Stagnant MMOs

This is a response for a discussion in the comments on Spinks' post Bring on the clones.

I find that both the ways in which players interact and the game systems (not necessarily just Combat) of the MMO space have been mostly stagnant for the last 8 years. There have been minor attempts to mix it up (e.g. AoC's melee combat, Aion's jet packs, Public Quests, Dungeon Finder), but the developers still copy "the same black and white, two-faction faux war with safe and 'contested' zones; the same action combat with the same pace, hotbars, and skills; the same solo quest grind with the occasional dungeon run; the same poo-pooed crafting system that has little consequence to players; the same 'hyrbid' classes which really aren't hybrids at all, but rather 3 min-maxed role specializations that are the Holy Trinity through and through" (link).

I play very few games. I find one that has enough complexity and depth (often requires multiplayer in order to uncover that depth) such that I stick with it for years until I've exhausted its playability. I love First-Person Shooters, but I only really love 3 of them: Goldeneye/Perfect Dark, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2. These are all vastly different games. They all play differently; they have distinct strategies, resources, tactical considerations, objectives, moods, etc. To highlight a variation, Counter-Strike is about concealment and weapon accuracy/bullet spread; TF2 is about evasion, keeping or closing distance, and reloading. Never mind that a shotgun in both games is the same; the situations and tactics for using it are very different (and must be learned).

I've played very few MMOs as well: FFXI, WoW, and now Eve. I have purchased or trialed many others (EQ2, LotRO, WAR, Guild Wars, AoC, Chronicles of Spellborn, Tabula Rasa, Global Agenda, Champions Online, Ryzom, Aion, Rift, Vanguard, Dawntide, Darkfall, FF14, and The Secret World). FFXI, WoW, and Eve have drastically dissimilar game systems.

• FFXI is about cooperation: working with players to level up, complete challenging quests, or make money. Crafting was a motivator for me to expand my character's available classes and gain more levels. It has an extremely friendly community and many group activities: slower-paced, group-oriented combat, XP groups, epically long quests, arena-style fights to earn money, raids, PvP, and group crafting.
• Eve is deceit and information warfare. It is a struggle between knowing that you need friends to move up in the world and not knowing whom to trust. Its community has an outward appearance of borderline psychotic, but within Corporations, players are friendly to each other and willing to do activities together. Eve is a sandbox and has the most content of any MMORPG ever, and thus newer players have a monstrous time just getting their barrings. Nothing in Eve is simple, and there are many ways to enjoy the game.
• WoW offers convenience and satisfying gameplay. It has extremely snappy and fast-paced combat, and very little in terms of a virtual world. It is about using people as briefly as possible to acquire the next achievement. WoW is two distinct games: the leveling game, and the game at level cap. Hop in for a few minutes, do a quest or two by yourself, and log out without interacting with anyone. Or if you're at level cap, you do chores by yourself, queue up for a dungeon without speaking, or maybe you have a scheduled raid where you recite a dance that has no transferable knowledge or skills (to another raid).

Most of the games I listed in parentheses above are very similar to WoW. While the classes might look different, or the spells be named something unfamiliar, or the setting be changed, they all follow the same template.

1. A solo leveling game with a dungeon/raid-heavy "end" game produces the same community as I experienced in WoW. 
2. Since everyone must be capable of soloing mobs, the combat abilities can't vary too wildly between classes. 
3. If combat is fast-paced, players have enough time to launch two, maybe three attacks before moving on to the next mob; this necessitates that combat be wholly uninteresting since you only need to use 3 abilities. 
4. Typically the mobs are not varied enough to require players to consider a different set of 3 skills, because that would be too disruptive and slow down the pace of leveling.

When developers describe a system akin to Public Quests, they are talking about an exception. I can read between the lines: combat is normally performed by yourself, but then the game has these exceptions scattered about where you work with other players. The sad part is that very little coordination is required during the PQ, and people rarely converse. Playing alone together at its finest.

If I can look at a list of game features, and envision my entire career with the game (solo quest grind, occasional dungeon, switch class, solo to max, chase after gear and reputation), then I've already played it in another form, and thus I'm not interested in playing it again.

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.

