Accountability System for Dynamic World MMOGs

Let’s think about how society holds people accountable for their actions and why. We’re not going to be able to directly model this in a game, but understanding how morality and social structures maintain themselves in real life can provide us with a basis for the mechanical social structure in a game world.

What (most likely) separates human beings from other animals is that we can calculate consciously the affects our actions will have on others. We can conceive of systems to judge actions on a scale beyond our own self-interest. These conceptions are institutionalized through religion and law. Societies dynamically generate and modify moral codes that their members tacitly understand. When there are enough people in the society, institutions arise to enforce moral codes and perpetuate, beyond the scope of the family, certain moral standards.

Accountability and moral agency are tightly bound. If we can be held accountable for our actions, we have the capacity to make moral decisions and be held to moral standards. We want the morality of actions to make a difference in what a player chooses to do when he interacts with others.

Societies in online games take on much of the morality of the real-world society in which the game is played. The effect of morality is deadened significantly in online games, though, leading to plenty of negative, uncooperative behavior that leads to undue pain and suffering.

Active morality promotes social order and cooperation, which, in general, leads to a much better social experience and a more enjoyable gameplay experience. In order for morality to matter in the game world, though, there needs to be accountability. Actions taken against (or with) other players need to have consequences, positive or negative, in order for the morality of those actions to matter to the player. Consequences cannot be enforced by players without knowledge of the precedent action.

Accountability in MMO dynamic worlds is deadened by several factors. Dynamic world games have to mitigate these factors significantly to make accountability work.

1. There’s no way to teach the morals of the game’s society to newbies without them experiencing it. Newbies are given a character that should have a solid understanding of the moral framework, but it’s impossible for the newbie to have that level of understanding.
2. There’s no ultimate punishment in the game world because death has little meaning. This has far-reaching consequences and cannot be overlooked.
3. The cost of abandoning a character and creating a new one isn’t prohibitive. Griefers only lose time when they are forced to make a new character, and those griefers usually have more free time than those who are being griefed.
4. Players don’t play every waking hour, so decisions that may need to be made have to work around when a player is online. The player’s perceptions and actions are limited by how long they spend online—there’s no analog for this in real life.
5. Survival is not a motivator for belonging to social groups. I-game groups are much more ephemeral and the bonds between players are much looser because there aren’t many pressing needs, and no need is as pressing as survival.
6. Membership churns in social organizations. As a result of weaker bonds between players in social groups, a player can jump from group to group at little penalty.

An accountability framework for a dynamic world needs to have several parts:

1. Event capturing and fact collection. The game engine can provide plenty of information about what characters have done. This information can be factually perfect—which is actually better than the general imperfection of information in real life. Collecting data can be difficult in games that have a lot of ambiguous actions available to players, but if players’ actions are relatively well defined, event capturing can lead to a significant increase in accountability.
2. Player aggregation and contextualization of information. Trusted players should be able to take the bare-bones fact sheets generated by the game engine and write histories around them that can be read by other players within the game.
3. Limited information availability. People don’t immediately know all of one anothers’ deeds and misdeeds. A game shouldn’t model this directly, but some gradual information spread depending on player contact and faction contact is necessary.
4. Account-wide activity memory. Because we cannot assume any degree of roleplaying, the moral actor should not be considered the character, but the player. All characters played on the same account should be connected. Activity histories should appear the same for all characters on one account (though there should be some reorganization of the view to allow the activity of the current character to be at the top or highlighted).
5. Give in-game social groups facilities for communicating at all times within the game. This means much more than guild chat. Social groups should have message boards accessible from within the game. There should be something like a wiki that the group can put up to hold important data about itself that its members need to know for the social order to be maintained. Organizational tools are crucial for the promotion of moral and cooperative behavior.
6. Allow social group membership to have a dramatic effect on how a player plays the game. More than simply giving the player a tag beneath their name and a chat channel, guilds should open up a whole new world of coordinated and uncoordinated group activity. When a player joins a new group, she should notice a difference in the way she plays the game every single time she logs on. In this way, group membership can have significance and membership churn can be reduced. Survival can be replaced with raw utility as a motivator for social behavior.

MMOs should make playing with others as smooth and rewarding as possible. In a game world where players can have significant effects on each others’ gameplay, it’s critical that social groups have the tools to invent and maintain morality frameworks to ease cooperation and promote social stability. Without tools to aid tracking and managing accountability, dynamic worlds will continue to breed a disproportionate number of psychopathic characters—such games will always be alluring but, ultimately, socially unstable, exploitable, and brutish.

