Community Platform for Online Gaming

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MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 1 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 Online games have grown in popularity with the ever expanding reach of the World Wide Web. MTV Network's commitment to be a leader in this area has set forth many efforts to supply content and infrastructure to meet this growing demand with our audience. The Online Games Group of MTVN has built a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform that provides community services for online gaming called Game Services (GS).

GS provides a feature rich foundation for MTVN game content for selected developers to supply games that include our community features and online game services. Online games are about fun and challenging experiences, personalization, community and social interaction, and the GS platform makes that easy to deliver. Much like what MTV did for the music industry in the early 80's 3 provide an infrastructure for music videos that revolutionized the music industry, MTV can now do for online games on the Internet.

What Is Game Services? GS is a comprehensive web-server based application service optimized for online games. GS supplies the common community services most ... more. less.

online games require, such as player registration and profiles or co-registration, score submit, leader boards, badges, player reputation, multiplayer services and much more. GS is a platform that provides its services to any number of web sites at the same time where each site can pick and choose the services it requires. Each web site maintains its own view of data as there is no sharing of data between sites or registration repositories. GS is a service 3 there is no user interface or GUI or anything to display at all. It provides all of the low-level services one would use to build upon it a robust community-oriented gaming web site. A particular web site can selectively choose to expose any subset or all of the GS features to its users. Centralizing the functionality provides immediate return on investment such as: " Best of breed: the gaming platform opens the opportunity for the best developers to easily participate in providing services and content embedded within the MTVN community. " Service oriented approach: cleanly separate the functionality (back-end) from the presentation (front-end). This leaves the web sites to expose the features they want in a presentation consistent with their own site design. " Economy of production: one small development and production team focused on building and maintaining the services, instead of utilizing each web site 9s resources. " Focused internal experts: dedicated team members are platform experts, skilled at multiple deployments. " Centralized hosting resources: offers economy of scale servicing GS, deployment and scalability. Each web site does not have to duplicate efforts to support online gaming. The Community Platform for Online Games " Centralized services: multiplayer server, leader boards, chat, ranking and so on. Each web site does not have to license, deploy and maintain these services. " Resource sharing: each participating web site has immediate access to any new games, features and services as opposed to individual development, deployment and maintenance. " Community: aggregating the user community such that we enjoy the benefit of a network effect and participation in gaming events (multiplayer, tournaments, challenges, etc.) is open to a broad and diverse audience. " Simplicity: the GS API is very simple and uses familiar technologies. Almost any front-end can use it. " Sponsorship: allow games to offer sponsorship, ad delivery, contextual advertising and impression metrics. A user of GS would be another web site (employing HTTP services with Java, C++, Ajax and others), a browser based game client (using Flash, Shockwave, Java, ActiveX) or a casual PC game. Even mobile applications can access GS. Basically, anything capable of initiating an HTTP POST transaction and receiving XML or JSON in response may use GS. GS Application service (community.php) Pool of games And other content (Flash, Shockwave, Java, Download, etc.) Web Site Middleware php / MySQL data Web Servers ` Browser-based Online gamers Mobile Gamers Applications ` Casual Games Figure 1: GS Platform Access Diagram MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 2 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 3 of 28 The cbusiness rules d of community services and online gaming is coded within the GS Application Service layer such that games and web site page coding does not concern itself with the details, such as player rankings, ordering leader boards, badge assignments, tournament rules and so forth. Why Game Services? Why invest in centralized software development of what, on the surface, appears to be a relatively simple problem? Many individual games and even some web sites would not require all the features provided by GS. Centralizing services and the development of those services affords a large company like Viacom many advantages, such as: " Individual sites can pick and choose the features they require from a large ever expanding platform; " Content syndication: content can be added to the platform and shared by subscribing sites (where it makes sense); " Audience aggregation: social media sites flourish on large and diverse populations of users. Small sites gain the advantage of increased users from larger sites; large sites gain the advantage of a more diverse audience. " Pooling of development and support resources: limited redundancy of one or more sites developing similar features or learning from the same mistakes; " Platform scalability; " Feature development, all servicing sites gain the knowledge and experience of the more advanced sites; " Open API allows both internal and external developers to develop new content independent of the core platform team; " Consistency: a