Moral Choice Beyond Good and Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Balance, Part 2: Ten Key Tips for Balancing

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

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

Finding Imbalance through Tier Lists

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

Avoid Imbalance through Preventative Design

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

Balance Towards Fun

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

Mechanic Assessment: Use-based Skill Gain

(I made a more recent post which basically replaces this one while doing a much more thorough analysis. Please read it instead of or in addition to this one.)

From my experience with use-based skill gain systems in Oblivion, Morrowind, and Darkfall, I’ve noticed that such systems are inferior. They should be avoided in favor of other approaches to skill-based advancement (as in Fallen Earth) and class/skill hybrid systems (like the one in Final Fantasy Tactics).

First, three gamist reasons why use-based skill gain is an inferior character advancement system:

The character can only be rewarded for a much narrower set of tasks. And that set of tasks is doing whatever action the player wants to level. It’s not clear how quest (or whatever kind of achievement system you want) rewards can fit into this framework. Use-based skill gain cuts out an important part of the incentive structure. In an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, Dogs in the Vineyard, or Mousegard, combat isn’t an end, it’s a means towards surviving a precarious scenario. There are other means, such as parley, avoidance, and escape that serve that purpose just as well. With use-based skill gain, it becomes difficult to reward the player character for accomplishing anything except easily quantifiable combat and crafting tasks. This leads to gameplay focusing on direct combat and crafting, which narrows significantly the effective and beneficial conflict resolution methods.

Use-based skill gain leads to runaway positive feedback loops that restrict character growth and ability diversity. I kill using ability A so ability A becomes more powerful so I use ability A to kill stuff. This loop generates a second-order effect on skill growth. If you only have a few abilities that are strong enough to use against mobs that drop worthwhile loot, you’re going to use those abilities frequently leading to them becoming more effective and the farming being more efficient and worthwhile. In this way, characters are stuck using the same abilities because only certain abilities are day-to-day useful. But all the abilities are on a similar scale. The Illusion and Mysticism schools of magic were like this in Oblivion: they had some nifty effects, but they were largely composed of utility spells that you would never justifiably use enough to keep the skill level competitive with your melee skills or destruction magic.

Use-based skill gain encourages and rewards exploitation, macroing, and cheating. Some skills necessarily will be used less than others. By factors of hundreds. This forces designers to balance skill advancement against use. This problem cannot be solved. Designers need to measure skill-use frequencies and balance that frequency against how difficult advancement should be. But if a player wants to level a skill, he’s going to find ways to use it more than is reasonable, throwing these calculations off and leading to imbalance. If the player wants to level his buffing abilities, he is going to cast buff spells on everyone he sees if he’s nice, but more likely he’ll cast a buff on himself, then dispell it, and repeat those two actions until he has the desired skill level. Players will always seek to find safe ways to level skills, trivializing the advancement system—developers will always be behind in preventing this kind of behavior. Exploiting and macroing becomes the only way for an honest player to keep up. Darkfall’s EU server has fallen victim to this problem. Exploitation is always the most effective way of increasing skills and it breaks the balance of skill gain.

And one simulationist reason:

Use-based skill gain doesn’t make sense from an immersion/metaphor perspective either. People do not go out and put their life in direct danger to advance from novice to super-novice at using a sword. They spend years practicing with the weapon for several hours every day. The time spent practicing far outstrips that time spent in actual life-threatening struggle. When you’re engaged in combat where life is in the balance, the amount of skill you have when combat begins determines if you live or die. You’re focused on survival, not on dinging 34 on your sword skill. Certainly you will learn from direct combat, but not even a tenth the amount you learned from training since you were the age of 10.

Use-based skill gain should be avoided for primarily these four reasons. As a mechanic, I thought it was a great idea before I played games that implemented it. Now I don’t see a reason to go with use-based skill gain over a different skill-based advancement system, such as purchasing skill levels with XP or some other broader resource.

Alganon: Not Hyped for a Reason

[PLEASE NOTE: This article was written during the first open beta phase, several months before the release in early December 2009. I have not played the game since and I probably will not touch this game in the future to update these impressions. I'm sure some issues I mention here have been resolved. Please keep in mind that the views noted here refer to an early open beta of the game. They do not necessarily represent the game as it stands now.

Regardless of that disclaimer, I would not touch this game again for any price. I wouldn't play it even if it was free. There are better MMOs at every price point--even if Alganon pulled off most of the features they promise it would barely be a competitive product.]

Alganon’s NDA is gone as of yesterday. Here are my impressions for several hours put into the open beta. I saw enough of the game after about six hours to permanently turn me off to it. Under no circumstance do I recommend you buy this game in its current state. I don’t think even if they work out the bugs it will even be worth playing because of some very lazy design work that permeates each mechanic in the game.

