NFTs, Stolen Valor, and Upholding the Intrinsic Value of Achievements in Video Games

I saw a post yesterday about using NFTs in games as rewards for achievements. It went beyond the fundamental observation that NFTs are basically Monopoly money that you buy with real money and explained why that's a really terrible idea specifically in a game space:

This effectively takes the 'achieve' out of 'achievements' by offering players a path to “pay to win”. It guts any prestige with such rewards, and ignores that it is ultimately a worse experience.

Let’s walk through it together.

One player does the achievement and earns the reward and equips it to show off.

Another player purchases it from another player and equips it to show off.

Now players realize that anyone can buy the reward, and the achievement loses meaning.

If this is no longer about achievement, what’s the point?

To make money? Anyone could potentially complete the achievement or get carried to earn the reward, hence there is little value or reason to buy it.

So now the achievement system doesn’t have purpose and the rewards for it have little value to players.

This is why designers design to GOALS. Features that go against the goals don’t get made because they will have undesired consequences. We don’t just add things to add things.

I agree wholeheartedly. But what bothered me is that this explanation revolved around NFTs inviting play-to-win mechanics into a game. To me, that means that NFTs are just the latest symptom. The real problem is the temptation of pay-to-win.

I don't think there's a lot of difference between cheating and paying to win (especially if you're paying for hacks). From a game maker's perspective, it boils down to the same thing -- a challenge is offered to players so that they might reap a sense of accomplishment from trial and error, failure and persistence. The game itself will provide the player with a visible token of that accomplishment so that they can remember it, exhibit status, and serve as an example to other players to persevere. Some players decide they have no interest in investing themselves in the challenge and just print a T-shirt saying they've been there, done that. Realizing that some portion of the tokens are counterfeit, the community immediately sees less value in the tokens and thus a marginal return on the investment to earn it.

To me, that means there's a decision branch here that defines certain player groups by mentality:

1. Players that will meet the challenge to get the reward.

2. Players that will cheat or pay to get the reward without meeting the challenge.

3. Players that will neither meet the challenge nor seek the reward because they no longer see the value in the reward. 

4. Players who will meet the challenge despite knowing of counterfeit rewards, either because they still see value in the reward OR they never saw value in it in the first place.

Obviously, our goal is to encourage players to adopt mindsets 1 or 4. 

The common thread here is how players value rewards. We create rewards in games according to a perception that they are symbols of achievement. Some players agree with that. We speak in terms of intrinsic reward. Those who perceive no spiritual connection between the reward and the experience only view the reward as an item. They assign it a cash value and pay for it. So, the challenge is to preserve the sanctity of the achievement-reward relationship. 

I think I have a potential solution to that. But first, a few personal things about me.

From my military service, I have an Air Force Academy graduate's ring, a Combat Infantryman's Badge, Air Assault Wings, and a Bronze Star. All that stuff is on my uniform and I could pin it on a blue baseball cap with gold letters like every other guy down at the VFW if I wanted. But all it would tell you is that I went to college and Iraq and one time I slid down a rope out of a helicopter. 

What I don't have is a Ranger tab, a red beret worn by Air Force Special Operators, or a medal for not shooting innocent people. Instead, I have a back injury that lets me know when I'm not doing my yoga poses frequently enough, intimate knowledge of what it's like to almost die of hypothermia or drowning, and a memory of a moment when I saw my life flash before my eyes, made a conscious decision not to shoot a kid, and found moments later he was pointing a toy gun at me.

Those are some of my best memories of military service, and two of them are of failure. The memories are way cooler than the medals. You may have heard the phrase 'stolen valor' in the news. It refers to people who go out to military surplus stores, buy a bunch of uniform items, and wear it around pretending to be war heroes. They're basically hackers and NFT purchasers in real life. I don't think the term is accurate. You can steal medals. You can steal people's attention and admiration. But you can't steal valor. You can buy a Combat Infantryman's Badge on Amazon, but you can't buy my experiences. 

All of which is to say that maybe we're making the wrong kind of rewards in games. I think one of the coolest aspects of Horizon: Zero Dawn is Aloy's trips back to Rost's grave. It's a touchstone for her, and her interactions with it change as she progresses throughout the game. It's especially potent to me because of its authenticity. Aloy is a warrior, and she has the experience of survivor's regret. Not all my memories of military service are good, but I still wouldn't trade them away, and Aloy's visits to Rost resonate. Those moments are a constant way to remember an important moment in the game, the completion of a challenge, and a means to deepen the player's relationship with the story and character.

