2009: Retrospective, Observations, Prospects

I’ve played a surprising number of MMOs this year. None of them held my interest for more than 40 days. Here are the MMOs I’ve spent more than an hour playing and a quick thought on each. This isn’t meant to be decisive objective analysis.

• Ryzom – sparsely populated, antiquated interface. There’s certainly potential here, but the product may simply be too dated.
• Perpetuum Online (Closed Beta) – Eve Online, but on the ground with mechs. Has potential but I did not want to grind through the non-existent early game during beta.
• Alganon Online (Open Beta) – I will not try this game again even if it were offered free of charge.
• Aion – I thought I could play a grindy game and enjoy it as a meditative experience. I was wrong.
• DDO – It was fun to duo until I hit the paywall, then it became too much work to track down free content so I lost interest.
• World of Warcraft – Still the premier themepark game. I can’t stand the triviality of it even though the game was some fun to duo through when I was in the right mood.
• Eve Online – Normal activity is way too monotonous in this game. It’s constant partial-AFK unless something serious happens—and something serious barely ever happens unless you spend a lot of time playing.
• Fallen Earth – A crafting themepark with awkward action-oriented combat and a tantalizingly open world. The gameplay felt like a complete grind to me. I didn’t think it was worth writing an article about the game.
• Darkfall – A completely trivial character advancement scheme (no specialization even six months after release?), easily exploited for quite some time) that would be better off much more flat and much less grindy. “Your mastery of Rest has increased” is one of the dumber concepts I’ve encountered in an MMO.
• Atlantica Online – Super grindy, but had a novel-enough combat system and some cool guild perks like guild crafting and town ownership in a themepark game.
• Lord of the Rings Online – Though not as polished and streamlined as the WoW themepark, if I were to choose a themepark game to play, it would be LotRO. Good variety in goals, non-standard class concepts with some innovation, and a reasonably open-feeling world kept me playing LotRO and actually enjoying the experience for longer than I’ve been able to stand any other MMO.

Other games that I have enjoyed this year more than most of the MMOs listed above:

• Settlers of Catan – A neat little board game with a random map and enough chance to keep play interesting. Maybe there’s a little too much chance for my liking.
• Europa Universalis 3: Complete + Heir to the Throne – I love EU3. Grand strategy at its best.
• Borderlands – Diablo with guns. A fun time—especially in co-op.
• Table Tennis/Ping-Pong – Probably my most-played game of 2009. Since June my father and I play 3 to 5 11-point games per night. We’re not great but we have fun.
• Blood Bowl – The most recent LRB rules sustained this game further than the software that implemented them could have.
• AI War – A good indie RTS, though it can be a bit boring at times.

What have I learned this year?

• People think a lot less about game design—even game designers—than I expected.
• It’s difficult to write about game design when you don’t have any built-in credibility and you’re primarily writing for gamers, not people who actually have a vested interest in learning about game design.
• Mind-numbing but pleasant and ego-tickling content is pervasive and popular, both in blogging and in games.
• I’m in a small minority with regards to my gaming interests.
• Don’t talk about other bloggers unless you’re praising them, even if you aren’t being serious.
• A blog’s popularity doesn’t justify reading it, even if it happens to cover the genre you write about.
• There are a very small number of blogs about MMO design that are worth reading if you spend much time thinking and writing about MMO design, even if you are an amateur.

Some goals for next year:

• Consolidate several of the essays I’ve posted here into longer, stronger, and more pointed articles on game design.
• Make some kind of index that will let new readers figure out what the hell I’m doing here. It’s currently quite confusing to start reading more recent articles without having some concept of the concepts I posted about earlier.
• Participate in the creation of at least one game that sees the light of day. (Currently I’m involved in two MMO-related projects with small teams and I have a few personal projects I’d like to bring to fruition.)
• Write more clearly. This may mean posting less often—hopefully Mot will come back and pick up the slack so I can really dig in and put out some good writing. I may be past the phase where I’m just spewing ideas and seeing what sticks.

Goal Generation (Pt. 2): Games as Relationships

[This post is part two in a series of posts about goals in games (MMOs in particular). Here is the first post.]

Games are like interpersonal relationships. And no, this is not to be taken in jest.