Design Goal: Kill the Boring

When you’re playing a character in a huge 3D world, you want to go to wherever the interesting stuff is happening so that you can have fun. Yes, it’s a trivially true statement, but it lies at the center of many debates in MMO design.

The obvious design decision is to make players walk or ride or float on clouds or fly with their wings (sometimes) through every foot of the world. They have to do this manually, because if they aren’t logged in and staring blankly at their computer screens, bad things must happen.

Bad things must happen, right? Obviously this is the case because no MMORPG allows you to AFK travel. Hell, few MMORPGs allow you to do much aside from various guises of waiting around  (watching progress bars, walking on a safe road, riding on a gryphon, watching your character auto-attack an enemy to death). But what bad things would happen if you let your players skip the boring parts of their character’s lives?

If we’re going to follow the industry-wide pattern of streamlining MMO gameplay, we should take the obvious but oft-overlooked step of allowing the players to be offline or AFK during as many boring or trivial tasks as possible.

EVE Online lets you queue up manufacturing tasks and log off or do something else while they complete. This is an important step towards automation, but a small one. EVE’s mechanics are based around largely non-interactive fundamental activities: combat involves a lot of waiting and gathering is almost entirely non-interactive. In most combat and gathering activities, less than one-third of the player’s time is spent interacting with the game—and those interactions may not actually involve making interesting decisions.

MMOs will be more fun to play if as many boring parts as possible are stream-lined out of gameplay. Keep travel time appropriate so the world can be big, keep production time appropriate so items can have meaning, but don’t make the player pay for this by making them stare at the screen needlessly.

When you’re addicted to an activity, the most intense moments are usually when you desperately want to fulfill the addiction, not when you’re sating your urge. By that logic, it superficially seems that having a lot of dead time your MMO is justifiable. But if we extend the logic further, we have no answer to the question “why must players be logged at all while their character does mundane and boring tasks?” The more time a player spends bored or disinterested in a game, the more boring the game appears. But if being bored in-game is optional (and actually sub-optimal), players won’t stay in your game to be bored—they’ll stick around to do what’s fun and they’ll only remember that your game is fun.

What would you prefer? Four hours spent in-game where only one is spent having fun, or two hours spent in-game where one is spent having fun? MMOs these days lean towards the 1-in-4 ratio.

So why don’t we ditch the boring stuff?

This suggestion is not one that can be implemented with little change to the theme-park model. It requires a rethinking of how MMORPGs engage players. But if the average player is going to put in 1,000 hours of play time, I’d rather have those hours in concentrated bursts of fun lasting around one hour, not in five-hour slogs.

Defining Moderate Simulationism

Simulationism does not mean blind reproduction of real-world processes in a game. I have a more nuanced and objective definition of simulationism. Using this conception, we can better understand what I mean by moderate simulationism.

My approach to moderate simulationism is based on a managerial technique employed to some success among Japanese automakers and subsequently many businesses worldwide: The Five Whys.

Take a look at the high-level mechanics in a game and ask “why”—“why does this work?” or “why did this happen?” After drilling down through consecutive “why”s, you reach a point where you have no other answer but “because the devs say so.” This is the point at which there is no further game-level reasoning: you must step out of the rules themselves to answer this “why.” I call this jump to metagame reasoning a “bottom”. It’s the end of whys that are useful to the player when they’re playing the game. Each time you have a successful answer to a “why” question in a chain, the why-level for the mechanic increases by one.

Gamist systems tend towards metagame reasons taking control almost instantly. The rules in a pure gamist system exist primarily because of metagame reasons—all of the rules do, high and low abstraction layers alike. The perfect simulationist game would allow this chain of whys to proceed all the way until you reach the point you would say “well… I don’t know!” in real life.

In virtual world design (which is the primary concern of just about every single MMO) pure gamist systems fail because the game rules become too arbitrary for the players to suspend disbelief and become immersed in the world. The immersion loss is too great to justify the marginal balance improvements a pure gamist system ensures. Pure gamist virtual worlds do exist, though, in the form modern MMORPGs. There are no pure simulationist MMOs because pure simulationist systems are impossible to implement. Limitations on computing power doom pure simulation. Even if the computing power limitations disappeared, thorough simulations routinely become too complex to program and too complex to play. We don’t even have the means to interact with a computer accurately enough for a simulation of such depth to be feasibly usable.

