In truth, my money had NOT bought me any kind of different experience – merely stuff. I love stuff, don’t get me wrong, but my significant investment in the game wasn’t allowing me to level up any faster. There was no added interactivity or further engagement to be had. As far as I’ve been able to tell as a player, when Pet Society gets a new feature it is released to everyone regardless of level.

Since the time that I began playing, in the spring of 2009, Playfish has added a hand-holding first-five-minutes experience that the game originally lacked. Pet Society actually forced all players to go through the new FFM experience when it launched. As a player I was annoyed that I had to tick their boxes (and rip up one of my precious fruit trees to plant a flower!) but as a developer/researcher I was actually interested to see the new experience. Essentially you just navigate around the various menus and perform a few tasks. Icons glow, messages pop up, etc. I smell a questing system!

This belies the promise of Pet Society. It took me a long time to figure out what was fun for me in Pet Society. I didn’t enjoy the minigames you play with your pet which are part very simple watch-and-click games/part Nintendogs grooming. I discovered that the fastest way to level up was to visit my friends who were playing the game and feed them one piece of food. This became very monotonous. So, my fun was shopping; really, the collection of stuff.

Eventually I became so bored that I stopped playing. I can’t help but think how much more fun the game would be if they wed the collecting-stuff behavior to a light questing system. I’d have some reason to stay in the game and continue spending money. But perhaps questing is a subscription model behavior. Pet Society did already get me for $80 after all.

I shot several minutes of a group of mosquito larvae swimming in the shallow pool of a fountain with a Sony Handycam. The mosquitoes each looked like one single flagella, whipping back and forth across the bottom of the fountain. I tracked one mosquito in particular and chose a few moments from that footage to slow down. I received permission from an electronic musician, Four Tet, to use his track “No More Mosquitoes.” I overlaid “No More Mosquitoes” with a British Broadcasting Corporation’s recording of a lecture from neurologist V.S. Ramachandran.

In the clip, Ramachandran is discussing the sensation of free will. According to his research, the brain experiences the conscious feeling of making a decision after the neurons have already fired committing to that decision. The brain delays the feeling of choice (the illusion of free will) until the moment that the body takes the step forward.  Effectively, your brain has already decided to step forward but the brain delays the decision to coincide with the action. Ramachandran suggests there must be an evolutionary purpose behind this lag; humans benefit from the feeling of making a decision being experientially linked with the action resulting from that decision.

Watching mosquitoes fling themselves back and forth across the shallow pool in my backyard reminded me of this part of the lecture. Is there also an evolutionary purpose for the mosquito to believe that it is choosing to cross the bottom of the fountain?

Slomosquito was accepted into the SloMo Video Festival, which toured extensively. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and attended a showing of the festival including my film at the Hammer Museum.

I was responsible for grounding the concepts into specific interactions, the game, story and visual design. I began with the world: What kind of people lived there? What was the architecture of this place between the real world and the world of information?

I developed the backstory for PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game while earning my Bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California. In addition to studying magical realism fiction writing with Aimee Bender, I took several Victorian literature classes. I set PMOG/The Nethernet in a digitized Victorian world, a look generally known as steampunk. I fell in love with the idea of Victorian-era London as similar to the structure of networked information. Both are dramatic mazes of people, structure, and story.

I started by writing short stories that became the “Histories” of this Victorian internet world. The Histories mentioned characters that were later brought out of the fiction and into the live game as Non-Player Character (NPC) virtual puppets. I worked with the community manager at GameLayers, and a volunteer force of player Stewards to run live events using the NPCs. Stewards helped us keep in touch with the rest of the player base, enforced the social rules, and maintained the community standards. Between the Histories, the NPCs, the theme and setting, and my work with the community, I established and perpetuated the fictional universe for PMOG/The Nethernet.

The image on here was the illustration from a story in the Codex fiction, drawn by Colin Adams under my direction.

After launching in mid-2008 as PMOG, we realized we needed to make the game more approachable. I lead a rebranding effort and renamed the product The Nethernet. Television producer Jesse Alexander and games producer Alice Taylor from the UK’s Channel 4 advised me as I worked to adapt our web MMO for a broader audience.

The art direction of The Nethernet was meant to be a more mainstream approach to the steampunk theme that was present in PMOG. In large part we kept the general steampunk theme to bring along our community and be able to iterate quickly. I like to think of The Nethernet style as Disney-does-steampunk. The illustrator Colin Adams drew all of the images on this slide with my direction.

I made flow charts, wrote Google documents, and created spreadsheets to communicate the design of the game and user experience to the programmers. I also made animations, filed tickets with the bug-reporting system the company used, annotated thousands of screenshots, and designed or led the design for each game’s website.

The game design of PMOG/The Nethernet was centered around the basic actions of surfing the web. “The player goes to a website, and …” “They like the site and…” “They don’t like the site, and …” “They connect with the site, and…” For example, a player visits NewYorkTimes.com and reads an article that they disagree with. They leave a Mine on the URL. Later, another player reads the same article and by loading the same URL, triggers the Mine. The second player loses a few currency points and has an opportunity to attack or message the first player.

The Mine was the first tool that I designed, illustrated here in the upper left. Mines were damage-causing weapons that players left on websites. When other players subsequently arrived at the site, their browser window would shake and they’d lose points. Mines were the “I don’t like it” of the game and a way to prank other players.

The diagram here is a flow chart for the interaction between a Mine and a St. Nick. A St. Nick is a pre-emptive move against a player who wants to leave a Mine on a website. Players attach St. Nicks to each other; when a player with a St. Nick attached to them tries to leave a Mine on a website, the Mine is destroyed. The St. Nick is the illustration on the right.

By either leaving a mine on a website or attaching a St. Nick to a rival, the player accumulates points. The orange and green boxes represent “player x” earning increases in two character statistics: the Chaos faction and the Vigilante class.

There were two opposing sides in PMOG/The Nethernet, Order and Chaos. Centering PMOG/The Nethernet around the struggle between Order and Chaos fit the space of the internet. The internet is a huge mess of information, with different companies, people, and rule sets interacting and struggling for dominance. Players who choose the faction of Order are generally the type of internet users who correct grammar on Wikipedia; players who choose the faction of Chaos are the type who send their friends distracting links.

PMOG/The Nethernet was one of four games nominated for Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the Year in 2009 by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. We lost to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King from Blizzard Entertainment.

I hired the illustrator Colin Adams for Dictator Wars, having used him successfully for PMOG and The Nethernet. Originally, I had contracted Colin to render steampunk styles but his take on dictatorship was appropriately fun and lighthearted. I communicated a list of characters and items to Colin via email, most often providing a source image online for him to reference.

Working this way we generated distinct characters, items, vehicles, and illustrative images for Dictator Wars. I then remixed these pieces into advertising content and promotional materials for the game.