What if more achievement awards were like that? Sure, loot is loot is loot. It will always have universal appeal. But what if by completing an achievement a player could earn a memory? Perhaps a unique interaction with an NPC or access to a special area where you are granted a view of the game world that few others get to see? Maybe John Marston has a little more to say or think about when visiting Arthur Morgan's grave. Maybe you get permission to listen to Zavala's collection of jazz albums. Maybe you can go fly fishing with Captain Price at his cottage in Derbyshire. 

These are all things that could either serve as replacements for or supplements to an in-game item. Moreover, they can be built upon over time to give the player a sense of growth for both their character and the game world. Offering experiences as rewards could possibly restore a sense of intrinsic value and boost player interest. Whether it's an NFT or not, loot may always be just a thing that people can buy. You can pay to win or collect, but the only way to get an experience is to actually go out and experience it. 

What's Going on with Baklava

This is the end of my first year on the Baklava team for Games for Love. Our scrappy band of volunteer indie developers is slowly making headway toward a playable demo. In the meantime, I've been able to tie down all the idea fairies flying around and herd them into a coherent set of narrative objectives and story points for the game. Herein is what I've been able to establish for 2021...

To start with, our Director's vision is to bring you a four-person couch co-op beat-em-up-slash-team-assembly game. Think of it as a hybrid of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game and Overcooked.

We began with a simple concept - Four juvenile T-Rexes must battle across the islands of their homeland to defeat a horde of lava monsters and the volcano god launching them. They must use their wits and teamwork to bash the lava monsters into dust while assembling items to help them achieve their objectives. 

I won't give away too much more about why exactly we're fighting those lava monsters or what exactly we're building. It was an interesting enough journey over the last five months just getting the story's foundation settled. Here are the key elements I worked out. 

#1: Building a Smart Island for Intelligent Dinosaurs

This seemed pretty simple. A fantasy world of limitless possibilities. A veritable Dinotopia, if you will. Potential can be paralyzing, though. Not every world is the MCU (nor should they be, because that'd be exhausting). Starting out with world building is like standing in an infinite hallway full of doors. Each door leads to a new hallway with a finite number of doors. Each time you open a new door, you find a new hallway with a decreasing number of doorways. Once you pick a door, you can't walk back through it. Unless, that is, you're willing to abandon your choice and the possibilities it led to. I think this is the primary reason people go all the way in their world building efforts, only to ball the whole thing up and throw it in the trash so they can start from scratch. If you're not rigorous in your notes, you don't have a map to help yourself walk back through the doors you took, and you get so lost it's easier to go back to square one.

I fell in on a draft concept with some really neat ideas. The dinosaurs' home would be the Greek island of Santorini. That led to a drive to give the game a Greek cultural theme. The dinos were going to assemble baklava to feed to the lava monsters. What is baklava, you ask? So did I. And because I didn't know, I assumed my 11-year-old son wouldn't know, and since nobody wants to go to a Wikipedia page mid-game, I realized we'd have to explain that. And in writing that explanation I realized that we'd have to explain why we're fighting and feeding these lava monsters at the same time. Also, our T-Rex heroes were going to be Muay Thai kickboxers (short arms, remember?) who had learned martial arts from a dinosaur that had come to Greece from Thailand. I didn't know why he was there. I didn't know why a bunch of T-Rexes on an island of technologically advanced peaceful dinosaurs would learn martial arts. The ideas were great, but the narrative arc was turning into a rat maze. 

The world had become a place where everything that could happen was happening. It had been built by breaking the rules of worldbuilding in hallways - opening more than one door in the same hallway and not closing doors behind yourself when you exit a hallway. I couldn't see a way to make the player feel immersed in the world without giving them a lot of exposition/explanation or just leaving them in the dark. Neither option seemed like something they would enjoy. 

We had several discussions about this in which I tried to shift us from "Santorini" to "an island with Greek-ish characteristics." It was a struggle to find a balance between authenticity in the cultural element, consistency to support our story, and a way of presenting it without creating a text box as big as the island itself. 

And that's when it hit me. An idea so crazy I couldn't help but throw it out there. This is the crude PowerPoint illustration that changed it all for us.

