Magic Circle

Some of you may recall a time when all the conversations about game design seemed to be about the "magic circle" and "immersion".

A little while after that, those terms became unpopular.

I think we need to bring them back. Actually, I think they became unpopular because anyone who can read trends knew damn well the games industry was trending against them with the rise of casual games. But trendy or not, I want to bring them back.

See, back in the day, most of the times I disliked a game, it was because either the gameplay got stale or the story had a gaping hole in it. Both are a loss of immersion.

Easy example: FFIX introduced a character so loathsome, so like essence-du-Jarjar, that I got deeply annoyed every time it popped up on screen. I wasn't thinking "what an annoying character". I was thinking "what the hell were the developers thinking?" Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.

Similarly, in Tales of the Abyss, a major plot point involves blaming a seven year old for something that A) was prophecy and B) he wouldn't have done if anyone had ever bothered to tell him anything or even treated him vaguely nicely. Again, such a worthless story hole that I lost all respect for everyone. Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.

But, boy, I long for those days. These days, the awkward story and horrible gameplay of top-flight games is still just as awkward, if not more so, but I rarely get too upset at it. Because now there's a new contender: directly breaking the "magic circle" to try and rope the player into some more publisher-advantageous situation. Usually, in-app purchases. Hoo boy, I say "a new contender", but what I mean is that the Tiger Woods of immersion-breaking showed up and is just making every other immersion-breaker look like a child.

For example, remember Sleeping Dogs? As GTA-likes go, that game was best in breed. Interesting setting, excellent level design, fun gameplay, interesting characters, decent dialog... the game only had one flaw for me. On literally every screen aside from the actual gameplay, there was a scrolling marquee: "Log in for the REAL Sleeping Dogs experience (TM)".

Every screen.

And this excellent, super-immersive game... just kind of slipped away from me. I never logged in. Maybe they just wanted to share high scores, and not to sell me pricey DLC. Who knows? It doesn't even matter, because the "magic circle" was broken. My immersion slipped away every time I hit the menu button, every time I hit a loading screen. Even though the game was excellent, I was losing interest and eventually stopped playing about six hours in. It was just too hard to get into the swing of things when the game kept telling me that I wasn't playing the real version of the GAME THIS IS A GAME WE WROTE IT WORSHIP US PLAY IT LIKE WE DEMAND YOU TO THIS IS JUST A GAME STOP GETTING IMMERSED POKE POKE HEY ARE YOU LISTENING.

That's how it felt.

I picked the most extreme sample - the best game with the smallest amount of "magic circle" breakage. It was still enough to destroy the game for me.

Most games are significantly worse, especially AAA games. Obviously, it's all inherited from casual games. And a lot of people will say that casual games kind of changed the culture to make it acceptable, so now it's acceptable. But the thing is, I never bought that excuse. Even in casual games, it's distracting and makes me want to stop playing. I like casual games where I can play the game fully immersed.

As an example, Triple Town. An excellent and immersive casual game... until you run low on moves, at which point it breaks the magic circle and tells you to buy more moves (along with other upgrades). It should be noted that this was when I lost interest in the game.

"Don't you hate paying for stuff? Isn't that the problem?"

Well, no. Trophies are just as bad. When a casual game starts popping up trophies, I'm basically done with it. It's sabotaging its own magic circle. That was the downfall of Farcy 3 to me: three different kinds of popup trophies. So a great game was brought low by magic-circle breaking... even without asking me for any money.

Sure, asking for money tends to be worse... but that's because the implementation tends to be a lot more aggressive. That's because money is involved: the developers or publishers want it to be more aggressive so they can make more money.

With me it backfires, but I don't know whether that's true of a lot of people. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are fine with the "magic circle" being broken. Trophies as standard practice make that obvious, as does the success of in-app purchasing. But I think maybe it's time to consider that people may not know what they need. Many of these practices abuse gambling disorders and addictive mindsets rather than actually providing an interesting game. Maybe there is a way to make money by offering a good game, rather than by making your game crappy but addictive.

I also think maybe it's not as straightforward as it looks. I think there probably are a lot of gamers - the vast "silent majority" - that don't buy into this distracting trophy-and-IAP stuff. However, they might buy into a game that is properly immersive. The question is - how can you make money off that? Off me, to be specific?

First, I guess we should talk briefly about "magic circles" and why I keep putting quotes around the term.

In brief, the "magic circle" is a concept where the rules and scenarios of the game define a reality that is different from the rest of the world. There is a clear line - this is within the game, that is outside the game. It was a concept very much in vogue for a year or two, but then everyone realized that it's far too simplistic to represent the actual situation that games create. Personally, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. While insufficient, I think it's a good starting point.

I think the heart of our discussion isn't about "how to make money using the magic circle", but instead "how to put money inside the magic circle". This is why secondary currencies are so popular. Buy the secondary currency with real money in one brief moment, and now that currency has been put into the game world and can be spent without breaking the circle. People talk about how those kinds of intermediate currencies "trick" the player into "mis-estimating" the "actual cost" of a transaction... but I think it's simpler than that. They simply lower the barrier. If the money exists in the game, you can spend it in the game.