Communication is Essential but Requires Work

The only communication between you and a game occurs when you use a control device (keyboard and mouse, microphone, traditional console controller, etc) to give the game input. The game talks back to you through visuals and sound. Communicating with a game is expressing your will to the game through the use of controls. Just like in conversation with a stranger, your first steps towards communicating with the game may be misunderstood—you’ll do what you think tells the game what you want, but something else will happen in the game than what you expected. You try to stop Mario before a ledge but he slides off. This can get quite frustrating, but developing this communication between you and the game is the most basic step towards forming a strong relationship.

Like communications between people, communication between player and game leads to a certain unique kind of relationship. No two people will have the same relationship with a third person just as no two people will have the same experience playing a game. Each player enters each play session in a different emotional state, with different knowledge, and in a different real-life environment than any other play session. So within one person’s experience, they could have several significantly different play sessions that led to far-flung outcomes from frustration to jubilation.

We Interact So We Can Be Validated

We maintain relationships where others validate our personalities, thoughts, ideas, dreams, and desires. This process of validation makes us feel good about ourselves, so we seek it out. Usually people who engage in non-validating relationships are unhappy and, probably, seeking to end that relationship.

We enjoy playing games that seem to validate our will. If games fail to validate our will, we can’t communicate with them well enough for a working relationship to develop from which fun emerges.

Goals as Validation Schemes… or Not.

Some of our goals come from within and some from without. These goals are much different in how and why we pursue them.

Goals that come from within make us happy just through their accomplishment. If no one else ever saw that you completed that goal, you’d still be happy about it.

When we look for goals, we often look to those around us. What are they doing? If they’ve accomplished certain goals and they are happy, I must be able to achieve happiness through accomplishing those goals. Goals are propagated through a society in this way. Such goals don’t make us happy simply through their completion, though—we need someone to validate that the goal was worthwhile. When we complete the goal, we’ll go to our friends and tell them about it and pay close attention to their reactions. If they react positively, we feel good about our accomplishment—our friends have validated our efforts—but if they react negatively, we are much more likely to see our actions in pursuit of a goal as a waste of time.

Goals work similarly in games. The game becomes the society from which we draw the second kind of goal, though, and we rely on the game validating our actions in order for such goals to be worthwhile and, by extension, for a game that relies on such goals to be worth playing.

Goals can be usefully categorized:

• Based on their source. Where does the goal originate?
  • Intrinsic (or intrinsically sourced) goals originate within the player’s mind.
  • Extrinsic (or extrinsically sourced) goals originate from some other agent, like another player or a game.
• Based on if they are communicated directly. Is the goal told to the player, or does the player form the goal automatically based on the environment?
  • Implicit goals are realized by the player without direct communication.
  • Explicit goals are literally told to the player.

A successful goal generation and completion process in a game proceeds like this:

1. You interact with the game to learn what you are capable of doing.
2. The game makes it clear what you should do (an extrinsic, explicit goal is generated), or you find something you want to do within the confines of the game (you generate an intrinsic, implicit goal).
3. You develop a plan to achieve your goal. This plan consists of implicit subgoals.
4. You complete the subgoals and, by so doing, complete the main goal.
5. For extrinsic goals, the game validates your will and presence in the game world through rewarding you and encouraging you forward. For intrinsic goals, you are happy and encouraged by completing your goal.

If part of this process is missing, the game will fail to hold your attention beyond its limited value as a curiosity.

Notice that gamers that need validation will rely on extrinsic goals and the pat on the back the game will give them when they succeed. The railroading that results doesn’t bother such a player, because games are merely validation engines for them. If the game doesn’t validate a player that needs validation, that player will stop playing. They will feel like the game is pointless to play.

For players who do not need validation from the game, they will not be happy with a game that does nothing but validate them—they may see such a game as lacking substance. These players want games that will allow them to exert their will on the game world within reasonable bounds. Railroading will be a turn-off.

[I removed an ill-conceived and incomplete section of this post that will be rewritten and included in a follow-up to this post. -Ev]

Self-Balancing Systems?

I’ve been thinking about meta-games recently. No, not the metagame that I talked about earlier, but systems that produce sets of game rules—literally, software that procedurally generates entire games.

I’ve written posts abstracting the various parts of RPGs into neat definitions. The writing was dry and probably didn’t earn me much cred in blogging circles, but it needed to be done before I could even conceive of game rule generators for the RPG genre. Without some basic vocabulary we have difficulty even discussing simple abstract systems.

