Checking In

The focus of the annual Austin Game Developers Conference is online gaming, specifically the challenges and the opportunities it provides. But while most people think of Blizzard or NCSoft for online gaming, Habbo Hotel has been around for far longer than World of Warcraft - and attracts nearly as many people worldwide, with over 7 million unique visitors each month.

GamesIndustry.biz spent some time with Sulka Haro, the lead designer for Habbo Hotel, to find out his thoughts on the nature of games, the differences between markets, and why it is impossible to copy a virtual world if you don't know how to manage it properly.

We are putting a lot of energy into trying to keep the service as safe as possible. Some parents just look at the surface of online services and not actually what is happening underneath.

If someone uses a swear word, [parents] may think that's the world's worst possible thing, even though we are putting energy into looking for, for example, sexual predators. The work which we are doing behind the scenes is pretty much invisible even though it is actually consuming a lot of time for us.

We are looking at how people are behaving. There are moderators who have been on at all times when the service is open so that we know what is going on. I just wish that all parents out there would talk with the kids and actually look at what they are doing every now and then to try and understand what [Habbo] is, not just first impressions from watching the screen for thirty seconds.

On Habbo, there are teenagers dating each other, in a harmless way. They are really just experimenting with the idea of dating. I think its better that they actually get the first experience virtually online, where it is anonymous and they aren't actually really doing it, as opposed to getting the first experience by really going out with a guy. That's way more dangerous!

I don't really think that increases safety that much if you try to limit what is happening and don't actually put the energy into moderating. Obviously, limiting [what people can say] helps, but it's not the end-all solution. People will find a way around it.

I think we have 19 hotels in some 30 markets...I can't remember the exact number. It's been growing so fast...

I'm not the person making those calls, but we are trying to be as realistic as possible. Obviously, there are a lot of markets that we could be going into, but if the infrastructure, for example for payments, is not something that is easy to work with...

If you look at the emerging markets, it could be that the teenagers are the ones who really don't have the money, and no way to actually get to the plugged-in mechanisms, so for us it might not really make sense to go with a market which might be huge.

There's actually some weird market differences as well. For example, if you look at Russia and Brazil, you wouldn't intuitively think about it, but there are teenagers who have so much money that you wouldn't believe. Really, the economies are polarized. There is a huge amount of incredibly rich people and the rest who have practically nothing. I don't know how many millions of millionaires Brazil has, but it is big. The rest of the users can't afford anything.

If you look at a country, you actually do have to go and look at the statistics and really understand how the economic situation is in that market, how the infrastructure works...it is not intuitive all the time.

Yes, I guess we are probably number three behind Nexon...I'm not sure exactly. It's working out really well. Pre-paid is good.

What I found really funny [about the Nexon presentation] is that it could have almost been my presentation. Because practically everything he was saying, the experiences they've had, we've had exactly the same thing. All the fraud issues...and when we introduced the pre-paid cards in Finland, we got called the next day to get more.

At Habbo, one thing we've really learned how to do is community management. And that's pretty hard to copy. Not too many people know how to do it.

The way you structure the universe...there are a lot of products out there that really have been copying Habbo. When Nicktropolis launched, I found a blog post from the developer, and he was saying that he actually decided to do a copy of Habbo and then they licensed technology to do Nicktropolis. So they have been looking at ours and copying our service, but some of the stuff that they do kind of looks like they didn't really get it, they just copied it.

So if you just take a spec of a world and implement something based upon the spec without really knowing the reason why it has been done...even doing a small change in the code that people are playing could have a pretty big implications as to what the experience really is. Just by copying, you can't do it. You actually have to understand what you are doing.

If we were starting over now with a completely new product, there are some things we might be doing differently. But we are changing the product itself constantly. There are new improvements coming out all the time. The good thing is that we know what we are doing badly, and we are working hard to fix it. Fortunately, a lot of the competition is doing even worse in that aspect.

The US media. But, then again, it is understandable that the games media is writing up products which are "proper" games.

I was just talking with someone about the definition of what a game is anyway. There's some pressure on even changing the term, what it really encompasses. I really prefer talking about "play" because that is something that people get and that is a term that is applicable to what we are doing...as well as WoW, because you can't say it is not play.

Whereas some people are saying that we're not a game, but WoW is a game, so maybe "a game" should mean something that you can play, but...

And I'm not going to touch it.

I think the world is really changing in that my generation is playing games a lot more than the previous generation, and looking at the younger generation, they are also playing games a lot more at all times.

So, I think people are accepting play as part of life now a bit more than they used to. It could be that the quality of life has improved so much that there is actually time for people to play around with stuff. And I'm hoping that people would play a lot more, obviously...

There's even interesting research on how making daily work more playful improves productivity for people. Having fun while you are doing something "surprisingly" makes you more productive (laughs).

Obviously, we are looking at mobile. I mean, Nokia's headquarters are pretty close to where we are, so Finland is especially about telecommunications.

Typically, teenagers' phones are pretty old, again, so if we did something on mobile, we would probably have to target pretty old handsets, and that could be a problem.

If you go to a site called Mini Friday, that's a mobile test we did which is a tiny little bar ...There's a pretty strong community there where people log in and chat with each other.

Mii, at least, is great. The only thing Nintendo has done wrong, at this point, is that the Miis don't actually encounter random people. Like whenever I go to a Mii parade, I'm just seeing my Miis. When I go online, I'd like to see a thousand Miis appear there suddenly. That would be fun. I'd spend hours looking at the stuff that other people have created.

As for Home, Daniel James said it pretty well. It is like this world with a $600 entry ticket. So, I'm not sure how much the people who are getting the PS3 will be into the world. At least in the demo I saw, it was this pretty clean Sony world...you're able to buy a virtual Bravia television that does not break. That's kind of funny, in some sense, but a bit too clean. Too polished, somehow. I don't know. It didn't feel like I'd really call that place my home.