Alex Kierkegaard: The Smartest Guy in the Room

He’s called “icycalm” and he’d have you believe he’s the smartest guy in the room. He probably is; he certainly writes like it. He has played more games than I have—he’s played more games than my closest friends and myself combined. He knows what he’s talking about as a gamer. If you should read any gamers' views on gaming, you should probably read Alex’s.

The problem is that he writes as if he doesn’t want to be read. He insults his opponents and spends so much time telling you how smart and exceptional he is that you are forced to doubt it. His style and tone lead to most readers dismissing his writing. Neither he nor his ideas should be dismissed, but Alex insists on testing everyone’s patience. He’s saying some important stuff about gaming; he does himself a disservice by splattering insults and  self-congratulation throughout his otherwise fascinating writing.

Two of Alex’s articles every self-respecting gamer should read:

• The heart of role-playing games isn’t smacking crap with a sword. In fact, most videogames classified as RPGs are far from deserving the title. Alex offers a great summary of the history of RPGs and how we’ve gotten to a this sad state.
• Arcade culture—we should regret that we’ve lost it (or that we’ve never had it) in the West. Alex analyzes the arcade culture in Japan with a certain reverence and respect uncommon in his work. He tells you why the arcade ecosystem produces amazing games and how Westerners entirely miss the point.

Yes, these articles are long. I assure you that they’re worth your time if you are interested in gaming.

[Alex has responded to my post by calling me "trailer trash", and a "fagot". Sounds good to me. -Ev]

Terminology Pedantry: “Stat” or “Attribute”?

I have a bone to pick with the word “stat” as used by game systems to describe the properties of game entities.

A "stat" is an observation codified into mathematical symbols about a thing or event that (it stands to reason) exists independently of the stat. If I roll a six-sided die, there are six possible outcomes. I roll the die a thousand times and make the observation that each outcome occurred a roughly equal number of times. I can say that I rolled “1” 180 times—this is a statistic.

Statistics don't determine what side of a coin comes up when you flip it. The attributes of the coin and the forces applied to it determine how it lands.

The word “stat” came into common use in this role because those numbers that describe (not determine!)the capacities of a person or thing in real life are called “stats”. The properties game designers ascribe to characters in a game would seem to be such measurements—but they are not. What we call “stats” in game systems are the actual factors that go into determining the results of actions; they aren’t measurements or observations and therefore aren’t suitably named.

An "attribute" or "property" is an actual child-fact itself. The attributes of a thing determine how it behaves. It doesn’t matter how you observe the behavior (on the scale of human beings), the causes and effects will remain consistent.

In a game system, game designers decide what properties different entities have. These properties, when we put numbers to them (like a “strength” score), are not statistics—they are the attributes of the game entity. A statistic would be like “your character succeeded in breaking this door after 3 kicks.” The attributes of the character and the door—what are usually called “stats”—are what actually determine if the door opens due to the blow.

“Attribute” is clearly a better word for the inherent properties of game entities. I tend to use this word to describe such properties when I talk about games, but no one seems to pick up on the distinction. It’s not really important, though, because people usually understand, in general gamer use, the word “stat”’s intended meaning. In the interest of clarity, I’ve made this post about the term. At least we can use the most clear words in our discussion here, so if we start talking about statistics and character attributes at once there won’t be meaning-confusion.

Themepark MMO Design: Optimizing Reward Distribution

The overarching goal of the themepark is to keep the player entertained through keeping them constantly in sight of the next goal. These goals are usually extrinsic and explicit. Themeparks rely on vertical advancement to provide a string of goals that lasts for a significant amount of time, first through levelling, then through gear and rep grinding. Once these goals are accomplished, the game is practically over, so themepark games need a reliable stream of content updates to sustain growth. Once a themepark game hits a critical mass of content, it can survive without new content for some time, though it may not grow, based on players rediscovering old content and new players occasionally signing up and enjoying old content.