The Character-Player Gap

In tabletop games, it’s important to maintain the gap between the player and the player’s character. These games hinge on the players roleplaying—the conflict resolution mechanisms are a big aid in the process. The quality of a game of D&D often depends largely on if the players can maintain a separation between themselves and their characters. When the players roleplay their characters effectively and don’t metagame too heavily, suspension of disbelief can take hold and lead to intense immersion. If the gap closes between the player and character, the game becomes a poor simulation with little soul.

MMO design, though it finds its roots in tabletop RPGs, cannot work off the assumption that there is a gap between the player and character. Social competition and cooperation force the gap shut.

How the Gap Closed

In order to compete most effectively against other players (i.e. take the path of least resistance at every possible point and maximize gain) the character is discarded. Roleplaying is significantly less efficient than playing as yourself, so a player motivated by competition will not bother doing it.

To cooperate most effectively in games, players use tools like voice chat that will erode the sense of talking to the character. The player’s interaction with the game world is no longer tightly bottlnecked through the game, it spreads out onto forums, vent channels, IRC, and IM clients. It becomes significantly more difficult to maintain a character-player gap under this diversity of contact—and most of this contact is necessary to cooperate most effectively.

If there is a not a social contract based around roleplaying, people will not roleplay. One or two people failing to roleplaying consistently leads to exponential numbers of players thinking it’s OK not to roleplay. So games cannot expect roleplay where there are a significant number of new players who are not familiar with the concept.

What Does It Mean?

Design games that don’t rely on their being any separation between player and character. Don’t limit the player’s ability to talk to other players because they are not on a certain character. At its most superficial level, persist guilds and friends lists across an entire account (perhaps on a server-per-server basis).

We can only safely assume that a player is roleplaying when he’s interacting with NPCs. MMOs should have a wider variety of NPC interaction choices. NPCs need to have lives that mean something to players—this alone will lead to a significant change in the meaningfulness of an MMO’s world.

The closing of the character-player gap doesn’t necessitate gutting systems of all immersion and stripping them down to their most addictive mechanics. The player character primarily needs more means of effecting the world that are affected by the character and not the player. We simply cannot rely on the player to roleplay in any form. We must fashion gameplay around this fact, not, as WoW and its descendants have done, in spite of it.

(When I present the design for the MMO I’d like to make, you’ll see more clearly how I intend to do what I say here.)

Accountability is the Currency of Dynamic Worlds

Theme-park MMOs are consequence-free zones—unless you get into the kind of behavior that is against the TOS, but even then the worst punishment is being kicked off the game.  It’s not a problem that theme-parks don’t have serious consequences for player character actions within the game mechanics because no character has an impact on the world. Regardless of what you do (barring some very rare GM-run events) the same mobs will continue to spawn in the same places and the same quests will be done by different people without interruption.

As soon as you give the player the ability to take actions that have far-reaching impact on the experiences of other players, you need to instill a conception of consequence in the player’s mind or face a blight of sociopaths actively ruining the game.

The basic building blocks of dynamic worlds are the actions of the players as they interact with one another and the environment. These actions have meaning in that they change the behaviors or capabilities the environment—both the simulated world and the players that inhabit it. Players need to have feedback from the environment as they interact so that they can learn the rules of interaction and the extent of their own capabilities.

Feedback can be supplied in two ways: in that the players sees what effect his actions have on the world, and in that the player sees how he should feel about that effect.

All games give feedback in the first form. You push on a crate and it moves in the direction you pushed. Simple feedback like this teaches you how to interact with your environment and helps you construct a mental image of tools you can use in further problem-solving endeavors. These rules tend to be too simple in MMOs and this feedback is too minimal, but this feedback’s existence provides the underpinnings for the second kind of feedback.

The second kind of feedback is less common in MMOs. Usually single-player games have NPCs that will react to the player’s actions by interacting with the player differently. The way NPCs react to the player suggests how the player should feel about what they are doing in the world. If the player is behaving badly (in a particular social context), NPCs react with shock, horror, and derision towards the player—the player is supposed to feel this about his actions and adjust them. Because NPCs in MMOs are generally worthless cardboard cutout quest-givers, their reactions have no importance to the player—even though through executing the quest-givers will, the player has interacted with the world in the only way possible in the game, the player doesn’t care about the NPC and skips through quest text. NPCs are just tools used to move forward, to get to the endgame and do the real business the game brags about, be it raiding or PvP.

When the player interacts with other players as his main means of playing the game, either through direct interaction or through effecting a cohabitated world, the tools required to show the player how he should feel about his actions are altered beyond recognition. No longer are NPCs the central focus of the game—players have to make moral judgments about other players. The quality of those judgments has an impact on how much fun each player has.