If the money doesn't exist in the game, then the quality of your game is a barrier to spending money. The better your game is, the less likely a player is going to want to break the magic circle and screw up the game. So, conversely, crappy games may actually have an easier time getting players to spend outside money, because the player is okay with "surfacing" and breaking the crappy "magic circle".

It's certainly possible to put things inside the circle, but it's also possible to put things outside of a weak circle where players are okay with surfacing for it. For example, every multiplayer game has expanded the circle to include many players, lobbies, and so forth.

If you think of these games as a series of gears rather than a magic circle, you might see how this is done. There is one gear, small and fast. This is the gameplay itself. Very immersive, very deep. Alongside it is a larger, slower gear. This is the lobby and scoring system, where you can show your enthusiasm, set up new matches, alter match parameters (such as what you are wearing) and so on.

The two gears drive each other, serving two different needs. The small gear drives the large gear, yes. In turn, the large gear offers a valuable stop-off. While the large gear isn't very interesting or immersive on its own, it's almost painless to go from the large gear to a real-money store due to the shallowness of the circle. Similarly, switching between the gears is much less painful than jumping directly from the match to the outside world or visa-versa. The power of the core game gear keeps the large gear spinning even though it doesn't have much power itself.

You don't have to take this geared approach, though. Several "massively single player" games have come out - Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls, and so on. Most of the things that would be in the large, slow gear are made almost entirely automatic, and handled within the game itself. Can you monetize it? Maybe, if you can put monetized currency in that primary game.

The core concept here is that in order to monetize a game without alienating me, you have to monetize it without breaking the "magic circle". There are, in my thinking, three basic ways to do this. Just to recap, they are:

1) Charge before I play. Classic method, yes, but also useful for expansions, renting servers, etc.

2) Create a gentle gradient to the outside world by "gearing" your game. It has to be really gentle. Generally, a store accessible from the slowest, shallowest, most meta part of the game.

3) In-game currency fueled by out-of-game purchases. However, this is excessively easy to screw up. Your core gameplay loop can easily be damaged by it, in addition to the less tangible risks to the "magic circle". It is very easy to use an intermediate currency and still break immersion all the time.

Anyway, as mentioned, it's clear that many people don't have a problem with all this un-immersive stuff. I may be an outlier.

Or I may be more common than you think, and we're a market that everyone is ignoring.

Big Data = Big Abuses

I've had a rough time defending myself on G+: I think that targeted ads are bad, except when they are explicitly asked for. I also think that corporations need to be shackled, legally, from tracking their customers.

These are pretty severe opinions, and I caught a lot of flak from people who disagree. Which is fine. The arguments can get heated, but it's not like a political argument: there are points being made and disagreed with, rather than opinions simply being stuck to. However, since my opinion is apparently pretty far from the norm, it needs a fairly large amount of defense.

Let me start by establishing that big data != small data.

The first line of defense against my opinions is that companies have had all this data forever, they're just using it more effectively now, and that's fine.

That doesn't hold water for me. Having something you can't use and having something you can use are simply different categories. If you have an old musket your great-great-grandaddy used in the revolutionary war and your neighbor has an AK47 they use to shoot crows, are you going to argue those are the same situation?

Whether you are for or against gun control, you need to acknowledge that those are different categories of gun ownership and use.

It's the same with data: having a giant stack of receipts you use to file taxes as opposed to having a giant database you use to predict exactly what each individual customer, by name, will buy this week... those are fundamentally different. Whether you are for or against the right to do such a thing, you still have to acknowledge that they are fundamentally different categories of data possession and use.

Now let me argue that big data = big abuses.

Our current economic woes come from big data.

Let's start with the sub-prime mortgage crisis. This was a situation only made possible because of big data. The massive amount of storage, networking, and communication required to analyze, package, resell, and distribute mortgages is fundamentally big data.

If they had to shuffle actual papers around, it would have been impossible to bundle and resell these mortgages in quantity. Because of this, it would have been impossible to shift and seemingly diminish risk, and fewer such mortgages would have been approved. The crisis may have still happened to some extent, but it wouldn't have been a bubble popping, just a pinprick on ordinary economic skin.

It's probably still a tender topic, so I imagine some readers may take offense to what I just wrote. Instead of spending a day on that one topic, I'll just move on to other topics with the same fundamental situation: big data causing big abuses.

In my opinion, the largest big data abuse is algorithmic trading, specifically high-frenquency microsecond transactions. Algorithmic trading has played a role in, and arguably been the cause of, several of the more recent stock market disasters.

The trading of stocks to take advantage of moment-to-moment price fluctuations is the way to make money on the market, as you'll see at those Wikipedia links. There is no law against it, and people have become great successes because of it. "Quants" are mathematicians turned billionaires.

So, why would you hate that? Why would you hate success? Are you some kind of horrible success-hating freak, you freak?

