Tag Archives: game experience

Hate to say I told you so: Why “always online DRM” will fail

Posted on by
Reply

In the past days there has been a lot of buzz around the new SimCity game. Sadly, the buzz is less about the game itself (although there seem to be some other issues as well) but more about the awful always online DRM the game introduces. After a rough start in the US due to problems with the server availability, similar problems occurred during the European launch, although Electronic Arts promised they would be better prepared in this case.

And Electronic Arts is not the first publisher who incorporated always online DRM in their games. Three years ago, I wrote a blog article on basically the same topic, but with another protagonist: Ubisoft. They introduced their always online DRM with the Settlers VII and Assassin’s Creed 2 – and guess what happened? They fell flat on their face and stopped the DRM, which – until then – was one huge user experience failure for the honest customers.

Back then, I wrote down some thoughts why always-online DRM / copy protection will fail. Turns out they still apply today:

1.) Not everyone is always online. Most hardcore gamers / heavy users have flatrates and are permanently online during play. But believe me: There are still (casual) gamers out there who play games on systems without a permanent online access. Suprisingly, they might even want to play on a laptop system while travelling.

2.) Wireless LAN is great fun if it works fine but due to the increasing growth of inner city networks and number of access points there is a real wireless network smog around. Depending on your hardware and the density of networks around your home it is not unlikely to lose your wireless lan connection for a few seconds until your signal is found again. These might be short breaks of only a few seconds but I cannot imagine some better killers of immersion and flow during gameplay than a pop-up message of the copy protection telling you that you lost your connection.

3.) Server accessibility. Well, even the best servers go down some time. Or your local provider has some connection issues. The consequence will be the same: You cannot access your singleplayer savegames. You cannot start your game. It`s already a bad issue if that happens to a game which is free to play. But it`s an epic fail if people pay 50 bucks for a game and cannot play the singleplayer campaign (!) because somewhere a server went down. I already experienced a Steam server downtime during a launch day. No fun at all, believe me.

4.) Longtime server availability. What happens if it turns out the game doesn`t sell well? Or people will stop playing it? Servers get shut down after a while and your game won`t be playable anymore. Of course, the publisher might fix this via patch – but there are enough cases of games which were abandoned completly.

5.) Legal customers are the ones who will suffer. It`s a general problem of every error-prone copy protection system: It`s the people who legally buy the game who will face the problems. It might be the software pirates hacking the copy protection who will be the ones facing less problems than the legal customers. It happened in the past and it might happen to Ubisoft`s system, too. If it does, it`s hard to explain to the legal customers.

I sincerely hope that Electronic Arts will abandon the always-online DRM sooner than later. Until then, I won’t buy a game with the DRM and strongly recommend to all other gamers to do the same.

CfP: CHI 2013 Games User Research (GUR) Workshop

Posted on by
Reply

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 11th, 2013

ORGANIZERS
- Pejman Mirza-Babaei, University of Sussex
- Veronica Zammito, Electronic Arts
- Joerg Niesenhaus, University of Duisburg-Essen
- Mirweis Sangin, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
- Lennart E. Nacke, University of Ontario Institute of Technology

AIMS AND SCOPE
CHI 2013 “Games User Research: Practice, Methods, and Applications” workshop provides a venue for collaborative knowledge construction, sharing and dialogue across the games industry and the interdisciplinary academic fields. The goal of this one-day workshop is to advance the state of the art in the game industry by knowledge-sharing with frontline research from academia and between companies. It ultimately aims at providing the basis for cross-pollination across the involved research fields and industry sectors. The theme of this year’s workshop is: “Beyond Usability: GUR practices to evaluate video games user experience”. We welcome all contributions from academic researchers and industry practitioners on innovative methodologies and applied techniques to assess fun, appeal and engagement in games.