Through making moral judgments, players establish de facto tribal societies. Once in the context of a society, players behave in regimented, sensible ways while relating to others in their society. The player who acts out will be stripped of his status within the society and will not be able to take advantage of the facilities that society provides, so players are incentivized to conform and contribute. The relations built through this socialization keep players hooked into the game world and happy. PvP is contextualized into society versus society warfare, not meaningless and random killing.

Accountability is at the center of the social and moral systems that form the backbone of player-driven, dynamic worlds. Developers have to provide tools to allow players to hold one another accountable for their actions. Developers need to build tools to track the behaviors of players and reveal important details to other players in appropriate places, building a framework for players to establish crucial trust relationships. By giving players the power to avoid untrustworthy or uncooperative agents, developers can give their players a world where actions have meaningful consequence without the world falling apart into a chaotic mass of criminality and complexity.

Accountability is the social currency of dynamic world MMOs. In order for a player-driven dynamic world to succeed, mechanics must facilitate accountability.

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.

MMOs for Gamers: My Approach

Designers face a unique design hurdle in mass market MMOs: they have to make a game that isn’t relying on gamers for its chief source of subscribers and sales. I know many people who play MMOs but do not play games in general. They are drawn to the genre because it offers a social playground. The game mechanics are interchangeable and unimportant to them because they are just a side show to a game of social maneuvering, friend making, and accomplishing arbitrary goals cooperatively. If the game is popular enough to draw their friends in, the non-gamer will jump in and mass-market games are forced to make the landing comfortable. MMOs provide a microcosm of a meaningful life: you learn the game in your youth, you build trust and form relationships with others, you exploit those relationships and the dynamics of life in the world to do what you want to do and enjoy yourself.

It appears to me that most MMOs are produced with the goal of appealing to both the non-gamers and gamers equally (or appealing to primarily non-gamers in truth but appealing to gamers with marketing speak). I don’t think this is a productive approach. Non-gamers will not be interested in a game that forces them to play frequently and assumes they have some kind of skill and care about the outcomes of gameplay. They want a platform for social interaction. Gamers want the game to bind the players together into a de facto community—gamers do not want the community to draw the players. This naturally creates a situation that Gevlon likes to draw in stark relief: non-gamers who don’t really play the game intermingling with gamers who are primarily in the game to play it. To judge one group by the other’s standards, as Gevlon does to much controversy and dramatic effect, is foolish—it’s a variety of ethnocentrism akin in kind, but by no means in significance, to the ethnocentrism that mars many pieces of historical work regarding Asian and Middle Eastern cultures written by Western authors of the past thousand years. It’s easy to believe something is better just because it is your belief—it is not easy to come to grips with the complex reality of a multi-dimensional and multi-faceting picture of goals and motivations.

I approach MMO design as a gamer. I’ve played many games in nearly every genre. I don’t rely on the mainstream to supply games—I play and love games like Armageddon Empires, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (X and XI, primarily), Front Office Football, AI War, Dwarf Fortress, Europa Universalis 3, and ADOM. I seek to find the games that I will have fun playing, and play them until I no longer find them fun. I’m accustomed to learning difficult and opaque games; they often give me the greatest amount of concentrated fun. Blundering through difficult games for hours in order to learn even the simplest uses of their mechanics doesn’t faze me. In this, I’m a rare type of gamer and I’m indelibly a gamer.

I am the diametric opposite of a non-gamer, and understanding that will allow you to see where I come from with my design ideas and my exhortations towards a revolution in MMOs. Any MMO can rise and fall on the waves of social fancy among their players, but the ones that stay big seem to have good games locked within them. I want to design and play MMOs that are sound games around which strong communities can flourish. That is the most sensible and least trend-dependent (and therefore more stable) way of achieving success.

Information Availability: An Underused Asset

MMOs are confronting a unique challenge in the gaming world: detailed information is available about any MMO—and is expected to be available—that can potentially compromise the fun of the game.

This problem is critical in MMOs but inconsequential in single-player games. It’s easy to control information flow in single-player games. You reveal information to the player as you see fit. You do not need to design with the expectation that your players will enter the game world knowing how the game works and exactly what they’re going to do to get as powerful as possible. Players can gain more information than they should simply by playing the game multiple times (or by going online and reading FAQs and guides)—this is an unavoidable situation but it’s not usually a problem. In a single-player game, there can be some illusion of fairness: some illusion that a player will not try to completely compromise the game by finding game-breaking exploits and repeatedly performing them. Such an illusion is reasonable because if the player exploits a game to death, the only person they’re harming by performing the exploit is themself. They’re robbing themself of the full experience of playing through the game as it was intended to be played.

