New World Notes

Play Crush House, the New Indie Game Where You're a Camera Person With Secrets in a Mysterious Reality TV Show

If you're looking for a quirky immersive game for this long weekend, check out the Crush House (Steam page here), where you play the camera person in a reality TV show from the 90s/early 2000s. I've been playing off-and-on since blogging about it last April, and it's enjoyably creepily voyeuristic, surreal, and tense -- though in this case, the tension isn't to shoot enough aliens/zombies/etc. in time, but to shoot enough drama and butt shots before your audience ratings go down.

As a player tip, prepare for a slow start as you get acclimated to the gameplay loop in the first two-three days of shooting. But then the plot twists start popping!

While the concept is beautifully executed, I think this is a case where the experience could be even more immersive, and incorporate voice acting. (Understandably tough to pull off on a lower budget.) I would love to see a live action variation of this concept in VRChat or Second Life (he hinted broadly) where we could enable voice chat and really lean into the live action reality show angle. Steam description below!

 

Richard Bartle & Readers Opine on Irena Pereira's Theory on What Went Wrong With WoW

Lots of interesting reader feedback to my interview with Irena Pereria, on what went wrong with WoW, based on her insights as a former Blizzard designer/developer. Irena's core argument is that changes to World of Warcraft starting with the Cataclysm expansion degraded the sense of World of Warcraft as a dynamic, living virtual world and hurt its appeal as a virtual community where you wanted to socialize with other players.

On my Facebook feed, Richard Bartle -- who literally wrote the book on designing MMOs -- stopped by to offer some complementary thoughts:

The deleterious effects of many quality-of-life changes were obvious to most experienced designers as soon as they were discussed, and the effects were exposed by Asheron's Call 2. It put them in and it failed. Nevertheless, most modern MMOs now put them in as standard (or, for some things like fast travel, sell them). Some such features are unavoidable, though. When WoW didn't have a LFG mechanism, there were addons available that provided that functionality (albeit not with instant teleportation into an instance). Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to put it back in again without changing the bottle.

Instead, it's better to nudge players to play with each other, as they do in countless Minecrafter servers, as Bartle writes:

Self-directed entertainment isn't just entertainment: it's fun. If people merely want entertainment, they can passively watch TV or listen to music. If they want fun, they can play games. Minecraft isn't just entertaining, it's fun. When an MMO becomes the equivalent of a movie but you have to play a combat mini-game between scenes, the fun is leeched out. The same thing happens when other players become objects rather than subjects: you may as well play a single-player game.

Some reader responses, some concurring, some disagreeing, after the break -- though I'd read the original interview first to get the full context:

 

What Went Wrong With WoW? A Blizzard Veteran’s Theory on World of Warcraft’s Fall From Its 12 Million Subscriber Height

Chart via u/Kamikaze4228 based on open source data

Ever wonder what became of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft? The groundbreaking MMORPG is still successful to be sure, but in recent years, it has fallen far from its 2010/2011 peak of over 12 million subscribers. 

Since then, its subscriber base has been on a sharp steady decline, dropping in 2019/2020 to below 4 million subscribers. In recent years, it’s wavered between that nadir and around 8 million, enjoying brief growth when a new expansion is released -- but never coming close to regaining its commanding heights. 

For the longest time I assumed this loss was simply typical attrition, as WoW players moved on to newer MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online, or metaverse platforms like Minecraft and Fortnite. 

But a veteran Blizzard developer just casually told me there were other key factors at work -- design changes I’ve seen little discussed before.

Irena Pereira joined Blizzard in 2006 (a little over a year after WoW’s 2004 debut) with an official role as a UI designer -- though that focus rapidly expanded. 

“[Blizzard] wanted a unicorn, somebody who could code, who could do art and design,” as she puts it to me now. (Disclosure: Irena and I are currently working on an unrelated MMO project, but more on that down the way.) In her three years at Blizzard, she worked on Patch 1.1,  as well as  the expansions Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, primarily as a UI designer. (“But again, full stack, I did everything, including designing with new features for the game.” She also managed WoW’s add-on community.) 

From that vantage, her post-mortem for World of Warcraft's declining user numbers (if I had to roughly summarize it) is this:

World of Warcraft lost its draw as a dynamic, living virtual world and even worse, lost its resilience as a virtual community.

“WoW as it was when it was first launched, is a very different game than WoW as it is now.” as she puts it. “Initially you’re dropping into a starting zone with an open world.”

