A Broader Community

I support the Epic Slant Forums as a location for MMO pundits and fans to have serious, directed discussions about MMO design, hype, playing, and blogging. Please take a trip over to the ESF, register, and put in your thoughts. It’d be great to have a community where people serious about MMOs can gather and have discussions that are truly worth reading. I’ll do my best to make ESF such a place. I hope you will, too.

In no way is ESF going to supplant TATI as a place where I record my thoughts and ideas. ESF is solely a place to have short-form, more free-flowing discussions on a wider variety of audience-determined (instead of writer- or editor-determined) topics.

Play is Extreme Simulationism

In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work.

-Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? by Paul Tough

The boundary between work and play is blurred by the hellish commitments MMO players make to their guilds and online friends. Players willingly spend thousands of hours in-game, having fun in very few of those hours, and later find a huge, soul-sucking void in their past where one, individual, mediocre game once stood proud. Play can become life—perhaps this is the much fabled immersion everyone talks about. But what does immersion mean when the most soul-sucking game is probably one of the least immersive?

Play is a model of life. Play trains us to perform actions in the real-world. Play is a safe environment to learn about and practice behaviors that will benefit us later in our lives. Do MMOs take advantage of this? There are some abstract behaviors like guild leadership that can translate into leading other organizations. But most often useless memorization of irrelevant sets of stats and game mechanics decides the victor.

What if we made mechanics in MMOs more like the mechanics in real life? When does the simulation stop being fun and start being work?

Imagine being a blacksmith in an MMO. Imagine that you are actually a blacksmith in that world. Do you have time to wander around the country-side hitting bunnies with sharpened metal? No. You’re busy doing your job. You make so many swords, barrels, horseshoes a day and that is your life. You do it for 20 or 30 years after your apprenticeship ends and you die. Is that fun? It’s certainly repetitive. But there’s a lot of learning, skill, and knowledge there. Certainly a game wouldn’t force the player to stay logged in for the entirety of the character’s “day” in the world, but I don’t think that a player logging in for an hour or two and actually doing some smithing—and not clicking on a button that says “smelt copper bars” and waiting for a progress bar to fill, but actual game mechanics that emulate the process of creating a bar of copper out of some ore—is bereft of fun.

You could learn a lot about the world you live in through playing such a game. You can have fun while you learn—you can have fun by learning!

Imagine making a sword over the course of a half-hour and when you’re done with it, you have the knowledge that you actually made that and that someone else’s character’s life (permadeath would be crucial if we’re going to get serious about dramatic play here) depends on its quality. That is so much more meaningful than spending three hours smacking kobolds that’ll respawn thirty seconds later; and there are real world takeaways from that session aside from some money disappearing from your pocket every month.

I’m pushing past moderate simulationism here, but I see definite possibilities for games beyond A Tale in the Desert to harness real-world processes to make crafting—and the rest of the game—more fun, more rewarding, and more real.

The Reciprocity Fallacy

People will return favors without thinking much about it. A vague sense of justice pervades how people behave in society. It’s not the justice of law, though—it’s a more abstract justice that only has one rule: if someone does something for me, I must do something for them. The values of these two actions need not balance, though usually action and counter-action are not vastly disproportionate.

You can harness this fallacious tendency when designing guild, party, and other team play systems. Encourage players  to give gifts to other players—you may even want to make generosity an advantageous strategy by rewarding guilds and players who help out non-aligned players and newbies. When players receive gifts or favors from other players, the receiver will feel a subconscious (if not conscious) sense of being beholden to continue playing so that they can return the favor. This is the positive side of the “revenge” motivator in games. Even if players don’t remember who their benefactors are, they will have a quiet sense of responsibility towards your game world in general.