My reason is simple: it is success at the price of the market. "Zero sum" success. Their success did not come from making the world or the market better. It comes at the price of making it worse. Abusing it. On the best of days, it's a tax on people who are trading for real reasons related to the actual performance of the company in question. On the worst of days, it crashes the market entirely.

The argument can be made that this is effectively stealing. If a bully takes a geek's lunch money, we don't call that success. We call it stealing, even if all we see is the bully making a gesture and the long-suffering geek timidly handing over cash. Wow, sure looks voluntary, why are you complaining about it?

We can argue that what the bully does is illegal and what the quants do is legal, but let's leave aside the question of legal and talk about the question of benefit. The money HFT nets you... where does it come from? It comes from people who are participating in the market in the way the market was intended to work. It comes out of their pocket, without their permission. (It may also come from other HFT, but for the sake of argument, we'll consider that a closed pool of "HFT cash".)

How does that benefit the market?

It doesn't. Actual participants are made poorer for the sake of some people who have found a nice loophole. The loophole of big data.

With enough data, they can figure out what trades will happen when, at what prices, and hop on top of that. They can always be on top, skimming the cream off the milk everyone else is buying.

I hope that my point is clear: I'm considering everything from the perspective of a healthy market and economy. Rather than just hailing anyone with cash as a "success", I only hail those that actually improve things as a success. You can make as much money as you want, as long as you do so by offering better products or services. Otherwise, you're a burden on humanity and I want you gone.

I've used financial examples for big data, because that's the industry that's had big data the longest. However, there are other examples, such as the RIAA's persecution of its users based on data obtained from sifting through endless thousands of torrents and data transmission records. Once again, big data allowing for a big abuse, although the big abuse in this case was less devastating than crashing the world economy.

You can argue that not all big data automatically results in a big abuse. That's true: big data can have a positive result, especially in medical data, where it can lead to fairly serious breakthroughs as we discover the links between similar and dissimilar cases.

But the point is that you can't simply ignore big data. If there is data, it can be mined. For example, here is Target mining data. The data they are mining? Strictly the things you've purchased from them recently. Surely you can't fault them that! It's barely even "big data"!

That's right. With what I would consider the smallest, sparest kind of big data, Target has figured out how to tell when your baby is due - without you even buying pregnancy-related goods from them, or telling them you're pregnant. This isn't proof that Target is evil, or even an example of evil big data. It is an example of the sorts of things you can tell from even a relatively small amount of data.

We can't treat data as if it is unimportant. We need to consider any data to be a danger, just like any gun is a danger, just like any moving vehicle is a danger, any poison is a danger. In any given case, the data may be secured and well-behaved, just as in most cases a gun, car, and jar of rat poison is secure and well-behaved. But, on the other hand, we consider it illegal to wave a gun around while asking for more money.

Now, big data cannot be opted out of.

A lot of people want to "vote with your feet". If you don't like big data being used against you, stick to suppliers that don't use big data against you!

There's a lot of problems with that. The first is that it relies on you to know which places are going to use big data against you. Many of the big data applications are subtle enough that you won't notice.

The second is that opting out usually doesn't accomplish anything. For example, I don't use Facebook, but they still track me. Moreover, the fact that everyone I know uses Facebook extends their reach to me even if I don't use them - games released for Facebook only, posts only available to Facebook members, and so on. It is the same with Google, Steam, Microsoft, Apple - opting out of their services does nothing to actually stop them from affecting you.

The third problem with opting out is that you really can't. Big data is everywhere. What cell phone provider will you use that doesn't abuse their data? What internet provider? There are no innocent parties. The corporate culture doesn't allow for it.

You can argue that when abuses get bad enough, enough people will vote with their feet. I would say that's unlikely. Classically, corporations have been extremely good about maintaining a grip on their abused customers. Humans can get used to anything - for example, we've gotten used to high-frequency trading.

"Then what's the problem, if people aren't upset?"

... well, go back and read the essay again. The problem is that big data causes big abuses. What you don't fear can still hurt you. We weren't afraid of HFT, or sub-prime mortgages, or music distributors. They still caused us a lot of problems - even if we weren't even participating!

...

Oh, right, targeted ads.

I think that any targeted ads you didn't ask for are just like high frequency trading. It's a situation where the company is data mining to figure out the sort of things you might be about to do, and then pressuring you to do them in its favor. You were about to do them anyway, the market was about to function fine, this is just them stepping in to take their cut because they know you.

I won't argue that it's evil, but I will argue that it is anticompetitive. It is very difficult for a newcomer to compete with that. It'll get more difficult as established megacorporations band together to share your data, forming pan-industry teams to lock down their dominance.

There are some situations where it could theoretically benefit you - for example, if they are having a sale on something and you happen to want that something, you could get it at a lower price. However, if they are truly someplace you want to shop, you should be giving them explicit permission to send you notifications on that sort of sale.

Otherwise, it's them using their market share to pressure you to spend more and to wall out their competition. I consider that bad for the market and bad for the consumer. I consider it almost identical to HFT: taking advantage of someone participating in a useful (but predictable) manner.

It's not at HFT scale yet, but it's the same fundamental kind of thing, to me.