How awesome is this? Secret of the Monkey Island, one of my favorite games of all time, as a school play. Pure genius. (Jump for a Youtube embed.)

So, I asked PEGI about the WotLK 12+ rating based on it containing scenes where the player has to torture human-like characters, and shoot people in cages, some of whom beg for mercy before being killed by the player. Their stance is that the 12+ rating is correct, since the violence isn't graphic enough, and that the victims don't respond to the violence in a realistic manner. No blood - the violence doesn't exist. I'm slightly confused on how lying dead in the ground after being shot is unrealistic, but maybe that's just me. I was told I can continue the discussion by filing an official complaint, but I don't think I want to go quite that far.

I guess by this logic one could create a text-based game where the primary objective of the game is to strangle bound people, have long descriptions of how the suffocation happens and get a 12+ by PEGI, since there is not graphics involved. The official PEGI literature uses word "depiction" to describe the game content, but PEGI interprets that as pure visualization. I can only assume the lingo has been carefully chosen for maximum approval by authorities, and the interpretation for the maximum benefit of the gaming industry.

What this means to me, is that when I get to the point of purchasing games to my daughter in a few year's time, I won't actually trust the PEGI system. While the visualization of violence and sex is something I think I'll want to protect her from, I don't want her to play games with torture either.

I work in the gaming industry and I love games. And I really like WoW, too. But I just sometimes get this feeling that a bit more honesty wouldn't hurt anyone. And organizations which have been created within an industry in order to proactively prevent authorities from meddling with the industry tend to have issues with honesty, which seems to be the case here. Sigh.

Richard Bartle blogged a while back about a WoW quest where the player has to torture an NPC, and how it upset him. Which raised a lot of (sad) comments from all over, so he had to reply in public.

Richard, I agree with you. The quest is sad, and I don't think it fits in WoW very well. Sadder thing is, there's more similar content in WotLK and some of it is ever worse.

Here's a quest where the player is asked to experiment with a disease agent on a prisoner. Here's another torture quest (during which you see prisoners to be tortured, and can't free them). Here's my personal favorite: a quest where the player is ordered to kill citizens captured by the enemy, as a punishment for being captured. The prisoners are in cages so they can't escape and you're supposed to shoot them in cold blood.

What's Blizzard trying to teach people who play WoW? The comments in Wowhead make me feel a bit better, which range from "I hate Blizzard for doing these cruel quests" to "This quest killed me a little on the inside".

I don't think it's going to happen, but what I'd love to see happen at Bliz is:

1) Have a discussion with the copywriters who wrote these quests, and talk about why the quests where done the way they were done. And if you have the guts, state this in public.

2) Allow for alternating storylines where you can complete a quest without doing this disturbing stuff.

What makes this discussion especially interesting is that WoW has PEGI rating of 11+ in Finland, and 12+ elsewhere. I doubt this would stay if someone actually told PEGI about these quests. And this goes to show how PEGI is broken.

Update: PEGI lists WotLK as 12+. I sent them a query about whether they think torture scenes are appropriate for 12 year olds, and got a quick reply:

"We have examined the game World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and according to the PEGI system this game has been rated 12+ because of the depictions of non-realistic looking violence towards human-like or animal-like characters. Also in he scenes/ quest you describe the violence visualized is still non-realistic."

I guess this begs a question on what is actually realistic, and what isn't. PEGI's interpretation seems to be that since you can opt to play a non-human character and there's no blood, the scene is non-realistic. I'm slightly confused - I guess Reservoir Dogs torture scene was non-realistic as well, since the violence wasn't actually visualized at all.

Update 2: PEGI's questionnaire that's aimed to make rating games easier states the following are indicators that a game should be rated 18+:

• Depictions of gross violence, which includes torture, dismemberment, sadism and horrific depictions of death or injury towards human-like or animal-like characters.
• Depictions of violence towards vulnerable or defenceless human-like characters

The explanation for the former suggest the torture should be somewhat graphic to count, and the latter is indicated to have merit on it's own, be the violence graphic or not.

