Last weekend I spent about 10 hours playing Mass Effect 2. I won’t bore the non-gamers out there with superlatives on how fantastic it is, what a totally immersive gaming experience it provides, and how utterly compelling the story is.

Except I just did, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make today.

For most of videogame history you as the gamer didn’t have any moral choices to make in a game. You were the Good Guy and the goal of the game was to defeat the Bad Guys.

This gradually changed as gamers grew up and videogame designers got more comfortable with moral ambiguity in a game’s storyline. Now a lot of games allow the player to make choices that directly or indirectly affect the plot and outcome of the game.

Back in the day when these types of games first came out, I always chose the ‘evil’ options. In any Star Wars game I was the Sith Lord, choosing the Dark Side of the Force while betraying friendships and killing good guys.

In the first Fable I was so thoroughly evil that halfway through the game my character had already spawned horns and caused entire villages to evacuate at the first sight of me.

When World of Warcraft came out I only chose an Alliance Night Elf because my buddies played Alliance, but I really wanted an Undead Warlock to wreak havoc with. (I’ve since become totally committed to my NE Druid but that’s mostly because of the class’s überness.)

And don’t even get me started on one of my all-time favourites: Carmageddon.

But games got more refined, and what started out as simple black & white choices between good and evil has now turned in to a landscape of shades of grey. The Bioware game studio is considered a master of games with moral choices, and their latest product has left me feeling rather, well… confused.

The game I’m talking about is of course Mass Effect 2, and the confusion stems from a sudden inability on my part to make ‘evil’ choices.

Mass Effect 2 is a sequel (of course), and I played the first Mass Effect twice - one as the ‘good guy’ and one as an evil bastard. I thoroughly enjoyed both versions. The ending of the game wasn’t affected too much, but the whole feel and mood of the game changed. Overall I wasn’t too bothered by the choices I made, I just wanted to play the game to its full potential.

Mass Effect 2, however, has changed things. ME2 offers abundant opportunities to make moral choices, and many choices are pretty straightforward - kill or let live, steal or give back, lie or be truthful.

But some choices you have to make aren’t so monochrome. Do I intimidate and hurt this man to give me vital information that can save lives, or do I go easy on him? Do I kill this repentant bad guy, or do I let him go and trust he won’t commit more crimes? Do I shoot the frightened hostage aiming a gun at me, or do I try to talk him down from his panic?

And those are just the direct choices. The game is rife with choices that have deeper meaning and longer-lasting repercussions. Do I take the quick and often violent way through missions, bullying and intimidating my way around, generating more money for myself and my team members so the better, bugger guns are available faster and I can save the universe more efficiently? Or do I walk the straight and narrow path which invariably makes it more difficult and challenging, but the trail of corpses and devastated lives in my wake will be considerably thinner?

What used to make these choices so easy is the realisation that it really was just a game I was playing. Pixels on a screen, bits and bytes, lines of code, all that jazz. But Mass Effect 2 is such an advanced game, graphically and gameplay-wise, that you don’t feel like you’re playing a game. You become immersed in it, you are part of the game, and the choices you make in the game somehow reflect on you as a person.

And because of this I find myself unable to make any choice in the game that could be considered ‘evil’. Sometimes the morally grey choices leave me almost paralysed because I can’t figure out what the best option is. Occasionally I loathe myself for shooting the bad guys, even when they’re shooting at me, because the game succeeds so magnificently in painting its characters as real living beings. Even the aliens seem real, which is a truly amazing feat of game design.

So I’m confused. As with the first game I want to play Mass Effect 2 twice, making radically different choices in each session.

But I already know I won’t. Not this time. The game is too good, the voice-over acting too convincing, the digitally generated facial expressions too real. A part of me wants to be the bad guy again, rampaging my way through the gameworld, uncaring and unfeeling.

But that’s not who I am in the real world. And because of that, in Mass Effect 2 I can’t be that person in the game world either.

Ten Ton Hammer has published an editorial about EVE Online. Specifically, about the type of unhinged player base that EVE Online boasts.

“I was approached by one of the leaders of Red Alliance… but almost immediately we were down the rabbit hole. Much to my surprise, the RA director didn’t want in-game information from me; he wanted us to use the forensic resources of our intelligence agency to trace down The Enslaver’s home address. At a coordinated time, armed with this information, a RA member would apparently cut the power to The Enslaver’s house in the real world, and in EVE a RA capital fleet would assault the abruptly pilotless Titan. Yikes.”

I play this game. Mwhahaha.

(Via Offworld)

Ever since I played the demo I’ve been waiting for this day: the full version of Auditorium is now available.

For those not in the know (and this is I suspect the majority of my readership), Auditorium is a superbly addictive game. The basic premise is simple, as it is for most forms of digital crack cocaine posing as games: you need to guide a flow of particles to several containers using a set of manipulator fields. Easy to learn, difficult to master. The later levels become increasingly complex and you’ll have to think hard and experiment a lot to solve a seemingly impossible puzzle.