Harnessing reciprocity  in design encourages players to make the game world more alive. Players will interact more if interaction yields positives for all sides. When interaction is a beneficial experience, players that would otherwise keep to themselves will willingly reach out and become part of the community. Breaking the tunnel-vision of solo play results in a significant increase in time spent in-game. When you have other people with whom you’ve developed these positive relationships, you are going to work to keep those relationships up more than you would if you were purely thinking rationally of the risk and reward of solo play.

The effect of reciprocity is dulled somewhat by anonymity, but it is a powerful force—it’s the intangible force that binds guilds and keeps people logging on every night.

(Thanks go to Raph Koster and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini for highlighting the Reciprocity Fallacy.)

Meta-PvP: A Strength of Victory System

I’ve been toying with the idea of a PvP MMO game that doesn’t involve players fighting one another directly.

The game would consist missions that players can undertake to combat other player factions or NPC factions. Missions could be initiated by players who run factions or NPCs. Each mission would involve a scenario or a set of scenarios where a player (and perhaps a few NPCs under his control to some extent) or group of players fights a group of NPCs of the opposing faction while trying to accomplish various objectives. There would be multiple scenario types including “deathmatch”, escort, protect the item, obtain the item, etc. Certain numbers of each type of scenario would need to be completed within a certain time-frame to complete a faction-wide mission—for example, to take a city/town/hamlet/farm. As the sides complete scenarios, they are awarded points based on their performance in the scenarios. The side that obtains the highest score accomplishes their goal, be it defending or attacking.

Nowhere in this system are players required to lose a battle they participate in. The system actually works perfectly fine if both sides win every single encounter in which players take part. As long as the NPC AIs are good—and they might not have to be much better than Darkfall NPC AI with some added behaviorlets—players can enjoy playing through challenging content and succeeding without being teabagged by 12-year-olds while accomplishing broader, world-changing objectives.

Can a system like this allow people to have their dynamic world cake and eat it too without it being a newb-repelling niche experience? Could such a system bring dynamic world, sandbox PvP to the masses?

Grinds I Don’t Mind: Dynasty Warriors 6

This game and the others in the Dynasty Warriors series have immense replayability for me. I grew to love the Romance of the Three Kingdoms through playing this game and its predecessors.

The defining oddity in Dynasty Warriors titles: the core gameplay is really repetitive and “grindy”, yet I find myself playing through the same battles many times without getting bored. Individual enemies are seldom challenging to beat and, when they are challenging, they are usually “turbo-charged” officers who have the same mediocre-at-best AI but have ridiculously beefy stats. Once you get past the visceral coolness of wading through massive numbers of enemies, slashing as you go, the game seems to be quite a grind.

If the game were only a button-mashing beat-em-up, I would not enjoy it. Dynasty Warriors games have an added dynamic of choosing what path you take through each individual open-ended battle—even though you can be fairly certain of victory, the way that you can accomplish victory can vary significantly depending on which character you’re playing. If you play the same battle from the same side, but choose a different character, you may have a completely unique experience while still affecting the whole battlefield. Your impact on the battlefield is in evidence. It’s addictive and enjoyable.

Within a battle, there are numerous events that are triggered if certain conditions are met. This is a fun system not because it is particularly adaptive, but because it affords the battles more uniqueness and it invites you to “hack” it by doing actions in odd orders. It’s fun to learn the dynamics of a battle and then play it again and take advantage of your knowledge. The CPU doesn’t react reasonably as much as I’d like, but sabotaging an enemy force is surprisingly fun.

Why don’t I mind the grind in Dynasty Warriors 6?

• Battle events are varied depending on my success or failure at certain objectives leading to a somewhat dynamic battlefield.
• The visceral thrill of combat is sufficient—the graphics and presentation are good enough to keep the grind mildly pleasant.
• The grind is punctuated with accomplishing objectives. This is a “killing with purpose”-style grind similar to early WoW and Aion.
• Deciding where to go and what to do next within an open-ended battle at the strategic game layer involves enough in the way of interesting decisions to prevent the grind from becoming monotonous.
• Whatever I do will have noticeable affects on the course of the battle.
• I genuinely enjoy the Romance of the Three Kingdoms settings. Seeing the characters brought to life in the game world is worth more to me than it would be if I was not connected to the story.