I guess my opinion on this is that it's fine to have the scenes in WoW, but I don't think the game's content is suitable for the 12+ rating it's been given. WotLK should have PEGI rating of 16+.

As of today, Habbo is a dual currency economy. Credits are bought and used to purchase persistent value, and you can earn Pixels by doing Achievements and just hanging around online. We're piloting the change in UK, and if it's working fine, the other countries will get it at some point in the future (as usual).

The user feedback is of course mixed, but given the ratio of positive vs negative comments, I think we'll get pretty good overall rating in the final evaluation of the release.

I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in the GDC "Free to Play, Pay for Stuff" round tables - I'm fairly sure this would not have happened without those sessions. And of course, Daniel James and Matt Mihaly for graciously sharing so much of what they've done with virtual economies.

Unfortunately I can't spill all the beans on this but rest assured what's out now is not the whole system. There's still a lot to work on, and most importantly a lot of user feedback to read. It seems I'll be giving a post mortem of sorts about this in GDC, where I hope I can share a lot more than this. :)

Nielsen Norman group just published a 95-page report about Agile processes, and how design can work inside the flow. I haven't had the time to read through the whole thing yet, but it seems the overall quality of the papers is pretty good. The report starts with a fairly long bit about agile scrum-style iterative processes and delves into the design bits only later, so even if you're not actually using agile processes right now, the paper should fit you just fine.

I'm not getting a dime out of recommend the thing - the reason I'm pointing you there is that UX and Agile is not necessarily the easiest marriage in the world, and that I'd love to see more companies start using Scrum. I just watched the team give a sprint demo today back at the office, and it's glaringly obvious people are happier now than what they were before we started using Scrum. And we're getting more done, too! :)

Given that I think my iPhone is the best thing after the invention of sliced bread, MobileMe sounded fantastic. Push email, calendar synch from the cloud, yay!

I ended up disabling the free trial after a couple days. The service is utterly broken.

The calendar synchronization doesn't actually synchronize the calendars. In addition to not supporting subscribed ics calendars, it actually went and deleted about half of the events I created on my iPhone.

The email push only works for the me.com address and I'm not going to swap to email addresses. And it seemed the push actually only works about 50% of the time.

AIM using me.com account is useless since I don't have any of my contacts on that account. And I don't want to start using the account either, since I won't want to lose the contacts if I later stop using MobileMe.

The iDisk is too small for anything big, and too slow for anything quick.

Having said all that, I hope Apple fixes the service, and lets me on another free trial so I can verify it really is fixed. Until that, so long!

In unrelated news, I think Apple fucked up badly with the feature set of the new MacBooks. I would have been seriously tempted to get one, but the lack of a Firewire port is a deal breaker for me. I've tried using USB for hard drives and the performance just doesn't cut it (in my own "real world copy lots of stuff around and time how long it takes" tests, same drive over FW400 is about twice as fast as the same drive over USB 2.0). And I'm about to shell for 16 GB memory cards for the new cameras, and I'm seriously considering getting a Firewire reader for those, since the USB reader is painfully slow.

You need to have some level of Internet cultural knowledge to appreciate this:



(Watch in YouTube.)

Eric Ries, one of the IMVU founders, has posted an excellent piece on three key questions to ask yourself when thinking of virtual goods models:

• User-generated content (UGC) or first-party content?
• Subscription or a la carte payments?
• Merchandising or gameplay?

I'm finding the amount of Habbo references interesting, but then I would assume that every virtual goods startup has used the service as a reference.

First a short awesome clip of Little Big Planet gameplay where someone has constructed a working calculator out of more than 1600 parts in the game. Watch it to the end, so you'll see the magnitude of the construction. Boggles my mind.



Second clip is an hour long, but worth watching if you do any design work which results in users making choices. The video shows a talk from Barry Schwartz and deals with the Paradox of Choice as he's putting it - people get paralyzed of all the choice available nowadays, and end up choosing nothing as a result. My head is exploding with the amount of application this has in the design work I do, as well as explains a lot on why life feels a bit hard sometimes.

