Uncapped PvE Content and Prestige

Spinks pointed out the irony of WoW's 10-man raids: namely that the raids are too small to sustain a guild around a 10-man raid team. Raids were reduced in player count because of logistics and accessibility concerns. Now they are so small that they cause logistics and accessibility issues. /ironic

This reminded me about uncapped PvE content. WoW used to have uncapped encounters in the form of world bosses, and it will be getting some new ones in Mists. Rifts are uncapped, as well as other forms of Public Quests. PvE content in Eve has no player count limit. Many of the original raids in EQ and FFXI were also uncapped.

It's important to note that there are no "balance scaling" mechanics in these systems. Mobs don't receive extra HP with every player at the fight. Nor does more money or gear drop depending on the raid size.

There are some advantages to unrestricted PvE encounters:

• Bring as many friends as you want. No one has to be second string or on the bench.
• Bring as few friends as online. You don't need to cancel the raid if one player doesn't show up, because the encounter is not necessarily attuned for X number of players.
• Risk and Reward are inherently balanced. Larger the party, the less risk involved, but fewer payouts per person.
• Challenge is self-ordained. Make the fight as easy or hard as you want.
• Pick-up-groups could do any content. ++Accessibility

I see four reasons that players raid:

1. Story/Content
2. Power (e.g. character progression, money, gear)
3. Challenge
4. Prestige

Players interested in fulfilling the needs of Story, Power, and Challenge will have their needs met by the uncapped system. Players can easily experience any content they wish; they simply need to bring enough bodies. They can toy with risk and reward to modify the power payouts. And they can adjust the difficulty by inviting a different number of raiders.

Those seeking Prestige, however, will not be happy with an uncapped raid. If the encounter were a signal of prestige, and because of its challenge or accessibility, predicates that the access or completion of the content is rare, then Prestige players would want as few people in that elite club as possible. The scarcer the resource, then the more valuable it is deemed. The rarer the achievement, then the more distinction it bears. 

Some times there is confusion regarding the difference between Prestige and Challenge. Prestige certainly can and often does derive from Challenge. If a task is difficult, then fewer people are capable of completing it, thus making the success rarer. But Prestige can come from a time commitment: e.g. level 99 in Diablo 2. If everyone were dedicated enough to reach level 99, it would not be prestigious (like level 85 in WoW).

The Achievements you unlock, the gear you wear, and the stories you tell are trophies that signal your prestige. The more people with those trophies, then the less special they are. But the players seeking content, money, and challenge will all be having fun.

From a development and design perspective, less time needs to be allocated to meticulously balance and rebalance fights. Obviously the encounter payouts need to be in line with other content so that players have an actual choice. But there is no need for a scheduled nerfing or complex algorithms that adjust the difficulty based on the number of players. Let us decide our level of risk, reward, and challenge.

Your Job is to Make Tasty Sandwiches!

I walked into a Subway sandwich store for the first time earlier today. After ordering, I was confronted by a lot of options that weren’t presented in an efficient way. There were approximately four steps where I had to make some choice as to what to put on my sandwich—four distinct phases where different ingredients were either added or withheld from the sandwich.

When the sandwich was completed, it has a total of 4 ingredients in it (bread included).

I ordered a sandwich that had a distinctive name that suggested almost every ingredient that would be present. “Sweet onion chicken teriyaki” leads me to expect the sandwich has onions, teriyaki sauce, and chicken on it, probably with lettuce thrown in because that’s how sandwiches are usually made. Instead, after ordering the sandwich, I was confronted with four different decisions, each with more than four options. It was not clear at all what would go on this sandwich or what should. Why is that? Because I am not a professional chef. I don’t go into the store expecting to be saddled with making myself a good sandwich. I went to the store so that I could buy a good sandwich that they had thoughtfully designed and put together.

This is a great metaphor for a significant problem application designers face: giving the user as few decisions as possible while allowing them to effectively and easily use the application to accomplish their goals. Subway failed at this basic design problem by saddling me with far too many choices, almost invalidating its primary reason for existing (to sell me tasty sandwiches as easily and quickly as possible so as to make a profit).