Instead of actually generating entire game systems from scratch, let’s try to solve an easier problem. How could we automate balancing of RPG combat mechanics? This requires algorithmically tweaking rules conceived by a designer—the designer gives a framework for abilities and the algorithm comes up with the exact numbers that should balance those abilities against one another to hopefully make all of them parts of viable strategies.

The processes used to self-balance combat mechanics probably can be modified and applied successfully to other aspects of the game, but being to abstract at this stage of discussion could lead us to severe language trouble as I fail to find feasible broad terms.

I will summarize two ideas I have for self-balancing combat systems in this post. In later posts, I will discuss each in significantly depth.

Zero-Sum Ability Balance

Assign utility values to each of the effects and costs that abilities can have(positive utilities for the effects and negative utilities for the costs). Pick out the effects each ability will have and make a weighted list of costs. The zero-sum ability balancer would go through and value the set of effects for an ability, then assign costs preferentially until the ability reaches a total utility of 0. If you value effects and costs properly, this will automatically balance the abilities in your game.

The primary difficulty is coming up with the proper valuations for different costs and effects. Genetic algorithms could be used to generate and cull valuations systems. The problem is highly multivariate, so writing an algorithm that attempts a direct solution process would be significantly trickier.

This method will work for both class- and skill-based systems.

Popularity-Based Ability Balance

Let players vote with their feet. If they think a certain ability is overpowered, let them choose the ability, but make that ability less powerful for everyone in the game world by some increment. The increment would be smaller for abilities that are staples for certain kinds of builds so that everyone using the level 1 firebolt won’t nerf it into being useless. Basically, The more people choose a power, the less powerful it is. Let the playerbase create characters and play the game in this way for a month (a shorter interval of time may work), then reset the base values for the effects on abilities and adjust the penalty-per-player. Run like this throughout the life of the game and watch it balance itself. If you have 10,000+ players, you have a reasonable chance of generating a balanced system—and that balanced system is actually self-adjusting when new patches come out!

If all players behave rationally and build characters based on information available about their abilities and popularity (the interface should provide some idea of how popular abilities are), this system would converge on balance faster than the zero-sum ability idea. This system would not counteract poor ability design in terms of putting useless or bugged effects onto expensive abilities, but it will balance the non-bugged abilities and it would make clear through the popularity numbers what abilities are bugged or need to be reworked. The game would need to make clear to the players that choosing the most popular ability is usually not the best idea—confusion in this area could lead to problems.

This approach probably wouldn’t work on a class-based system because it relies on the selection of individual abilities. If done at the class-level there’d be no way to isolate the abilities to buff or nerf because people don’t choose their class’ abilities, only the class itself.

OK, But…

These ideas are very experimental and very raw at the moment. I just wanted them to get some air and perhaps a few comments pointing out big holes that I missed.

Has anyone tried to implement a self-balancing system before?

If so, how was it done?

What ways can you think of to allow games to self-balance?

Liberate the Narrative!

Static stories in MMOs are just sets of game rules applied over the existing combat and crafting mechanics.

Static stories consist of quests (or, more broadly, game-induced goals or game-determined tasks) primarily. A quest is a game rule. The rule converts a set of player actions (kill 10 rats, go to a location, interact with a thing, or any combination of such actions) into rewards and allows the player to accept new quests.

We can describe a quest the same way we can describe any other game rule, like an ability:

• Prerequisites. You have no hope of executing this game rule unless you have fulfilled its prerequisites. You need to complete some set of actions or obtain some set of game elements
  • A quest cannot be accepted until you fulfill level requirements and have completed the earlier quests in this chain.
  • An ability cannot be unlocked until you’re at a certain level, you have a certain amount of gold, and/or you’ve unlocked certain other abilities.
• Triggers. To make this game rule execute, someone has to do something. (Perhaps this trigger could be included in the prerequisite part, but I figured it’d be more clear to include it here.)
  • To start a quest, you need to talk to this dude or go to that place or interact with this item.
  • When you activate an ability (through clicking on its icon, hitting a hotkey, etc.) you trigger it.
• Requirements. A set of costs that need to be paid in order for the game rule to execute and who needs to pay those costs.
  • For a quest, these are the quest objectives.
  • For an ability, these are the resources you expend to use the ability (this includes both time, as in a cooldown, and the MP, stam, etc. cost, as well as any other cost you can think of).
• Effects. What comes to pass when the requirements are met for a triggered game rule?
  • An NPC may reward you for a completing a quest by giving you experience, some gold, and a dandelion. Maybe he’ll even give you a buff and a cinematic!
  • Abilities cause something to happen to the game world. You execute a fireball ability and cause damage to enemies in an area, you pop your trinket to break a stun, you taste the rainbow and find yourself in front of an annoying leprechaun, etc.
• End Conditions. What has to happen in order for this game rule to no longer apply? An end condition can repeal part or all of a game rule (game rules can contain other game rules).
  • Some abilities end right after they accomplish whatever effect they have, while some abilities last quite some time (like damage-over-time spells, buffs, and debuffs), and some other abilities require a set of conditions to be true before they’ll turn off (i.e. destroy this idol and the boss’ magical powers dissipate!).
  • Usually quests end when you turn them in or you manage to fail at some important part that cannot be reset without resetting the quest.

