 So we've talked about two games where the community was bad, and we can argue that it's because of the fundamental mechanics of the game. Now, with good games, or games with good communities, a lot of people make the exact opposite argument. They will say that, alright, this game is not that great, but the community around it is great, so that makes the game great. We in fact will argue the opposite, that good games make good communities, just like bad games make bad communities. So here's the game, does anyone know this game? Not enough people. Okay, so Natural Selection, Natural Selection 2 is coming out soon, finally, it took forever. You can get the beta on Steam, but Natural Selection 1 is still going strong. This game is a mod for Half-Life 1, it's free. If you saw it, you would not believe it was a mod for Half-Life 1, it is unbelievable. It is an asymmetric first-person shooter, real-time strategy game. Yes, this game is the kind of game that people like Dream might exist. Well, it actually has existed for as long as I've been- There's aliens, aliens versus marines, just like Sigourney Weaver, but it's an RTS and an FPS. There's someone who sits there with an RTS view commanding real people who are playing an FPS, and this game totally works and has been around for a while. So the commander selects me and FPS guy and says, alright, here's the shotgun, you take the squad and go take out that hive, and then he sends another group to do this. Now imagine if you're selecting guys in Command and Conquer and they're like, screw you, and they won't go. You hand out jet packs and everyone just jumps off the edge of the map. But anyway, Natural Selection has probably one of the best online communities I've ever seen. You join a game and everybody's trying to help you learn, and the game is just like everyone's friendly, everyone's cool. If you play this game, the community is small enough, there's this one guy and you'll know him, because he goes, gah, gah, gah, every second. But anyway, why is the community of Natural Selection so good? Well, there's many reasons for this, right? Reason number one is that the game actually has a high barrier to entry, but Scott, didn't you just say the Heroes of New Earth had a high barrier to entry? In fact, I would argue this game even has a higher barrier to entry than Heroes of New Earth, because it is actually way more complex. It does, but the thing about the barrier to entry of Natural Selection is that it is not something that's weird that you would never think of to do. Like, you know, to be good at Natural Selection, you don't have to shoot the other Marines, right? That's not how you, you know, and the thing is, once you get in the game, because people can talk to each other and one person isn't going to bring down the whole team, in fact, not, you know, more of the barrier, right? If you can outnumber the other guys, that's good. You know, so what you want to do is anyone who's on your team is going to be helping you. If you're a noob, they're like, you know, follow me, noob, you know, at least, you know, even if they don't really want to help you, they'll help you, you know, they'll let you be like a meat shield for them. Yeah, and you'll still feel good about it, because you shot the alien with like one bullet before you bit your face off. So, even if another player is a total jerk, hates noobs, is swearing, is 11 years old, if he wants to win, he is going to help you play the game, whether he likes it or not. And the game is kind of confusing. If you don't know what's going on, you're going to be like, most people join Natural Selection and they're like, duh, how do I get weapons? It's like the commander has to give them to you. The aliens don't have a commander, they have this hive mind where you see these, like, translucent icons all over the place showing where all the other aliens are. There's these squeaky sounds everywhere in this environment telling you what's going on. You hear Marines, like, talking to each other about their wife and kids as they walk by around the corner. It's like, you spawn, you see all these buildings, and everyone's going like, phase, phase, phase, and you're like, what? But then someone will be like, noob, go over to the glowy thing and push shift. You're good at this game, right? Because there's not a lot of players, but there's a few hundred, and on these few good servers, they're always rocking all the time, the servers are full, and it's totally awesome. Now, the thing is, you know, we talked about some mechanics, but there are actually very specific and obvious things beyond this general, oh, the game encourages community that make the community very good. Yes. Well, is that, oh, is it? That's so dark. That's so bad. Anyway, in Natural Selection, right, there's a ready room. You know, before you start a game, and after every game, everybody goes into the ready room. It's basically this room where the marines and aliens can just stand around doing nothing. You just walk around. Just walking around. And there's all talk going on. You can jump. Now, you join a server, and what you're going to see is that people will be hanging out in this ready room for a while before the game. Talk to each other. Sometimes a guy will use like a little mod and play rave music