a leadership position (~24%). This shouldn’t seem strange to anyone who’s played an MMO before or anyone who’s been in their 20s before. The mentality of the “student gamer” is widely different than the “adult gamer” in their 30s. In addition, when you factor in the female demographic, which is far from negligible, the amount of players opting for a leadership role diminishes drastically.

If you were to map those age categories with your existing playerbase, you’d find many more players in the adult/female gamer group than you would in the 18-22 demographic. Yet games are primarily designed for the latter group. Admittedly, this group is often the most vocal (for various reasons) yet a poor designer is the one who designs for the renter rather than the owner.

Case in point, the top tier guilds in WoW. Ensidia, Blood Legion et al. all maintain a core player base in their 18-22 demo. They play hardcore hours for a few weeks until the content is complete then un-subscribe until the next patch, then do it again. People at this level of skill and time dedication are in such a small minority – perhaps 200 people out of 9 million – yet the game has tended to their playstyle. Cataclysm is a perfect example of why this method fails, with the over 3 million subs lost over this expansion cycle.

Quick stats first. Heroic Lich King was out for nearly a year and had massive nerfs to the content. Still, in what is arguably the most casual-friendly expansion pack, only 10% of players ever finished that mode. Heroic Firelands had under 1% completion during it’s current-content run. There were zero systems developed for the 99% of players who obviously had better things to do. The game you bought in the box was the exact same game for over a year. Then 4.3 came out and included costume customization and the LFR tool. The first was somewhat casual-friendly while the latter boosted the raid consumption from 10% to 50% (on an easier difficulty curve).

TOR gets back to the front now, with a design element favoring the vocal minority of gamers – namely hard challenges, a gear grind and specific “special snowflake” encounters/rewards. This is an exclusive group that builds internal cliques of friends but actively shuns the casual player. This is also the player group who consumes content at an epic pace and leaves the game wanting another challenge. There’s nothing wrong with this group existing. There are plenty of games where the challenge is organic to the game (CoD comes to mind). In a themepark however, the rides are limited and take resources to develop. If this tier of player consumes content faster than you can build it, they leave. If they only account for 10% of your playerbase, you really have to ask yourself, do they really matter for the longevity of your game?

Gaming as a Boone or Bane

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IGN has a pretty decent article about why people play games.  I mean this from the company that plasters the game it’s reviewing’s ads all over the place.  Journalistic integrity is far from it’s humble beginnings.

This jist of the article is that people escape into video games to avoid the stresses of everyday life.  This is not new.  People do this with TV (always a happy ending), films (hero saves the day), comics (look at those bodies).  It’s the basis of art.  Games use lies to tell the truth.

In my personal case, I’ve been down the rabbit hole a few times.  I am quite cognizant that games are my personal refuge.  I feel comfortable in them.  I feel powerful.  I have a great understanding in them.  I know that the game is playing fair and if I find one that isn’t (World of Tanks for example), then I simply leave it aside.

If I try really hard at something in a game and I fail, I’ve lost time but gained experience. If I try really hard at something in the real world, I certainly lose time but I also lose money, respect, confidence and a whole whack of other things.  Sometimes I can leverage the game experience into the real world.  Leading a raid is a great example of this.  You have to heard 24 other cats to the same pen.  Healers and Tanks are somewhat similar in that they need to prioritize and take leadership. DPS, like it or not, are the grunts.  Heck, I’ve known doctors who played DPS just to let their brains relax.

It’s interesting to see the correlation between what we game, why we game and who we are in the real world.  This blog certainly gives some insight into my mindset.  I just hope that people who do game, understand why they do and get the right kind of pleasure out of it.

Fishing – The Marker of a Good MMO

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I started playing MMOs when UO launched.  It had fishing and it was an extremely basic version of the activity at first – basically fish and junk.  A while later they put in what I consider the most expansive fishing mini-game of all time – treasure chests.

I spent hours sailing across the sea fishing up all sorts of things.  Treasures chests, sea serpents, water elementals and finding more treasure maps.  I made a treasure hunter character just for this activity and it was awesome.  It was hard mind you, you could easily die when you dug up a level 5 chest but from start to finish, fishing was one of the main reasons I played UO for so long.

EQ had fishing but it was (and is?) still rather basic.  Pole, bait, find a lake each with different fish with different things to do.  I maxed it without question and still had fun filling in the dead spots waiting for the damn boats.

WoW had fishing as well and at first it was even simpler than EQs system.  It then added fishing pools, special fish, neat quests and amazing food.  Now we have pets.  I think I would put it as #2 in terms of fishing mini games for what I’ve played at least.

Rift recently (patch 1.7) put in fishing and after about 8 hours you can max what you need to.  There’s the inherent achievement/artifact mini game that comes along with it but fishing as a whole is a simple affair.  Perhaps they’ll put in some more stuff for people to do with it but I am finding myself fascinated with fishing once again.

It’s clear to me that I can’t stick with a game unless it has fishing and I think it’s one of those systems that shows that the rest of the game is solid enough for the devs to build something that’s nearly 100% flavor.  How well balanced does your game have to be before you have the cycles necessary to devote to such a skill set?

I wonder how many other MMOs that are trying to enter (or establish themselves) into the massive pool of games will take the effort to put in time wasters like fishing.  MMOs need time wasters with personal flavor.  Games without them are simply destined for niche markets.