similar set of features deployed across all gaming and social media sites affords the audience familiarity and comfort while interacting with any GS enabled site. " Client agnostic: any front-end client can utilize the services: a web browser using Ajax, a web site using HTTP, Flash, Shockwave, C++, Java and so on. Any technology that can communicate using the HTTP protocol and process XML or JSON can use GS. Where Is Game Services? http://arcade.mtv.com 3 all games in the arcade section are staged from gs.mtv.com. Most games include game tracking, score submit and leader boards for unauthenticated users. MTV also syndicates games to international regions using a GS game syndication feed. Coming in 2Q 2008 are in-game ads and Flux co-registration. http://games.vh1.com 3 the entire games section of VH1 is implemented in GS using the genre and game list features to showcase producer controlled content lists on the home page and genre pages. GS produces the lists of games and associated meta data in XML format that the pages then combine with CSS using XSLT. Most games include game tracking, score submit and leader boards for unauthenticated users. The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 4 of 28 http://games.cmt.com 3 implemented exactly the same as VH1 only using different games. http://games.comedycentral.com 3 similar to MTV games and game services are staged from gs.comedycentral.com. Here we also use Flux co-registration for the multiplayer games (see Redneck Games 2). http://apps.facebook.com/southparkgames/ - implemented almost entirely using GS. Introducing the new player challenge system, private leader boards, badge awarding, experience points and using the Flash SDK inside all the games. http://apps.facebook.com/fiftystates/ - implemented almost entirely using GS. Introducing the player challenge system, private leader boards and utilizing the Flash SDK. We are finding that a single framework can accommodate most Facebook game applications. http://www.worldofpop.com 3 the single most utilized Game Services web site, developed entirely by the Game Services team. http://www.atomfilms.com/ - the game player uses GS and we are integrating services to enhance the platform such as voting on content. Game Services Architecture The Game Services architecture is a three-tiered application stack consisting of: 1. Client-side SDK, where the client could be Flash (AS2 or AS3), Shockwave, PHP (HTML based games, web sites, Social Networking sites) or Java (such as Scenic); 2. The GS PHP layer, which provides session management, security and data wrapping; 3. The data layer, providing all persistence and all business logic. Refer to Figure 1: GS Platform Access Diagram and Figure 2: Game Services Relationship with a Hosting Web Site and see the section on Scalability. GS has a complete user registration and profile service but typically GS is going to act as a symbiotic extension to an existing web site. Most web sites already have a complete registration system but they lack the services specific to games. GS can extend the profile service of the hosting web site and provide its capabilities: leader boards, badges, experience points, and so on. GS provides this extension through a co-registration service (refer to the section Co-registration on page 13.) To perform co-registration, GS must understand how the hosting site identifies authenticated users and requires access to the current logged-in user's display name and identifying key such as user id. The Community Platform for Online Games GS Application service gs.mtv.com Pool of games And other content (Flash, Shockwave, Java, Download, images, etc.) Middle Tier php / MySQL Database -- Stored procs Web Server www.mtv.com ` Web User In-browser plugin Flash Shockwave Unity3D Java GS SDK GS Server gs.mtv.com Web Content Registration Database database Figure 2: Game Services Relationship with a Hosting Web Site Open API The GS platform is open to MTVN developers and authorized 3 rd party developers. We provide API support through a Flash SDK for Flash clients, PHP interface files for web sites using PHP, documentation and sandbox environment where new concepts can be tried and tested. A Java (for J2EE site development), Unity 3D and Shockwave SDK are on the roadmap. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 5 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 6 of 28 Because this is built as a web service, just about any application capable of issuing HTTP POST operations and parsing XML response packets is a potential GS client. GS itself implements no user interface or direct end user services. This methodology keeps things simple so that any moderate programmer can easily integrate their required services and format the result to their design. Security Everyone is familiar with the woes of keeping things secure on the Internet. Security is a particular issue with GS due to the competitive nature of games and the natural tendency for hackers to attack the games and the web sites they live on. An even broader security issue is the lack of trust in game clients themselves, since most games are developed by third party external developers who may not be concerned enough or qualified to deal with proper security. GS operates under a strict three-tiered security model. " Public services 3 functions available to anyone on the public Internet. An example public service is viewing a particular leader board. " Authenticated services 3 functions that are called by users, who are logged in and properly authorized to communicate with GS servers. An example of an authenticated service is score submit. " Private services 3 functions that are only called by authorized internal administrators or services running on their behalf on a private network (i.e. Intranet or VPN). An example of a private service is adding a new game to the database. We employ a variety of measures to address security, including CAPTCHA, SHA1 hash, encrypted cookies and encrypted transmission payloads (e.g. Blowfish encryption of POST data) where appropriate. Through the use of our client SDK most security measures are modular yet transparent to the game programmer. Scalability The current implementation of GS uses very simple but standard web technology: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP). However, very little of what we have done is strictly dependent on this application stack. We believe nothing we have done is dependent on the operating system or the web server. Most of the core functionality and the business rules of the platform are coded in SQL Stored Procedures and run in the database engine. There is nothing inherently dependent on MySQL, we could migrate the site to any robust SQL compatible database (such as Sybase, MS SQL Server or Oracle). The Community Platform for Online Games All our interface code, authentication and supporting services are coded in PHP. This layer of functionality is dependent on a PHP module running on a web server, yet it is not OS or web server dependent (PHP runs on almost any platform). However, since we are dependent on PHP to take advantage of another technology (ASP or Java) would require major code rewriting and possible re-architecting parts of GS. This architecture allows GS to run on as little as a single low-end computer servicing a very modest audience (a few hundred users) and scale up from there to as large a web farm as required to service the target audience. The following diagram shows the current GS deployment capable of serving hundreds of thousands of registered users and a fairly large concurrent audience of tens of thousands of simultaneous users. Figure 3: GS Production Infrastructure MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 7 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games We also implement Akamai Edge Suite delivery for many of our assets and certain queries that are not immediately time sensitive. By integrating Akamai technology into GS we have some dynamic control over how hard our database is hit during peak load times. Database Partitioning An application design such as this usually leads to a bottleneck at the data layer where all processes block trying to read or write to the same place. The GS design addresses this issue with several partitioning schemes. The primary key to most tables is the web site id, allowing data partitioning based on web site registration repository. Multiple sites can be stored in the same database using this key. The entire data set can be partitioned to separate database servers based on this key as there is no cross-pollination of data between registration repositories. Game Services This section describes all the features of GS. Categorically these services are: Player Profile Services 3 services related to an individual registered user; Gaming Services 3 services related to a game or group of games; Multiplayer Services 3 services supporting multiple registered users playing the same game concurrently; Chat Email support tasks Tracking & Metrics Ecommerce Search In-game ad delivery The following sections will outline the features and services of each area. Player Profile Services A player is an entity that encapsulates the data attributes and services associated with a registered user of GS. Most sites call this a user, but since this is a gaming service and typically we call participants in games players , we adapt that term here. The terms player and user are interchangeable throughout this discussion. The profile is a container of all the attributes for any individual registered player. Such attributes include a screen name, password, birth date, location, etc. A player in our GS database identifies a unique individual and forms the relationship of the player with any participating data objects such as leader boards, tournaments, reviews, comments, and teams, to name a few. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 8 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Figure 4: Profile With Avatar, Tag Line, Level Rating and Other Attributes Profile Attributes Attributes are the data items associated with a specific profile. A summary of profile attributes: " User Name: A pseudo-name or screen name the player selects to represent him or herself to other players. The User Name must be unique. A player 9s user name is their unique moniker that appears in any GUI element to represent the player (leader boards, lobbies, chat, profile, etc.) This helps to protect the player 9s true identity and provides a fun way to represent an alter- ego throughout the gaming web sites. A screen name must be unique across any single site (in case the database represents multiple web sites). " Real name: The user's real name. This is captured in the profile when site authorized communication occurs between the site administration and the user. This is never reviled to other users. " Location: Location information includes city, state, zip code and country code. GS does not actually validate any of this information: it is expected the hosing front- end would enforce its business rules on location information. " Date of Birth: we capture this to enforce COPPA compliance, demographic tracking and to represent social context in profiles and gaming services. " Gender: used for avatar representation, demographic tracking and social context. " Tag Line: Each player may enter a sentence or two to make a statement that is viewable by other players. " User Info: A free-form text field user's may enter narrative data about themselves or things that are important to them to be used in a social context (e.g. trivia about me; my most important things, etc.) or a site may choose to structure this data for MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 9 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games specific responses (as World of Pop did with 20 specific pop trivia responses associated with each profile). " Security features such as password and user security question (e.g. What was