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The Social Gaming Summit, held in San Francisco last Friday, has been explored here on the site by our own Akela Talamasca. Today the Worlds in Motion blog has a great writeup of a panel on user-generated content, with an emphasis on how that concept applies to online gaming. Industry luminaries including Three Rings' Daniel James touched base with attendees on what makes user content so compelling, why users create, and what game makers can do to incorporate player creations.

Most interesting was their observation that virtual spaces were more important than virtual worlds per se. Jeremy Monroe, Director of Business Development for the makers of Habbo Hotel, offered this: "You have to make sure that you're bringing content that is suitable to all players in the world. So when we bring a piece of content that skews to one demographic we have to make sure that we bring more content that skews to the other demographics. Some games try to create different servers, such as a PvP vs. PvP situation. You have to give everybody equal opportunity and an equal number of tools to express themselves."

A new MMO comes out. You've read the reviews, Watched the promo videos. Changed your desktop to show the buxom model on their cover art. Subscribed to the newsletter. Read all the developer interviews. Attended the chats! Participated in the lively banter between the lead designer and the people of a well known community forum! You've made your own guild before you even got to play the game! You pre-ordered the special collector's edition, and the game's theme music is on continual repeat on your iPod!

The fateful day comes, you install the game and ... well, it's a decent enough game, but it just isn't what you expected. You play it for a few days, and then start wishing you hadn't given away all your gold and sharded your epics in your old game. And maybe you suddenly regret telling the raid leader just exactly, precisely what you thought of him. So do you stick with the new game? Or return to the old? How long do you give a new game to grab you before you erase it from your hard drive, put the disks on the shelf, and call it a decent effort but just not the game you wanted to play? Just the free month? Until you reach the max level? Or just fifteen minutes perhaps?

From the Sexbox and Mass Effect to World of Warcraft, Everquest and even face-to-face Dungeons and Dragons, the mainstream media hates your hobbies. They're turning you into suicidal addicts, mass-murderers, inappropriate touchers, criminals and terrorists, right?

Well, seeing that you don't seem to be any of those things, has it occurred to you to wonder just why such FUD keeps turning up over and over. No, it's not Luddism (well, it's mostly not Luddism as it's commonly thought of). For the most part, this is about money.

Rick van der Wal over at Digado ( which stands for "Digital Adoption") wrote a very interesting piece listing his "Top 7 Marketing Strategies in Games." Van der Wal (who is studying Communications and Multimedia design at the Hogeschool Rotterdam and has worked as a Marketer) hits on a few points that are very insightful. His article really goes hand and hand with Sanya Weather's "Why People Quit" piece over on Eating Bees.

His first strategy, Socially Excusable Meetings, states that games have evolved to a point where they offer complex, social environments and have become a "social excuse to meet and interact." Much like golf. As Van der Wal points out he's not the first to make this comparison. I've seen the analogy made that MMOs are in fact today's version of golf, which aside from a "social excuse to meet" has long been used as informal "business meetings." Why not take this modern day version of an old school concept to a whole other level?

Strategies two through five: Create Clear Objectives, Instant Rewarding, Create a "common" Goal, and Challenge your User all seem obvious to everyone except gaming companies. The one that intrigues me the most is "Challenge your User" because as I've mentioned before, players are starting to feel less and less special. As Van der Wal points out, gamers are more than willing to listen and learn, spending hours of their precious free time in game. Instead of letting them just grind their day away - challenge them! His final two points (The Value of Status, and Create "epic" Experiences) are just as fascinating. Van der Wal's points aren't just marketing strategies though, they can even be regarded as design strategies. Strategies that could benefit the gaming industry immensely.

Wilhelm of AGN is one of the many players setting sail in the PotBS pre-order preboarding, and he's dealing with one of the hardest decisions MMO players ever make: choosing a server. OK, maybe it's not really that hard (choosing a class probably is), but there is an art to it.