The goals of the themepark model:

1. Keep gamers occupied for some time while not requiring significant thought from designers. Adding a new dungeon is cheaper than adding new game systems, so release new ones just as players get bored with old ones.
2. Ensure that gamers always have something to do—explicitly given to them—so that they don’t get lost while they have content yet to complete.
3. Provide reward structures that incentivize the repeated completion of as much content as possible.
4. Expose players to as little content as possible while still keeping their interest. Allow players access to as much content as possible provided the player spends enough time in-game. Expose them to content multiple times, but allow each occurrence to be far enough from the last that the content doesn’t get stale rapidly.
5. Provide multi-tiered reward structures so the player receives a steady stream of rewards occasionally broken by discontinuous non-linear jumps in character power. Various currency systems that pay for different kinds of rewards can provide non-linear growth bursts that keep players interested.

All of these goals can be boiled down to one: Ensure that the player always has some new reward to gain and that the reward is obvious, desirable, and seems tantalizingly within reach.

Themepark MMOs are all about timing rewards. Well-timed rewards keep the player tickled and interested enough to continue doing otherwise repetitive actions. If the reward stream remains linear for too long and isn’t punctuated by non-linear jumps in character power, the player will become bored and be overcome by perceived “grindiness”.

Occasional jumps in progression succeed at keeping the player’s attention because people generally predict outcomes in a linear fashion based on their experiences. When factors compound to generate an exponential or logarithmic effect, the accuracy of an average person’s predictions will flag. In fact, many strategies in games are overpowered because they have some factor that exponentially relates to force effectiveness which leads to the force not only having an advantage, but having a growing advantage as the game progresses. The designer failed to see this exponential factor, because he didn’t notice that two linear factors were being multiplied into an exponential factor. Designers, just like players, will see the combination of linear factors and expect linear results—this is a flawed expectation that a good reward system will exploit.

The pacing of rewards ultimately decides the success of the themepark game. At the root of the themepark paradigm is character growth, and at the center of character growth systems are reward systems.

The Imitation Rut

[This is a partner post to Psychochild's post "The Innovation Paradox".]

Today on “things you already know if you’re paying any attention to the MMO scene and this blog”: the MMO scene is in an imitation rut. So few MMOs have done anything profoundly different; they rehash others to a significant extent and often fail in the rehashing. The patterns have been set since Ultima Online and Everquest, modern games just have better graphics and rearranged deckchairs. There has been very little change in kind, and large changes in magnitude: WoW multiplied quests, games like Darkfall and Spellborne reshuffled combat, Aion amplified graphics, Fallen Earth and Vanguard expanded crafting, Guild Wars pushed instancing, WAR cranked up themepark PvP. But where have we gotten? Recent MMOs weaved a few innovations into the fold, but in general the framework is exactly the same. Progress has been glacial.

I feel like MMOs are in the early stages of development as an art. We may soon start seeing masters rise in MMO design. Until then, we might need to satisfy ourselves with imitation and come to live with frequent failure.

Here’s a roadmap of an individual’s journey from interested spectator to master:

1. Be aware of it. You play games and have opinions.
2. Criticize existing works. You understand enough about how games work to form and express a valuable opinion about any game you play much.
3. If you can start practicing the art—you start making things. You imitate stuff that you think has worked well with the deluded impression that you can improve it easily. Here you don’t really know much about how the art works, but you think you do because you’re too incompetent to understand your poor judgment. (Incompetent people vastly overestimate their abilities; see Think Twice by Michael J. Mauboussin among others.)
4. You understand enough about the art to realize that you’re making crap, but you keep going. (See Ira Glass on storytelling.)
5. Through understanding and using various techniques, you become an expert. You know many things and make complicated systems to exhibit this knowledge. (See Zed Shaw.)
6. You become a master. Your understanding becomes so ingrained into who you are that you basically have no technique. You intuitively do whatever is necessary to accomplish your goal in the simplest, most efficient fashion.

The MMO space has collectively not moved past step 3. It appears very few individuals have touched 4 and 5.

Why?