What, then, is moderate simulationism?

Start with a living virtual world. It doesn’t have to be an accurate simulation of some subset of the real world, but it should be a virtual world that sustains its own operation but changes as different agents interact with it. These agents should be AIs to start. Once you have a self-altering world, you define a set of interaction points at which the player can touch the game world—these interaction points manifest in the player character and its capabilities in RPGs. The way that the player character can interact with the world depends on the parameters of the simulation and the natural conditions that arose as the world evolved under the influence of AI agents. The why-levels of most of the key aspects of the game world will now be significantly deeper than they are in modern theme-park (and even further, sandbox) MMOs, but there is still a bedrock of world design principles that are safely below the why-level of the real world.

(Props go to Tales of the Rampant Coyote’s article on making magic less mundane which helped me to better understand the core of simulationism.)

A Path to the MMO Revolution

Bloggers prattle on about mainstream, big money, big staff, mass-market MMOs. Only there is the stagnation so brutal and the gameplay so monotonous, yet the money is so huge.

But MMOs will not be redefined in this grand marketplace of titans. MMOs will be reiterated—progress has slowed. Now it is no more than a telephone game between big development houses. What developers misinterpret from WoW will guide the changes in the AAA MMO industry, not the visions of luminaries.

When there is (at least the perception of) big money available but a large and risky initial investment is required, market participants will aim to minimize all other risks. World of Warcraft has shown the market the revenue potential of MMOs, but, in the process, it has kicked risk-aversion into a high gear. Investors see WoW’s success and think that only WoW can be so successful, so they should reiterate WoW to capture equivalent numbers. The more deviation from the WoW formula, the more risk. This has slowed MMO evolution to a crawl. WoW is so big, so polished, and so old that other MMOs who aim to duplicate WoW’s success in a high-investment, high-risk environment will inevitably fail.

If you think it’s feasible to compete directly against a game that has 300,000 man-hours  invested (high quality man-hours by some of the best MMO designers and programmers in the industry) and has already captured the market, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you. It ends abruptly in the Behring Strait. Maybe you’ll be on Deadliest Catch.

How can new devs combat the million-ton behemoth? By being more agile and keeping their eyes open. It also helps to stay as far away from the towering King-Kong-standing-on-King-Kong-in-a-Hitler-disguise as possible.

Agility means being small and quick. Through limiting the scope of projects, experimentation can take root. Developers can rapidly iterate on projects with small scopes, trying new features and honing old ones in the fraction of the time required by a towering monolithic AAA title. Project complexity rises exponentially with respect to the number of modules that must interact. Keep the number of modules small and you can make fairly radical changes without worry about the entire game turning into a flaming pile of debris. This small-and-sharp model for project design can be applied to each module in a game as well. When developers recognize the functional boundaries key modules, they can manage the complexity of module interoperation more efficiently.

Keeping your eyes open ensures that you don’t fall into the traps into which your predecessors tumbled headlong. Communicate with your community. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. If you find you’re promising something you can’t deliver, let people know. Keep everyone informed and keep them excited. Pay attention to the design of other MMOs. Play other people’s games—and, more importantly, play your own game. Don’t add features that aren’t important. Make sure you’ve got one guy who has wrapped his head around the design trajectory of the game and the goals of the design. Make sure you’ve got someone who has their head fully wrapped around the lore. Make sure you’ve got a programmer that understands the architecture of the modules inside-and-out and can direct the general construction of the game. Etcetera.

Staying away from the Space King Kong Nazi Ape means do not try to directly compete with WoW. Find new mechanics and perfect them. Make a different game. Don’t be afraid to genre-bend, but don’t let genre-related marketing drive design. Don’t make a game that is a reflection of a game already considered fun; Make a fun game.

The games that act on the prerogatives set forward in this post will comprise the MMO revolution. The generation of MMOs that starts the revolution will be smaller games than we’re used to in the MMO field. They will be released early and patched often. They will evolve into fun games elaboratively. There will be no Great Leap Forward, but instead a series of rapid, modest steps. It’s easier to walk up a mountain than it is to leap to the top of it.

Make the path of least resistance more fun.

If you let players design their content, they will not design it to be the most fun. They will design the content so that they can accomplish their goals as easily as possible. This dooms open PvP games set entirely in traditional purely persistent shared worlds.