The first thing that determines where you want to play in a multi-realm MMO has to be your previous in-game friends-- if there's anyone already in the game that you need to play with, then you want to make sure to be on the same server they are (as Wilhelm says, "go play with your friends" trumps his rules entirely). After that, everyone's got their criteria. Me, I like a server with a little higher-than-normal population-- it can't be so high that it's overcrowded, but I don't want to play on a low-population server. These are massively multiplayer games, after all. Wilhelm says not to pick the first or last server on the list-- clearly, he's a man who avoids extremes, and probably the highest populations as well.

After that, it's as arbitrary as you want it to be. Wilhelm goes for the most complicated name, but usually by the time I've punched in my criteria, the game only gives me one recommendation, and then I take it. Any other factors that go into choosing a server when you first fire up an MMO?

I think I've mentioned before that I really enjoy Sanya Weathers' blog about running communities for MMO games, and in her latest post, she makes a great point about stability and expecting it from the games we play.

The example she uses is Xbox Live, which isn't technically an MMO, but does, as she says, constitute a "massive, multiplayer experience." Microsoft has had trouble over the holidays keeping it up and running, and now they've decided to give out a free download to compensate players. How, says Sanya, can they be surprised at this point that they'd have a surge of users over the holidays? Isn't it common knowledge at this point not to play MMOs when a new expansion comes out or when new users show up in droves?

But then she shares the real insight: this shouldn't happen any more. MMOs are no longer a niche business, something we should have to suffer hardships just to play these games. As she says, "it's time to expect our toys to work when we plug them in."

Of course, any IT guy will tell you that downtime is unavoidable-- accidents happen, and predictions are just predictions. Anyone expecting anything to work all the time is going to get disappointed. But at this point, if you have a game (or a system, or a service) that is supposed to be "massive," you have no excuses when everybody shows up to play.

Saving the world is something that most have us as gamers have grown rather accustomed to over the years. Almost since the beginning, game designers have used the risk of global destruction as a tool to more completely involve players in the seriousness of a given game narrative. Whether we're preventing our world from being sucked into a demonic alternate dimension, devoured by a horde of merciless alien predators, or being blown up by a clown-faced madman, the stakes are nearly always high. MMOs certainly never bow from using world destruction as a plot-device; it's usually at the center of the end-game.

So what then do we make of a post by Tony Walsh on his Clickable Culture blog earlier this month that questions the extent to which MMOs are contributing to the destruction of the very planet most of us inhabit every day? He cites some statistics that estimate the carbon footprint of your typical computer server, such as the ones that power most MMOs, is as big as a gas-guzzling SUV. When you consider the sheer amount of power it must take to keep the servers for World of Warcraft alone running, you start to get an idea of the magnitude of the discussion. Walsh suggests that the best compromise for those who are green at heart is to simply not play MMOs at all.

While I have to grant that I had never considered the environmental impact of MMOs before, I disagree with his point that the best option is to cut ourselves off. If we took that approach to power use, we'd scarcely have justification to turn on the heat, let alone power on our computer. I don't doubt that we'll see a "green" MMO that uses carbon-neutral power in the future, I don't think it's something we should worry too much about in the meantime.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the holidays is that many of us have to leave our rigs behind us as we make the often lengthy journeys from our gaming hovels to visit family and friends. In a lot of cases, we're lucky if our relatives have broadband, let alone the kind of computer that could run our taste in MMOs. So unless you've got a pretty kick-ass laptop, you're almost assuredly out of luck when it comes to satiating your gaming urges.

For those lucky enough to be in a household with cable, we may have stumbled on a bit of gaming methadone to help calm the shakes. G4 recently aired a special on the "MMO Phenomena," which covers World of Warcraft, Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan, The Agency, God & Heroes, Second Life, and more. Nobody on-staff has seen the program yet, so we can't really vouch for it's quality, but it's better than nothing, and it should be on a fairly regular rotation. Keep an eye out!

