Concrete and Abstract Games

I also arrive at a design philosophy of moderate simulationism in MMOs through an analysis of features that define MMOs as concrete games.

Games can be classified along a continuum from abstract to concrete. The most abstract games, you might call them “pure”, are abstract strategy games. The most concrete game would be life itself. The gamism-simulationism dichotomy that I engage with frequently in my abstract design discussions is parallel to the abstract-concrete continuum. Gamism tends toward abstraction—rules for the game’s sake—and simulationism tends toward the concrete—rules for the metaphor’s sake. MMO design is locked in a struggle between the game and the metaphor; the debate is the center of many design discussions and also the source of many ill-conceived arguments.

Abstract Games

“Abstract” as used in “abstract games” means a lack of reference or relation to the real world—Abstract games’ mechanics do not model or have a significant intended relationship with the real world. Think of an abstract game as conceived and played for its own sake. Any similarities we see between it and the real world are not the sources of design decisions, but simply exist because people relate their world to everything they see (a classic reformulation of “if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”).

A good example of this is the abstract strategy game of Go (also known as Weiqi or  Baduk). Legend states that Go was invented some 4000 years ago by an counselor to the then emperor of China. The emperor had a son who was a bit dull. He commissioned the counselor to invent a game that his son could play so that he might pick up some degree of mental acuity. How would you design a game if put in the counselor’s situation? It makes the most sense to try to invent a game with simple rules that requires deep thought to play well. To design the game, we’re starting from the very abstract and working our way to mechanics that can be implemented using a few stones and a board with a grid scratched into it. This is demonstrative of how abstract games are conceived.

Abstract games are games designed for the sake of gaming. They do not seek meaning through association with the real world. They give meaning to themselves and their peers. In this way board games can seem utterly trivial to a mature human being unless they genuinely enjoy games (disregarding the social aspect for the sake of discussion).

The “purest” and most extreme abstract games are abstract strategy games. These games have three crucial features:

• Perfect information is available when the state of the game is fully known by both players. (Note that the state of the metagame does not matter here.)
• No element of chance can be present in the game mechanics. This means that only the strategizing of the players affects the outcomes of individual in-game actions.
• Only two players must play the game together. If more players are added, the game becomes political and no longer is purely strategic based on the game mechanics.

We can discern the abstractness of a game by judging how far away from these three features the game strays.

Concrete Games

Concrete games are metaphors for parts of real life. Concrete games create the illusion that the laws of the real world exist in the game. Extremely concrete games are in-depth simulations that allow the player to interfere on behalf of some element in the simulation. These games cannot be played on boards or with pieces of wood or stone, they need the computational power of computers to allow them to provide a model of some part of the real world that can allow players to suspend disbelief.

Concrete games have many players, very limited information flow, and are perpetuated by chance.

If you took all chance away from a concrete game, it would most likely fall apart as a game and become quite boring.  Each player would be able to precisely forecast the result of each of their actions, so all of the complex mechanics would boil down the number of viable strategies to a mere pittance. All of the highly situation decisions made in real life that necessitate the use of rare capacities and patterns of thought would be removed from the game, because chance models the interactions of the myriad minute details that a game cannot hope to simulate effectively. Quantum physics has shown us that even the most basic fabric of reality is subject to the whims of fortune. So to simulate (and therefore to be concrete) requires chance.

In real life, information flow is choked by the limits of our perception. A game that hopes to simulate real life in any way must model this stunted flow of information that may be incomplete or outright incorrect.

The vibrancy and ever-newness of our world is due to the fact that billions of people inhabit it. We are able to communicate with millions of people every day using technologies that were invented only decades ago. The effects of millions of individual interactions between diverse peoples leads to en endless stream of situations that would be fun to model and toy with in a game. Concrete games take advantage of this reality.

MMOs are Concrete Games

MMOs are virtual worlds—in no way are they abstract games. Every individual indicator in MMOs is in favor of their classification as concrete games. As such, they benefit from designs that allow simulation to happen. In this way a game can harness the natural processes of the real world that lead to endless fun and interesting situations. To choke an MMO with abstractness is to take away the very best and most natural fun that can be had in worlds full of thousands of people, saddled by necessity with limited information, and brimming with opportunities for serendipity and chance to reap havoc.

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.

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.

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.