your high school mascot?). " Opt-ins: we capture up to 31 individual opt-ins per user. For example, the user may opt-in to a site newsletter and separately opt-in to receive information from a particular site sponsor. Each opt-in is interpreted according to the business rules of the hosting site. GS only manages the data capture and provides services to process opt-ins. " Avatar: a registered user customizes a site-wide avatar to represent their image on site, in leader boards, and within games that support it. " Site-wide experience points: as players play games and submit scores or win/lose in multiplayer games the business rules of the hosting site determine how many experience points that play earned the player. Experience points are accumulated on a site-wide basis to determine most active players and distinguish really good players from mediocre players. (NOTE we also support tracking experience points on an individual game and group of games basis. These accumulators are discussed in the Gaming Services section). " Game Play History: GS tracks a certain amount of prior game plays on behalf of each registered user for each game they play. " Best Score: GS tracks the player's best score for each game played on a given site. Refer to the section on Gaming Services for more information about scores. " Profile usage statistics: various statistics are tracked such as date profile was created (so a site can show "member since 1999"), date/time of last login, number of logins, date profile was last modified. " Buddy List: Users maintain their own list of other players on a given site they regularly associate with. Mainly used for chat, but also for multiplayer gaming, challenges and teams. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 10 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Figure 5: Profile With Buddy Editor " Favorite Games: Each player can maintain a list of their favorite games. Usually used as a short cut. " Comments: Other players can comment on players. This forms a community arbitration system. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 11 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Figure 6: Profile With Comments " Badges: A player can earn badges in certain games for superior game play or achieving certain predefined milestones. Once earned the badge is never taken away from that player. " Game Rating: a player earns a rating when playing individual multiplayer games, since a rating is dependent on the player's performance in that specific game (it's not a site-wide value). This is described in more detail in the multiplayer section. " Co-registration site key: for sites requiring co-registration we track the user's key on the other site such that the profile can be linked. " Personalized game content: Certain games support personalized content (level builders, custom tracks, etc.). For examples of this feature see Deer Stacker on Comedy Central or White Rapper Boom Box on VH1. Features in Development: " Currency (affinity points): Registered users accumulate currency as they interact with certain features that reward specific interaction. Currency differs from experience points in that they can be redeemed or deducted from the players account. Currency is a form of e-commerce where players can redeem their currency to purchase items (in-game, digital rewards, etc.). This is discussed further in the e-commerce section. " Message boards and Forums: users may post comments in forums. " Notifications: Information alerts sent to users indicating certain important events that have occurred involving their profile. Such events include: buddy add/remove, MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 12 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 13 of 28 another user commented, forum reply, leader board change, challenge event, team update, etc. " Team Memberships: a list of team affiliations and role within the team. " Mobile device: player's mobile device address for alerts, presence indication, challenges. " Groups: users belong to groups of other users who maintain similar interests. For example, the Trivia Lovers group. Profile Services Services are the functions provided by the system that act upon profile attributes and compound other services, such as security. GS services specific to profiles are: " Register new account " Update existing registration " CAPTCHA service " Login " Forgot password " Get User Status 3 returns various attributes such as last login time, number of logins, date account was created, etc. " Get Users Online " Logout " Co-registration with other MTVN or external sites (currently MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and Facebook) " Avatar rendering service (for example, see http://gs.worldofpop.com/games/avatarBuilder/composite.php?site_i d=9&user_id=61&size=1 ) " Various access, set and listing methods for all of the previously discussed attributes. Co-registration Depending on initiatives, resources and timing we partner with external 3 rd party sites for content and services. We always want the user experience to appear seamless such that the user believes it is one cohesive site. It may be necessary for user profile data to exist in more than one place, or parts of the profile exist in an auxiliary database. We developed a co-registration service that allows GS to know where to look if profile data exists outside its realm. Co-registration presents two data problems: 1. User registration data originates on a 3 rd party site and should be linked to the GS database. This methodology has been implemented on MTV.com, VH1.com, ComedyCentral.com (using both UREG and Flux registration), Facebook, Yeti Games and multiplayer GameTrust games. 