And just like that, we left Greece behind. In a world where intelligent T-Rexes fight lava monsters, why can't there be self-aware text boxes that serve as geographic features? Why shouldn't there be self-aware text boxes? Baklava happens in the past, but it doesn't necessarily have to be OUR past. It could be an alternate dimension. Have Rick and Morty visited this dimension? Perhaps. Am I thnking about putting a five-horned dinosaur in a lab coat, calling it Sty-Rick-osaurus, and making him give our heroes weapons to fight lava monsters before disappearing through a portal because he has to go to a "council meeting?" 

Absolutely. Because for this to be the type of island where stuff like that can happen, then stuff like that must happen. 

The best part is that we can pick and choose what happens. If it does happen, then it happened because it could. If it doesn't happen, well, that's just because it didn't happen on this occasion. Maybe it'll happen in Baklava 2. Are there Greek dinosaurs? Sure! Should Leonidosaurus tell a lava monster "This. Is. PANGEA!" and kick it down a bottomless pit? 

I mean, dude YES. And if it works for our story, I will do that. 

That has been extremely liberating for everyone. With a single text box, we have simultaneously put ourselves back into a place where anything can happen and excused ourselves from justifying a lot of it. We have a foundation of "no time to explain, bash a lava monster." And that works so well because it's exactly what the player wants to hear. 

#2: Four Heroes Ought to Mean Four Stories

One thing that always irked me about most simple brawlers is that your character selection has absolutely no impact on the game's outcome. All this work goes into creating visually unique characters and so much is taken away from the art because those characters are treated as interchangeable shells for punch-bots. I wanted something more for our game. 

While I knew it would be unrealistic to create four entirely unique game experiences or create all the branches and reconnection points for the four individual heroes throughout the game, I did make a goal for myself to give the player some sense of investment in their choices. The solution I came up with is to give each T-Rex a personal motivation/ambition that's tied to the larger quest. If each player can achieve some sort of scoring threshold by the time the game is completed, then that T-Rex succeeds in their personal ambition.

I'm excited because this expands the play experience in two ways. First, co-op players have an additional incentive to help each other achieve their scoring thresholds throughout the game. It's not just about beating the lava boss. It's making sure everyone gets the high score at least twice (or something. We haven't figured out specifics yet). For solo players, they can run through the game multiple times and collect new rewards. 

#3: The Mega Meta

This is more of an objective than an actual accomplishment (thus far), but I've set up a pretty big goalpost for myself. Because Games for Love is a charity and profits from the game will go directly to funding programs like 1UP Lifebridge and GFLExperience, I want the game to at least in part evangelize those missions. So we want themes of teamwork, volunteerism, hope, and healing. Most of those are endemic to the game, but the healing aspect is more of a challenge. Killing the lava god feels bad. Finding out that the lava god is somehow a victim and needs saving from itself feels a little too Moana. But in a game of dinosaurs assembling things across islands where anything can happen, I don't think we should pass up the opportunity to build a literal life bridge. 

We're not to a highly detailed plan of levels spread across a three-act story structure yet, but these first items were a pretty heavy lift, and accomplished on volunteer-hours over Discord. I'm proud of the work so far. I'm excited to start refining things and get a story that hurls these intrepid little T-Rexes to their destiny. Here's to everything we'll do in 2022!

Hack the Hackers: The Potential Power of Narrative to Stop Cheating in Video Games

I find nothing fun or fair about using hacks in multiplayer games. I don't condone it. Still, I view hackers showing off on livestreams with the same fascination as women who binge-watch murdershows. It's a passing interest that I've studied for a while, and I wonder if we're missing something in the effort to stop them. 

I found this neat quote by Johan Huizinga, who studied the importance of play in human culture. In calling cheating "anti-play," he said "as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play world collapses." 

That seems to be true. Cheating in multiplayer games runs rampant in everything from World of Warcraft to World of Warships to New World. It causes unending rage across player communities, requires companies to spend millions of dollars annually to find, fix, and destroy hacker accounts, gives development teams migraines, and leads to lawsuits whenever players argue the ban-hammer was erroneously dropped on them. 

But all of this treats cheating like it's an arms race. The cheaters get a better hack, so now we need a more advanced system to detect it and thwart it. We are locked in a constant cycle of threat creation and threat response. I think there's a broader approach to this conflict; an opportunity to win hearts and minds.

Dan Ariely at Duke University has studied the mindset of cheating for years. If you have time, his TED talk on why we cheat is riveting. If you don't, here's his quick 13-point breakdown. 