Aion makes an innocent but devastating mistake in an effort to simply make a tasty sandwich. They’ve streamlined their game into a candy-coated, artificially enhanced stream of purpose-built monotony. Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition falls into this trap as well.

When you log into Aion, you enter a world that is clearly made so that you can run around and effectively kill monsters. Everything’s arranged nicely for your viewing and killing pleasure. The ducks are lined up and a well-maintained rifle is put in your hand for an enjoyable afternoon of shooting—but the ducks are wooden and the rifle doesn’t shoot anything, a wooden duck flips backwards whenever you fire. The gameplay is directed; it’s so directed that, after 10 hours, it felt completely empty to me. My path through the game was perfectly clear. It was so well lit and nicely paved that I felt that I might try a different, dustier, less-traveled path. But there was no other path.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (4e from here on) streamlined the hell out of the tabletop roleplaying—or, perhaps more aptly, rollplaying—experience. Its predecessor, 3.5e, was asymmetric, arcane, and had a serious case of power creep. Wizards of the Coast apparently had enough of that and decided to finely tune the 4e rules to cut off all those rough edges and remove the arcane and less-trodden paths, to simplify the complex, and to run out of town all the rules but those that governed situations that could be vaguely described as combat. Suddenly the sprawling 3.5e is replaced by a very consistent, smooth 4e that has all the corners neatly rounded and all the danger areas surround in safety fences. 4e is a game system that is very obviously a game—it has clear boundaries that become quite obvious when you try to run a 4e campaign. All those fun utility items that abounded in 3.5e are gone. The unique and flavorful mechanics of each class are replaced by abilities that are minimal variations on a consistent framework. The abilities and, by extension, the classes, feel like repackaged and rebranded copies of the same few ideas.

Streamlining games can solve mechanics problems, but it ultimately rips the soul out of a game. When all of the interesting detail is stripped and all the excitement is paved over, it doesn’t matter if the game is perfectly balanced: it simply will not have enough flavor to be fun. You might leave the game feeling like it was well-balanced and complete, but you won’t find yourself excited.

Moral Choice Beyond Good and Evil

While browsing through the Alganon website for publicly available data on the game, I was angered by the insistence on using the horrible good-evil dichotomy that has become the standard system of moral choice in games.

There are two factions in the game: The Asharr and the Kujix. Guess what they represent? Just pick the easiest possible dichotomy that has been used the most in videogames: Good vs. Evil. Alganon doesn’t stop there, though! It folds all of of the positive “good-aligned” traits—light, nature, heart, mind, order, obedience, and protection—into Asharr and similarly it folds the opposites into Kujix. They went all-in on this cliché. This kind of design laziness borders on the obscene. Reading about Alganon’s weak backstory brought memories of a certain AGDC session flooding back into my thoughts.

Mot and I attended a group session at AGDC ‘09 entitled “The Jesus-Hitler Problem” where we had a series of small-group discussions about how to make moral choice in games less banal and ludicrous. Everyone agreed that the good-evil dichotomy is weak, overplayed, and should be relegated to the trash heap, but few people had much to say about how to replace it. Some suggested avoiding the question all together and divorcing moral choice from game mechanics. Some suggesting having some kind of faction system in games to represent a players alignment with the wants of different important groups in the story.

It’s definitely time we ditch the good vs. evil dichotomy in games.  Both sides are stupid. No one actually ever fits into either of the sides accurately. They’re caricatures that have been dulled by overuse. (And I find it ridiculous that people don’t have a problem how MMOs imply that the moral caliber of one’s being has to do with one’s race.) We should keep moral choice as a mechanic, though, because leaving it out doesn’t encourage players to try different paths. The stakes become very low if moral choice doesn’t actually have an effect on the game world—we almost shouldn’t bother with moral choice at all in that case. Faction systems are a better idea, but don’t fit a wide range of genres.