My philosophy of design is to make the path of least resistance into the path of most fun. There doesn’t always need to be an easy way out of every situation that yields positive results for the player, but if the player is optimizing for the easy way out, which players usually do, they should find their optimization leading them towards engaging with game systems in intended ways designed to be fun.

In a typical open PvP MMO, players can pick and choose their engagements so that they very rarely have to fight a superior enemy. This means that players hunting alone are going to get ganked by roving bands of players who risk nothing in the engagement. Rarely will there be a scenario where players on each side of an engagement assess the situation as being even enough that unpredictability of the outcome leads to a willingness to take the risk on an even-strength enemy. The result of this kind of behavior: most engagements are routine for one side and frustrating for the other.

Discontent stirs regarding PvP as pageantry, as well. Players who seek alternate worlds where consequences can be devastating and rewards significant abhor scenarios and “battlegrounds” preened and molded particularly for the delight of theme-park goers.

There must be some middle-ground between meaningless risk-reward scenarios and largely uneventful, often-frustrating open world PvP.

The most obvious solution is to restrict the actions that players can take in the game world. This doesn’t mean adding even more hyper-gamist rules to an already rule-riddled mess. It means limiting the parts of the world in which the game allows direct player interaction so that each interactive simulation can be very good, very fun, and very convincing. Only interactively simulate the fun stuff—allow the player to only participate in the simulation of what players want to do in their character’s shoes. The game world and AI can handle the mundane stuff. If the player needs to control the mundane stuff, let her give the AI goals and then go and do something fun with another character or *gasp* let the player play another game instead of getting burnt out from playing your game too much.

My primary issue with modern MMOs is that they encourage players to put four hours or more into the game per day, and out of those four hours less than one hour is spent doing what’s fun. It’d be better for both players and devs if games were made that can be lots of fun for 30 minutes a night out of 45 minutes played. If I’m going to get 1,000 hours of total game time out of your target audience, I’d prefer to get those 1,000 hours at one hour per day instead of five hours per day—especially when that one hour will not lag behind the five-hour session in terms of time spent having fun.

(In a later post I’ll get into the specifics of how to do what I suggest here. This is a basic precept on which I’m designing my own MMO. I intend to make the design completely public—I don’t care if someone steals my ideas. I don’t have the time and resources to make the MMO I’d want to. I’d rather play the game of my dreams than have it sit in a word doc on my desktop.)

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.

Combat of Pure Strategy (Pt. 1: Introduction; Melee)

Mot introduced me to a game called GOPS (short for Game Of Pure Strategy). It’s an exceedingly simple game, but the results of the game are determined purely by strategy. It’s one of the few games that involves absolutely no element of chance while remaining non-deterministic.

I’ll give a general description of GOPS before continuing; if you’re familiar with the game, feel free to skip this paragraph. GOPS is best played by two players. The game pieces are three sets of tokens with value markings on them. Usually tokens are marked with values that start at 1 and increase in a regular fashion (it’d be interesting to have token values increase according to a power law or some other distribution—I haven’t experimented with it before). Each set of tokens is identical to the others. Each player claims a set of tokens, leaving one set left over. The left over set constitute a stock that will be contested by the two players through a simple bidding process. Bidding proceeds by a token being selected out of the stock at random, then both players play a token (simultaneously) of the value they wish to bid. Whoever bids higher claims the contested token. The tokens that the players bid are discarded. Play continues thus, with players bidding on each token in succession and the higher bidder claiming the contested token, until the stock is exhausted. Once the stock is exhausted (the players’ tokens will be exhausted at this point, as well), each player totals the values of the tokens they have won. The player with the highest total wins the game.

If my description doesn’t make sense, feel free to check out the Wikipedia article. Or this.

Several months ago, Mot and I had a series of discussions about fitting GOPS as a combat system for an MMO. I think it’d be great for melee combat, and with some modification it may also work for magic and ranged combat (I’ll cover ranged/magic in a later post).

No random numbers need apply. The system would be relatively simple, as well. Show the combatants the tokens they’re bidding on and give them a time limit within which they must select the token they wish to bid. Better melee characters can receive bonuses for winning certain kinds of tokens. There could be special tokens as well that could be injected into the contested slot (the player would press a hotkey to queue abilities into the contested slot in place of whatever token would otherwise have appeared) by either player in an attempt to perform a special attack.