2. User registration originates in the GS database and linked to a 3 rd party web site. We use this method with Cheetah Mail, certain Electrotank and Facebook games. The Community Platform for Online Games A user can register on a hosting web site and GS can access the authentication information and automatically match that user to a profile in the GS database. GS holds and associates the hosting site 9s user key such that profile data and user game data are linked. Read SiteAuth Cookie decrypt data, verify contents yes Read GS Session Cookie Decrypt data Is Session Valid? no Continue with GS service call Find Existing User Or Auto-Create new User: Map site_user_id to user_id Set GS Session: Is Session Valid? yes User not logged in: Return info to caller so a login request can be invokved no Get User Info: Get user_name, primary key user_id Request for service (e.g. SubmitScore) gs.ourwebsite.comwww.ourwebsite.com done Figure 7: GS Co-registration Model MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 14 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 15 of 28 Other Profile Concepts GS is a robust platform containing many features. This section describes features and concepts that may require additional information to understand the platform. Teams A team in the online gaming sense is a collection of players whose collective game play results are considered together (as if a single player) for scoring, competition and ranking purposes. The team can have attributes such as a name, a mascot and a bio. Teams are usually fixed in size but that number depends on the application the team participates in. The team will act as a single entity under certain gaming models such as in a tournament teams can compete against each other and look like a single player. The team terminology may also include guilds, clans and possibly others depending on the profile of the web site audience. The Community Platform for Online Games Groups A group is an organization of players with a common interest. Organizing players into groups is a common social media construct. Group profile attributes and application are TBD. Avatars The avatar system we developed is very flexible and not dependent on any particular web site. Avatars can be included inside games and on web pages and in stand-alone applications. The avatars them selves are divided in to parts, or layers, and individual sites have a small degree of flexibility determining which layers they use and complete flexibility determining the assets that make up the individual parts. For example, there are different head shapes, hairstyles, eyes, nose and mouth, as well as stylish accessories such as hats and body art. Figure 8: Comedy Central Avatar Builder GS provides services to render avatars as .png formatted files in a variety of different size. Gaming Services Gaming services encapsulate the functionality related to a particular game residing on GS. A game is a container of the attributes associated with a single game. Game attributes are name, description, thumbnail, implementation technology (such that the code knows how to generate the <object> tag), links, and so on. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 16 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 17 of 28 Games may also have other rendering flags such as active/inactive (do not show inactive games in any game list), public/private (private games available only to logged in users), time sensitive begin date/end date (game only available for a promotion period) and premium/non-premium content. Game Delivery 3 Flash, Shockwave, Java, ActiveX, Download (.exe, .osx). Leader Boards. Game groups 3 two or more games considered together, such as a game suite, where they share a leader board and experience points. Site-wide and game group player ranking. Game source, assets, attributes for programmatic (CMS) staging Game syndication: XML feeds to communicate games, game lists, leader boards to 1 st and 3 rd party affiliates. Game Organization: games organized by genre, popularity, franchise, related games (links, associated shows links to web pages, associated download games) Developer attribution. Featured games. Game ratings (by user votes). Reviews (by users). In-game event tracking (integration with Omniture). Profile status and avatar integration. Features in Development: Badges 3 players earn a badge for attaining a certain level of game play in a particular game. Contests 3 open competition for a fixed period of time tied to prize or digital reward. Tournaments. Gallery of user generated content (see below). Support for player augmented games (user generated content) 3 users can design their own characters, enemies, levels, environments, etc. such that either they can restore the game or other players can play their creation. Private leader boards to support user created content or challenges. Dynamic sponsorship and in-game ad services. Score Submit A score is a result of a complete game played by a user at a particular date and time. Given the configuration of the game on the GS servers, the score submission may trigger other events such as experience points, badge awards, challenge reconciliation and various notifications. Games and their representative leader boards may also have multiple time periods. Therefore a single score submit may have an effect on more than one leader board. Time periods are arbitrary windows of time. All games must use the all-time time The Community Platform for Online Games period, meaning the scores are managed without regard to time. Most games will use additional time periods such as daily, weekly, monthly and others. As scores are submitted the system checks what time periods are currently active and updates each time period leader board accordingly. If, for example, a game has a daily and a monthly leader board then each score submit affects 3 leader boards: all-time, today's daily and this month's monthly leader boards. In all cases, a given user's score is updated only if they beat their prior score on the given leader board. The system manages a score history and always keeps the players best score for each game played. The best score in the history may not necessarily be the score that appears on a leader board due to the context of the leader board query. For