My suggestion is that we keep moral choice, but change its gamut radically. Moral choice shouldn’t run from perfect good to perfect evil separated by a vanilla neutrality of uselessness. For moral choice to be effecting and memorable, players have to be forced to choose between two equally appealing (or equally disastrous) options. There should be a solid case for either choice being good or evil. 

Here are some dichotomies that arise in moral dilemmas; one’s beliefs on a dichotomy need not be either one or the other, there can be some degree of dithering:

• Idealism vs. Pragmatism (Hope vs. Reason)
• Material vs. Spiritual
• Mercy vs. Justice
• Need vs. Deserve
• Impulse vs. Reason (Heart vs. Mind)
• The Many vs. The Few
• Authority vs. Equality
• Self vs. Others
• Present vs. Future
• Certainty vs. Opportunity (Fate vs. Free Will)
• Intent vs. Consequence
• Unity vs. Diversity

If we profile NPCs through using their positions on these dichotomies, we can construct almost lifelike belief systems. Once we have belief systems, we can present the player with options that will either appeal to or disgust NPC groups that with which the player interacts. The tests of morality can occur relatively frequently, probing at the player’s conceptions of each of these dichotomies. Different factions react in different ways depending on how the player has behaved earlier in the game.

Through expanding the moral quandaries and removing the pretense of good vs. evil, we can create arresting moral decisions, and then have those decisions have deep-rooted effects on the way the game progresses. Such a system will be significantly more engaging, replayable, and thought provoking.

On Balance, Part 2: Ten Key Tips for Balancing

On Monday, I wrote about the fundamentals of balance. Here’s the second and final part of that discussion.

Here are ten important take-aways from Sirlin’s series on balance, but with an MMO bent. These tips cover a wide range, from ways to find imbalance to ways to quantify and fix those imbalances. I added specific MMO-related applications of some of Sirlin’s points about balancing fighting games.

Finding Imbalance through Tier Lists

• Ask players to organize classes, character types, and abilities within each class into five tiers based on their power or usefulness in different scenarios. The highest tier should be “God”-level—these are dominant strategies—and the lowest tier should be trash-level—these are strictly dominated strategies. You want to clear out those two extremes and ensure that the other tiers are as close together as possible.
• Tier lists can be applied to classes or abilities in MMOs, but with a caveat. Characters in typical fighting games are mutually exclusive in the context of play—a player can not be more than one character at once. But in an MMO, a character can have multiple abilities at once and those abilities can be at multiple power levels.
• In a class-based game, it’s easy to apply the tiering system: for each role, tier the classes in their effectiveness. It’s not a disaster if a class is God-tier in one role, as long as it isn’t God-tier in too many, making it basically a dominant strategy to play that class (ala Channellers in Shadowbane). You can use tiering to roughly balance the utility of each class in different situations. It’s a good idea to make the design intentions of classes available to the player so that they don’t make a terrible decision when they choose a class that gimps them at doing what they love.

Avoid Imbalance through Preventative Design

• Imbalances are avoided by the use of counters. Sometimes these counters are passive: Elemental damage is countered by elemental resistance; physical damage is countered by dodging, blocking, and armor. Sometimes these counters are active, like using a shield bash to interrupt a healer casting a life-saving heal spell.
• Design counters and counters to counters. But don’t turn your game into rock-paper-scissors.  Iterative deletion of dominated strategies can be used to determine where bedrock is hit. Sometimes counters can be generally weak, but they can exist just to counterbalance a possibly exploitable mechanic.
• Don’t become fixated on balancing at a micro-level. In a class-based game, you’re balancing class against class, not ability A against ability B. Keep this in mind—sometimes combos of a class’ abilities can make it overpowered and you’d miss that if you were focusing on micro-level ability balance.