The first-time new user experience now is tightly controlled:

“But now, when you log into WoW, there's dialog boxes and quest objectives, and NPCs talk to you, and scripted events -- all these things that kind of drive you from one moment to the next in a role. That includes making the game very easy at start:

“Currently with the starting zone for Dragonflight, I think it takes you about 10 minutes to get to level 10. Ten minutes. It's basically a couple of hours through the starting zone, I think you end up level 20.” (Reaching level 10 originally took something closer to week or more of play.)

The ease and speed of progression for players undermines motivations to talk with other players, and seek their help.

“The pace of leveling is the very first factor that I think has destroyed the early game and killed the community spaces where people would actually meet,” as Irena puts it. “The strategic shift to drive new users is very scripted on rails. The new user experience makes it so that players are paying more attention to the game than they are paying to each other.”

This also made WoW feel less like a world:

“This is a classic blunder that game studios make -- they feel they need only to throw more content at players, more storytelling and more narrative. I love storytelling, narrative, don't get me wrong. But the whole point of a great open world is for you to explore it at your own pace, not to be compelled to do things in an order.”

Now, there’s little reason to spend downtime in WoW talking with other players, let alone helping them out.  

Or as Irena puts it: “There's no white space in the experience.”

Which takes us to another problem: 

“Incentivizing multiplayer gameplay requests are gone. With increasing power levels, you really can solo most content. You don't need anybody, like with talent trees and whatnot. Classes can handle situations by themselves.” 

Now, high level players can just solo quests with a pet. There’s no need for other people, even to just take down a powerful NPC in the zone. 

“There's no risk,” Irena argues. “So you don't need help if there's no risk. These are all things that disincentivize finding other people to play with you.” 

I was surprised to hear all this. Back in its early years, WoW guilds required highly organized group planning and management, especially for complicated, high level raids.

In recent years, says Irena Pereira, that’s not so much the case:

“I mean, there's still raids, but a lot of the emphasis on group gameplay is just on the raids. Players want higher end game experiences. They want to take down big bosses. The smaller ten man dungeons like Karazhan, they don't do those anymore. A single five man dungeon like Gnomeregan is gone, like no nobody does that.

“The gray area, the juicy part of the experience kind of just slowly got whittled away, more and more and more player convenience features to bypass the annoying things. Suddenly you're not really running into people anymore. The player convenience features actually undermined the opportunities for social connection in various places in the game.” 

Irena pinpoints the problem to the launch of the WoW Cataclysm expansion in late 2010, with warning signs in the run up to the Lich King expansion of 2008, heard during a discussion with fellow WoW designers:.

“We were talking, I believe, about the Death Knight and planning an expansion for Lich King,” she recalls, “and we're discussing power leveling curves and multiplayer encounters, and [Blizzard VP] Jeff Kaplan said, ‘What about the solo player?’

“And then from that point on, there just seemed to be a lot of bias for supporting solo gameplay in this multiplayer world. But it was an overcorrection, like way overcorrected.” 

The result, Irena would argue, can be seen in the declining subscription numbers since 2010:

“They saw a precipitous population decline in a late stage, post-Cataclysm, the WoW population dropping, dropping, dropping. It got so low. But [Blizzard was] struggling with figuring out how they were going to improve revenue.” 

Above: Irena with fellow Blizzard veteran Brian Birmingham

A partial solution originated from her colleague Brian Birmingham, who lobbied for the re-release of the original version of WoW in 2019, dubbed World of Warcraft Classic, where play progression took more time investment, and more interactions with other players:

“When WoW Classic came out, it boomed. It became more profitable than retail because it brought back the original game and all the slower gameplay and all of those things that made WoW special came back. Players ate it up.”

You can see the subscriber numbers climbing back up after the advent of WoW Classic and successive Classic versions of previous expansions:

Second Life-Based Mini-MMO Adds ChatGPT & Other AI Tech to Gameplay Including NPCs, Story Bible, and Quest Generator

Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO in Second Life -- think a text-driven GTA Online, but both more creative and adult-rated -- just added AI interaction to its roleplay gaming systems. If I'm not mistaken, this is one of the first live MMOs to integrate LLMs like ChatGPT into gameplay. (It might actually be the very first!) 

The AI for Crack Den roleplay comes in several flavors: The Story HUD for giving out quests, Live Character Cards for NPCs, AI-generated dialog from NPCs, and for querying Crack Den's massive story canon and rules database. To do that, lead developer Nadir Taov is leveraging multiple LLMs: 

"If it’s answering questions or generating summaries that can be vanilla, it’s GPT 4o. [See above -WJA] If it’s story-related, I switch to more unrestricted models that are tuned for roleplay too. At least three different models in play: MythoMax and LLama3 so far … new models seem to be popping up every few months and each require special ways to structure prompts so I’m exploring when I can. I’m trying to see if how agnostic I can get to the models though."