• MMOs are so big and complex that sizable teams are required to design them. These teams are pulled down by the majority of designers, the designers who don’t have much experience due to the relative youth of the industry and wouldn’t be capable of great success even if they had more experience.
• MMOs are difficult games to design. Most of the problems you’ll face while designing an MMO have no simple answer.
• No one can hold an MMO’s entire design in their head. There are so many moving parts, so many rules, so many little details. Even a vague notion of the layout of the design takes quite some time to understand. So perhaps the complexity forces the institutional learning process to a crawl.
• The institution is closed. There’s not a lot of information publicly available that interested parties can consume in order to become initiated in the dark arts of game design. The institution wants to keep its secrets as they are, safely stashed away where no one but the chosen few can profit from them. We’ve started to see this falter, but it’s a slow process.
• The social side of MMO design is less well-understood than the mechanical side. And we so often see games fail in the mechanics—the side they do understand. The interaction of the social and mechanical is not apparent or understood by enough designers, either.
• The industry is young. It takes approximately ten years to become a master of an art. The MMO industry is not much more than 10 years old. Perhaps some of the old text MUD guys have had the time to become masters, but have they been practicing design enough to get there?

Where’s the change going to come from? It’s hard to get excited and make things when the business model is broken and the games are too damned big to make well without an institution behind you. Eventually, masters will rise, the floodgates of communication will come open, and game design will advance exponentially. Until then, we wait and eat the gruel we’re given—some of us will be satisfied, while some, like me, will be waiting eagerly.

Abominable Aphorisms

I’m growing increasingly bored with pseudo-aphorisms some MMO bloggers and many commenters spout continuously. Having to repeatedly deal with the same empty rhetoric slows the conversation to a crawl at times. I’m going to address a few of those abominable aphorisms here in abbreviated form.

“Don’t release it until it’s finished.”

When’s it finished? When is what finished?

If you finish the design, that means it’s perfectly balanced and precisely accomplishes your goals. The only way you know if this is the case (turns out it’s never the case) is when you’ve actually got users to bang on the code and tell you if it satisfied them and therefore satisfies your requirements.

If you finish the coding, that means there are no bugs. None. This is impossible. If there aren’t bugs in your code, there are probably bugs in someone else’s code that’ll make it seem like there are bugs in your code. Driver issues? The player will think you haven’t finished the game, even though it’s probably the hardware manufacturer who is at fault.

You can’t finish the coding until you’ve finished the design.

The limit isn’t in developer ability—the limit is time. Time strangles every project (except for Duke Nukem Forever). In games as complex as MMOs, nothing ever gets finished: devs just stop working on them.

“Change for change’s sake is bad.”

A patch that arbitrarily changes an existing game is bad, but that’s only one small corner case that fits under this infeasible saying.

If people never invented just to see what could be made, no one would have invented videogames. Also: familiarity bias.

“The glory days of MMOs are long past.”

Take off your rose-colored glasses. Nostalgia bias is messing with your gaming experience.

The “glory days” MMOs were new to you then. There were, like, three of them out at the time. You had to love them or leave the genre. You’re still here because you loved them. It doesn’t mean they were good, or that they’re better than what’s available now.

“If only the MMO devs would learn from the past, then…”

MMO devs play fewer MMOs than a current MMO player. Why? Because they’re busy spending 10-16 hours a day making MMOs! They don’t know everything about every obscure MMO—they don’t even have a good handle on all the popular MMOs. It takes months of un-interrupted play time to get a full handle on the mechanics and dynamics of a modern MMO. Who has time to do that but the most hardcore players, people who are usually college students or unemployed?

“If it works, don’t mess with it!”

This naive view assumes that fun is objective. Fun isn’t. Different games vary in fun from minute to minute for each player. Fun is contextual and highly subjective. What you think is fun is not fun for everyone. Nothing ever objectively works—nothing ever works for everyone.

Also, MMOs are a bit complicated. There are thousands of game rules that interact in millions of ways. If you take a few of those game rules out or tweak them, the game may become a complete mess. Removing rules from the system may break the game as a whole. The dependencies between the rules are very complex—it’s extremely difficult to extricate one specific mechanic and say “isolated from everything else in a game, this works.”

It’s much easier to point to things that are broken. But in order to fix them, we have to know why they are broken. Rarely is it obvious. Sometimes it’s because the game will never be well-balanced due to systemic flaws. Sometimes it’s just one rule that needs tweaking; but you can’t know all the consequences of fixing what is broken without trying. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Why is World of Warcraft Easy?