For the veritable cavalcade of new titles in development to make it in the lucrative massively multiplayer genre, they're all going to have to face the challenge of standing up to the "holy trinity" that is World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and EVE Online, at least according to Lauren Michele on her blog Mystic Worlds. While there is certainly room for niche titles to make their mark (a category she sets aside for the likes of CoX and Guild Wars) every new game in the MMO space, whether they like it or not, has to compete with the big three. Casual-friendly games have to compete with the polish and spit-shine of WoW, more intense games, both in terms of graphics and mechanics/lore have to compete with EQ2, and any game with aspirations in the PvP or economic niches have to go toe to toe with EVE.

While I might not be inclined to agree with the specifics of her characterization, I think the larger point Lauren makes is extremely salient to developers working within the genre. While second-tier first-person shooters get compared to Halo in the same way that new MMOs get compared to WoW, those new shooters aren't typically competing for those same dollars. The same can't be said for MMOs. While it's true that MMOs are one of the few growth spheres left in gaming, a fact which is largely responsible for the rather dense gaming horizon ahead of us, those new games aren't just going to have to compete with one another -- there's a whole litany of old titles that continue to hold players and represent direct competition. It's about to get a lot tougher out there.

Raph Koster has posted about Live Gamer, a new service we posted about yesterday (heavily funded by venture capitalists) that is attempting to bring the real money trading market (where you pay real money for ingame items) over to the official, developer-approved side of things. Gamasutra has a Q&A as well, and there's a lot to chew on as regards to what Live Gamer seems to be attempting to do.

Raph's idea seems to be that RMT is simply another ancillary service that can spring up and provide revenue around the MMO market (of which this very site you're reading is one). But there is a serious difference between RMT, and services like the one this site provides (in the form of MMO news and guides). RMT is still, among most players, considered cheating. As most people trying to make money off of RMT have pointed out, it's a cultural thing, much more ingrained among Westerners than anywhere else. But it's still a perception that exists-- it's OK to look at a strategy guide to become a better player, but it's not OK to pay real money for better gear.

Which makes Raph's last two sentences that much more disturbing. He says gamers won't like this (and they already do not). But he says that the same people who publicly decry RMT will be spending money on it in private. As much as players argue against RMT on message boards and in blog comments, there's no denying that these venture capitalists are convinced there is a huge market there.

Yesterday, the Washington DC chapter for the Association of Computer Machinery welcomed game design guru Richard Garriott to speak at its last meeting for the 2007 calendar year. Garriott, who has been writing and designing games professionally since the age of 19, is currently the executive producer on Tabula Rasa, though he's perhaps better known as the man behind Ultima Online, likely the MMO for which he will be most remembered. It helped pioneer the massively multiplayer game as we know it, and ushered in many gaming conventions that we're still familiar with today.

While we were expecting something of a more technical speech from Garriott given the venue, the lecture was more autobiographical, with the esteemed Lord British explaining how, as one of the industry's oldest members, he's had to ride the wave of expectations in PC gaming over time. He also reflected on many aspects of Tabula Rasa's recent release, making it a relevant discussion for gamers who are more familiar with his more recent offerings in the genre.

Richard Garriott, founder of the legendary Ultima series and Executive Producer for Tabula Rasa, gave a lecture this evening to the Washington D.C. chapter for the Association of Computer Machinery. Of course, being your personal guide into the complex world of MMOs, we were on-hand to cover the event. While you'll have to wait until tomorrow to see the full write-up, we couldn't resist posting this juicy bit of information that fell from the lips of one Lord British.

Addressing the issue of the near-constant feedback cycle that MMOs enjoy by virtue of being in a persistent state of development and refinement, Garriott cited Tabula Rasa's PvP as an element of the game that was being moved up the ladder of development priorities. PvP in the game's current state essentially amounts to guilds camping teleporters and hospitals, waiting for members of warring clans to appear, where they can be taken by surprise and slaughtered.

Garriott's vision for the future of the PvP system is set to feature TR's popular Capture Point gameplay mechanic. Clans will be to capture CPs for themselves, generating money based on the activities of the NPCs within the CP. This will have the dual effect of giving warring clans something to do besides spawn-camping as well as give a context for PvP that makes slightly more sense within the lore. It's always been a bit of a rough sell having fellow members of the Allied Free Sentients slaughtering each other, but the idea of clans trying to control commerce is somehow more palatable.