But in multiplayer games, it’s expected that the players know the game systems well—if a player doesn’t start without enough skill, he is stigmatized. When failures affect other people, failing has a multiplicative effect and can cascade, causing disproportionately large penalties. When a game is conceived without a single-player mode, the learning ground must be built into the multiplayer experience. RPGs are naturally attuned to this learning stage because character growth is usually slower than player skill acquisition (provided that the player actually tries and isn’t babied through the content). MOBAs, as I discussed in an earlier post, do a poor job of this.

Information availability is a double-edged sword.

The first edge helps players: new players can more easily master the core concepts and mechanics of the game using the information available to them as an aid. This can cut down the trial-and-error needed to succeed in-game significantly. The community is doing the interface designers’ and documentation writers’ jobs by documenting the mechanics of the game: pointing out pertinent, critical information about the mechanics and how to use them in a reasonable way.

The second edge hurts game designers: no longer can static information be used as a critical point of gameplay—this means that typical means of storytelling in single-player games will not work as intended because they’ll be spoiler instantly and disregarded. When more than fifty thousand (or another arbitrarily large number) human beings are going to experience your content and solve the exact same problems, there is a sufficient market for the solution of those problems that the information will be made readily available. Gamefaqs and thottbot are the two websites that embody this principle, though one generally covers single-player games and the other only one massive multiplayer game. Players are incentivized to find thottbot when they play WoW. They’re incentivized to use addons like QuestHelper to help them streamline their play sessions—this is not because they want to compromise the content (as they regularly will do and blithely remove the fun from the game, then complain about it) but because they have no reason to avoid the good information that makes playing the game easier and significantly lubricates the otherwise daunting expanses of character advancement. As a designer, you must assume that story and fun will always be compromised by success in a social setting.

There are two take-aways I want to emphasize from this analysis:

1. Designers in the MMO space do not need to be afraid of creating deep, complex, and difficult games composed of mechanics that take time to learn and master. As long as character advancement reveals abilities and mechanics at a sufficiently slow pace without boring seasoned gamers, complexity and depth can be assets without presenting players with a wall of unmitigated and impassible difficulty. Information availability should be emphasized in-game to allow players to learn faster and become versed in the fundamental mechanics as soon as possible.


2. Storytelling needs to be rethought. Static stories will no longer be effective for a large enough percentage of the playerbase (and for the louder part of the playerbase). Even more flexible conversational systems (like Star Wars: The Old Republic’s system) are fodder for expanding informational awareness. New ways of storytelling need to be invented that allow for dynamic worlds that aren’t as dull as procedurally generated content tends to be.

MOBAs: Newb-Unfriendliness Typified

I can’t talk specifically about what MOBA I’ve been playing, but I have been playing one that Mot really likes and I like a bit as well. The gameplay is engaging and requires constant attention. There are several layers of strategy involved, and inadequacy at one level can cause a loss when playing competently. From what I’ve read and seen, this game is representative of MOBAs in general, so I will comment on the genre instead of the game specifically.

My initial impression of MOBAs was largely skewed because the game forces newbies to play against people with vastly superior skill at random. The matchmaking engine for the MOBA we played, in particular, used an ELO rating system that matches up teams with similar aggregate ELO ratings (exactly how the aggregation happens is unknown to me). Mot is a good player and I’m a brand new newbie, so naturally we are pitted against good players when we choose to play together. This leads to my prompt destruction and eventual frustration as players who know the game inside and out pick me apart for mistakes I didn’t even know I could make.

And when I made mistakes, it cost my whole team the advantage. I basically was forced to throw games in our opponents favor just because I was new, and this was frustrating my unwitting teammates. I expected some backlash, but people were either understanding or silent in most games. There was a minor taunting episode once that didn’t affect me much. Being a burden on others and not having much fun in the process left me unwilling to play the game again.

Why should I play a game where I will cause other people to not have much fun for half-hour increments? A newbie playing a MOBA is a lose-lose deal. The newb gets a dose of harassment and taunting from angry teammates, and those teammates are forced to deal with an ineffective team member and come near wasting a half-hour of their life.

I played a few more games before I wrote this post and they solidified my observations. I played well in two games and enjoyed myself, scoring two wins and contributing to the victories as much as I could. The third game, though, left me wanting to never load the client again. The other team was well-coordinated and played very well throughout the contest. I could hold my own in a lane for the first stage of the game, but the other team got together early and destroyed us repeatedly in small engagements and sometimes in a large blob. I don’t know enough about the game to combat a fluid blobbing strategy, and my teammates were reviling me. I asked them to actually help me instead of making fun of me, and they proceeded to be negative and make the whole experience a miserable one for everyone.

