Oh #spymaster, I saw this comment posted to twitter the other day …
“decides to stop following everyone who uses #spymaster. Do you guys even know what twitter is for?”
… I have no arguments with the “stop following” part, everyone is free to do what they want. It’s the whole knowing what something is for that bugs me. My short answer is this …
“the street finds its own uses for things”
William Gibson – Burning Chrome – 1982
… the aphorism that has also become somewhat of a manifesto for people around my age who share(d) an interest in technology, Sci-Fi, Hip-Hop, 1950 electronics magazines, post-future urbanism, The KLF/ORB/FSOL and flying cars, while growing up. Don’t tell me we’ve turned our back on it?
The slightly longer answer …
There are many websites and even technologies that started off as one thing and become something else. An example randomly off the top of my head is Flickr, which has a fairly well documented history of starting as a game and turning into a rather successful photo (and video) sharing website.
And you know, people have turned this whole internet thing from a military and general system for academic communication into something you can *gasp* play games on, don’t you know what its for?
Kids, get your Galactic Empire off my X.25 Pad!
Experience tells me that on websites with large communities there are many camps, two of which we’re concerned about here…
- The very vocal minority, often early adopters, very techno-savy, who have strong opinions of what a service should or shouldn’t be.
- The vast majority of users who just carry on using the website on a daily basis and don’t really care about the finer details of technical implementation as long as their friends are there and they can carry on using it with too much friction.
Take for example the whole #fixreplies firestorm that hit a while back. In a nutshell, Twitter removed an option, that was turned off by default anyway and that only 3% of people turned on …
… and I’m guessing of those 3% most are from the early adopter, techno-savy group. Who of course noticed when it went away. But having it turned on pounded the servers for everyone else.
When you build a huge, massively used system it’s generally a good idea to build in the ability to progressively turn bits off should it become unstable. If turning one of those bits back on would make the whole system unstable again and magically instantly fixing it isn’t an option, then you leave it off.
The vocal minority get pissed (and those in the tech industry should probably know better), the vast majority (97%) carry on as normal without noticing a thing other than increased uptime and reliability. Or you keep the vocal minority happy and screw your main user base.
So what does this have to do with Spymaster?
Well, some people seem to be getting a bit upset about how the game uses twitter and how people chose to play the game. I’m not directing this at Joe and his bullet pointed list of actions specifically, he just happens to be linked to from this TechCrunch post.
But here’s the thing, the way I play the game (details below) introduces me to a lot of users I wouldn’t normally interact with. Most of them have around 11-190 followers, have a twitter stream full of spymaster tweets, @replies to followers and people they are following and general chit-chat. Of the people they are @replying to, some seem to have nothing to do with #spymaster and other follow the same pattern.
These are the from the vast majority of users pool, users who are, and I can hardly even begin to believe this, having fun. Enjoying playing the game and even adding commentary above that added by spymaster itself …
“@revdancatt HOW DARE YOU”
“@revdancatt Don’t know who you are, but you and I are done professionally! It’s on, I tell you! It’s on!”
“flickr celeb @revdancatt keeps wounding me. I’m gonna go cry in the corner”
“@revdancatt — Sir, THIS WILL NOT STAND!!!! [pounds shoe on table fer dramatic effect -- Odor Eater falls out, blunting aforesaid effect...]”
I’ve even seen accounts that look so new (default icon, only a few followers, all tweets are #spymaster ones) that they’ve obviously been set up to play spymaster. Some of these will be people creating a second account so as not to annoy their friends (how wise) but others will be people who have now joined twitter, just to play. For them Twitter is a gaming platform first and foremost.
“the street finds its own uses for things”
William Gibson – Burning Chrome – 1982
I think that roughly makes my point: If you don’t like all the #spymaster tweets from people you are following, unfollow them or ask them to stop, it’s that simple.
“But wait!” you may say “If we the vocal minority don’t speak up, Twitter will never fix stuff, like blocking hash tags!”
Well a) it’s not “Broken” so doesn’t really need to be “fixed”. It’s “Broken” for how you use it. b) I’ll get back to that in the section “Customized Clients or a new Twitter” if you want to skip ahead.
How I play Spymaster, a rough gameplay analysis and why the @spymaster Twitters are important.
So I like to dissect game and try and figure out the mechanics, find optimal paths and so on, and this is what I’ve come up with for Spymaster*.
1) I appear to make most of my money from people attacking me and failing …
… To put it into context, I’m only level 3 in the above screen-shot, doing “Tasks” will earn me about 1k and I can only do a few before having to wait a while for my energy (a limited game resource) to fill up again. An average failed attack will give me around 18k, which I could “earn” in around two hours of actually paying attention.
2) I earn more from a failed attack against me than I lose from a successful one. The below shot shows 6 (co-ordinated) attacks, each person won and lost an attack (the last one killed me, which seemed to have no effect other than make we wait 15mins before I can play again, fwiw) …
… overall I lost £5,832.07 and “won” £28,350.35 for a net gain of £22.45k all for very little effort … but still some effort …
So it seems that if they are high level and attacking you (a lower level player) and they win … they don’t get much as they are attacking below their level. If they lose then they lose a whole bunch of cash to you, seemly as punishment for attacking down levels, but also because they probably have more of it than you.