The “story” part is a bit of text splashed onto the screen to accompany the game rule—just like the flavor text that you see when you hover your mouse over your favorite ability. Both blurbs have the same amount of relevance to the game mechanics and mean nothing by themselves. The “story”, so told, only has meaning to you and other human players because it represents something you’re familiar with: stories as told in prose and poetry. The game itself doesn’t care what language that text is in or if it actually means anything.

People do play games for their stories, though. They play games to become enthralled in a universe. But does this require flavor-text-only narratives? Flavor-text-only is not the most efficient, effective, or involving way to tell a story in an MMO—and players demonstrate it constantly by overwhelmingly discussing their in-game exploits as interactions of game mechanics instead of describing the incredible story they read that was attached to a quest chain. There certainly should be flavor text—it helps with immersion to say the least—but character narratives don’t have to rely on flavor text at all in order to be meaningful to the player and to the game. We can generate such narratives by simply giving the player game mechanics that can effect the world in a way worth noting, then we can allow players to record their story (the game can help them to do this) and share it with other players. You don’t need a meaning-bereft and oft-ignored justification for why you should kill ten more rats when the game could simply let someone (player or NPC) have a rat problem and give that character the power to change that reality by their own hand or with the help of a sword-bearing passerby.

Modern sandbox games (Darkfall, EVE) allow the player to make his own story, yes, but the game limits the player’s story through game mechanics that allow the player to do little, and even less that can be recorded and later analyzed. You can craft and kill things on a large enough scale to capture a city or a planet—but who records these facts and presents them in an easy-to-understand way? And those interactions aren’t the only ones we’d like to hear about. Plenty of great narratives are lost because players do interesting things and don’t think of recording their experience. The game should allow interested, involved, and qualified players to create certain kinds of game rules, like quests and other tasks, and build the story themselves. You can have your cake and eat it too: let qualified players make quests, then less-qualified players can accept those quests and change the world as they complete them to achieve higher status and obtain valuable rewards. Sandbox-lovers and themepark-lovers can co-exist happily in such a system.

We need to liberate narrative from its enslavement to static game rules. Let players make the primary narrative of the game by combining and manipulating game rules to interact with the world. They do this anyway outside of the game through telling stories centered on the game mechanics, like the harrowing tale of how they beat this forty-man raid first on their server—harness the story-telling potential inherent in game mechanics. Let players build stories using the game mechanics as building blocks and put those stories in the forefront. This kind of player-driven narrative would free the story from its static, deterministic drabness that has led many prognosticators to discard story in MMOs as a mere do-nothing formality that is better off ignored. The flood of meaning and fun such reform would cause has the potential to turn the revolutionize the MMORPG.

Toboldian Content: A Useless, Poorly-defined Measure.

Tobold has a fatally flawed and useless definition of content. I usually don't carry over comments from his blog to this one [removed an unnecessarily strong phrase, my apologies -Ev], but he’s brought up a topic that I would like to address.

A Poor Definition of Content

Tobold begins by stating his definition of content in a sound-bite form:

I would say that any MMORPG has two fundamental parts: A repetitive part, for which the base rules are always the same, for example combat. And the non-repetitive part which creates the conditions for all those combats, which I call "content".

There are wrong assumptions here. Tobold assumes that all repetitive action in MMOs is combat, which is patently untrue. Crafting may be even more repetitive and deserves a mention. Aside from this semantic contention, t (Oops, I misread "example".)The “base rules” for combat are not always the same. The easiest example are the vehicular combats in WoW: they certainly do not use the same rules as normal combat. Also, playing as a different class engages you with different rules in combat. Tobold could be talking very abstractly here, but I doubt he is—he has never talked so abstractly before. The “base rules” for combat should also include the various special abilities for whatever foe you’re fighting, so those base rules do change between combats with different kinds of monsters (I’ll go into this further and make stronger assertions related to game rules in a future post).