Afterwards, I went to the forums and did some more reading about the game to try to better my play. I’m confronted with advice to learn what every hero can do. There are 28 heroes, five of which you’ll play against in a given game. That means in six matches, ideally, you’d encounter every hero in the game at least once. Some champions are far more popular than others, though, and you only tend to learn an opponent well if you lane against them for a while and see what they can do. This means that it may take 20 to 30 matches to lane against each hero and have a passable level of knowledge about your opponents. At 30 minutes per match, that’s 10 hours of being a newbie—ten hours of dragging your team down as you try to learn the game. Combine that with trying different champions and the tendency for the MOBAs to be extremely unforgiving.

It seems like MOBAs are rigged so negative and frustrating situations have to happen to new players. I doubt there’s a lot of growth potential in the genre with such a miserable newbie experience. It’s a shame, because the game mechanics are unique and fun when you are playing against opponents at your skill level.

Group vs. Solo

With the FFXIV news at E3 and the 9th annual FFXI census, talk about forced group play is stirring once again.

I'm going to be pretty blunt: group play makes games much richer, more social, and much more enjoyable than any solo play. Solo play makes players more reclusive, less interactive, less trustworthy of their fellow players, and downright terrible at the game. I'll cite WoW and all her offspring as examples.

FFXI was a hard game which wasn't very forgiving. However, by the time you were level 30, you knew how to play your class, as did everyone else. Once the party of 6 was assembled, you decided on a place to camp, and off you went. Getting there took some time, but once you were settled, the game play was slow-paced, but not easy. You had to make sure you were paying attention, but not so thought-intrusive as to stop the wonderful social experiences. You got to know a lot of people in your level range; you grouped with them frequently. If you were a jackass to people, you didn't get an invite back into xp parties. FFXI is often sited as having one of the most friendly communities in any online game.

Sure, after playing FFXI for 3 years and tired of waiting around in Jeuno for hours looking for a party, the prospect of soloing was a highly welcomed change. But I've seen what it does to communities, players, and the game itself. Players are not very friendly in WoW. They want to get in, get their shinies, and get out. If you are new to the encounter, you are going to flamed to high hell. Once at level cap, the game changes. Players have no idea how to play in group content because they've been soloing the past 2 months. This creates bad experiences for both the newbie and the veterans.

Imagine getting a pick-up heroic instance group together in WoW and not having to worry about how good the other players are. That is how FFXI is.

There is a sense of urgency in WoW that I think is very insightful: if you can't get a group together in 10 minutes, everyone leaves the party. It doesn't matter if they are multi-tasking by questing or farming, they will still leave.

Maybe the lesson to be learned from this recent generation of MMOs is not that soloability is desired, but rather instant-action. Bring back heavy group content, but make sure someone with only 50 minutes of playtime can get something done. It shouldn't have to take 3 hours to find a group, but I shouldn't be playing an MMO by myself either.

Fostering Community Growth

The last two MMORPGs I have tried were Darkfall and (currently) EVE Online. I was on the roller coasters for quite a few years and wanted to see what the other side of the genre was like.

I've made observations about sandbox games, particularly in the newbie areas since I haven't played either game for more than a few weeks. I will say that as complicated as EVE is, it does a much better job than Darkfall at weening the rookie off the training wheels and getting players doing at least something. Maybe it's because EVE has been around for 6 times as long as Darkfall. Or maybe not.

But there is a major fault in both these games that I want to address--namely how the player goes about becoming part of a community. Finding a joining a guild in a sandbox is very much a chore and takes initiative on the players' part (like all things in a sandbox). There are in-game and out-of-game recruitment channels, but there are no accidental recruitment channels. In theme-park MMOs, you put together a questing or experience party, you are meeting potential members for your guild. You think "hey, this guy is fun and knows how to play; I'll invite him to my guild." Done. Easy for the recruitment officers. Easy for the potential members.

In EVE and Darkfall, there is no native trial-run environment. Although there were a few spontaneous parties created around the goblin camps in Darkfall, everyone in the party was still seen as a potential enemy, not a potential comrade.

The solution is pretty simple: create co-operative environments where both guildless and guilded players can come to let their guards down long enough to get to know other players. Where players see others as potential friends and companions rather than potential backstabbers.

I know this sounds very artificial and against the open-world, anything-goes mentality of sandboxes. But with a subgenre so heavily focused on communities and relying on those communities to generate the fun ships for the players, you'd think that it would be less of a chore to get into one of these guilds.