Linden Lab recently experimented with LLM-powered NPCs in a test area, but Crack Den is a thriving and highly active roleplay game. First launched in 2006 as a rickety RPG where stories and quests were conveyed by in-world notecards, the core player base has remained, evolved, and grown together. To this day (by Nadir’s estimate) some 5,000 SLers visit the mini-world of Crack Den every month, perhaps to participate in the mayhem, or to gawk like post-apocalyptic tourists and the desperately seedy goings-on.

Launched last weekend, Nadir tells me the community reception has been pretty good -- and even helped bring in some new players: 

 

Raph Koster Unveils Stars Reach, Playable Worlds' Sandbox MMO Sim -- And First Step in His Metaverse Strategy

Stars Reach is an upcoming sandbox sim just unveiled by legendary game designer Raph Koster and his startup Playable Worlds. And while it's very much an MMORPG, Raph tells me fans of open virtual worlds like Second Life and VRChat should find it appealing:

"It is a game, not a pure social world," as he puts it. "But the fact that we let players control planets to a decent degree means that there could be some overlap."

To go by the trailer, it looks like an unlikely hybrid of Dual Universe and Palia, the comfy social MMO. But as Raph explains on this /Reddit AMA, the simulation aspect runs quite deep:

This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years. It is the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online and to Star Wars Galaxies. It has in it all the lessons of all these decades of online game development -- and it looks forward, not back, to reinvent what an online world can be.

Stars Reach uses simulation to a degree never seen in an MMO before. We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up.

And not just our water -- everything does this. 

One aspect of Stars Reach also worth pointing out (and this came up during our chat at Gamesbeat) is it's a first step in Playable Worlds' metaverse strategy -- as I explain in my book's online afterword:

WATCH: Tiny Glade Offers a Better, AI-Powered But No-Prompt Model of 3D World Creation

Tiny Glade is an upcoming game with a free new demo on Steam, and it's a perfect counterpoint to the prompt-based creation depicted in Readyverse yesterday.

Watch above! There's quite a lot of procedural/automated graphics happening in the background, but unlike prompts, Tiny Glade puts the emphasis on user choice and creativity. The goal with the AI here is not to replace human creativity, but to make it easier, more delightful. It also seems robust enough that very dedicated people could, with enough practice, create especially amazing worlds.

More from the game's Steam page:

New Startup Building Platform That's "Garry's Mod meets GTA meets SL powered by UE5"

Hypersonic Laboratories is a new startup which just got funding to build HELIX, an upcoming multiplayer role-playing sandbox platform for user-generated content (UGC). I got an early peek at what they're building, and the ambition is pretty impressive. As David Chiu, Hypersonic's head of business, put it to me: "Think of it as Garry's Mod meets Grand Theft Auto meets Second Life powered by Unreal Engine 5".

So, yes, intriguing. Also notable that the development team has veterans of major game developers from Roblox/Uplift Games (creators of "Adopt Me") and Activision. This roughly fits my prediction in the book that we'd soon see the rise of Grand Theft Auto-type metaverse platforms. 

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has the whole story, including:

Kickstart This: Update a Groundbreaking Mixed Reality Hide-and-Seek for iOS/Android -- Jim "Babbage" Purbrick is Helping Develop!

Now on Kickstarter: Can You See Me Now, a crowdfunder to update a groundbreaking mixed reality game of the same name for the modern era of iOS and Android. Launched in the early 2000s, it helped inspire the creation of Pokémon Go, but Can You See Me Now is much more accessible:

"It's hide-and-seek with the hiders online and the seekers in the real world," veteran virtual world dev Jim Purbrick explains, "but having two parallel realities and the players relying on information leaking between the realities make it interesting and feel like each reality is haunted by ghostly presences from the other." Purbrick worked on the original game from UK tech art collective Blast Theory before going on to work at Linden Lab and Meta, and will also help develop this modern update.

In the original version, the real world runners were kitted out with bulky PCs and GPS trackers, but with the reboot, it will just require a smartphone to run. The gameplay creates the cool and eerie experience of existing in two realities at once:

How Will AI Change Storytelling in Games? Leigh Alexander & Writers for Divinity: Original Sin 2 & Deus Ex Have Nuanced Takes

To go by social media froth, the rise of AI technology like Large Language Models is soon going to utterly Change Games Forever, leading to waves of roiling layoffs of game industry employees. Why pay game writers, one common argument goes, when we can just get ChatGPT to churn out reams of NPC game dialog?

Speaking with several actual writers of hit acclaimed games, however, I got a much more thoughtful perspective, bereft of doomsaying.