The strength of the game is its music. Every container represents part of a musical score. As the particles fill the container, the music associated with the container plays. This adds an element of hypnotic beauty to an already fun game.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have about 56 more levels of Auditorium to play. See you in 2011. Maybe.

Wired Magazine has published an interesting article about Real Money Trading (RTM - using real money to buy virtual money and goods in games like EverQuest, World of Warcraft and EVE Online). As an occasional customer of RTM traders I found it a fascinating exposé.

Soon enough, amid the daily grind of his obsession, he would see in the game itself a way out of the bleak hole he had fallen into. He would take a clear-eyed, calculating look at what he and his fellow players had been doing all those months—at the countless hours they’d given over to the pursuit of purely virtual but implacably scarce commodities—and he would recognize it not just for the underexploited form of productivity it was but for the highly profitable commercial enterprise it might sustain. He would spend the next half decade bringing that business to life. And though some people would hate what he was building, and others would want to take it all away from him, there would come a day when Pierce, eight years older, could look back on an accomplishment that was bigger than he had ever envisioned—and stranger than he would ever comprehend.

While the article sheds an interesting light on the somewhat shady world of RTM, I get the impression the author has an axe to grind with the RTM-scene as a whole and the topics of his article specifically. The article’s author wrote a book about his own experiences in the RTM world (and doesn’t neglect to plug it) and seems to go out of his way in the article to put some people in a particularly nasty spotlight. But he’s subtle enough about it that Wired’s editors seem to have let it slide.

Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley gives an annual presentation about the state of the internet at the Web 2..0 Summit. While I often think that big corporate analysts tend to be out of touch with what’s really going on, I felt that this presentation gives a good overview of what’s going on and where we’re headed.

Yesterday I visited the 8th Mobile Monday event in Amsterdam. I’d been meaning to attend a MoMo much sooner than this but something always came up or it just wasn’t convenient. But this time Bruce Sterling was one of the speakers, and a chance to see one of my childhood SF icons was too great to pass up.

The theme of this edition of MoMo was “How mobile is changing society” and all four speakers addressed this topic in their own way. Yet the similarities between their visions were overwhelming. They all spoke about contextual services, of how your mobile is turning into much more than just a phone and is becoming a device that delivers services to you depending on where you are and what you’re doing.

Bruce Sterling’s talk lived up to the audience’s high expectations, as he literally climbed the pulpit (the venue was a converted church) and preached to his disciples, the ‘mobile sinners’ as he called us. He spoke of the internet of things, about the explosive growth of connectivity and how we’re building our technological future on an unstable, volcanic foundation.

Great stuff for technophiles like me. Yuri van Geest, one of the founders of MoMo, confessed to me that he’s trying to get Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge to come speak at future editions. If he actually manages to get that arranged there’s no way on this earth I’ll be missing out.

A right-wing pundit with a pole up his ass the size of the Eiffel tower is complaining that an Obama presidency would result in the “Europeanization of America.” Which he seems to conclude is a Very Bad Thing.

Yes, it must be bad for America to start looking more like Europe, because Europe is this dreadful part of the world where people have lower standards of living, a lower life expectancy, more crime, and less happiness.

Eh, wait.

Actually, America’s standards of living are lower. On the December 2008 UN Human Development Index, the USA ranked 15th on standards of living. 11 European countries precede it on the list.

Life expectancy in the USA is a few years shorter than in Europe. On the World Life Expectancy chart the USA ranks 27th. Nineteen European countries are ranked higher.

Crime rates are generally much higher in the USA than in most western European nations, with significantly higher murder and assault rates per capita.

A 2006 study aimed at creating a world map of happiness showed that the top four happiest countries in the world are all in Europe, with 11 European nations ranked in the top 20. The USA ranked 23rd.

Yes, the Europeanization of America would be a bad thing. We wouldn’t want the USA to become civilized, would we?

I recently attended the Design for Conversion conference that was held on the light boat in Amsterdam. The venue was small and had a bar/nightclub feel to it, which promoted an informal atmosphere and made it easier to start conversations with total strangers.

The attendees were divided into seven groups of each about 12 - 14 members, with two or three team captains. Each group was assigned a case to work on in between the keynote sessions, and at the end of the day every team had to give a short 3-minute presentation about the ideas they had to improve the conversion rate of their case subject.

The group I was put in had the KPNvandaag.nl portal as our case topic. The objective of the case was to promote usage of the portal, find a way to integrate KPN commercial messages in the portal, and how to gain valuable user insights from usage of the portal.

The team captains of our group were Lotte Zwijnenburg (info.nl), Boris van Beek (ikki.nl) and Reinout Wolfert (webanalisten.nl). Some of the more active participants were people from small agencies, IT companies, freelancers and insurance companies. The final 3-minute presentation for our group was given by me (no one else volunteered).