example, the best score earned 3 months ago may not make the leader board when showing players scores earned for the current month. Leader Board A leader board is an ordered list of scores for a particular game in a date range, showing the best score for each user. Any given user appears on the leader board only once, and it always shows the best score earned by that player under the constraints of the query (date range, tournament, and challenge). Figure 9: Top-10 Leader Board MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 18 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Figure 10: Leader Board with Paging Controls Player Ranking Players are ranked on individual game leader board by score. We support both high- score games (the higher the score the better the rank) and low-score games (such as golf where the lower the score the better the rank). In the case of ties the player who submits first is considered the better rank. Game Group and Site-Wide Rank Game services has a game group concept where any number of games that appear on a site can be considered together for player ranking. This is similar to the Olympic Triathlon or Decathlon concept. Players play each game and are ranked according to how they perform in all games in the group. Ranking for game suites such as a game group or site-wide (all games on a site) do not consider the score in individual games but rather use the player's ranking on each leader board. If a player does not appear on a leader board for a certain game then their rank is the worst possible position in that game 9s ranking. A score is assigned to the player based on the sum of their ranking on all the leader boards in the game group, and then each player is assigned a rank considering this score. This system rewards players for participating in many games as opposed to doing well in just one game. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 19 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 20 of 28 Player Rating System Players are assigned ratings in individual multiplayer games using a rating algorithm called Elo. The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess and Go. The rating system confers player status and identifies like-capable players. This system enables fair player matching for multiplayer games and tournaments. The rating system takes into account experience (prior games played), wins, losses, and draws such that novices and less capable players are identified from experts. Digital Rewards and Badges Badges are collectable digital awards that a player earns simply by playing games, participating in tournaments and other site wide events. They represent skill and perseverance in each game played and activities participated in. Specific badges will be defined by game. Some badges, such as mastery, can be won by playing a single game, round or level. Others, such as Lifetime Total Score, must be earned over multiple (or even many) rounds: the more you play and the better you do, the more prestigious your badges become. In addition, rare and unique badges may become available only for a short time, and can be won by completing certain challenges within a single game or tournament. All badges won are stored with the user 9s profile. The user can always view their badges, see what badges are available. Badges are also on public display as a community building bragging right and challenge incentive. Once a badge is awarded it stays with the user forever. Badges are only one form of digital reward. Another form may be to earn rights to a video or music clip, special locked content on the web site, affinity points (tokens), game micro-transaction items or other in game special features such as power ups, locked levels, extra lives and so on. Sample list of events that generate a reward: Achieving a threshold score in a particular game (for example: earn more than 3,000,000 in Breakout and earn a cbreakout killer badge d.) Win a particular tournament and earn a badge. Play a certain game 25 times. Complete a particular game. Contest A contest is a period of time a game is played to declare one or more winners for a pre-defined prize. For example, cplay Arcadia this month and the top 3 scores will win an I Love The 80 9s Toy d. The Community Platform for Online Games Tournament Tournaments allow either individual players or teams to compete in a game or suite of games over a period of time. Tournaments vary in structure: there may be ladder or round-robin. It may be too early to discuss exactly how tournaments will work but we know we need to organize players into groups around a game (possibly more than one game) with a leader board containing just those results. The tournament is open for a finite period of time. Challenge A challenge is an ad-hoc tournament set up by the web site administration or an individual player for a particular game or group of games. It takes place in a finite period of time and has a private leader board to track the results. A player sets up a challenge by identifying the game (or games) and who can participate (public is open to anyone on the site, private requires a list of emails or registered users who are allowed in) and an end date after which the challenge is closed. And email is sent to the participants (except in a public challenge) containing information to locate the challenge. Some examples: A challenge to a buddy list to see if you can beat my score; A public challenge to play a newly designed level to see who can get the best score; A triathlon to play a 3 game suite to see who scores the best. Reviews Users can review games and the reviews are visible by other site participants. Reviews require content moderation by a site administrator. Gallery of User Generated Content Certain applications gather user generated content. Examples are the Wrestler Society X characters, Mencia Synth compositions, user level designs in a game that supports user generated content, and so on. A gallery is an application that enumerates