182B. Advanced Social Control for Games
As we enter a new paradigm of pro consumer game services we have the opportunity to deploy social controls far superior to what exists in Default Reality, that optimize engagement and conversion.
When I published Systems of Control in F2P in 2013 I attempted to write it in an objective, non judgemental tone. But I was clearly warning consumers and regulators that social controls were being used in games that were harmful to players. No doubt some developers used the information to make their games even less friendly.
Now that regulation is fast approaching, and developers will be in an “Adapt or Die” situation, many will whine and be eliminated from the labor pool. That’s a necessary next step. For those that can adapt, or who have been waiting a long time to make fantastic games but were not allowed to do so, this presents an opportunity to use social control to make gaming experiences that are better than anything available in Default Reality.
A big part of this will be abandoning the inequities and limitations of 250 year old conventional economics and moving to what I might call New Economics. Most of these techniques aren’t really new, they’ve just been applied here and there in haphazard fashion without ever having been integrated with a cohesive design. This allows me to use these Default Reality systems as examples and explain how they could be used to improve Games as a Service.
Creating Opportunity
I’m a fan of managed economies, they are ultimately much more efficient as I’m about to explain. The USA had a managed economy during WW2, and America reached production levels that were considered mythological, even by German standards. The Willow Run B-24 heavy bomber factory produced a bomber every hour. When German spies reported this back home, it was too fantastic to be true. It was laughed off. But as it became apparent that it might be true, it was understood (but only whispered) that it was mathematically certain that the Axis was going to lose.
The USSR maintained this level of productivity for decades, and it is why they were able to compete with the USA despite only having a third of the population. China adopted a managed economy and never looked back. Now it feels like they produce as much as everyone else combined. Which, is how the USA used to be.
So what is a managed economy? What are the pros and cons? Why did we abandon it? Or did we? What does this have to do with games?
When I was a kid, I was only a generation late for WW2. I trained for a military career from the age of 6. Robert Heinlein was my jam! As soon as I was old enough (at 16) I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). Your score on this test would be used to assign you to a role in the military, and this allowed the military to make the best use of all candidates to fill their easiest to hardest roles. Some roles, like pilots, would undergo training costing the government millions of dollars, so allocating labor efficiently was critical. I got a 99 out of 99 score so I was very excited about my future. Plus I had the Congressional Letters of Recommendation from Bob Dornan who I had helped get elected a couple years before.
Education, and efficient assignment of labor to tasks, is perhaps the most critical component of a managed economy. The USA military, and perhaps the entire military industrial complex, is a managed economy. The rest of the country’s industry was kept private. When I rejected the military path at age 18, I sacrificed a lot. But I had no idea how much at the time. I can’t say if I would have done that if I had known. I just assumed that the world was merit based and that I would do well on whatever path I took.
It didn’t take too many years to learn that the private “unmanaged” economy is not merit based. Who you know is more important than what you know. This is especially true in more insulated industries like game development and Hollywood, and it’s certainly true in Academia. The intensity of nepotism in the unmanaged economy leads to huge inefficiencies. You can see something similar happening in Russia after the fall of the USSR, as nepotism and oligarchy replaced the previously managed economy.
I use this example to illustrate that the inefficiencies built into conventional economics (with fragmented market driven production) lead to a huge mismatch not only in physical supply chains, but in the labor supply. Right now unemployment is a huge problem in all major countries. This generation leaves college with very limited opportunities in life. When they do find a job, it’s typically unrelated to their education. Without specialized skill sets, they are easily laid off.
Countries without managed economies have young people excited about being game developers and influencers when they grow up. Companies might need elder care workers, miners, and chemists specializing in rare earth metals. These are not sexy jobs for young adults. Thus the most critical jobs are left unfilled, and we have a flood of workers wanting “prestige” jobs which are both non essential and highly competitive (and thus under paid).
When we have too many people wanting the same job, that’s a disaster. When we lack essential workers, that’s also a disaster. In a managed economy this doesn’t happen. While some people might argue that a managed economy means less “freedom”, opportunity is the best freedom. Being unemployed for long periods of time might be “freedom”, but most people would prefer to have a good job where they are paid well and respected, with high job security.
That’s actually the dream for the younger generations. And it’s a dream they almost certainly won’t experience unless they are privileged in some way and can cut to the front of the line. But what if we could give them that experience in a game world? It’s not an if, we absolutely can do that if we have the design and economic skills to give that to our players.
It’s that sort of life that they will pay to experience while they are unemployed, or under employed, or abused at work. Which, might be most people. Especially younger people. It may be argued that “games are a waste of time”, but if they are producing mental wellness and acting as a bulwark against depression and suicide, they absolutely aren’t a waste of time. If we can sell them “opportunity” instead of a dopamine addiction, we can make life better for our players and keep them as loyal customers for years or even decades to come.
What Would an Opportunity Game Look Like?
The options here are limited only by the team’s design skills and creativity. While an understanding of economics might be helpful, I have to caution that conventional economies have been designed for 250 years to reduce opportunities for most people and to maximize wealth/opportunity disparities. Thus those implementing conventional economics without this awareness are going to end up making shitty games that 99% of consumers won’t appreciate at the level you want them to.
For my example (which again is just one out of an infinite number of ways you can do this) I will approach making a 4X strategy/economics game, which is my top specialty. I do design simple games (like FPS games) but feel it’s not the best use of my skill sets. Understanding the core limitations of design in the strategy genre is helpful, so I recommend these source materials:
Also, since my own research and research done by NetEase proves my hypothesis that asymmetrical games far out perform symmetrical games, we are going to deliberately make our game asymmetrical:
We are going to simultaneously solve all of the biggest issues in MMO 4X gaming simultaneously using social control:
See papers 134A and 136C for a very detailed analysis of these issues and why they decimate monetisation by 90+% in current online games in the genre. I fixed some of these issues in my 2012/13 Sid Meier’s Civilization Online design (before I recommended the project be shut down due to production issues). Here I solve all of them in one paper. Or at least provide a recipe to do so. I don’t publish complete models since that’s my livelihood.
