Evidence-Based Design

• WoW talent distribution metrics. Somewhat flawed methodology (he only examines a set of characters with Allakhazam profiles), but interesting nonetheless. 12% balance druids, represent!
• An RMT solution to the Chinese government-mandated anti-addiction system.
• Pictograms and culture. Worth thinking about if you’re planning to localize your game. You can’t bake the word “Blacksmith” into your sign textures. Well, you can if you want to redo all your signage for every version of the game. Good luck with that, and I’ll spend a lot less time a) thinking about universally understood icons, and b) asking the artists to do the textures once and only once.
• Information design is graphic design: improving the usability of information software (via Juice Analytics). MMOs are information-heavy games; we should be working harder to present the players with the information they need in a format they can use. WoW has a decent default interface, but still, how many of the most popular WoW UI mods are ones that improve information display?

“Game Accessibility — Why Bother?” is today’s cheap Gamasutra link here at We Can Fix That with Data. Author Dimitris Grammenos argues that you should care about accessibility because it can happen to YOU.

So, what would you do, if you woke up one morning only to find out that you can’t play your favorite game anymore, just because some designer did not consider something as simple as allowing redefining the game controls, or altering the game speed? Would you like to spit in his coffee? Would you wish to punch him in the face? Well, take a good look in the mirror because that designer might as well be you.

Shit! Please tell me which WoW designer decreed that I can’t rebind right click’s “interact with target” to a key so that I might get to the violence. If it weren’t for that, I could play almost 100% with the keyboard. (Then again, if I didn’t have to use the mouse, my left-handed mousing skills probably wouldn’t have gotten as good as they have over the last few weeks. I credit this step forward to my bank mule, who uses mail and the auction house a lot. With the fucking mouse.) (Not that I have any bright ideas on controls for those systems, I just don’t get the interaction thing.)

In other words, I’m still one-handed. PC games are largely accessible. I’m more annoyed that I can’t open my own bottle of beer.

Speed limits are perhaps are worse situation than many of you realize. There is very little engineering that goes into a regulatory (black on white) speed limit. While designers use a “design speed” that speed is only used to determine the minimum conditions for the worst situation. E.G. the tightest curve possible at the design speed. According the the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) the official way to set a speed limit is described as “When a speed limit is to be posted, it should be within 10 km/h or 5 mph of the 85th-percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”

A speed study determines the 85th-percentile speed. This is done by sitting on the side of the road and measuring how fast motorists are moving when no other motorist is limiting their speed (i.e. not held up by other traffic). The result is the highest speed at which 85 percent of the traffic is moving rounded to the nearest 5 mph increment. (Some agencies may also always round down or up). So in other words, you the driver set the speed limit. The only engineering reason the speed is set lower is to allow for road conditions (steep grade, deadman’s curve), roadside development (shopping district, residential), or similar as listed in the MUTCD.

Fascinating — it’s the old “build it and watch how they use it” approach. From the interesting comments in this interesting post on why you should just wear your freaking seatbelt already (via Metafilter).

Thanks for all the kind comments and emails. My wrist’s recovery isn’t quite on schedule — I was supposed to be able to type by now, but the doctor’s telling me to wait for another freaking month. This has significantly hampered my ability to work, but after a few days learning to target with the keyboard, I’m playing WoW at about 90% efficiency. It helps that I’m a caster druid, so my job is to either “tab to target, hit Moonfire hotkey, hit Insect Swarm hotkey, hit Wrath hotkey a bunch of times, tab to next mob” or “hit f key to target groupmate, hit Lifebloom hotkey, wait … hit Lifebloom hotkey, wait … oh shit, hit Healing Touch hotkey, wait …” About all I ever have to type is the initial “am I healing?” when I join the group.

This may say something about group gameplay and dynamics in WoW — not that I’m complaining. I’m happy I can do something other than watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD.

In “stuff I wish I could comment on further that’s come up in the last few weeks:”

• The discussion on guilds at Will’s is timely, because another one of my recent WoW activities has been shopping for a raiding guild. It’s been an interesting experience, and I plan to rant about it later. See also Kevin’s followup commentary.
• Terra Nova talks PvP balance. I’ve done PvP balance for a long time. I eventually discovered a secret to making changes that feel responsive, rather than change-for-the-sake-of-change or an attempt to jerk players around: wait until the last minute to commit changes. Producers hate it, QA complains, but if you fix a perceived problem and sit on it for two months, nine times out of ten that’s enough time for player ingenuity to solve the problem on their own. Then you post the patch notes and they think you’re an out-of-date idiot, and you are! (Well, regardless, they always think you’re an idiot.) (And assuming that the game mechanics allow for sufficient emergent behavior.) I’ll have lots more to say on this in the future, heh.
• Darius Kazemi’s new metrics middleware company gets off the ground. They have an extremely awesome blog so far. I expect they’ll be an extremely strong competitor to Emergent.
• Holy shit, Rush Limbaugh intelligently defends games. Well, he defends games by way of comparing them to guns, which doesn’t really work on the target anti-game audience, but hey.

I’m having wrist surgery tomorrow, and I’ll be relegated to left-hand mousing and no typing for a while. See you in a couple of weeks.

Bioware spends more money on middleware. It sounds like stuff for server programmers, but this paragraph is interesting:

Using the technology, BioWare will be better equipped to handle large numbers of player interactions and events within its MMO environment. The developer will also be able to monitor the game environment in real time and immediately offer fixes for any game oddities, and to identify and react to malicious player behavior in real time to ensure game integrity.

Earth and Beyond did something similar years ago — if something crossed a certain threshold, the server would let somebody know right away. For customer service, real-time is awesome. For design — in my experience — I don’t really care what people are doing right now. I care about how their behavior changes over time, I care about how many people were playing Class B last week as compared to last month, and if I’m making new abilities for the next patch, I want to know what the average stats have been in recent history. That stuff shouldn’t be changing on its own overnight. However, it’s probably pretty cool to know when it does.