Balance Towards Fun

• Abilities have to be powerful. Balancing games isn’t about lining numbers up so that they sum to zero, it’s about making the game as fun as possible for as long as possible.
• Maximize the time where both sides have a fighting chance. Always give each side a reason to fight further—there should always be something to lose worth protecting and something to gain worth taking. Be careful of runaway negative and positive feedback loops.
• Always pull the bottom up to meet the top. This can be difficult in MMOs, but you should work very hard to avoid nerfing classes or abilities. It’s better to have a gap filled a little too much than to leave a void.
• There should be gamist reasons why every mechanic is present in the game. There should be simulationist reasons why mechanics work as they do. The challenge is to pick the mechanics that are balanced for simulationist reasons—actually real-world systems that balance one another aren’t easy to find.

On Balance, Part 1: Strategy and Depth

Everyone at all interested in game design should read Sirlin’s series of posts on balance. He brings up just about every important facet of balance relevant to games in general. He uses mainly examples from fighting games to illustrate his points—they work great as examples of the concepts he discusses.

In this post, I’m going to summarize many of concepts Sirlin illustrates (you should definitely read his articles if you have the time). Balance is a critical concept in MMOs and certainly merits a post on this blog.

Strategy

A strategy is a planned set of actions. Every game has a strategy-space that consists of every possible strategy the game permits.

Some strategies are better than others. The best strategies dominate all other strategies. A strategy is dominant if it is always the best strategy to choose regardless of the state of the game—an expert in the game would always choose that strategy regardless of his opponent’s decisions and the expert would always win.

A strictly dominant strategy is always the best to choose. A strictly dominated strategy is never the best to choose.

There are different layers of strategy. In theme-park MMOs, there are character growth strategies specific to each class (the specific talent builds for a feral druid, a prot warrior) as well as in-combat strategies (a DPS rotation for a hunter or an aggro control plan for a tank). The order in which you complete quests is also a strategy. Each of these layers have different goals and optimizing one may necessitate choosing suboptimal strategies in others. MMOs are fun because there are a lot of strategies that allow us to succeed—success is almost guaranteed—so we almost always feel like we’re being smart players by choosing good strategies, even if our strategies are far from optimal.

Darkfall is a unique example of the strategy paradigm of character growth being turned on its head in an MMO. Any character, as of October ‘09, can max out every skill in the game. Every character is expected to be able to effective perform every role as the game is played now. Most MMOs necessitate character growth strategies that are essentially time-independent, because there is usually some limit to the character’s growth that is set by its class or a skill cap—character growth strategies focus on the character optimizing for a desired role when it reaches the limit of its growth. In Darkfall, all growth strategies are rendered moot in the long run. Every character is exactly the same given a several month span of time. The strategies that matter for Darkfall in its current for are those that optimize the instantaneous power of a character at all points in its life. This problem is significantly harder to solve, but it tends to be less interesting than endgame minmaxing. (There probably can only be one optimal growth strategy in Darkfall.)

Depth

Depth is the result of there being enough viable strategies for the number of possible strategic permutations to outstrip the player’s capacity to experiment with many of them in a reasonable amount of time. This results in an evolving metagame where certain combinations become popular.

Depth is, at its root, the result of asking a player to solve variations on a problem that is very difficult to solve. It’s not obvious to the player at any level what strategy will net him the best results, so players will try out many different strategies against many other strategies in search of optimal solutions.

For instance, assessing mid-game positioning in chess can be a monumental task as the number of possible moves grows significantly as the board opens up. Calculating the value of positioning vs material is a monumental task. Usually there is not enough time to come to a definite valuation, if one is possible. Chess has a lot of depth in that you can play it many times without seeing identical mid-game positions, so not only is piece valuation and position valuation a hard problem, it’s rarely the same between games. Different players put different weight on different ways of evaluating board position and material; the metagame of chess has been evolving for at least four hundred years and most players still struggle to gain a grasp on evaluating board positions and possible moves.

MMOs currently lack depth. The problems that a player must face when he sits down to play are severely limited in difficulty. Modern MMOs are mostly built to tickle players with rewards and those rewards are their primary motivation for continued play. If game systems had enough depth to rival the reward addiction, MMOs would be able to get over the Kosterian Curve of rapid adoption followed by devastating desertion.

