I have a design tool I call "Don't Solve the Hard Problem" It consists of three steps
A. Identify: What is the expensive, difficult aspect of delivering on a highly desired user promise?
B. Clarify: What is the actual root of the promise?
C. Cheat: What is the the cheapest way possible to actually deliver on the root promise?

Moderating your community social norms matters immensely.

Findings suggest “that people who are high in RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) will be prejudiced in prejudiced societies but may be tolerant in tolerant ones,”

psypost.org/2022/01/new-ps… This all ties into a big philosophy of how to manage game communities.
- Game populations are heterogenous in terms of personalities and motivations.
- Every game has sociopaths, narcissists, authoritarians, etc.
- Genre shifts ratios but do not remove these sub-populations

I wrote this highly technical description about our narrative direction.

"Focus on sharing authentic human stories of self-discovery and awareness. Not plot, Plot, PLOT, plot, plot, Plot!" 1. You may ask "what the heck does that mean?"

"Plotting" in narrative is often about chains of cause and effect that result in visible state changes in the world.

Ex: Orc king captures heir -> Hero kill orc -> Kill orc king. -> Oh no! McGuffin is in another castle! Etc.

There's coded language here ("play to contribute") referencing a more pragmatic take on P2E that seems to be taking hold in some companies.

Yes, extrinsically motivating play w cash is bad. But paying modders? Less controversial. Essentially what Roblox, Second Life are doing

https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1477179107343736834

My guess is that after the speculation trash fire dies down, we'll see title settling into the following pattern
- Deep official support for community creation. With rev shares
- But those rev shares are 10% on high margin businesses.
- With highly obfuscated payouts like Roblox

If many games are about the 'fantasy of labor' to use @metasynthie's term, it feels like many of these crypto games are about the 'fantasy of investment'.
You can be an investor, the only way to get ahead: put money in, click some game-like buttons, and amazing returns come out And in the zeitgeist of the Fall of the American Empire, it is the last standing American dream: Put money in the market and, through the magic of unrestrained capitalism, gain wealth, power, and respect. Maybe enough to retire. With healthcare. In New Zealand.

History is littered with the twitching corpses of cash-rich outsiders who looked at games and said, "All we have to do to win is the EASY PART: Make a game." "I invested billions in this cool hardware! Now let's do the EASY PART."

I am wary of narrative BS driving tech trends.

Storytelling only needs to *feel* like it makes sense. But it never needs to produce solutions that function in the real world.

For those interested in the metaverse, VR, AR, etc, it is worth looking back at 'virtual worlds' Virtual worlds had a clear narrative example that almost everyone referenced, the Holodeck.

There were over 50 episodes that described in lush detail the types of experiences you could have in a virtual space.

People watched them. And imagined 'what if this was real?'

1. Excellent paper on the 'Light Triad', which is intended to be a measurement of positive human personality traits.

Long, but worth reading!
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33… 2. The three factors are:
- Faith in Humanity: The belief that humans are good.
- Humanism: Humans across all backgrounds are deserving of respect and appreciation.
- Kantianism: Others should be treated as ends in and of themselves, and not as pawns in one’s own game.

Every once in a while I return to an older essay to see if I still agree with Past Me. This is one on reaching broader audiences, multiplayer and how games achieve cultural significance.

lostgarden.home.blog/2009/11/30/thr… In the ensuing years, the market shifted rather decisively towards many of these trends.
- Multiplayer is now a dominant driver of revenue.
- Streamers market the emotion of gameplay
- Mobile and casual markets exploded with some games reaching hundreds of millions.

A great blindness of technologies is how easily they are coopted by systems of values. The Internet, for example, is this wonderful bundle of connectivity technologies and standards.
But despite early marketing, there is nothing inherently about it that makes it Open. Or Free. Or Good.

Scaling human systems beyond the natural constraints of how humans scale is almost always unethical. Some natural human constraints that I've looked into seem to be:
- Number and strength of human relationships (Dunbar)
- Rate at which relationships and trust develops

The joke goes: An expert game designer is 20x more effective than a newbie. They are correct 20% of the time instead of 1%.

Why are game designers wrong 80% of the time? 🧵 Sometimes they are wrong by a little. Sometimes by a lot. Is it poor planning? Are they morons? An expert painter does not produce a completely broken picture 80% of the time. Why is this so hard?

Read the Spirit AI interview on RPS with interest. It shows how hard it is to have a conversation about community moderation.

Three perspectives:
- Wronged user
- Moderator
- Social designer 1. User perspective: "I have been wronged/abused/etc. Mods should make it stop immediately. They are clearly in the wrong from a unarguable moral standpoint if they do not." Black and white, zero wiggle room.

Hello! I'm a game developer and today I turned 45. Some say this is older than the allowed max of 25. Still making games. Still excited about the future. (self-indulgent thready-thread) All the accomplishments that I'm most proud of happened after 35. It took time to learn. And make contacts with matching souls. Turns out the average age of a successful entrepreneur is 45? Huh.

We started out with 1 currency in our F2P games (Triple Town, Steambirds Survival) and have switched over to multiple currencies.

Several reason for this (of which obfuscation is not one) (thread...)

https://twitter.com/DanielSolis/status/1078770461176197120

1. Easier economy balancing. Each currency maps to a functional area of the game. If one area of the economy is imbalanced, you can tweak sources and sinks for that unique currency. And not imbalance other areas.

The poison of a social network is this:
- Humans invest social energy in reciprocal relationships, building future support.
- Time spent reading and liking tricks our brains into thinking we have support.
- But in most cases, when a crises arises, there is nothing there. There's a cruel math.
- A human struggles to have ~150 meaningful relationships.
- When following someone with >150 connections, you've entered into a relationship blackhole.
- No matter how little you give, you are spending yourself on acts that will never give back. A drain.