Either way, here's what I find most interesting when we think about people who hack to gain an advantage over others in multiplayer. From the article:

"Increasing the reward gained by cheating or the penalty of being caught cheating did little to change the amount of cheating in the group."

"The more abstracted we are about the cheating, the more willing we are to cheat."

"If we feel like someone has cheated us, then we are more likely to cheat to get even."

"We cheat when we see others we associate with cheating."

"A nudge to remember our moral compass has a profound impact to reduce cheating if it comes before the opportunity to cheat presents itself."

In light of Ariely's findings, it seems like nuking player accounts is a doomed strategy. The Call of Duty community's response to the banning of 10,000 accounts at a time appears to back that up. It's all drop-in-the-bucket and we-haven't-seen-the-last-of-them stuff. The damage to the play world is compromised. If people experience loss at the hands of a cheater or watch a cheater using hacks on stream, the damage is done and the cancer is already spreading. This is a problem that demands a more proactive approach. But what? 

I focus on points 2 and 5 above. Can we reduce the "abstractness" of the game environment to the player? Can we shine a laser pointer at the player's own ethical code before they engage in the game?

I think we can.

The principle of "abstractness" relative to the game is a subject of study unto itself. You play for "credits" or "tokens" instead of actual money. Even if you pay money for the credits, Ariely finds that there's still a diminished sense of value and that you'll cheat to accumulate them. You could arguably say your K/D ratio in a multiplayer game becomes a kind of currency. If you can't track it, then you can't be driven by it. 

The biggest sense of abstractness lies in the game world itself. "That is not actually me cheating, and I am not actually harming other people, and the owners of these avatars who I shoot are nowhere near me and will never know my true identity or where I live." 

A player therefore has no sense of connection to their fellow players or the game world. It's the same problem as trying to get older generations to believe in climate change. "I'm not going to be here in fifty years, what do I care where the sea level is then?"

I believe narrative structures can be developed in games to make players care about the overall game environment. I mean, the whole purpose of narrative is to make the player feel immersed in the world, right? 

America's Army did something that felt a little experimental with the concept back in the day. They set up an honor system that unlocked "special forces character capabilities" if you played by the rules long enough. Notably, the fastest and roughest way to lose honor points was to kill a teammate. Even if that RPG hit them by accident, you lost 10 points (it took countless hours of play just to earn 5) and got locked out of the game for a few hours. It definitely made you think twice about pulling the trigger. 

I think the biggest thing that can be done is to repeat a practice Ariely tried in an experiment. In the experiment, Ariely told students in two separate classrooms to make it very obvious they cheated on an exercise. The difference was that one classroom cohort signed an honor code before the exercise, and the other didn't. The groups that signed the honor code consistently exhibited lower levels of cheating. 

Could a main character from a game's campaign ask a player to take 30 seconds to sign an honor code before jumping into multiplayer? Would that be such an inconvenience to the community that it kills the log-on rate? I can't imagine it being worse than what we are already experiencing. 

It sounds silly and corny and antithetical to the player experience, I know. Having the Master Chief telling you to raise your right hand and repeat the UNSC Academy Honor Code might be a stupid idea. Then again, if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid. 

Ultimately, I find Ariely's argument compelling that keeping multiplayer spaces safe is more about giving a little TLC to our buggy moral code than it is about defeating malicious computer code. That means flipping the script on the player's internal monologue. The best way to hack that is with a new narrative that compels them to take care of their game environment. 

Mazes Instead of Wheels - A Modest Proposal For a New Model of Battle Royale

The teaser videos for changes to the Fortnite and Warzone maps over the last week haven't really excited me, and I haven't been able to convince my gaming friends to try Battlefield out with me. I'm not really excited to leave Verdansk, but at the same time I'm feeling like it's gotten stale.

I got to thinking about why I feel caught between this boredom and apprehension. It's not because I like modern warfare more than retro 80s warfare more than WWII warfare more than treehouses that defy Newtonian physics warfare. It's really that, at the end of the day, it's same-stuff-different-map. 

Change the map all you want. The story is still the same, isn't it? Here comes the ever-shrinking circular border of gas/fire/wind/tachyons. Time to run toward the center where sixty-five people are waiting to snipe you. If you're lucky enough to make it into a good hiding spot, your reward is to run for the next winnowing of the real estate. 