Put Newbies in the Best Possible Community

For big MMOs that cater to all the myriad playstyles, let’s ditch arbitrary server selection and instead come up with a model that works based on preferred styles of play.

Timmy likes PvE, Jimmy likes crafting, Joan likes PvP, Edward likes crafting but hates PvP, Dave thinks that PvE is a waste of time but loves to participate in the PvP and economy. Out of these five players, zero of them can make a meaningful decision about what server to join when they’ve first logged into a modern MMO. PvP-flag indicators do far too little to help people decide where to settle if flagging is even implemented—most games don’t bother—and roleplaying designations have even less meaning. Given only a list of server names there’s no way to make a meaningful decision of what server to join—a decision that can make or break a player’s in-game experience.

Let’s find ways to make server choice work better for the new player.

If the player has friends already in-game on their first log-in, let them provide the names of their friend’s characters and/or what guild their friends are in, and the player will be shuttled over to the appropriate server.

When an experienced player signs up for your MMO, give them a list of playstyles and ask them to rank them on a hate-dislike-neutral-like-love continuum (or have the player rank the playstyles from most preferred to least). With responses to five or ten such questions, you can gather enough information about the player to put him or her in a server with people with whom he or she will actually enjoy playing.

For inexperienced players, ask them questions about what kind of activities they would want to do in game with language that is newbie friendly. “Do you want to make the weapons that your friends use as they charge into battle?” instead of “Do you like crafting?”

Use this information to put people on servers where they can easily meet like-minded people and have fun. This doesn’t mean segregating all the various playstyles, it means integrating them where they are compatible and separating them when they are incompatible. If someone really hates getting ganked, don’t put them on a PvP server. If someone wants to craft and doesn’t mind PvP, put them on a server with other crafters—or put them on a PvP server that’s short on crafters.

A small amount of time spent gathering player preferences can lead to huge dividends when players find friends faster and get hooked sooner. There’s no reason to make player’s fire meaningful decision in game be a blind decision.

EDIT: Dblade, in the comments, suggested a better alternative to a Q&A with the new player. He suggests a Oblivion-like tutorial that allows the player to show their play-style through actual play. I think this is a great idea, though it can't sufficiently judge if the player likes PvP and crafting. A tutorial where the game learns the player's preferences coupled with a few simple questions before the player dives into the full game will greatly increase the chance of the player dropping into a community in which he'll want to take part.

The One Character Fallacy

Many of the character advancement problems that we encounter in modern MMOs are caused by the one-character philosophy. Single-player RPGs adhere to this philosophy for good reason and originated it as a metaphor. As with the blind adoption of many of the other tropes of single-player RPGs, MMOs have taken this one blindly and not done adequate work to adapt it to fit the realities of massively multiplayer gaming.

The one-character philosophy exists and has persisted because of these design decisions:

1. Player characters do not age.
2. Player characters cannot actually die.
3. There can only be a limited number of PCs per player.
4. Character advancement is very time-consuming.
5. Character advancement is almost entirely vertical.

The one-character philosophy doesn’t need to be a static emplacement in MMORPG design. There are several well-documented issues with expecting the players to stick with one character throughout their journeys:

1. Grinds are necessary to keep players playing if they are meant to stick to one character. Developers want to milk as much play time from characters as humanly possible.
2. Vertical character progression has to be long. This means that level barriers lie between you and having fun doing what you want in the game world.
3. The wild swings of the nerfbat turn your favorite max level character into a useless sideshow in your favorite style of play. You’ve put 150 days of playtime into your character, but now it’s all rendered moot because the balance has tipped out of your favor.
4. Making an alt means repeating the whole grind again!
5. Lots of vertical progression means lots of content strewn across the game world that is only accessible to narrow groups of players at a time. 90% of the game world is useful to less than 10% of the players at a given time. Making good content is difficult and uneconomical considering the low number of total hours players will spend with that content.
6. Max level boredom is the result of grinding your way to max level, then looking out over the desolate landscapes of useless locales and wondering “now that I’ve climbed the mountain, what do I do next?” This is less a problem is World of Warcraft, because the game is very top-heavy, but in other games this is brutal. (Warhammer)
7. Death has to be meaningless or half of the players will run around naked, sit in town and macro all day, or become exploiters due to inhuman risk aversion.
8. Permanent decisions are anathema because characters have to live with what might be cripplingly bad decisions for the rest of eternity unless the player wants to throw away the time spent on that character.

