 All right, so the game makes the community, you know, who was at the keynote this morning? More of you should go to the keynote, but watch it online, right? But anyway, Jane McGonigal mentioned, right? That, you know, their research only works if you're not an asshole and you're not playing with assholes, right? Well, we all, I'm sure everyone here has played a game with assholes before. Yope, especially on the Internet. Yeah, I'm the asshole, I'm for sure. And the thing is, a lot of people, right, they like a game, and then what'll happen is they'll say, oh, I don't want to play Counter-Strike, everyone who plays it is an asshole, right? I don't want to play Call of Duty on Xbox Live, everyone who plays it is an asshole, right? And the thing is they don't seem to realize that, you know, it's actually the game that creates the assholes, right? The assholes, you know, it's not like assholes have a preference for certain games or whatever. Everyone's a normal person. It's just the game itself is actually psychologically controlling people and forcing them into a certain type of behavior that makes them a jerk. So if a game has a bunch of assholes playing it, it's the game's fault and I'm going to show you how that's true right now. Now, there's a whole field, you know, game theory is something that's often scary to gamers. You think, oh, I want to be better at games. I'm going to learn game theory. You go to the library and get a book and solve this math. You're like, what, you give up? There's a subset of game theory called mechanism design, which is very relevant to what we're about to talk about. So if you find this part fascinating, we're doing a panel called Game Mechanics and Mechanism Design. On Sunday. On Sunday morning, but we'll talk about that very specifically. But it's the idea that if I'm making a game, I care about how people play my game and I want to encourage certain behaviors. So there's math behind everything Scott's about to say. All right, so who here knows if my clicker not working now? We were so professional a few seconds ago. I told you not to use that jag-ass clicker. None of the clickers are working? All right. My clicker works just fine. Whatever. Who else heard of this game? Here's of New Earth. Oh, wow. A lot of people. Okay. So for those of you who don't know, here's of New Earth is basically a clone of Defense of the Ancients, right? There was a mod for the Warcraft 3, right? And the idea of the mod was that you controlled just one guy instead of an army of guys. And there was sort of a tower defense thing happening, but you didn't control the towers or the mobs. They were just mobs from both sides going down three paths. And there were towers all along the way. And they were automatic. And it was up to you, your little hero, your one guy. You had to go around the map and level up by killing these regular old normal, you know, automatic bad guys. Now, it was one of those fiddly, janky kind of mods like we all loved back in the day where people would figure out weird mechanics like, oh, if I kill my own guy right before the other guy kills it, then he has to get the XP. And that evolved into the strategy. People would come up with terms for these different, like, fiddly mechanics that arose kind of organically from the nature of the mod. So the Heroes of Neworth guys, they came along and they were big fans of the defense of the ancients. And they said, hey, this thing is, you know, even though this game is great, it's a Warcraft 3 mod. Let's make a game that's on its own. It's a standalone game that's the same kind of game. And, you know, let's polish it up and add a bunch more classes and make it good, you know, make it standalone awesomeness. So I was in the beta of this because one of my friends suggested it to me. And it is, I say with no hesitation, the worst online community I've ever been in in my entire life. Right? I mean, like, you think that, like, you know, racism and sexism all over Xbox Live is bad? No, no, no. Scott invites me to the game. He's like, you got to see this. I'm like, okay, and I log in. I got kicked out of the first five games I joined in less than five seconds each. I got sworn at. The vitriol there was amazing. And I've been playing Counter-Strike since it came out. I mean, you know, Counter-Strike, it was like, hey, awesome, Counter-Strike deeply. You know, if they're saying, oh, screw you dudes, you hacks, I'm like, whatever. But Heroes of New Earth is the first time I was like, whoa, these people, I'm not playing this game. They're too bad. They're even bigger assholes than I am. So what made them such assholes? Why did Heroes of New Earth make jerks? Well, we already discussed that the game sort of has these fiddly mechanics. If you want to level up faster than the other guy, you have to kill your own bad guys. Why would you kill your own team? Who even thinks of that? Except people who are like deep into it. So the heart for already, you have this problem where the hardcore players know these ridiculous strategies of shooting your own towers that no normal person is ever going to do. Now think about what happened here too. This was not intentional in the original game. It's not like the guys who made Dota were like, let's make all these very specific mechanics. Like what if you set it up to where if I block my guys a little bit and then let them go, they'll be more of a mess and they'll win when they get out there. All these very fiddly, you know, clicky actions per minute