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Fun news from the XBox world, a new thing called trollshards. Analyzing player activity and putting the trolls to play with other trolls, a brilliant idea I had 5 years ago, way to go Microsoft!

Playing games over the net, there's always these little things to take care of to be trollproof. On a computer, you can do a few things that start from running your own server on an old firewalled piece of junk pc. Just a little manouver to set up the thing and keep it updated and waste your time kicking and banning all these people with non-ascii player names, fun.

Things must be harder on the console side, not much you can do huh? And why would people have to deal with trolls anyway? A big welcome to trollshards! What would be more enjoyable than to play with other people like you, trolls with trolls, cheaters with cheaters?

I think a big part of the trolling problem stems from the lack of real world connection between players. A friend told me about this fat dude sitting on his arse, drinking beer and lurking near spawn points, killing noobs. The guy said it's the most fun thing in his life. What a life.

When we're designing Hoodo, we are keeping the trolling / cheating aspect well in mind. We had a long talk about the topic yesterday and sort of came to the conclusion that Hoodo won't probably be the game of choice for the fat guy at the spawn point. Or maybe it is!

In Real-life social interaction there's the strong factor of reputation. Of course in the virtual sphere the same rules apply but more loosely. There's a huge amount of dumbasses hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, wasting people's time. Hoodo drives people to actually meet the other players and show their faces. I think that's the strongest antidote to trolling, better than any software / algorithm based measure.

On Hoodo, you won't get anywhere far without any interaction with other players of the game. You and the others monitor your reputation and your achievements, just like in the real world we all monitor each other constantly through some subconcious process.

I believe that actually meeting another person helps better to catch that persons vibe and to understand his or hers existence more fully. I don't know if anybody does lan-parties or such anymore but there was a great idea, a degree of civility abound. In the respect of trolling, having a lan-party with people you know is so much different than playing pvp at a korean pc-ban (net cafe). It's all about the non-anonymity.

Of course our players are security conscious and careful about exposing their location and too much personal information. Hoodo will accommodate for that, be assured.

For many years my programming approach has been of the 'how to make an inherently faulty system work to a degree' kind. On Hoodo, the GPS data is inherently faulty. Any GPS developer can tell you the same story. You have to deal with all kinds of noise and blackouts and things and still make sense of the data. For me, that's a big part of the fun. Our bots are built to deal with all kinds of corrupted crap that comes thru the pipeline, making educated guesses of this and that. Fault tolerance extreme!

Same thing with the actual players. The general assumption with a person playing is that he/she is misbehaving for some reason or another. Just like in real life, when you realize that so much of your energy goes on dealing with the faults and failures of the people around you (and their energy goes dealing with yours), we have adopted an approach that focuses on players reputation in the game.

A sort of a personal revelation that came a few years ago is that in the real world people won't care less about your self image. How could they, they're not you. So it's all what you put outside. How you direct your energy to build your reputation. People that are not you are looking at you thru your reputation as a person and that in many cases is the difference between a go or a no-go. Of course everybody has faults and everybody acts stupid and irresponsible at times but it's about the big picture. Gauging your reputation can be very healthy at times, prepare to make some shocking discoveries. =)

It's been very busy again at Hastur with many things moving on with Hoodo as usual. After some exhaustive in-house playtesting we've come up with a few more vital features for our android alpha, an interesting plug-in interface for modders and prodders and a scheme to field test our game with people who have no idea what's it about. Lot's of talking and bouncing off ideas as usual. And coding too!

Being spread all over the globe we're holding meetings via skype. Not the most convenient thing with time zone differences of over 10+ hours but that's the way it rolls with us. Skyping in a few hours, what's the time in England again?

See you soon again at the spawn-point!

Sami
hastur