MMOs refuse to stick to this metaphor wholesale (aside from Darkfall and other games that force you to only play as one character on one world) when they allow alts. This allowance is the first down the road to mortal characters in MMORPGs.
Problems with perma-death:

1. Discourages character investment.
2. May overly reward excessive play-time.
3. Character progression may be overly repetitive.
4. Managing too many characters at once.

Design responses (off the top of my head):

1. Focus on horizontal character progression.
2. Ensure there are important activities that a character can only do when the player is offline. Characters may have to sleep for a certain amount of their lives to not face penalties. Such penalties make it optimal to play multiple characters while not necessarily making every one of them uber.
3. Reduce vertical progression to the side-effect of good and skillful play. A 10% cap on vertical ability gain would be reasonable. Ensure that vertical progression is no longer the focus—speccing well and having a strategy for your character should be more important.
4. You don’t need to be logged in as particular characters to perform certain actions. Perhaps web-based or otherwise out-of-game interfaces would be more effective for managing the auction house, trade goods production, and other repetitive activities that can be more effectively managed from a dedicated interface outside of the game engine.

Discarding the one-character philosophy has its own problems, but it’s impossible to fully grasp the potential of a multi-character system until it’s actually implemented, and I don’t see any games giving it an honest go yet. One-character thinking has reached its natural conclusion; we need to move on. MMOs have proven their marketability, it's time to make game mechanics that leverage the nature of an online game instead of shoe-horning single-player mechanics into multi-player games where they do not belong. I believe the one-character philosophy is one design stumbling block past which we will find much better MMOs.

The Role of Chance

“Cutting down the role of chance” is one of the more overlooked of my 10 Points for the MMORPG Revolution, so I will tackle it first.

The first step towards cutting down the role of chance is to understand the role of chance. Randomness is a root preconception that players have in MMORPGs, and, to seasoned RPG players, it seems absolutely necessary. In actuality, this assumption need not hold. In this post, I will review the roles of chance and why we want to reduce its role in upcoming MMORPGs. In a later post I will offer suggestions as to how to cut down the role of chance in specific instances of each of these roles.

(As a thought experiment, I encourage you to think about how you’d design an MMORPG that does not use a random number generator. We’ll see if our ideas match up when I get to the second part of this discussion later on.)

Here are the three roles chance plays in MMORPGs. (If you can think of more, please comment! I want to make this article as complete as possible without getting overly concrete and nitpicky.)

Random Numbers Simulate Character Ability

In role playing games of all kinds, random numbers are used to determine the outcome of events because they can resolve actions independently of player skill. If a character needs to roll a 15 or more on a 20-sided die to successfully perform an action, that character has less skill than the character who can roll a 10 or more and succeed. No level of player planning can overcome his characters limitations without some luck—this is appropriate, because ability gating and character growth are important, fundamental parts of RPGs.

Random Numbers Model Unforeseen Factors

Random numbers model the effects of actions that are outside of our scope of observation. In real life, we notice events that seem to occur randomly, but this is just a symptom of our subjective viewpoint. Because we don’t see the causes of certain events, we assume that they’re random. Under further analysis, we find that human-level events have complex cause-and-effect relationships that, if followed prior to the “random” event, make the event an obvious effect. As individuals, we can perceive so few of these strands of cause-and-effect that it is impossible to get our heads around most of the complex activities that we are subject to in a given day. Hence, the idea of "randomness" or "chance" in human-level interactions and one of the roles that chance plays in RPG systems.