Combat would be constituted of contests which are organized into rounds. Bidding on one contested token is one contest. Each contest would have a time limit of 5-10 seconds. Sets of 5 contests constitute a round of combat. Whoever wins the round (whoever has the higher total value of tokens won) deals damage to the opponent and performs whichever of their own abilities they had won during the round. A one-on-one combat may take 5-8 rounds depending on who is fighting. This would be slower-paced than most MMOs, but this is not a problem because I aim to emphasize tactical decision-making and not rely on twitch mechanics to keep the players aware.

Why have combat of pure strategy?

• It reduces the role of chance to a bare minimum.


• It gives players a good reason to pay attention to combat.


• It is non-trivial to win a combat.


• It is entirely based on the strategic thinking of the players—you lose because you make mistakes or misjudgments, not because the dice weren’t in your favor.


• It creates micro-level tactical and psychological contests that are missing from most MMORPGs. It’s very satisfying to read your opponent’s bids and expend as few resources as possible to beat them.

Potential weaknesses:

• Combat may become too long.


• Players don’t necessarily want to have to pay attention to combat on a second-by-second basis.


• The first round or two is a feeling-out period where the results may be not strongly correlated to skill (the players are still figuring out what the other’s strategy might be). If players don’t fight one another often enough or if players switch targets rapidly, the draw of the GOPS system is severely weakened.

I think it’s at least worth prototyping a pure strategy combat system. I see a tremendous upside and a lot of appeal for players who enjoy skillful play but still want an RPG-like experience.

From Absurd Gamism to Moderate Simulationism

If you’re unfamiliar with the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist Theory, please read the Wikipedia article before continuing.

I describe the current state of MMOs as unabashed absurd gamism. The game rules are so strict and so vaguely analogous to real life that the player is forced to suspend disbelief ad absurdum. The metaphors in MMOs are stretched so thin as to be entirely transparent. There’s not even the vaguest notion of realism, not even a modest smear of grit to mar the pristine landscapes that are otherwise dotted with any number of mediocre models there for the player’s pile of pixels to get stuck on.

The learning experience in MMORPGs amounts to becoming accustomed to the ludicrously tiny sliver of actions that your character can perform to effect a millionth of the tiny part of the world that is actually interactive and not just painted adamantium in the shapes of houses, mountains, trees, and terrain. There is a lot of room for MMORPGs to grow into a space that computers are built specifically to handle: simulation.

We have, at our fingertips, machines that can do on the order of 2^30 operations per second (and that’s only counting one CPU), yet we plink around straight-jacketed in game worlds about as rich as a street urchin with a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars to his name. And it hasn’t gotten better since EQ. Instead of daunting worlds full of lethality and trials, we are confined to playpens full of brightly colored balls and clowns who mirthfully caper about to entertain us. It is entirely within our power to harness the capability of modern machines to do the complex calculations necessary to allow the player to enjoy a significantly more interactive and realistic world.

I’m not saying we should force players to piss in the woods every two hours or risk soiling their undergarments—I’m suggesting we build games that allow players to harness their creativity and knowledge of the real world to solve in-game problems. And if the player fails, he may actually learn something about the world he actually lives in (as well as the world his character lives in). Solutions do not need to be esoteric processes labored over by some poor intern. Just like in a tabletop roleplaying game, individual players can use what they know of the environment to come up with a solution.

Even if we do not open up the entire world to the player’s whims, we can at least aim to make combat more realistic and interesting. Perhaps it’s not best to make it as lethal as it is in real life, but at least we can all the players to use terrain, obstacles, and other features of the gameworld to their advantage—not the circle-strafing nonsense that goes on in games like Darkfall, but a more sensible system where positioning is crucial and in-battle tactics amount to more than what hotkeys you pound into the ground in what order. Shamus Young of Twenty-Sided wrote a great article where he proposed one such system.

One of my mission statements is to move MMOs from absurd gamism to moderate simulationism. That means making the game world more like a world and less like a set of gimmicks arranged to be quickly used up and discarded. I believe that this will be one of the many faces of the MMO revolution.