Tobold fails to consider player action-related rules as an element of content. Certainly what a player can do in the world, as dictated wholly by the rules that govern his character’s action, should dictate some part of a measure of content. We can judge the content of games based on game rules alone if we want: which game has more content, the one where you have 2 attacks or the one where you can build houses and dig holes as well as engage in diverse combat?

Tobold’s assumptions are off and incomplete, but perhaps his definition is still salvageable. He claims that the context for repetitive action is the content in an MMO.

Content can be quests, landscapes, dungeons, scripted events like boss fights, monster models, loot tables, lore, and many other things.

This seems reasonable, actually. But then he demonstrates a lack of understanding by attaching no content value to the times where these aspects of content are not hand-made.

What I don't count as content is the number of square miles of procedurally generated landscapes, or the near-infinite number of randomly generated dungeons in games like Diablo or City of Heroes.

What about procedurally generated quests that generate new dungeons that otherwise would not be present? Much content in roguelikes would be disregarded by Tobold, even though it’s entirely illogical to do so. Certainly generating what he’d otherwise call “content” with a machine instead of by hand should count somewhat towards the total content value of a game!

Compare a game with 5 hand-made single-floor dungeons that are always the same to a game with 5 hand-made dungeons that each have 4 more randomly-generated floors. Clearly a game with 25 dungeon floors, even if they have the same art assets and monsters, has more content than a game with only 5.

He then goes on to demonstrate superficial thinking by comparing two games that have just about nothing in common, European football and WoW. This example illustrates the weakness of his definition and its uselessness to describe something worth describing.

A Useless Definition of Content

What do we care about in games?

Do we care about how many gigabytes of textures and sound files are included on the DVD? There is no correlation between the aggregate filesizes of a game’s graphical assets and how much fun it is. And when we’re talking about games, we discuss them based on fun. (Except for the few people who discuss them as art, but they would also agree that sheer size does not dictate artistic merit.)

If we only take quantity of assets as a sign of amount of content, we’re saying nothing useful about the game from a critical perspective.

When players talk about content, they usually are discussing, perhaps indirectly, the amount of time it will take to complete the game. Clearly it doesn’t matter if quests and dungeons are hand-made or procedurally-generated, they add to the time it takes to finish a game in the same fashion—even if you’re only looking to beat a final boss of some type and not looking to collect every collectable and achieve every achievement.

Tobold’s Definition of Content Should be Disregarded

Both as a practical exercise and a critical exercise, Tobold’s definition of content is wildly flawed. His assumptions are incomplete and incorrect, his conclusions are not consistent with his other conclusions and assumptions, and the definition he seems to arrive at does not give us anything useful as game critics or gamers.

We cannot accept a definition so flawed on its own merits and counter to the common understanding of the word defined.

Familiarity Bias

We act preferentially towards familiar phenomena. We find reasons why the familiar is better than the unfamiliar. We defend what is familiar because we know its strengths and weaknesses. We avoid risk through avoiding change—even known annoyances and negatives are OK in comparison to unknowns.

But is the familiar really better? Familiarity and system quality may be entirely independent. Unfortunately, many of our quality judgments are formed with reference to the familiar and not to objective criteria, especially in games. There’s no avoiding it.

“The only intuitive interface is the nipple.” We travel from interface to interface, from game to game, and what we find easier to learn is whatever happens to be closest to that with which we are familiar. The familiar does not depend on what games were of the highest quality, though—we met our first games for reasons entirely separate from the fact that they were good games that we thought were worth meeting.

When I was 8 or 9 and was confronted with Ferrari Grand Prix for the NES, I messed around with it until I understood how to play. I had no concept of game quality, only an experimental feeling of fun or annoyance. It was novel enough to see the graphics move around on the screen when I pressed buttons. I didn’t play that game very much, but I have fond memories of it and remember it as an enjoyable game. Does that mean that the game is good by any objective criteria? Through some brute force process of experimentation and through the dumb luck of my parents buying me that game, I learned how racing games work and that I find them to be somewhat fun.

The universe of games I can like is limited to the universe of games I’m exposed to. There could be an amazing genre of games hiding away in a niche on the other side of the internet and I would never find it except by chance.