A simple game design example could be, this explains why choosing which quests to do in which order in WoW is so painful compared to installing an addon that tells you what to do next. Of course, I don't do the quests in the order the addon tells me to most of the time, but having a reference point to compare my choice to makes it faster to decide what to do, and I get more satisfaction for not having to doubt my selection as much.



(Apologies to those with RSS readers that don't show video.)

Couldn't resist posting after Ben Zeigler reviewed WAR starting with the exact words I'd used to start my review. :)

I now have a level 12 Goblin Squig Herder in Warhammer Online.

What I've liked this far:

• I love the sense of humor. And there's lots of it in WAR, more than in other MMOs I've played
• The achievements and related mechanisms like earning titles is very cool
• Public Quests as means to gather influence that gives better loot is _so_ much nicer than having to do raids
• Tome of Knowledge is awesome
• The speed of progression has been pretty good, I've felt very little of the things I've been doing have been grinding
• The Warhammer world seems to have achieved something I though was next to impossible - almost every player I've met has (accidentally?) chosen a name that somehow fits his in-game race/career, indicating they've all considered their "role" in the game to some extent, even if they're not roleplayers at all. Dwarf names sound dwarven, and orcish dudes have generally appropriate names as well. I think this is very impressive.
• The psychological effect of calling PvP RvR is awesome. I hate PvP, but love War's RvR, and the game telling me I've been flagged for RvR doesn't raise the PvP alert.

What doesn't work:

• As Ben is pointing out, I have real difficulty understanding the results of my actions in combat. Judging by how I'm scoring in the Public Quests, I'm pretty effective in combat compared to many other players, but I'm having issues understanding exactly why. I think I know what I'm doing right, but there's too little indication of what the underlying game rules are that guide what happens based on my actions. This is resulting in myself finding it hard to form combat tactics, but also I don't actually understand what equipment I should use, as I don't really understand what the different bonuses do.
• The game has issues with client/server synchronization. Two issues in particular I'm seeing are that my squig suddenly turns into a mode where it's still following me, but I lose control of it completely (the UI disappears). Second one is when I run to hit an opponent at melee range, and the client tells me I'm not close enough to hit, even though my Goblin is drawn right next to the opponent. The latter happens surprisingly often, and is very irritating.
• I've tried to create talismans, but getting the resources and just plain understanding how the crafting works is just too much. This means my inventory is cluttered by a ton of materials for making talismans that I can't really use, but don't want to destroy for fear of needing them. Also the talisman making balancing seems to be wrong right now, since getting access to items with better bonuses than ones from talismans seems to be much, much easier, than trying to use the crafting. In WoW, I could actually use leatherworking to get good stuff for my Hunter, but now the crafting seems to be pretty much useless.
• I'm not sure what to think on the subject of the world feeling empty, or full. I've formed a lot more spontaneous parties in Warhammer than I've ever done in WoW, and generally it's very easy to get a team formed for the public quests. However, most of the RvR areas are just empty, and something is causing the RvR scenario queue wait times to be so long that I'm effectively not able to participate in those at all.
• Last but not least, GOA is improving but they still aren't doing a good job. Their RSS feed for news has the same content for each headline. The website uses craptastic custom-made DHTML widgets in every place where possible, making the site hard to use. There's no forums. There's no decent manual, and no explanation of anything on the website. And interestingly half of the account management is still offline, so I can't yet give them my billing information! I would have assumed the credit card charging processes would've been done prior to launch, and not after.

So - my current sentiment is, I love the game and will continue playing for at least some time to see some of the content closer to the end-game. I hope the bugs and balancing issues are worked out soon, and that my server gets a better balanced amount of players to both Order and Destruction sides soon.

(Ben's comment on having the game run slow are odd. My MacBook Pro can run the game very well under XP, and that's using a graphics card Mythic says might not work.)