Mr. Finnegan Gets Cozy With Gbob
Sunday, April 8th, 2001
Mr. Finnegan here folks. With EA.com collapsing recently, I got
to wondering, "What happens next?" in regards to Ultima Online 2,
among other things. Fortunately for me, I got a chance to talk with
Bob Roland, former PR Guy Extraordinaire for EA.com about just that.
1) So, for the sake of our readers, what was your position at
OSI in relation to EA.com?
Me? I was the PR weasel. I think the official title was "Community
Coordinator." It was my job to come up with 20 different ways to
say "no comment" each day. I also had to read message boards until
my eyes bled, and then I would write reports nobody really cared
about. It was very, very fulfilling.
It only felt like that on some days. Truth of the matter is that
there was a great deal more to the job. Lemme ramble on about the
importance of community for a bit. Basically, community building
serves three main functions. The first is as advertisement, the
second is as a method for a company do make better games, and the
third is help the developers build something special that transcends
the mechanics of the game itself. Let's touch on these points.
Community as Advertising: All you have to do is take a look at
vapor products like Red Dragon Software or Dawn and you can see
how a community can sell a product, no matter if the product is
real or not. A strong community can create awareness, convince a
publisher to pick your game up and allows you to play at the table
with the big boys. Two good examples of this are Shadowbane and
Horizons. Both have fanatical fan bases who are looking for greener
grass and believe that they have found it with the to-be-released
game of their choice. I believe that on the basis of community alone,
both those games will find publishers or the venture capital needed
to publish it themselves. I think that if they hadn't taken the
steps they did to create a community, they would have had a much
bleaker future. For UO2, this wasn't something I cared about. We
didn't have to, right? If anything, I would have preferred there
to be no enthusiasm about the game and to allow it to speak for
itself after release. You see, using a community as advertising
carries a real danger. People who follow a game early on begin to
project what they believe to be the perfect game onto the product
they're helping to hype. Truth of the matter is that no game will
ever be perfect for an individual, right? So those people who helped
build your game will be the first to become it's bitter enemies
after the game is actually on the shelves. The Ultima Dragons and
their relationship with UO is a prime example. Small companies face
a real problem with this. Community as Advertising is a powerful
weapon, but you're very likely to cut yourself with it in the end.
It's a tough problem.
Community as Feedback: Communities can be a powerful tool for developers
to leverage. You have thousands of people, each with an idea or
thought to contribute. If a company is smart enough to listen, you
can create a better game because of the community. The problem you
face, however, is that it's tough to separate the signal from the
noise. Let's take a look at a hot topic like Player Killing. Now,
the market has proven conclusively how the vast majority of players
feel. The problem with message boards is that they show something
completely different than what the evidence has proven. You read
a message board and you would think that about half of the people
want more player killing, and the other half doesn't want it at
all. The truth is actually somewhere in-between. A good community
coordinator is one who has been around the block long enough to
realize that the people who post on message boards are not a true
reflection of the player base, but they can provide useful data.
I've called the message board posters "canaries in a coal mine"
(we call them rare--ed). If the canary dies, you got
a problem. If it's squawking, it probably just wants food or attention.
I would say that a person just going into the job of dealing with
the community will only have an accuracy of about 25% when it comes
to determining player wants. Better off reading the entrails of
goats. After a while you figure it out and you understand what it
is the players are really saying. You have to really listen sometimes,
but if you do your reward is a better game.
Community as tool for Player Retention: This is the real reason
why people like me have jobs. People pay 60 bucks for the software.
They pay 10 dollars a month for the community they discover. Think
about it, why do people play online games? The graphics aren't as
good, there's no plot, and nobody has found a way to magically eliminate
latency issues (unless you can reduce pings 500ms with a tachyon
generator or something). The reason is simple. They play them because
they find people to share their experiences with. I love this quote
by Dani, the creator of M.U.L.E. and other great games. She once
said at a GDC "Nobody ever died wishing they had spent more times
playing computer games alone." That's so damn true. Online games
transcend the medium by creating these groupings of people. Game
mechanics can play an important role in this process. Guilds, for
example. A good chat system. You can also foster this by creating
a "meta-community" of players who bond outside of the game itself.
Message boards are just the most obvious example. The Community
Coordinators of the future are going to be the guys and gals who
design new ways to create conducive environments for communities
to form.
There it is, Bob's Community Manifesto. You're the first unlucky
bastard to have to read it. I may have to write it down someday,
rather than just blabber on about these issues when I'm drunk at
a bar.
Thing is, there are only about 5 to 10 people really doing communities
as their job. That means I can be tops in my field. Of course, then
again, a person who really sucks at it can also be tops in this
field. It's the blessing and curse of being one of a handful. :)
Anyway, in the last couple of months I was also working on the
UO2 development team as a gopher. If some task needed to be done,
I was happy to pick up the slack. Mostly I was a data monkey, but
every now and then I got to work on something cool. I was able to
learn a great deal, and I think I would have been even more effective
at being a Community Coordinator after I had left that team.
2) To put it bluntly, what exactly happened? Did it happen all
of a sudden, or was there some facet of pre-meditated doom hovering
over EA.com that merely manifested itself in stages?
Oh, it was sudden. You know, toward the end there the morale on
the team was better than ever. We thought we had really turned a
corner, and there was nothing but smooth sailing until release.
Tyrant did a great job of getting the house in order, and all looked
good. I had only heard of our cancellation about an hour or two
before it hit the web. The game was almost complete, we were ready
for first playable, and the game itself was fun to play. I had been
fighting an ettin in the morning, and than I watched the demo for
the spell effects right before the rumors started.
As to what really happened, who knows. It would be easy to say
that EA is evil or stupid, but the truth is probably more complex
than that. Think of it in these terms. As a player, you don't know
everything about what's going on behind the scenes in a game. When
a developer changes something you don't like, you can only conclude
that they must be a bunch of incompetent twits, or a collection
of evil bastards. Now, if you're a developer, you know better. You
know why decisions were made, and why you can't talk about them.
It's kind of the same situation here, except it's between developer
and publisher rather than player and developer. I don't know why
they made they decision they did. I can speculate along with anyone
else, but I'll never know for sure.
It's not like EA woke up one morning and said, "let's fuck Origin."
It's a big mistake with anything to assume that those who you disagree
with are either stupid or malicious. Odds are, the other person
had a damn good reason in their mind for doing what they did. I'm
sure if you're an exec at EA you had a motive that made perfect
sense to you at the time.
That's why I'm not too bitter. These things happen.
Well?! Keep Reading, Damnit!
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