Our ideas for the KPNvandaag.nl case:

• More openness in the portal to allow for more customization, more news sources for users to add, and more widget functionality (calendars, email overview, etc).
• Integration of KPN services into the portal. Examples: SMS/phone history, personalized phonebook, sending SMS messages direct from the portal, overview of your phone activity, remotely program your digital TV DVR to record a TV show, watch TV, subscribe to digital TV channels, etc.
• Integrate relevant commercial messages into the widgets on the portal in a subtle way.

_____
Keynote 1
Andrew Chak - Getting the Next Click

Andrew Chak wrote a book a few years ago called Submit Now. He spoke about the core tenets of conversion optimization and divided them into three principles:

1) Start with the user and where your users are
Find the sites your users are active on (also search engines), and advertise on those sites.
Create different landing pages or microsites based on the needs of your users. Specify your message to different types of users and their specific needs.
Users only see what they are looking for, so be specific to that user type and use their own words.

2) Don’t sell, help them buy it
Help them find the basic information they need to make an informed decision.
Help them choose, be clear about your offer.
Influence the choice with highlighting, scarcity, user ratings, recommendations, etc.
Help them evaluate the different choices (feature table).
Help them see the result of their actions.
Be honest, authentic and complete.

3) Remove the barriers
No upfront registration, give (partial) content before you ask for user details.
Remove ALL unnecessary fields in your forms.
Remove uneducated choices.
Add persuasion elements (recommendations, scarcity, special offers).

_____
Keynote 2
Steve Jackson - Combining 4 techniques to improve your conversion rate

Steve Jackson has been a conversion optimizer since 1999, and he’s been writing a book about conversion optimization and web analytics which will appear in April 2009. He has created a model for conversion optimization called the insight model and explained it with a high-level view in his keynote.

The Insight model

There are 4 elements to conversion optimization in this model:

1) Persona - create a persona that is somewhat typical for our userbase, and view your website through the eyes of this persona. Be detailed in creating this persona and be honest to the choices this persona would make.

2) Competitive data - what works for your competitors? What sites are good sites with good conversions? Don’t be afraid to steal ideas from your competitors.

3) Clickstream data - use web analytics to gather information about what your users do on your website. What pages do they click through to, what pages have a high bounce rate, what pages are exit pages? Find the troublespots and correct them.

4) Experience data - you know from your own experience as a user and a professional what works and what doesn’t. Apply this knowledge to your optimization.

Steve also mentioned some other quick ideas:

• Use error pages to your advantage. You can turn a 404-error page into a better experience for the user. You can for example add a site search engine to your 404 error page, as well as quick links to the major pages in your site.
• The REAN model: Reach, Engage, Activate, Nurture.

_____
Keynote 3
BJ Fogg - The Elements of Behavior Change

BJ Fogg is a professor at Stanford university in California. He has written several books and does classes on human behavior, how to influence it, and how to apply this knowledge to the online realm.

BJ sees three main elements to human behavior that need to be present:
1. Motivation - people need to want to do something
2. Ability - people need to be able to do something
3. Trigger - people need to be triggered to do something

Motivation

There are three core motivators that you can use to create motivation for an action:
- Pleasure / Pain
- Hope / Fear
- Acceptance / Rejection

Use the lightest touch that works. Avoid over-motivation.

Ability

Users need to be able to do what you are asking. Increase the ability factor by simplifying the action, not by training your users. Make your conversion action as simple as you possibly can.
Reduce behavior to one click, one step, one action.

Simplicity has six elements: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine.

Triggers

There are three types of triggers, tying in to the three elements of behavior change:
1) Facilitator - makes behavior easier
2) Spark - motivates behavior
3) Signal - indicates behavior

Learn what already works for your target behavior and apply it to your own situation.
Often enough the motivation element already exists. Focus on facilitation (ability) and triggers.

_____

Conclusion

It was a good and informative conference with an informal atmosphere that made it easy to talk to other attendees. The case studies could’ve been better, but for a first-time conference it was very well organized. I’ll seriously consider attending the next one.

Game developer Cliff Harris recently posed an honest question to the game community: why do you pirate videogames?

The answers he got surprised and enlightened him. The quality of games is of course a huge factor:

Although there were many and varied complaints about tech support, game stability, bugs and system requirements, it was interesting to hear so many complaints about actual game design and gameplay. Not a single person said they had felt ripped off by a game due to substandard visuals or lack of content. The consensus was that games got boring too quickly, were too derivative, and had gameplay issues.

Also among the most frequent answers were high cost of games and the presence of DRM and other copyright-enforcement technologies. I’ve previously argued that high prices encourage piracy.

And treating your customers like criminals, which is exactly what DRM does, won’t endear them to you. On the contrary, it appears DRM only validates piracy in the eyes of many gamers.

More game companies should take a lesson from Cliff, who’s promised to make better games, sell them for less, and never to include any DRM anymore. It’ll take a lot more people like Cliff to change the games industry, but there may be hope yet.

(Via The Technium)

Brilliantly hilarious…

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

(Via Boing Boing)