So, while much ink has been spilled over cheating in shooters, the unspoken goblin frustrating battle royale players of every stripe is the degree to which luck plays into winning. It's better to have the favor of the circle gods than the meta loadout. 

That's a more important principle than I think a lot of people realize. In the player's view of a battle royale "story," there are only a few potential endings:

1. We won! My team and I prevailed! Did you see that? I can't believe that just happened! 

2. Stupid aim-botting $&#@!

3. Dude, we landed in the worst spot possible. We were screwed from the get-go.

4. Just wasn't our day. 

Experience #1 likely makes up less than 10% of average player experiences. And even then, it's notable that the phrase "I can't believe that just happened" is uttered on a LOT of streamers' win vids. They are expressing disbelief in their triumph because their volume of experience tells them it's not a reasonable conclusion to the game story. In other words, it's exciting but not satisfying. Not the outcome we want for the player. 

I get that there are all kinds of explanations rooted in psychology that explain why players continue to say "just one more round" time and time again after having experiences 2-4. And while that's good for a game's popularity and earnings, it boils down to establishing a relationship between the game and the player like a rat on a wheel. Keep running and eventually some cheese will drop. Meanwhile, to keep the player motivated between wins, here are some mini-missions, new weapons, and little accomplishments to pick up along the way. All of this is introduced through some cinematics to hype new guns, skins, map areas, and the like. 

This is how narrative is abused in battle royale games. Everyone knows that narrative is there to create an emotional conduit between the game-player and the gameplay. In battle royale that emotional conduit is narrowed to "excitement to collect new stuff." No further emotional connection is sought, let alone pursued. 

And while that's a successful model now, battle royale games should be looking to the future now. Because nothing stays popular forever just by putting fresh paint on well-worn concepts (looking at you, MMORPGs of the early 2000s). 

So the problems I see with the current state of battle royale are:

1. The story of the player experience is wearisome and frequently discouraging.

2. There's nothing to make players feel invested in the game world. 

And just for good measure...

3. Cheating is all over the place.

And this got me thinking about how narrative could solve a LOT of problems in the battle royale genre. Here's my pitch. 

Turn the wheel into a maze. Instead of telling everyone to get closer, tell them to escape. 

Now the dynamic changes from "be the last one standing" to "don't be the last one left inside." 

I think this creates a ton of dynamics to heighten the player experience. 

1. Player choice now has a lot more influence on player outcomes than random circle changes.

2. The story is more complex. The player isn't killing to kill. They're killing to achieve an ultimate objective.

3. By making the win condition slightly more complex than "kill all the things," you put a huge dent in cheating. 

4. The idea of escape is a fountain of story narratives that can take you beyond "stop the apocalypse," "stop the communist terrorists," or "win World War II." 

I've seen some games already play with this idea. Closest to it is Hood: Thieves and Legends. The idea is that a team of four players select their class and then try to steal a treasure from a castle guarded by NPCs. Meanwhile, an opposing team is trying to do the same thing. You go in, grab the loot, and then hold an escape area until you get out. All the while you can be pursued by NPCs and the other team. The mechanics and class-leveling (or lack thereof) keep it from working, but the idea is there.

Fall Guys has done an outstanding job of putting the idea to work. Sure, there's randomness to a lot of the play spaces, but it doesn't rob me of feeling like I own my decisions. 

I think that forcing people to find a way out is an exciting dynamic. Instead of a military backdrop, you can have scientists in a facility, or astronauts on a space station, or (my personal favorite) elite criminals pulling off a heist. Get in, get a required item for escape (key, money, air supply), and get out.

I'd offer that this narrative framework also might put a dent in cheating. Your standard lock-ons, aim-bots, and wall hacks would probably be great at helping you kill other players, but what's the relative value of that when reducing the in-game player count only brings you closer to being the last one left inside? 

Best of all, you have a natural out for map overhauls. Instead of nuking the world, you have already opened an escape hatch to somewhere new. Do the scientists get out of the underground facility, only to find themselves on a sprawling sealed-in military compound? Do the thieves find a new city? Do the astronauts fly to a new space station? These all feel like natural lead-ins that enable you to shift environments, change out weapons, and permit new skins without turning your thinly-veiled Crimean conflict into a gang war between the Judge Dredd and a guy in a clown suit.

Let's face it, the success of Westworld is based on the two questions it constantly asks you - "how will they get out?" and "what will they do after they get out?" If it works for HBO, it could absolutely work in a game.