Austin GDC: Live at the Sulka Haro keynote
Never heard of Sulka Haro? Then you must not have tried Sulake Corporation's casual online game, Habbo. Sulka Haro is Sulake's lead designer and he's going to be kicking off day two at the Austin Game Developer's Conference by talking to us about designing games to support open-ended play and end-user creativity.
9:29 AM CST: The keynote is scheduled for 9:30, and people are slowly filtering into the conference room.
9:34 AM CST: Introducing Haro to applause.
9:35 AM CST: Why am I here? Well, we have around 7.5 million users a month, 80 million users total, and around 100k concurrent users -- that's about the size of World of Warcraft.
9:37 AM CST: 1999, the founders of Habbo created a small online disco, were surprised at the number of international users.
9:38 AM CST: 2000, another game, this time attempting microtransactions. But the microtransactions concept backfired, a large population of kids playing the game couldn't afford them and weren't able to play competitively
9:40 AM CST: The vision of what Habbo would be was pretty simple -- we wanted to give users tools to let them do their own stuff. If we'd done a proper MMO it would have been a bigger project than we could have ever pulled off.
9:41 AM CST: They started the project with no expected lifetime... but it got big.
9:42 AM CST: Business model: virtual furniture using premium SMS. (Text messages to buy online goods, billed to your cell phone.) Micropayments and content authoring seemed to be a good fit.
9:43 AM CST: 2001, first Habbo Hotel launched in the UK. But they had the problem that most of their audience in the UK didn't have cell phones... so they went from selling virtual furniture to selling virtual currency.
9:45 AM CST: Selling property vs. selling currency. There's actually a big difference in how this works out, both from a user perspective and from how you create the economy. The system is continually tweaked.
9:46 AM CST: Advertising is another advertising source for Habbo. They have banners and other traditional methods of advertising, but they're trying to migrate away from that.
9:49 AM CST: In-game secondary market. Some items are going as high as $2000. Secondary market value of around $500,000,000 a year.
9:51 AM CST: Who's playing Habbo? Boys and girls, usually teenagers. Ages 13 - 16 seems to dominate. If they're 14 or younger, they were born in 1994 or later -- they've never known a world without the web.
9:53 AM CST: Hacking/scamming is happening in Habbo, but a lot of users seem to think that it's just part of the game. "Just don't tell my parents," when they get caught.
9:55 AM CST: Lots of research on the types of users in Habbo, which varies greatly depending on the region. Because of this, some cultural adaptation is needed for different regions of Habbo.
9:57 AM CST: How do you categorize Habbo Hotel? It's an online teen hangout. But it's not really "casual" -- there are people who spend more time in Habbo than in hard-core WoW guilds. Some people call it "Web 2.0" or "Game 3.0," but prefer the term "gameless game." Because there's no game, there's no violence.
9:59 AM CST: So what is Habbo? You create a pixelated avatar and can socialize with other people in Habbo in virtual rooms and public areas. There are also mini-games and you can build and customize your own rooms.
10:02 AM CST: Last year released homepages for users. Very visual, different from the way Myspace does it. (Can customize homepages like you would customize rooms.)
10:04 AM CST: Recently added music to the game -- players can customize their own room sounds. Can burn your music to a virtual CD and trade CDs in Habbo. Players creating the content.
10:06 AM CST: Showing off some player-created environments, here there are player-created versions of Hogwarts from the Harry Potter series. A police station where players are sitting at monitors, playing out as though they're in a police station. A McDonalds... players roleplaying that they have a minimum wage job. But it's all roleplaying, you can't actually trade items in that way, so it's all through emotes.
10:10 AM CST: More games players have created... racetracks, mazes, kissing booths (there's a fine line on what players can do before getting banned, though) , casinos (users are banned for actual gambling, so they have to be no-money), falling furniture game (trying to trap players by moving furniture around them), armies, mafias. And they can't even do anything -- they're just wearing suits and standing around and emoting.
10:13 AM CST: Habbo is all about open play -- players come up with the things they want to do.
10:15 AM CST: What's so great about open play? Players always know what's hot before you do. So if there's a new cultural phenomenon (like Spider-pig), users don't have to wait -- they can play with it right away.
10:15 AM CST: User generated content... hate that term, because it makes your users sound like content generated machine. So they call it "player created activity." </rant>
10:19 AM CST: Managing community without making the community managers becoming the stars and distracting users from the "player created activity."
10:20 AM CST: Under continuous development, switched to scrum last year which improved productivity. But scrum done wrong is a bad time for designers.
10:22 AM CST: Weekly user polls to see what users want, and since the game's under constant development, this means they can get new features out to users quickly. Have to avoid the trap of thinking you know better than your users.
10:23 AM CST: Creating a playground for users:
Create something to play with. Legos (in the real world) are a good example of this.
Intuitive interaction. It has to be simple and inclusive.
Set up a mood for play.
Support user created goals.
Shared social setting.
Bonus point: safety. Users should feel as comfortable as possible. (In Haboo, everyone remains anonymous.)
10:28 AM CST: Is it that easy? You might think that a player-driven environment like Habbo wouldn't need things like writing staff, etc, but they do -- need everything to support the users.