Promises

Here are some of Alganon’s claims (from its website). These parts of the game that led me to download the beta client:

• “dynamic quests specifically for the character”
• “Taming animals and controlling creatures with magic” will be important.
• “Much of this history is available to the players through the library, but much of it must be discovered. “
• “The game will ship with a total of two races and four classes; however, there are so many variations in skills, abilities, and specializations that the results guarantee no two characters will be alike. “
• Crusades are player-given quests to do certain big tasks like “wipe every orc from the face of the world”
• “our default auction system will support a number of internal tools to help determine the current market price for merchandise, as well as demand.”
• “Actions are what characters carry out during game play, such as a special attack or a tradeskill, etc. Abilities represent a point-based distribution system allowing the character to focus on specific class-based specialties. Skills are the underlying methods of growth in utilizing certain areas of class-based focus, such as a character's skill in swords, or a specific profession. Studies are the core support base for all other systems, allowing characters to grow over time at the same rate as all other players.”
• Players collect information and contribute it somehow to the library. Seems like some kind of in-game wiki/thottbot. Also a way for spreading achievements.
• A complex faction system. “Each character will have the ability to enhance or lower their standings with these different groups, races, and organizations. A character's standing with a faction can affect many things including what items, they can purchase, what areas they can enter, and what creatures are hostile. “

Realities

This game is awful.

• Interface blatantly copies WoW’s. Where it is different, it is worse.
• Lots of graphical and interface lag.
• Graphics are ugly. Worse than WoW—even if you play WoW on medium quality settings and this game on ultra.
• Everything is half-assed. I don’t see any signs of polish.
• Character creator was slow and ugly. Characters look ugly. Changing how a character looks often doesn’t seem to have any effect on how he actually looks. Character creation is worse than WoW.
• “Abilities” are actually a dumbed down copy of the talents from WoW. They’re available from level one. It’s really exciting to get a talent that grants me 1% cost decrease on a skill when I’m level one.
• Abilities reference actions that I don’t actually have. I can buy abilities to improve actions I’ve never seen.
• “Studies” are a time-based skill advancement system like EVE’s. It just gives you bonuses to stuff for having played longer. Because we’re in a level-based game system, it’s nothing but a reward for subscribing to the game for longer than everyone else. Who knows if it’ll help casual players catch up because character level probably completely trivializes any effect the studies have.
• REALLY long initial loading times. I have a solid-state harddrive, a core i7 processor, and six gigs of RAM. Are they kidding me?
• Quests are all of the “kill 10 bugs” variety. I was given one quest that was a “find this thing and pick it up” but the thing was nowhere—it just did not exist in the world. And even if I did find it, I wouldn’t have known to interact with it because the interface is so weak.

I couldn’t suffer through this game long enough to see all of the promises in action (if they even exist in the game). From what I’ve seen, I feel confident saying that almost every promise is a WoW feature relabeled or a copy-pasted feature from another game that doesn’t particularly fit.

This game tries to directly compete with WoW, and it will never win. I’ll be surprised if it lives for very long in the market, considering it has just about nothing in the way of innovation worth noting. It would take way too much work to make this game fun, but even if it does get cleaned up, it doesn’t stand a chance against WoW in the theme-park market.

If you’re going to release a theme-park MMO these days, it must be solid from day one. Even if a game is very much hyped, it will suffer from a rapid drop off after about a month. For an obscure and un-hyped game like Alganon, I don’t see a way for it to succeed in this market. It has no hype and it doesn’t deliver.

Alganon is a great example of how to make an MMO that has no chance of success: it copies without perfecting, it adds without improving.

On Balance, Part 1: Strategy and Depth

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

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

Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

Depth

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

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

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

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

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.

Terrible Idea: “It gets good at level 25!”

(It’s time to liven up this blog with some invective. As I read around the blogosphere, I’m often struck by the sheer idiocy of some of the sentiments expressed. The “Terrible Idea” articles will be a series of brief pieces where I yell at people who I think are representing opinions deleterious to the spirit of the MMORPG revolution. Beware that my expressions will be strong.)

My leisure time is valuable to me. If you’re going to give me a game and tell me that I have to play it for thirty hours before I have an honest shot at having some fun, I have better ways to spend my time.

Bootae has it right in this paragraph from his Aion review.

There are 2 key areas that an MMO developer needs to get right. Those being both the starting and end game experience. Your first hours in a new MMO need to grab you by the short and curlies, make you love the experience and drive you forwards towards the level cap. It needs to be good enough that we ignore any mid level grind, our subs happily staying active all the way until end game. (Bootae)

If I don’t see redeeming qualities within the first two to ten hours of gameplay, I’m shelving your game—and probably shelving it for good. I don’t think this is unreasonable whatsoever. If a game doesn’t respect my time enough to give me some of its patented fun content at a relatively early phase, I am not going to respect that game back. I certainly won’t re-up a subscription for a game that doesn’t respect me as a gamer.

“How can you have a valid opinion of an MMO without reaching max level and playing end-game?”

If my opinion isn’t as valid as some crazy grind-happy weeaboo who has spent four hundred hours killing aroused mushrooms, I don’t have a problem with that. I’m not a professional journalist. My opinions are biased towards a certain set of playstyles that are made remarkably clear if you read even the last five posts on this blog. I don’t need to suffer through forty hours of crap to know that a game isn’t worth my time. If it’s not worth my time now and it isn’t worth my time after a few more hours, I have better games that i can play. Even if my opinion is not “objective”, it’s still valuable. I value my time highly and so should you—I don’t put up with this garbage and neither should you.