I don’t remember how I found the sports management sim (also called “text sim”) community and genre that they so ardently and loyally support, but I’m very happy that I did. Front Office Football 2007 is probably my favorite football game for any platform. I would have had no idea that the game even existed if it weren’t for blind luck on a google search 5 years ago (when the game was on its last iteration, FOF 2004). At first I resisted the game because the interface is not for the faint of heart. The game sports the best (commercially available? game-format?) football simulation engine that exists—for that reason alone I gritted my teeth and blundered my way through hours of pain. Soon I got past the learning curve and now I absolutely love the game. I pick it up several times per year and play through 20 or 30 seasons.

When I talk with the community that has developed around FOF games, I find that people overwhelmingly support the game’s interface even though it is objectively ugly, a pain to learn, and often annoying to use even for veteran players. It’s clear that people like this interface primarily because they’re used to it.

And people get used to insufficient or broken game mechanics in a similar way. Consider the debate over building and unit selection limits for StarCraft 2 (the third point in this post). The original Starcraft had unit selection limited to 12 units, though the endgame regularly saw more than 100 units on the field for each side. What seems like a technical limitation ends up being a point of severe contention. SC is one of the most popular eSports in the world. Performing hundreds of actions per minute is crucial to achieving victory in the very competitive Korean leagues. Most of these actions involve circumventing the selection cap to maneuver larger numbers of units simultaneously. Instead of three clicks to move 36 units (click, drag to select, click to move), it took 9. This triplication of clicking for a simple maneuver needs to be carried out thousands of times in a SC match in order for one side to be successful. This is artificial difficultly. People defend a lower unit selection cap in SC2 because this arbitrary skill test separates the the wheat of pro players from teh chaff of amateurs, in a certain way. I think this is candidly ridiculous—the skill test of the game should be inventing and enacting successful strategies, not outwitting the interface—and Sirlin agrees.

When what has come before plays such an important role in what we enjoy now, we run into difficulty having anything resembling an objective discussion. Anyone suggesting meaningful innovation (or even a small change to something fundamental) is trampled by thousands of players who can’t understand how anything different could work. And there are the nostalgia addicts who refuse to understand the difference between playing a game as a wide-eyed 10-year-old and playing a game as an adult with fully developed mental faculties.

Designing a great game involves overcoming a surprising amount of familiarity bias. It’s important to also be aware of our biases when we try to hold productive discussions about games. It’s difficult to be aware of our biases and doubly difficult to mitigate them, but if we can succeed, the bounty in meaningful discussion is enormous.

What are MMORPGs and Why Should I Care?

A game’s genre has nothing to do with how much fun the game will be. It may, at most, bias you towards certain judgments by putting a game’s content and mechanics into a different context.

Most often games that fail are those that take the concept of genre too seriously in their design. These games tend to be cookie-cutter cash-in attempts. Perhaps if you are Keen and want everything to be magically perfected before any innovation is tried, you’ll like such a world of look-alike and talk-alike games, but these games are usually not so well-received. Execution is the hardest part of game development. You’re more likely to fail by betting on a game that needs flawless execution than betting on a game that shows innovation.

But still, bloggers and commenters feel the need to post polemics deriding the trends that compromise the MMO-ness of a game that has been clearly and easily classified as an MMO.

Genre tag discussions are pointless:

1. The people who are having the discussion have no actual use for the definition they’re making because they already understand the distinctions between games that the “better” genre tag would indicate. Only people who really care would even try to follow such a discussion. Never would such new terminology catch on, because only people for whom it is useless would understand the terminology.
2. Genre and fun are independent. When discussing games, we should be talking about fun. As a player and game designer, genres are merely signposts at the most abstract level and give little to no indication of how fun a game may be. Debating the meaning of a genre will put “genre” in terms way too specific to be useful to the general audience that relies on such tags.
3. Game design evolves. World of Warcraft is a much different game now than it was five years ago. If genre cannot even apply to one game over the course of its lifetime, how can it hope to apply to a universe containing thousands of games that may be in any genre at any one time? As developers explore the game design universe by making thousands upon thousands of games every year, the meaning of a genre will warp and alter. Trying to fix the meaning of a genre permanently is like, pardon the cliché, trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

Consider these three reasons when you next think about arguing with someone about what an MMO is. I’d advise you to politely let the person know that they’re engaging in a pointless discussion, or you can simply move on to a more interesting posting without wasting your time.