while you're in there, and everyone will dance. That's a picture of this block of cheese in one map, and people will just go over and like stack up on top of the cheese for no reason. Now, it's not just that, you know, there's this fun space to interact in, but think about what a ready room does as opposed to a counter strike or something where the map just ends, terrorist won, you know, new map starts, you just start playing again. The game ends, marines or aliens won, the game is over, and everyone who played the game is now thrown together into this shared space to talk about the game they just played for a few minutes. Man, we totally would have had you, but then you ninjaed in and got the hive. Or, you know, putty, putty, putty, putty. One time a game was going really badly, and this one guy was like screw this, and he went back to the ready room and was just playing rave music into his microphone, jumping up and down and flashing his flashlight, and eventually everyone rage quit and hung out and they're having this dance party. There was like 10 minutes of this. Block of cheese, right, a bar, you know, there's this fun, humorous social environment that you escape to in between games. You're not constantly in the stress of combat, you know. After the combat, everybody, good guys and bad guys, they get together and they have a good time. And there's another fun thing about it, right, is that the marines win. All the aliens are now turned into marines, but, you know, because they're all dead. But the marines, they keep all their equipment, so they'll be jet packing around the ready room. And if you have a jet pack, sometimes you can go into the secret porn room where there's not actually any porn, but there's still a secret room, it's fun to go in there. And if the aliens win, they get to keep their alien forms in the ready room. So sometimes what they'll do is they'll win, and they'll turn into an egg at the last second, and then in the ready room, they'll be a jumping egg. It's like victory egg! You can't do victory egg if you lose. So you have all these humorous things that get people to work together. There's one more thing that gives NS a really good community, and that is, there's not really that much rage quitting, right? Sometimes, I'm not saying there's none, because sometimes it's like, okay, there's no way we can win. We've all agreed to F4, because F4 is the button you press to go to the ready room, so when it's time to rage quit, people say F4, F4, F4, right? And if everyone agrees to F4, they'll F4 and start a new game, especially if a game gets messed up or something like that, which can happen, because it's half like one mod. But most of the time, it's actually, you want to keep going until the end, right? The Marines will be backed up into their base. They'll have one resource tower. It's just like that scene in Aliens, you've got like the last few turrets barricading the door, shooting into the distance, and you're just huddling, like waiting for the end. Yeah, and basically, if you sit there long enough, unless there's a time limit on the server, you can build up enough resources from that one resource tower to eventually build heavy armor and heavy machine guns for everybody, and the Marines will suddenly be like, oh, here we go, and the Aliens will be in big trouble, right? It's happened at least twice in 10 years. You can turtle it up, and the turtle shell will actually break open. You know, maybe like an alien will give up and be like, all right, we can't, you know? Because they have like these really tiny callways, and it's really hard for the Aliens to come, you know, in that narrow channel, and there's a sea of bullets from 20 Marines all shooting at the same time. Now, there's math and mechanics behind that too, because the way the game works is you get resource nodes and you capture them by building structures on them, and that gives you resources to do your thing. You know, change different forms of aliens, get better weapons, armor, and whatever. But you also get a small number of resource points if you kill an enemy. So if you are surrounded like the enemy, you're going to wipe out their last bastion, and you don't wipe them out relatively quickly, you're giving them resources as you die against their hail of bullets. You're basically giving them the points they need to escape even if they don't have any more resource towers. The game is designed to make sure that if you don't win quickly, the other team can totally come back and roll you. Just like in Battle Balls. Just like in Battle Balls. I don't think anyone here knows what Battle Balls is. No, we're not going to do Battle Balls now. No, we're not going to do Battle Balls. So this doesn't really apply only to games, right? The community can also make the community. Now, what I'm actually showing you here, it's not about what's being posted, right? This is about the fact that this is PHPVV, and what does PHPVV do? It posts on the side of everyone's, you know, every time you make a post, it tells you how many posts that person has made. Post 674, post 316. Also, look at how much space on this page is used up by non-conversation by like reminding you who the person is, all these stats about them, these huge, animated things everywhere. Those avatars and signatures