things like you see in Starcraft. But Starcraft 2 was intentional. We'll talk about that in some other panel. But that was just the nature of the game. It was organic. It wasn't intentional. In recreating this game, they remembered the experience being awesome. And they weren't sure what made the experience awesome. It was probably some other factor, but they latched onto these very specific fiddly mechanics and said, we have to get those exactly right. So they actually coded in things that were basically bugs in the original game. Like quick rocket jumping, but in this case it was bad. There's no reason that you should ever shoot your own guys in a game. That's really dumb. And the result of that was that no noob could ever figure this game out. You could never be good at this game unless somebody told you this ridiculous shit. Which would be fine if they wouldn't kick me out of the game immediately. So there's no way that the game tutorial is going to tell you to destroy your own tower. It doesn't say that anywhere, but that's what you should do. If your tower is about to die, destroy it. Because otherwise, if the other team destroys your tower, they get a ton of XP. If you destroy it, you deny them. And actually, it'll be like, denied. So they put that mechanic in the game on purpose, and they don't tell you about it in the tutorial. Now think about that. Back in the day when people were playing the fiddly mod, some guy would be like, huh, you turn around, kill his own tower, and then he'd scream into, well, Skype, yeah, does Skype even exist back then? They'd scream into whatever they were using, and they'd be like, denied! Ha ha! We have our own vernacular when we're playing games. To take that and put it in the game, that's possible. So anyway, this game is impossible for noobs. So as a result of that, anyone who starts out in this game, like me, downloading the beta for the first time, is going to be no good. That's guaranteed, right? So, you know, why does that make anyone asshole? It's just because noobs are going to have a hard time. Well, it turns out that in this game, you play on teams, and the teams have very few players. It's usually three-on-three, right? So with three-on-three, or a sign or other, I don't even remember if it goes four-on-four or whatever. But the point is that each player on your team is extremely valuable, right? If one person is, you know, a little bit worse than the other players, he's dragging the team down. Because what happens is, let's say you're playing an uneven game, three-on-two, it actually gives bonus resources to the two players that are short-handed, such that if those players have enough skill, it's still actually even, because they're getting such a boost from being short-handed. So if you have a bad player on your team, a ball and chain, you're better off kicking them off out of your game than you are having them on your team. So, of course, what's going to happen? Every noob's going to suck, guaranteed. Any noob joins a game, they're going to get kicked. And then no one can figure out how to play this game, and all the good players are total jerks. Now, why wouldn't people just play for fun? I mean, I don't kick someone on my Counter-Strike server, even if they're really bad and they are dragging the team down with team flashes, blocking, getting in my way. Why was this community kicking people out so voraciously? Well, the thing is, the game also had the scoring system, right? So you had a record that said, you know, wins and losses, and it was permanent, right? Counter-Strike, unless you plan a particular server that has a stat system, it doesn't keep track. You don't know how many wins and losses in Counter-Strike I have. I mean, there's some sites that try to keep track of it, you know, if people submit their data. If you're old enough, you might remember the CLQ for Quake. Yeah, the vast majority of people don't even look at it. But in Heroes of New Earth, your score, how good you are, is posted right up there. And they'll be like, no one under 100 may join this game, which means nobody can join the game who's not already awesome at it. So it's like people were so obsessed with having their record and their score be incredibly high, right? Because if their score ever dropped, nobody would let them play. No, you have probably felt this urge. Have you ever played a game where you've got a perfect record because you haven't played it that much? You're like 11 and 0. When you start a new game, do you ever think, maybe I shouldn't play? I don't know if it's losing and not having a perfect score again, not being on the top of the leaderboard because the math of the leaderboard is very poor. Everyone feels that. This game amplified that to the point that that became almost the sole purpose for people playing. They would play just to make that number go up. That was the primary urge. So if Scott walks one pixel too far, fucking kick him. Just get him off my serve. If I'm about to lose, pull the plug. Quit immediately. The game gives you a higher score for being a jerk and kicking nubes out and cursing at people and all sorts of bad news. Well, the cursing, they do that for fun. Well, I am. But if you tried to go into a lobby and join a game that was way above your rank, if they didn't just kick you before you could even say anything, they would just curse you out like, oh my god, who let in the nub is going to ruin my team? Oh god, this is disgusting. So that's here is of new words. Let's talk