user generated content by predetermined criteria, such as most popular, most voted, best, worst, and presents this list to other users such that they can browse and experience the content themselves. Multiplayer Services Games allowing more than one player to compete head-to-head in either turn based or real-time. Multiple gaming models will be supported: player vs. player (e.g. Sumo Volleyball, Redneck Games), multiplayer (e.g. Horse Race Trivia, Miniblast), massively multiplayer contests (e.g. Trivia Dome), MMOG style (we haven't done one yet) and tournaments of multiplayer games. Multiplayer services include the following features: MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 21 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Multiplayer gaming API allowing game developers (internal and third party) to work with our services using either the Shizmoo or ElectroTank platforms. Game lobby, complete with chards, avatars, presence, player status. Public and private rooms. Spectators. Player matching, find an opponent based on experience or rating. Tournament seeding. Chat, chat functions such as game groups, buddy lists, whisper and block. Voting. Influence 3 possibly tied in with status, influence increases/reduces one player 9s or team 9s ability based on observer and other player 9s consensus. Lobby and player enumeration functions, XML feeds to communicate games, lobbies, active users to 1 st and 3 rd party affiliates. Ability for players and spectators to view and comment on games (e.g., the final outcome of a tournament) using comments and forums. Lobby The multiplayer games have a lobby system that defines available rooms, players associated to each room and available seats. A lobby may contain players from other web sites hosting the same game (for example, a Texas Hold 9em poker game on Comedy Central, Spike and CMT all pull their players together to host a more active lobby than any one could do on its own.) Public and Private Rooms With multiplayer games a public room is open to all site users. A private room is available only to those players who know about it requiring prior knowledge of the room and name password. A moderator is assigned to the room to control access and set attributes. Private rooms may or may not be visible in lobby listings (moderator defined setting). Spectator A spectator is a participant in a multiplayer game who can only observe the game play performed by the active players but not participate in the game. Depending on game setup observers may be able to chat. Chat Service Chat is a complicated topic that will require ongoing research. We have implemented chat in multiplayer games using Electrotank. We have deployed site-wide chat using Meebo. We can also implement chat services with our Shizmoo server. Using both Shizmoo and Electrotank we provide a comprehensive service tied in with other GS services such as profiles, avatars, leader boards, badges and player ratings. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 22 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 23 of 28 We know we want services such as site-wide chat such that players not currently in a game can find other users and chat with them for any reason including coordinating a new game. Web site community service could offer chat functionality with similar requirements without a tie-in to online games. This should be tied together into one site-wide chat with the added ability to offer chat within a particular game. The chat feature will require features such as buddy lists, block and whisper. The platform will expose a chat API such that third party developers can easily build games utilizing chat. Current chat requirements: Presence service (player is currently logged in) and status; Avatar and other profile attributes; Blocking; Individual (whisper) and group chats; Spectator chat; Chat amongst participants in a given game or game lobby; Private table vs. public table chat; Message center (leave message for particular user to be picked up at next login) ; Integration with popular messaging services (AIM, MSM, Yahoo!, xfire); Eventual tie-in with mobile devices; Kid-friendly chat (i.e., select phrases from a pre-canned list); VoIP 3 live chat while playing a game; Buddy list 3 friends & foes. The Community Platform for Online Games Figure 11: Chat Widget on worldofpop.com Notification Services A critical service of a community is communication. Users will require n of important events of interest to them. The service will also notify users of news, new events, marketing campaigns and things we haven 9t thought of today. User 9s profiles will include switches to indicate the information of inte to them. otification rest Samples of email services include the following: Tell A Friend; Site support services such as registration confirmation and forgot password; Game Challenge; Tournament/Challenge initiation, progress, results; Leader board turnover; Newsletter (or interface with 3 rd party providers such as CheetahMail); Alerts. MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 24 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Game services also provides a notification system. Each profile has a notification queue. This works similar to the Facebook newsfeed. Notifications that may appear in a user's notification queue include: Challenge event (you have been challenged&); Leader board turn-over (you are no longer in the top-10&); Buddy request; Comment (so-and-so added a comment to your profile); Tracking & Metrics Tracking is an important module because we require a firm understand of usage patterns, game play metrics and ROI. Typical web tracking does not support gaming well because many of the usage events important to our understanding are outside traditional web logging. Tracking metrics include: Games played Games completed Games downloaded Time spent in game (avg. by game, user, genre) Aggregates by game, user, genre Game milestones achieved (defined by game, for example level 1) 3 