The workshop invites contributions on the following topics:

- Methods (e.g., how to design calibrated questionnaires)
- Solutions (e.g., guidelines to capture qualitative feedback)
- Industry practice (i.e., lessons from the trenches)

SUBMISSION
Participants are invited to submit a short biography (100-150 words) of the author(s) attending the workshop and either:

A 4-page position paper (in the CHI extended abstracts format) describing work falling within the topics of the workshop. Submissions may describe ongoing work, recent results, or opinions and approaches related to the workshop topic. We also solicit papers with industry, academic in a form of case study to highlight real-world issues that need to be tackled by new research and recent advancements that improve games user research processes, as well as novel and successful methods for evaluation design, player experience, and understanding users.

A presentation abstract and slides (we ONLY recommend this for industry participants).
Participants are invited to submit their submission (one PDF file) via EasyChair (GURCHI2013) by 11 January, 2013. Submissions will be reviewed and the organising committee will select up to 20 participants according to relevance, quality of results, research diversity, and likelihood for stimulating and contributing to the discussion.

PARTICIPATION
If accepted, workshop participants will be provided with a registration code which will allow them to register for this workshop, at least one author must register for the workshop and for one or more days of the conference. Participants will soon be able to check conference rates on the CHI 2013 website. Papers will also be compiled on the workshop website.

IMPORTANT DATES
- January 11, 2013: Submissions deadline
- February 8, 2013: Acceptance notification
- April 27, 2013: Workshop (TBC)

CONTACT
If you have any questions, please contact gurchi2013@easychair.org or any of the organisers.
http://hcigames.businessandit.uoit.ca/chigur/

Everything’s better with lasers…?! My first weeks with SWTOR

Posted on by
Reply

I spent some quality time with Star Wars: The Old Republic during the past weeks and want to share some thoughts on Bioware’s fresh-faced MMORPG. Although I did not expect a revolution of MMORPG game design, I was surprised that Bioware took very little risk by sticking to many well-known and established MMORPG standards. On the other hand, Bioware did a great job of capturing the atmosphere of the Star Wars Universe. Sound, art and character design are top-notch, although the texture quality is some years behind. Another thing that bothers me is that in the vast openness of the galaxy, the space combat runs on rails (here’s my hope that Bioware will release a full-fledged space combat add-on).

Surprisingly, Bioware did not so well with the whole graphical user interface (GUI). There are only a few options to modify your GUI, but it is far away from the freedom of interface modifications within games like World of Warcraft. That wouldn’t bother so many players, if only Bioware delivered a great GUI right from the start. Here are some examples for what went wrong:

The sum of your characters’s and companion’s actions grows fast and with them the need to organize all the fancy little icons across the screen. With only three control bars on the left, right and in the middle, Bioware offers only little room for placing all those action icons or additional items like medipacks. Especially the companion’s standard interface is far away from being intuitively understandable and easy to control.

Several pop-up menus like the inventory or the skill trainer options feature tabs, which can be found at the bottom of the pop-up window and not – as most users would expect them – at the top. Futhermore, they are comparatively small, with a dark font (cause it is a deactivated tab, right?) on a darker background and for this reason quite difficult to spot. It took me 10 minutes of searching and asking other players to find the mission items in my inventory (which have their own tab).

Another flaw is the button for leaving a flashpoint (instance) – it’s so tiny, that I wouldn’t have registered it without the help of my guild mates. The beauty of an MMOG is that you can ask people if you do not find the right button or option (which people do a lot in the general chat), but especially for MMOG newbies it would have been helpful to provide a more intuitive GUI.

But there are also some interface improvements in comparison to other MMORPGs. I really like the vertical beams of light, which direct you to the NPC’s loot.

After some weeks with SWTOR I have mixed feelings about the game. On the one hand I really enjoy the whole Star Wars atmosphere, the great character and art design and the dialogues. But on the other hand the characters and dialogues cannot draw off the attention of the fact that this a standard MMORPG that has a lot in common with the last generation of MMORPGs – except the great Star Wars license. In addition, the interface is neither intuitive enough for beginners nor offers enough modification options for experienced players to adapt their interfaces to their play style. Hopefully, Bioware will fix this soon – because if there is one further common ground in MMORPGs, it’s the regular updates.