about a different game. People play this game. People have mixed feelings about this game. So in my personal opinion, Mario Kart DS actually isn't one of the better Mario Karts. Mario Kart Super Circuit, which no one remembers, is probably the best Mario Kart. Because you can dodge the blue shell if you drive perfectly. But anyway, Mario Kart DS, everyone knows what the problem was. You play online and then if someone wasn't winning, they would just quit. And that was it. Yeah, my record was like 200 and something and like 11 losses. But yet, every time I started to win at all, the other person would start just quitting. And it got to the point to where I didn't finish a single race in like two weeks and then I'd just stop playing forever because there was no point. Right, so here you have the problem of people who are not very good at the game, right, are just keep quitting. And eventually they're like, every race I play, I just quit and then they get bored and they stop playing. Now why would they quit? I mean, why not just play and get better? Because if you quit, then it doesn't get marked as a loss on your score. Yeah, so if I'm losing at all, I have no incentive to continue playing the game. I might as well just quit because there is no penalty for me doing so. Me playing to the end can only hurt my score. And then on top of that, right, there was the added problem of this snaking, right? People would be like, no snaking, no snaking, right? Well, actually snaking was another one of those unintended, right, features in the game. They didn't intend for you to actually be able to do it constantly. They thought you would just get the blue sparks when you run around a turn. But the fact is, if you knew what you were doing and you hurt your hand a lot, you can get blue sparks all the time. I would actually rock the entire DS rather than rocking my finger because that was faster. So playing the game wasn't really a racing game. It was just, how long can I do this? Now, the other problem is snaking. All right, it was a problem in the game. It is okay for people who are playing a game to make a house rule. Like if we're all playing a board game, we all agree, all right, we're going to give a bunch of money to whoever lives on free parking. You have to remember you're not playing Monopoly anymore. You're playing some customized variant of Monopoly. But at the same time, you're free to do that. Now, in other kinds of games, you can agree, like in Counter-Strike, a lot of servers will say no bunny hopping. We will kick you if you bunny hop. And you have to agree to that. It's in the message of the day. And people will remind you if you do it, admins will be like stop doing it because it's a broken part of the game that they can't fix. Because Nintendo is afraid of pedophiles, you can't actually talk to anyone you're playing a game with. There is no way to have a social contract among gamers to say we will make a no snaking game. As a result, I played a win. So I snaked every time because I'm not going to not do the best move if I have the choice of buying Monopoly and winning the game or not buying Monopoly and not winning the game. In fact, I would argue that picking the latter option is griefing. By not playing the win, you were griefing the mechanics of the game. If you would like to learn more about that, we're doing a panel entitled Winning at Games on Sunday, where we will tell you how to win, among other games, Tritigo and Settlers of Catam. The point is, right, you got to play to win. Snaking wasn't against the rules. No one was going to stop you from playing. And there was no way to agree to alternate rules because Nintendo was afraid of pedophiles. That's another thing, is the lack of chat in the game completely removed any possibility of forming any sort of meta community. You could maybe form a Mario Kart community within an existing community, like Pat's Forum Mario Kart or Geek Knight's Forum Mario Kart, but there was no Mario Kart forum because you couldn't connect with other Mario Kart players. You couldn't talk to anyone. You couldn't be like, you're good and you don't want a snake. Do you want to play with me? It's like that person joins and then they're gone forever. So the community was basically this anonymous network of people who couldn't know each other, who all quit whenever they were losing and it was awful. Nintendo, if I were them, they could have fixed it by just having bots that would always join games and play to the end no matter what and have no humans out there, never let a human play another human, ever. They're not smart enough to do that. I don't think anyone even plays this online anymore. No. You know, it's sad because if they would, if they would just let people chat with each other, right? People could afford, you know, when you're chatting, not only can you form bonds with other people and connect to other people and set games up, but there's also a reputation going on, right? You know, in Mario Kart, your only reputation you had was your score that was right there. But if you could talk to people and you could actually form some sort of Mario Kart forum, people would be like, that guy's a bad player. Don't play with him, right? There's some way to talk about other players. I'm sure in Heroes of New Earth, even among the really good players, there's some really good players that the other really good players don't like. And they're like, don't play with him. And, you know, as a result, no one plays with him.