number of users entered, time spent, number of users completed. Tracking Milestones The tracking interface is designed to communicate certain game milestones to the tracking server (Omniture). This allows metrics to be recorded for important game events used to determine the effectiveness of the game with the intended audience. The game milestones are: Load This event is triggered when the game load is complete and the game is ready to play. This event is different than the load request event on the web server (triggered when the web server initiates the download of the content) because it signals all assets are loaded and the game is ready to play. Typically there is only one load event per game session. Play The game play event is triggered each time a new game is begun. Usually this is triggered by the user clicking a start game button or similar GUI element but some games automatically start play once loaded. It is up to the game developer to call this milestone at the proper time. Depending on game design, there is at least one play event per session, possible more if the game design allows the player to start a new game. The play event takes an additional parameter used to indicate which game component was played in the case of game suites (not levels 3 see Zone Change). MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 25 of 28 The Community Platform for Online Games Game Over The game over event is triggered when the game ends. This signals a completed game and is very important to gauge game play behavior. There should be a play event to match any game over event, but there may not be a game over event matching a play event if the player doesn 9t finish the game. The game over event takes an additional string data parameter. The value of this parameter is completely up to the game as to how it is used. In most cases set it to an empty string. In games where a win/lose scenario makes sense this parameter should be set to either cWIN d or cLOSE d. Zone Change The zone change event is game specific. A zone change is a game event such as a new level or a new environment or some other significant event. This event requires an additional parameter to uniquely identify the event to the tracking system. The data parameter to this event uniquely defines the milestone such that the tracking team can query the event and build reports. Ecommerce MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 26 of 28 ome Search The ecommerce service supports a variety of transaction services utilizing cash payments, tokens (our affinity points) and trading. We identified s of the ecommerce functionality as the following: Trade in accumulated points (tokens) for digital or physical rewards. Digital rewards could be exclusive music videos, free downloads from Urge, of digital swank to place on your personal profile page or avatar. Physical rewards could be DVDs, electronics, apparel etc. Purchase premium games (pay to play casual download games) or premium game plays (in games that support pay-to-play). Purchase in-game items (in-game items are defined by each game, such as special weapons, extra lives, locked levels, wardrobe enhancements, etc.) Purchase digital rewards or purchase items that come with points to fund power ups, characters, avatars, locked levels, etc. Premium membership, subscriptions to web sites and online services. The e-commerce system is scheduled for future development. Currently there are no projects with an e-commerce requirement. However, there is a lot of discussion of adding in-game items in our multiplayer games. The search service allows a user to search web site content such as user profiles, game titles, game descriptions and most user generated content (reviews, forum comments, etc.) The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 27 of 28 The search facility is scheduled for future development. Currently there are no projects with a search requirement. In-Game Advertising Usually games are supported with advertising shown in the periphery, such as on the hosting HTML page. For games this is suboptimal for a few reasons: o Limited context awareness, such as matching the ad with in-game sponsorship or theme; o Performance issues, such as Flash contending with Flash or other CPU intensive plug-ins; o No control, such as showing ads at game pause, game over, level up, etc.; An in-game advertising solution is powerful yet has many issues of its own. However, since Viacom business is based on advertising, a solution is inevitable. In-game advertising is an important feature to leverage our current web site ad sales initiatives and track ad delivery within the context of user behavior in online games. Games should have the ability to define ad placement and campaigns. GS will provide a simple API for developers to call out ads and describe to the ad serving engine the type of ads spots that are available. The game database will provide the rest of the information necessary to match ad campaigns with game context and send back accurate ad tracking metrics. The Community Platform for Online Games MTV Networks Online Games Game Services Platform Version 1.18 3 April 2, 2008 page 28 of 28 Road Map This is the current feature development schedule as determined by specific client needs. The definition of any feature or the order in which features are developed may change at any time. Features Scheduled for Immediate Development (Q2 908) Teams Tournaments Groups " Improved Notification system Player matching Item lists Features Scheduled for Future Development (Q4 908) Leader board turnover notification Additional profile attributes (upload photo) " Message forums Enhanced search (games, profiles, reviews) " Messaging " Improved COPPA compliance " Link to mobile device " Player augmented games Personalization ECommerce Notes and Issues 1. Allow amateur game developers to post games for community review? This is along the lines of the MySpace music concept, XBLA.

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