GDC Austin: Friday

Friday was a great day. I don't know how to express my day on Friday other than I feel like it was crafted for me. Playfish, Raph Koster, and Damion Schubert.

Koster doesn't have slides up yet, but in a nutshell he says that games are about training the intuitive part of the brain. And to do that we look to mathematical/computational complexity. Games in the NP and higher complexity realms are very engaging. I heard all my CS professors shouting with exuberance. He used Karp's 21 NP-Complete problems as a reference, and boiled down every successful and fun game to some form of an NPC problem. My question then: is any game modeling an NP-C problem reducible to SAT?

Schubert pretty much convinced me that today's MMOs need solo aspects.

And Sebastien de Halleux from Playfish convinced me that I should be making Flash games.

Now to catch up on all my work... (and play Aion)

GDC Austin: Thursday MMO Extravaganza

Thursday saw the Blizzard keynote speech, which was not a very informative session. It was the Universe Behind World of Warcraft, so Brack and Pearce spent their 60 minutes talking about how Blizzard is organized administratively--everything from staffing to the number of CPUs contained in their server blades. The stats were interesting, and really didn't need a keynote, but the most interesting tidbit is that prior to WoW Blizzard had 400 employees. Today they have over 4600.

The disclaimer to the audience was that every studio and company will have a different team structure to them. Blizzard even said that they will reorganize an entire department if they change the people in director or manager positions. The same disclaimer was said at the BioWare session, Come and See the Elephant, given by Bill Dalton. So given that these structures are highly subjective and change frequently, what is the point on spending two-thirds of a lecture on volatile and useless information?

The day wasn't all bad though. Aside from networking with some very nice folks at the Expo, we attended a very fast-paced, highly technical talk on Texturing Massive Terrain. The senior graphics programmer at Blizzard, Colt McAnlis, gave a very informative presentation about optimizations, compression algorithms, and some dangling questions on texture synthesis. I'm not going to post those notes because they are intense.

Another notable session was Petur Johannes Oskarsson's case study on EVE's player elected council. My notes follow:

• the Alliance system was the result of Corps forming emergent alliances without formal system
• CCP wanted to implement governance for New Eden
• decided to design democracy based on Iceland's democracy
• the proposal was written as an academic paper and critiqued by Bartle, EVE's fanfest, and eventually forums and fansites
• the biggest issue that came up was the definition of "democracy"
• resolution was to spam the document with the "you don't have any power"; players were fine
• Council of Stellar Management (CSM)
• - 9 reps; candidates run under RL names; 6 month terms; 2 term limit
• - general, anonymous election outside of EVE available to all EVE players
• - liaison between CCP and players
• - have forums; CSM reviews topics and after deliberation presents issue to CCP
• - council is flown to Iceland to meet CCP occasionally
• 1st CSM election: 64 apps; 11.08% turnout; 24.6k votes
• 2nd: 42 apps; 8.61% turnout; 20k votes
• 3rd: 40 apps; 9.74% turnout; 27.8k votes
• low turnouts, but raw votes actually highest in latest election
• but what can these metrics be measured against? how many elections have happened in MMOs? 3.
• political parties are forming: Voice of Reason
• no attempt from CCP at censoring or directing the topics raised by the CSM
• CSM can request review on customer support polices and forum moderation, but can't bring up specific cases
• role has expanded to two-way communication:
• - CSM used to gather Apocrypha pre-release impressions
• - presented with exploit report prior to releasing to public
• these councils need trust to work
• - in person meetings are a must
• - NDAs help create trust
• future of CSM? (these were just random thoughts by Oskarsson)
• - earmark small budget for good blogs, fansites, or communities
• - possibly increase number of reps as EVE population grows
• - give Dust 514 players a voice?