Again, we'll have a full write-up tomorrow.

The Forge tackles an interesting question: are fantasy sports MMOs? Some of the more traditional sports fans would probably deny it, but Matt echoes a great case made by Charles Hudson: they feature repetitive gameplay, a combination of luck, skill, and strategy, and there is the obvious social element. I don't know if I would call fantasy sports "virtual worlds" (so this is likely the last you'll see of them on Massively for the foreseeable future), but it's definitely true that both fantasy sports and MMOs share the same type of social gameplay that's made them both so popular.

Now, Matt says they also have a story, and to a certain extent, he's right. The real allure of sports is knowing all the stories behind it-- that Brett Favre's father passed away right before he played, or that the star hockey player is leaving right after the game ends to go see the birth of his baby. Behind all the stats, sports is one big storytelling session, and Sportscenter is the biggest daily soap opera of all time.

But I don't think it's the story element that pulls in fantasy sports players-- it's the competitive element. The numbers all break down, and at the end of the year, you have a clear ranking that says who's better than who at predicting sports outcomes, and by how much. There is a certain amount of that competitive draw in PvP, but MMOs, I think, are far too distant from the actual numbers to make a sports fan happy. They may be interested in story, but at the end of the day, the game comes down to runs, strikes, and outs, and I think that's the way they like it.

Ryan Shwayder pointed us to this fun little rant he posted on that most nefarious of MMO subjects: "the grind." Yes, the grind, that mythical beast that lies at the bottom of every MMO, slowly sucking the fun out of it. Wait, "mythical"? That's right-- Shwayder says that there is no grinding in MMOs. That constant, repetitive killing that you do to push your character to higher equipment and levels? That, my friend, is what you bought the game for.

An interesting point, and in a sense, he's right-- the only RPG I've ever played without a little repetitive grinding is actually Progress Quest (and if you're in on the joke, you know you don't actually play that game at all). It is true that "the grind" only rears its ugly head not when players are signed in and playing the game, but when they're out of game, and looking at all the stuff they need to do to wield that +5 sword of boar slaying. In a good game, actually grinding is actually fun.

Then again, we are only human, and there is so much boar killing you can do before you decide to move on. And since playtime is more and more at a premium, there's nothing wrong with developers making something that previous required 100 boars killed to require only 50, and create a whole other reward for those other 50 boars. But Ryan's also right in saying that the grind is mostly in our heads-- if we got everything we wanted right away, there'd be no reason to play the game. "Grinding" to the highest levels is what playing most MMOs is all about.

Or: Why gamers and virtual worlders should care about each other.

We're shy of a month in to Massively's existence, and one of the more persistent bits of feedback we continue to receive regards the inclusion of Second Life content on a site about MMOs. There are really two questions to answer here:

1. Does Second Life coverage belong on Massively at all?
2. Is the amount of Second Life content disproportionate to its mindshare?

I will herein state a claim for a definitive yes on point 1, and readily admit that point 2 is arguably a matter of taste. Maintaining editorial balance surrounding all of the many, varied games we cover is an ongoing process, and we've selected a suite of "core games" based on many factors including subscriber/member numbers, overall buzz and mindshare in the industry, and input from a secret algorithm I would love to call "interestingness" if it weren't already taken. We are proud to offer in-depth Second Life coverage as one of those core current titles.

Overall, we're taking a broad definition of the concept of MMO here at Massively. While the majority of our coverage concerns traditionally "gamer"-oriented titles like City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa, Lord of the Rings Online et al, we're also providing both news and feature content surrounding more casual, often browser-based titles like Dofus, Runescape, and Flyff. Despite popular perception as niche titles, some of these games are rivaling the big dogs in terms of membership and hours played. In an industry toying with the idea of whether or not Facebook is an MMO and witnessing Google almost surely building one, we see projects like MetaPlace further blurring the lines between web-based social networking and Gaming with a capital G. In the middle of those two trends -- hardcore and casual games getting mashed up, and MMOs and the web getting mashed up -- sits Massively; and we're excited to be covering it all as it happens.