To further boost the profitability of this design we are also going to make the game cyclical/periodic. That means the game runs for a fixed duration (or until a fixed objective is completed) and then restarts. This allows us to sell the same content to players over and over, massively reducing production costs and increasing product lifespan. Not doing this is one of the factors crippling persistent games like EVE Online.
Now imagine the player starts our game world at the age of 16 or maybe even 12 years old. They are not super heroes. Not wizards or warriors. Blank slates. When the server starts everyone piles in. If they want to make multiple accounts, I allow this because the design eliminates any advantage from doing so. More accounts means more enjoyment for them and more money for me. I will limit activity on each account per day (maybe 8 hours a day? can optimize in beta) to not encourage players to harm themselves. This might encourage heavy users to make more than one account, but I will warn players not to overplay for health reasons. I have more problems with players playing my games too much than I do with them playing them too little. Engagement has never been an issue.
The server has a visible countdown timer. This might be a week or two. Players run around a world of opportunity doing any activities they find interesting. As they develop skills, they may have more opportunities unlock for them. I track all of this progress through data collection, then give feedback to players on how they rank against other players on each skill. The more common a skill is, the more green it becomes. Rare or high level skills might turn blue, purple, or gold. Standard RPG progression mechanic.
What happens when the countdown stops is where I turn gaming upside down, and make Adam Smith roll in his grave. The server kicks everyone off, then it does a bunch of math. Perhaps this takes one hour of server maintenance, and everyone knows it’s coming at the end of the countdown. When they log back in, they are now an adult. Instead of choosing a “class”, the server has given them a class. It has given everyone a class. But instead of 4 classes like warrior, mage, thief, cleric, it gives each player a role in a complex economy. So that pre countdown phase is a hellcat of activity as everyone is trying to get the best possible role for themselves. I don’t have to ask them what they want to do, because they told me with what they did during the countdown.
The best roles will come from those that unlock/develop the rarest skills during the countdown phase, which generates intense FOMO and competition. The color feedback alerts the player to how rare/important the skill is that they are doing. Less skilled/ambitious players will be put into more common roles that the economy needs a lot of. Like “miner”, “farmer”, or “soldier”. More advanced players might have more educated/privileged roles like “geologist”, “agronomist”, or “officer”.
Differences in power level between the various roles is what makes this design asymmetrical. I am absolutely not trying to balance the roles. That would damage the design, engagement, monetisation, and lifespan of this game.
Now the game economy activates. Players are creating real outputs for a nation. I can assign a nation at start or after the countdown, making sure they all have the same number of players. Player trade between themselves is disabled to avoid various exploits, especially multi account exploits and “gold farmers”. They send their outputs to their nation in various ways.
In standard Civilization fashion, the nation then spits out technological advancements, improvements in infrastructure, and military units. The military units may be assigned to players depending on their role, and the development budget. If this game is being made “on the cheap” we can automate battles between nations while the players watch. How we make the map, and map expansion/POIs (Points of Interest), is going to affect game complexity and budget. We can start very simple in an alpha and then build to our budget.
The top military players may each get control over some % of the nation’s total forces. They can then allocate their share to conflicts on the map against player nations and AI neutrals. Thus the skill of these players will affect national defence and growth, allowing an economic underdog nation to perform well militarily.
We can just create one general economy with a limited tech tree (say, all of WW2), or we can go truly epic with multiple layered economies covering human progression over several centuries like with my Civilization Online design. In that design each nation progresses from one Era to another over time, with older techs and production becoming obsolete and new resources appearing on the map as they the technologies for them reveal them.
Here everyone is needed by their nation, and feels useful. My “holy Grail” standard for engagement in any online game is if the player feels like they will be missed if they don’t log in every day. We use that goal here as our North Star. If a player drops out we may take new players from a waiting list and either give them the role of the dropped player or perhaps have special “replacement” roles that you can only get by joining late. That latter option is harder to balance but would make replacement accounts valuable to players.
If we go for the “multi-Era” approach (if budget allows) then each nation’s technological progress would start the next countdown. Players would then advance in a related role appropriate to the new tech Era at the end of the countdown. This would maximize engagement at every Era as players are trying to end up with the highest role they can at the end. Based on final performance we can either give them titles, allow them into Veteran games, or maybe even make some roles (like political roles) available to them (but restricted to new players). Many options can be done here with the emphasis on providing ever increasing opportunities to players.
Monetisation would be per account created per server. So the more they play and the more accounts they make, the more they spend.
I would love to sit in front of my computer for the next month and build out this design, but I’d rather still be useful in the process instead of watching someone else have all the fun. Everyone needs to feel needed.
What I love most about this sort of design is that it is so open ended. If you have $5M budget, you build a simple version that people will enjoy. Then as the money flies in you build larger versions of this and release them when ready as new servers. New roles for players to unlock can be added at any time. Thus instead of dropping $100M on it straight up (which just really puzzles me when I see this done in the industry) you keep adding $5M while you build up your player base and let the game pay for itself. Then you don’t have to wonder if your game will be profitable. I assume the reason studios don’t do this is because they don’t plan for success and don’t know how to make open ended Games as a Service. But that’s really the promise of GaaS, isn’t it? If the only thing you are building out over time (the only “Service” you are providing) is more things in your microtransaction shop, then we know why your game disappointed consumers.