In essence my tactic (which is just a tactic btw, not the best tactic), can be summed up as … attack people above your level, in the hope that you can provoke them into attacking you back, as that’s when you get the money. Also, because they are higher level they’re probably earning more money from tasks and so on.
Just one more thing though, normally attacking (or being attacked by) people high above your level is a bad thing, so any winnings I get instantly get spent on arming myself to the teeth, I suspect I have a disproportionate amount of hardware for my level :)
So how would you go about finding people who are a few levels above you?
Well handily Twitter appears to be part of the game, just fancy that!
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 4
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 5
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 6
… you can construct other searches too, depending on what you’re looking for.
Clicking through to the players we can start to get a feel for what kind of target they are, here’s “billyforce”, we can see what he’s been upto and how many followers he has, etc …
Now the good news for people who hate #spymaster …
A general essence of games, is that you shouldn’t give information away to the other players, or at least you should know more about them, then they do about you.
Meaning one of the best overall tactics to playing #spymaster is to shut the fuck up. Fortunately for me lots of people don’t do that.
Consider these two options:
- You want to track how often player A attacks and wins, and how often other players are attacked by A. How fast player A moves up the levels and if they are spending their money on safehouses.
- You want to target a user who has just purchased a safehouse (which generates cash) and then gone to sleep … so you can let their income from the safehouse build up without them spending it. Which means you’re looking for a player in a timezone ahead of you.
In that second case, at around 3-4pm I could start looking at players from the UK, where it’s 11-12pm for them, searching for people securing safehouses …
http://twitter.com/#search?q=spymaster secured a safe house
… once identified, keep an eye out for lack of tweets for around 5 hours and then attack.
Both of these two cases sounds like a lot of hard work, something computers are much better at keeping tabs on. If only the game had some messaging system, and ideally where the players were located in the world and an API. That would allow a computer to keep track of these things … oh wait, Twitter …
Customized Clients or a new Twitter
But first, back to the original “problem”, to re-cap, I’d rather Twitter spent their time improving stability and scaling, rather than the ability to filter out #hashtags on the website for the vocal minority (actually it’d be nice if they could do both, but that’s not always very practical).
Anyway, I suspect that most cutting-edge users who are upset by #spymaster use twitter clients anyway. I’d be surprised if after this that the next updates to popular clients didn’t include the ability to suppress #hashtags.
So we can built twitter clients that exclude all mention of #spymaster, good!
Now what if we build one that keeps track of only #spymaster comments? We can use a combination of the URLs I use above …
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 6
… to discover players, attempt to discern where in the world they live for the timezone. Then once it’s found the players, consume their streams to monitor progression through the game, purchases and attacks. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to find quickly rising players with an appropriate number of followers.
The other thing these clients can do, is then share their information via twitter using their own #hashtag with other clients, allowing for a distributed network to track playing statistics and so on.
But, while do-able is probably a bit much for #spymaster. Not however for the more sophisticated games that will surly follow.
As web applications become more complex, a lot of focus can be put on the internal messaging and queueing needed to keep things running and scaling. If game developers can offload a bunch of this messaging (both client facing and internal), notifications and user authentication to a system that already has the issues of scaling and so-on nailed, then there’s no reason for them not to.
Using Twitter as a backbone or infrastructure to a game isn’t a bad idea, and for players Twitter just becomes a gaming platform with extra social aspects thrown on-top if they want it.
Is that what I want Twitter to turn into? No not really, would it surprise me, hummmm, not really, people like playing games it’s in our nature.
It does point to the possibility of creating something like Twitter that handles all the messaging and authing, the scaling and APIs, that games (or whatever) can build on-top of. The nice thing about this is that …
- A user, can play #spymaster and whatever new games come out on a dedicated “platform” rather than mix it in with the Twitter they already have (but remember for some people, twitter as a gaming platform is already the only thing they use it for)
- A user can play more than one game on the system, with all the messages for each game being mixed in with each other. Clients, blog-widgets and so on can separate them out and display them however they like.
- Other games could be built on-top of the mechanics of already existing games
- Meta-game and analysis can take place by aggregating all the data.
With Twitter extending their API, location based knowledge and stability, if they threw in private groups (for internal game messaging, oh and for a cost) and the option to piggy-back on their system in return for adverts placed in the messages. Then it becomes a pretty exciting platform for game development, if that game is narrative/location/social/casual driven.
So I’m sorry everyone who hates seeing #spymaster “spam” but I’m all for more games that’ll build up a rich history of plays, turns and actions. Hopefully your twitter clients will save you while the rest of us have fun.
;)
Bonus Controversial Statement for people who have gotten this far.
As big as World of Warcraft is, with it’s super rich graphics and immersion, it’s a closed system. With LUA you can build add-ons within the game, but it’s very hard to extend the games interaction out into the web. New “casual” games built on systems like Twitter(clone) that therefor have APIs for “free”, can be built out in all sorts of directions, and can be easily integrated and played on many different devices, from rich front-ended 3D games, to web-browsers, to iPhones, to real-life meetings and QR-Codes.
Just the Auction House in World of Warcraft can be a fun game in itself, but you can’t get at it from anywhere else other then the game. EVE online has broken away from this by having tools they tell you when you’ve leveled up a skill in the game, thus pulling you back to logging in to set the next skill away.
Unless games like WoW start to have more out of game interaction, they’ll finally get toppled by newer games that do.
Which isn’t #spymaster …
yet.
*I’ve set aside the whole number of followers part for simplicity.