that you're seeing here, if anyone's gone to PHPV forms, these are very modest, right? Usually someone's got something this tall with an animated GIF and cats, and who knows what's going on. This is an interface in human-computer interaction, which is the study of how humans interact with interfaces. This encourages certain behavior. It has certain affordances for the user. The post count is the worst. If any of you ever been on a PHPVV forum where they have post counts, maybe they give you like you're a bronze member, you're a silver member, you get enough posts, and you go into some dumbass thread, and you post like, yay, because you know that your post count will go up. Or you go in and you'll see a whole thread, and the thread is, hooray, I've reached 5,000 posts. Why does anybody care? You're encouraging this behavior. You're encouraging this kind of crap flooding of your own forum. Also, because you have these giant avatars and stuff, it makes it really hard to actually follow any conversations, especially if you're new to the forum, and you're not just blocking out, oh, I know who that avatar is, right? All that stuff that you haven't seen so frequently. Like if I see rims, you know, flaming cat avatar all the time, it's associated with rim, and I can scroll right past it really easily. But I've never been to this forum before, I don't know who these people are, it's like a total, like, mind-melt, like, oh my god, I can't tell who anyone is, what's going on? Wait, a flaming cat? What the fuck did that come from? I just made up something crazy, whatever. And this is why, at Geek Nights, we don't use no suit of THPDV, we use vanilla, this is actually the old version of vanilla, right? We have very, very tiny avatars, right? So you just, you can remember who someone is by their little picture, right? It's just small, it doesn't get in the way of it. No sigs, no post counts, none of that stuff is visible, just the conversation lined up. Yep. And as a result, right, our forum doesn't really have any BS on it. I've banned three, four people in six years ever, and those were just crazy people. Now another interesting affordance for another- It's always going to be crazy people. Another design idea is that quoting and private messaging are all in lines. If you PM someone, it just appears as a post that only you and that other person see. So this conversation is kind of a linear thing, as opposed to a lot of bulletin board systems where PMs are kind of like this separate system. It's almost like a ghetto version of email that only works in the one crap before. Yes, so you could become, I could be, me having a thread where everybody's posting about Malibu Pony, and then suddenly I'll just be like, hey, RIM, and it'll be right there in the middle of this thread, but only RIM and I will see it, and I'm like, hey RIM, you know Rainbow Dash is the best, right? Yeah, of course Rainbow Dash is the best. All right, just to be clear on that, let's prove it to these people. And then you start posting publicly again. And it seems to reduce the drama. It prevents people from having completely unrelated to the rest of the thread, PMs or flame wars, because instead the thread is kind of still there, and your conversation is just within the thread. It encourages this very specific behavior. I wish it helped people stay on topic, but that's, yeah, it can't be, you're not solving every problem. But yeah, you know, people think, right, they see bad communities, right, and they say, you know, they always look at the community as if the community is because of itself, right? No, the community is a cause of the game, a cause of the software, a cause of whatever it is that is associated with that community, right? If you made a brand new game today, and you didn't, no one is playing it yet, I could take a look at that game, and I could make a pretty good guess of what kind of community it had, it's going to have, based on the mechanics of the game, based on how the software works, based on how the scoring is, right? And no game developers, and it's, you know, not TV developers either, are thinking about this when they're making their games, when they're making their software, you know? Because the real math, mechanism design is a difficult field of study. It's actually a very important field of study, in things like the stock market. I mean, if you're regulating something, regulation of, say, the stock market, that's mechanism design. The governments of the world have a vested interest in creating certain responsible behavior. You can't necessarily just force that behavior. You're trying to make the rules of the game trick people into being nice, even if they aren't nice people. So yeah, if you're ever going to make software or make a game, right, think about what kind of community you want, and think about the decisions you're making about the design of the game, and what effect they're going to have on the community. And also recognize when people, when you're playing a game, try to figure out what the game is trying to do to you. What is the game making you do that you might not do otherwise? The game is controlling your mind. The game is making you kind of dance for it. Just like DDR moves your legs, really. Right, so that's what you had to say about that. Yay!