Leigh Alexander, an independent writer who contributed to the award-winning Reigns: Game of Thrones (2018) among many other titles, sees understanding tools like LLMs as crucial to her profession:

“Kinda feel like writers need a nuanced view of generative technology to keep up in the game industry right now,” as she puts it. “There's a big big big gulf between ‘working with generative systems to have an emergent relationship with my own writing’ and ‘having ChatGPT write the NPCs.

“The latter is an exploitive fad that I expect to soon collapse. The former isn't going anywhere and probably if you work in games you'll need to be more literate with it than [saying] ‘all AI is lazy’--  which is itself a lazy view. You still gotta hand-author everything in your own models, and consider applications of emergence deliberately and for a reason, because it often makes things harder.” 

She likens the “AI is lazy” charge to a photographer saying, “‘Photoshop is only for lazy photographers’.

"It misunderstands the purpose and breadth of the tool, and it actually makes you sound like you don't understand photography (which seems bad for your prospects if you are working as a photographer).”  

Above: Reigns: Game of Thrones, co-written by Leigh Alexander

By contrast, Leigh adds, “professional longevity for storytellers in the game industry means not just writing, but literacy with tools -- tools are the backbone of narrative design to me.”

Charlene Putney did narrative design for the recent hit fantasy RPGs Baldur’s Gate 3 and was a writer on Divinity: Original Sin 2. She also co-developed LAIKA, a LLM tool for game writers  “to offer suggestions using their voice, characters and concepts.” So as you might guess, her view on AI is also nuanced:

"I think AI will bring big changes to every creative field over the next few years, but not in an apocalyptic way,” she tells me. That’s even more the case with the game industry, which unlike the other arts, is only a few decades old. By her lights, AI offers games a chance to differentiate itself from other medium even more:

Above: Baldur's Gate 3, featuring narrative design by Charlene Putney

“To my mind, this is another tool. I don’t see it replacing writers in the long run, I see it as a brand new spark of potential that we can use. And that beautiful little spark of potential in it that delights me is the same little spark that delighted me in the independent game development scene a decade ago: dream it up, make it, share it -- now using the tenets of consensus reality as LEGO bricks. Not trying to recreate the media of the past: not novels, not movies, not songs. But some strange new creatures, new forms that are no more than shadows right now, coalescing into shape just out of the corners of our eyes.”

To that end, she’s creating other LLM-based tools for game developers, though notes that many of them are too busy -- or perhaps too apprehensive -- to experiment with them.

"With the strong productivity focus of the current games industry, it's hard for people to take time to play, to explore, and to bounce around with experimental things when there are hard deadlines and such a hostile general approach to working with AI,” as she puts it. “One needs a strong sense of self to weather the social media vitriol, and a strong sense of your own voice and what you want to say in order to experiment wildly."

As the lead writer of the classic Deus Ex franchise, set in a dystopian future amid the rise of sentient AI, Sheldon Pacotti actually contributed greatly to our popular apocalyptic conception of artificial intelligence, especially in Silicon Valley. (Elon Musk, among many other AI technophiles, is a fan of the game.)

“My usual experience writing science fiction is getting things wrong,” he acknowledges now. “Writing in 2000, I had a kid in the 2020s still buying CDs. Etc.”

“But one thing we might have gotten right in Deus Ex is people’s desire for AI in their lives. Morpheus, one of the Ais in the game, says that people crave being seen, and will take an omniscient AI in place of an omniscient god.” (Watch above.)

That’s illustrated even more in the game’s sequel, Invisible War, with an AI popstar character, NG Resonance. (Watch below).

“As an amateur futurist I’m gratified but also a little freaked out that in 2024 ‘companionship apps’ are a thing and in fact one of the fastest-growing applications of AI,” Pacotti puts it to me. “Whether as companions or “agents,” we’re likely to invite AI (and mass surveillance) deeper and deeper into our lives, and that should be great fodder for many dystopian plotlines to come, if not the key to the final triumph of the Illuminati in our time.”

As for potential use of LLMs in game development, Sheldon wrote me a mini-essay worth quoting in full:

Watch: Life by You Avatar Creation Walkthrough by a Top Sims 4 YouTuber

With Life by You soon to go into early access on Stem and Epic, we're seeing publisher Paradox Interactive put out more walkthrough videos for Sims-meets-Second Life-meets-Garry's Mod sandbox simulation lead developed by Rod Humble. This one focuses on avatar customization, and notably, it's by YouTuber Nini's Planet, who generally shoots Sims 4 videos.

Also notable: Before his two year stint as CEO for Linden Lab, Humble was a lead developer on Sims 2 and Sims 3. So compare and contrast with avatar/character creation with both Second Life and Sims 4!

More on Life by You: