EVE Vegas has completed, but my notes still keep coming. CCP Dropbear, who may have the most epic name I’ve ever heard (“Nick Blood”), gave the last presentation on Saturday evening, and did so in appropriate CCP fashion: inebriated. In fact, we just called him Dropmic the rest of the evening…
Background
For those that don’t know, Dropbear works in the Content department out of the Atlanta office, working on live events and such with CCP Headfirst in conjunction with Internal Affairs (yes, really) and the Storyline team like Abraxas and the rest. As presented, he has the goal of developing more game content that would flow from the live events. And he emphasized that much of what he’d say came from his own ideas; CCP hasn’t yet approved everything he wants to do, but things continue to look good. And if you didn’t know much about what that means, read the dev blog post Live Events: Only the Beginning by Headfirst.
Presentation
Live events actually fit under the storyline stuff rather than comprising their own official department. In fact, even the Storyline department doesn’t exist as such, or rather doesn’t have a fixed definition. This works because broad definitions lead to broad possibilities. They push interaction forward by using CCP actors: developer accounts whose chat shows up as purple text. (The sample text showed a bit of interaction with Mizhara Del’thul and Gottii, both former alliance mates of mine (so represent, Electus Matari!)
CCP’s goals here include fun, rewarding, and meaningful experiences – but the distribution of that may vary. As an example, some gameplay may be very meaningful (onlining SBUs) or rewarding (grinding standings) without necessarily being fun. And other stuff might be fun and meaningful for some players even without a game reward. Of course, stuff works best when it has a reasonable balance between the three. Live events help evolve a living, breathing fictional universe, but they also hand some of that power over to the players and catalyze emergent gameplay. This gives a lot of bang for the buck even with a small team. Experimental projects like this one help CCP learn a lot about players: what we want, how we act, and how we react. In fact, they ended up inadvertently proving the concept that developers can play EVE openly with us, without any undue rewards (cue the T20 and Aurora cries). And prodding the player base in new ways led to things like gate camping Jita…
The last set of live events during 2010 focused on the Sansha invasions, and Dropbear & Headfirst apparently had a lot of fun with those. (Dropbear took a screen shot of every Drake he killed, actually!) Players jumped on this with such enthusiasm that CCP simply couldn’t keep up with everything. In fact, they ended up using some of the player-generated battle data to help their own tracking and planning, doing ARG-style stuff by releasing data and creating various puzzles. The events really consisted of defending a planet from the Sansha, but in addition to blowing up ships, players came up with all sorts of other ideas such as destabilizing wormholes in various ways (ECM, freighter suicide runs), establishing planetary defenses via planetary interaction, and using locator agents on known Sansha actors. These events slowly expanded as CCP figured more things out and dealt with internal resource constraints. In fact, this ended up at the core of the winter 2010 expansion. Incursions started out as gameplay design for large-scale group PVE, and when Content saw it, they insisted on merging in the Sansha events due to the player response.
Now in the summer of 2011, we have three parallel event series. Headfirst continues to run events focused on the Sansha, and he will also launch an event series based on factional warfare using actors belonging to the NPC militia corps directly.
Dropbear, however, has a separate event series dealing with the Sleeper mysteries. This particular series launched on 7 July but really built on some very old EVE content about Sleepers and Talocans, plus the wormholes that began with the launch of Apocrypha. The new Arek’jaalan project focuses on research, documentation, and education related to these things, but players largely drive it and do so in-character. The distribution of rewarding versus fun shows up here: not everyone will enjoy doing science and archiving in their gameplay, so for those players, they may have more fun following Headfirst’s event series to blow things up (NPCs or other players).
To that end, players defined the vision to organize the project, with divisions like Ethics, Media Relations, Security, etc. Many folks had already created huge amounts of stuff, like a 95-page document reviewing all related content, but this existed OOC (out of character). Arek’jaalan will help filter this stuff so that our characters know it, rather than just the players, make it all available via EVElopedia, and then drive more in-game content including events, static sites, and other things. Dropbear made it clear that players interested in this general aspect of the universe of EVE who don’t get all excited about this could have plenty more to do in the future: large scale construction projects, co-designing new ships, field expeditions, unlocking new Incarna content, etc. Arek’Jaalan itself, though, doesn’t have much to do with making ships explode.
CCP wants to drive conflict so that it occurs organically between players. Some examples of this came up when a notorious Blood Raider pilot, Revan Neferis, pushed to lead the Ethics committee. CCP would like to take a conservative approach to this in creating it, in the sense of letting players and characters clash, but will keep throwing new problems and challenges up so that, as soon as the baby starts to walk, Dropbear will kneecap it.
Conversations
Seismic Stan and I spent hours drinking in the middle of a casino with Dropbear, joined at times by Stan’s charming wife and with a brief cameo by CCP Cupcake.
The afternoon just became an epic back-and-forth exchange of ideas, as we picked Dropbear’s brain about all sorts of things, mostly dealing with EVE content and such. He comes from a background of philosophy and ‘amateur science’ and in fact in the past played EVE (as a RPer) before joining CCP full-time in October 2008. He likes to poke around and understand actual current science, blend that with his thoughts on immortality, trans- and post-humanism, and then start mind screwing us all. While CCP has various restrictions on developers, they do pay lots of attention to the stuff we put out there, whether on blogs, forums, or other social media, and that includes the Content devs like him. He mentioned Peter Watts and Blindsight as a specific influence, among others, but he tries to focus more on reading things other than genre stuff (i.e. not spending a lot of time just with science fiction).
The Arek’Jaalan project basically consists of iterating on three core processes:
- Research and create content.
- Filter that content into the EVElopedia.
- Move the content in-game.
One shouldn’t view that as some sort of a waterfall process, nor does any of it belong exclusively to CCP (nor to players). The process has lots of collaboration, bleed-over, and experimentation to see what works and roll with it. Rather than wait until somebody has defined everything, the project contains lots of opportunities for discovery. In other words, Dropbear doesn’t have every single thing figured out, because we as players can come up with far more extensive and creative stuff than just one or two guys can.
That should sound familiar to anyone who’s ever played old-school pen and paper RPGs. No matter how much the GM plans, the player group will go off the rails and come up with something new and unexpected, so the GM must instead prepare to improvise so that everyone has fun without putting on too many constraints outside of what fits in the fictional universe.
And this stuff takes time. The event series won’t end in a month or two, but instead becomes a new way of developing content that can both create gameplay now and drive new things in the future. As an example (my own speculation here), Arek’Jaalan could lead to developing new forms of technology that could figure into a revamp of the exploration profession someday, much as the Sansha events led to the Incursions. And this can change how players experience the game, like the recent Incursion that effectively cynojammed a system where Fidelis Constans had a technetium moon POS reinforced.
More than anything else, I picked up on the fact that Dropbear is an EVE player. He has an almost scary amount of knowledge about the RP community, for example, and he plays the game actively, including “ninja missioning” in NPC nullsec. He wants the same things we do, and his vision for immersive gameplay with players affecting the development of the fiction made me glad. Those players who think that these things happen on rails, or that they move too slowly, or that they have no ‘opportunity’ to get involved once things have started to happen really should take a closer look and find new ways to get involved.
Tomorrow, I’ll post my notes from CCP Sreegs’ talk on security and general thoughts on the conference overall.
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