Ten Ton Hammer: Another
major issue
with voice chat and community tools is the age barrier for kids. How do
you protect children’s identities?



style="font-weight: bold;">Charles:
As a policy, we don’t let users register for PlayXpert unless
they’re over 13 years old. Beyond this, we don’t
expose age
information about our members.  They can certainly share this
information on their own, but we don’t provide it. 
Again,
the voice skins can equally address this situation.  A 13 year
old
girl can sound like an older man just as easily as they can decide to
sound like a fairy using the voice skins.  Alternatively, they
can
decide not to use voice at all and stick with text chat.


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Ten Ton Hammer: Are there
plans to launch PlayXpert with other development companies?



style="font-weight: bold;">Charles:
PlayXpert works with all games running DX 8, 9, or 10. 
We’ve had multiple conversations with the folks at NCsoft and
ArenaNet in Seattle, Austin, and Korea– and really like them
as a
team.  We have all of their games – and confirmed
that they
all work with PlayXpert.  I personally think it would be
compelling if NC offered their NC Launcher as a widget and they
delivered cross-game community to their users via various PlayXpert
widgets.  



Having said that, we’re not really a game distribution
network
today – and we wouldn’t want to do that if it was
only for
one publisher – our foundational Mojo is that we’re
player
focused and not limited to just one publisher in the tools we provide.
 



We have been approached by a few companies who are in the business of
game distribution to have a widget that distributes games via their
service.  Certainly nothing we’re announcing yet but
this is
certainly more our style.  We like to leverage the winner in
various dimensions of the gaming ecosystem and enable them to have a
widget so they can serve their users better.



Ten Ton Hammer: Many MMOG
players lose
touch after they leave a game; it seems PlayXpert gives them a means to
stay together. How does PlayXpert help keep players in contact?



style="font-weight: bold;">Charles: Indeed,
behaviors in games are shockingly similar to those in one’s
life.  I’ll tell you a story…



I once got into the habit of going to this one particular Starbucks on
the way to work every morning at roughly the same time.  Over
time, I learned the work schedule of the baristas and with even more
time, developed relationships (limited, but relationships nonetheless)
based on the dimensions of time and place.  



One day, on my way through the airport, I was selected to get
searched.  The guy searching me was one of the
baristas.  At
first I didn’t recognize him because he was wearing a TSA
uniform
– but sure enough, it was him.  This situation was
seemingly
random, but the result is that a familiar connection in my social
fabric appeared right before my eyes and I had to re-categorize the
relationship that defined how I knew him.  Instead of just
being
the guy at Starbucks, I had to categorize him as a guy that also works
for TSA.  Immediately, the community that was present at
Starbucks
existed here – but identity joining was required to make that
happen.



The points are two-fold:



In games, if you’re interacting with people, the same thing
happens – but the facilities that one normally relies on
aren’t present.  I could recognize this guy at the
airport
in real life (even in a different uniform), but in a game, I
wouldn’t be able to.  As a result, the issue of
managing the
federated identities of people, in a context-sensitive way across
games, and across communities is a big one and requires tools (like
PlayXpert) to do what traditional senses do for you in real life.



By using PlayXpert, players are uniquely capable of gluing together the
various dimensions of their social fabric and unifying the otherwise
disparate identities that represent them based on the games they play,
and the people they call “friends.”  If
the player
stops playing a game, the previous friends are not out-of-sight,
out-of-mind.  Instead, they remain associated in PlayXpert and
can
be tapped.  This is significant when you think of how
significant
word-of-mouth recommendations are when it comes to game adoption for
new games!



Ten Ton Hammer: Will
PlayXpert have any tools specific to guild management?



style="font-weight: bold;">Charles: Stay tuned!
*smiles*



Ten Ton Hammer: Tell us
something about your system that we have not mentioned. What do you
want players to know?



style="font-weight: bold;">Charles:
The amazing thing about PlayXpert is that it’s fundamentally
a
means for gamers, clans, content providers, studios, publishers,
hardware manufacturers – anyone in the gaming ecosystem -- to
deliver content, community, and commerce without worrying about the
“hard stuff” of in-game overlay and without the
time
limitations of changing the source code of a game client.  



So, all of the mod developers out there now have a system that lets
them build general purpose tools for games and for players –
and
not worry about whether a game provides a good modding architecture, if
the game has good enough distribution to be worth the effort, and
generally have to limit their ability to deliver value to the
player.  PlayXpert is the perfect mechanism to deliver this.



We have over 30 widgets that we’ve built in-house to
date. 
We’ve only released 6.  I expect the community to
build 300%
more widgets then we ever do.  We just want to prime the pump!



We get requests for widget API keys for PlayXpert (the mechanism to
build a widget) weekly from individuals who build cool tools for
communities and want to turn them into general purpose
widgets. 
These people are our extended R & D – focused on
delivering
value to players.  Just as a brief example, there’s
a tool
for EVE Online called EveMon.  It’s a great tool
– but
without PlayXpert – it doesn’t work in game (you
have to
alt-tab out to use it).  We’re currently evaluating
working
with them to Widget-ize it.  I can list lots of these examples
that are game-specific but they involve communities who play multiple
games from various publishers.



We encourage people to see PlayXpert in action in booth 6241 at San
Francisco GDC or visit www.playxpert.com
for more information. Thanks for letting us chat with the Ten Ton
Hammer readers!


Do you regularly use
community or voice toolsets? Would you if your favorite game integrated
PlayXpert? href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?p=209114#post209114">Let
us know on the forums!

To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our EverQuest II Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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