Random Numbers Provide Variety

Random Numbers are used in generating loot and monster spawns and can be used for determining the behavior of enemies (if there are multiple equally viable AI strategies). This randomness provides variety in the game world and is partially responsible for how addictive loot-heavy games are, Diablo II especially.

Entire dungeons can be generated on the fly using random numbers. Diablo II did this, but there are more interesting procedurally generated maps in roguelike games. Much replayability in roguelikes is due to the ever-different dungeons and maps that present the play with a seemingly endless number of interesting tactical situations and fiendishly difficult dungeon levels.

There’s a lot of work done in procedurally generated content, as well. Most of this stuff is rather technical, but goes to show that there are a lot of people working on effective ways to use random numbers to generate content in games.

Motivation For Reducing the Role of Chance

Why do we want to get rid of as many random number-determined actions as possible? With few exceptions this mechanic has been the core of RPGs for as long as RPGs have existed.

If we want to give the player the ability to change the world and affect other characters in meaningful ways, we need to make decision-making the central process. We need to allow decision-making to determine the outcome of events, not chance. If we provide the player with appropriate information about the decision they are going to make, there’s no reason to build into the game a chance of that decision failing outright due to a bad die roll (something that’s completely out of any player’s hands). I’m not suggesting that we remove failure from MMOs, but instead that we remove unavoidable failure from individual player’s actions.

In a system that allows player success to the best decision-makers, players can easily see what they have done wrong and accept their losses as lessons for the future. If the dice screw you, you’re going to be upset at the game—nothing is learned. If you plan poorly or make a bad decision, you can identify that without the obscuring power of dice rolls and make intelligent decisions using that input in the future, leading to player skill and player learning being the most important facets of the game, not time invested and luck.

Choice is a buzzkill

As the game industry ages, more and more complex games with greater budgets and larger development teams hit the shelves. A not-so-surprising trend is that with each new game more customization is offered. Whether it be character creation, ability specialization, non-linearity progression, or whatever other options designers dream up, these choices are presented to the players because the players have explicitly asked for them and the designers are relying on the intuition that "more choice is better".

Unfortunately, too much choice can be a bad thing. Several years ago at TED, Barry Schwartz gave a talk on the Paradox of Choice. He argues that choice actually makes people miserable. Schwartz explains: choice counter-intuitively creates paralysis rather than liberation. We are less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be with fewer options to choose from. Here's why:

1. Regret and anticipated regret.
   It is easy to imagine a different choice that would have been better; we experience regret and this detracts from the satisfaction resulted from the choice.
   
   
2. Opportunity costs.
   It is easy to imagine attractive features of the alternatives that we've given up.
   
   
3. Escalation of expectations.
   With all the options available, expectations of how good the final decision will be be increases. We have no expectations when presented with no choice. When confronted with 100 choices, we feel that one should be perfect.
   
   
4. Self-blame.
   With no choice, if we are dissatisfied, then the world could have done better. With much choice, we personally feel that we could have done better. The responsibility falls on the person. There are no excuses.

There is obviously a threshold. Some choice is good, but more choice is not better. Do we really need 50 guns in that new FPS? How about 70 class abilities in that MMORPG? How often do you make an RPG character, only to be unhappy with its appearance 20 minutes later? "Oh man, I could have had that hairstyle!" Have you really ever been satisfied with a game that had 10 alternative endings? (think about BioShock and Fable 2)

Dan Gilbert also gave a talk on Why are we happy. His talk is about synthesized happiness, but he claims that in the presence of choice, happiness cannot be synthesized (Freedom of choice chapter [14:20]), and therefore we become unhappy.

This only applies to choices which are mutually exclusive and final. How unhappy would you be if you could only make a single WoW character? FFXI uses a job system to give players access to all the options without having to make a final decision.

Perhaps we should be asking designers for fewer choices. At least development costs would go down.