World of Warcraft’s vaunted dungeon-finder has left some players surprised at how often they can successfully run pick-up groups through dungeons. Perhaps the average player isn’t as awful at the PvE game as everyone seems to think?

Or maybe themepark MMOs’ PvE don’t have that much skill involved. Maybe a few awful experiences have been entirely blown out of proportion into a general feeling that WoW players are unskilled dolts who can’t tie their own in-game shoes. Now that people are exposed to PUGing much more often, the outliers can’t muscle the thousands of successful runs out of people’s memories as easily.

I wager that the average skill of a WoW player is indeed low, but the required level of skill to run even end-game group content in the game is also quite low. Being a passable player is more about not actively being an idiot—it’s not so much about excelling.

With this dungeon-finder discussion pinging around the MMO blogverse, I see a great opportunity to seriously talk about skill in themepark MMOs, especially WoW: what skill is, how we measure it, and why we should care about it.

What is Skill?

Elements of skill:

• Motor skills. Your ability to control your character accurately.
• Planning. Your ability to quickly put together plans of in-game actions that will accomplish some goal.
• Knowledge. All the known details on which your plans are based. This can also consist of actual memorized plans.

These three do not all increase at the same rate. Generally a great player will be good at all three of them, but you’ll see players at varying stages of each as you play a game. Some people are great at learning about the elements of a game and coming up with effective plans, but lack the motor skill to execute those plans when time is of the essence. Some people are terrible at planning but can pull out of tight situations by being significantly faster to act than their opponent. Yet others know minute details about the game system but haven’t played enough to develop an on-the-fly planning ability nor the motor skills necessary to be a top-tier player.

Measuring Skill

The most intuitive definition of skill in an MMO is the effective difference between the chance of an experienced player accomplishing the same goals as a new player given the same initial conditions. As this difference approaches zero, the game has less skill.

This metric falls apart for games that are meant to be easy; we need to broaden that definition because we understand skill as more than simply being successful—it also can mean being most efficient. Skill’s effect on a game can be determined by finding the difference in rewards between a complete beginner, the average player, and an expert.

Player skill in an MMO can only be measured in the effectiveness of that player’s manipulation of her characters in the game world. To measure effectiveness, we must find some game system that provides a meterstick against which we can judge successful play. Perhaps the approval of the player’s friends could be such a meterstick, but that is very hard to quantify and, like any scenario where you rely on the whims of others, is subject to instant and irrational change. The simplest way to measure character success is to measure rewards received. This works on the assumption that the game will reward the player more for playing well—notice that it says nothing about the amount of rewards for playing poorly, this metric is about the difference between the reward for success in a given scenario and the reward for failure.

Perhaps we’re chasing our tail here, though, because I was trying to define success and now I’m saying that we need to measure reward differences between success and failure. I don’t have to define success here: games provide basic units of success for their players through their goal generation systems. Goal generation systems are how games tell the player what to do. Completing the goals  as given by the game is a basic indication of success. Themepark MMOs generate goals for players by giving them quests (or tasks or achievements) and rewarding the player for quest completion. This does not mean that players cannot generate their own goals—such goal generation would be intrinsic (sourced at the player) whereas here we’re talking about the extrinsic (sourced at the game).  

All mechanics-related rewards in MMOs result in the successful character growing. Quests give characters experience—the most obvious form of growth—but also grant money and items with which to progress the character’s gear. Even unlocking new quests is a reward that leads to more rewards that can cause character growth.

Character power can also be seen as a function of skill. A player’s skill in MMOs dictates the speed of her character’s growth. A player’s skill in MMOs is directly related to her ability to grow a character as quickly as possible. This includes knowledge of what quests are where and the best ways to complete those quests as to maximize growth. Maximizing growth is equivalent, then, to maximizing reward. Skilled players maximize rewards.

Notice that skilled players grow faster; they don’t necessarily reach parts of the game that an average player cannot. Over time, their rewards will be the same, even though the expert knows significantly more about the game and is much better at planning and executing those plans.

In WoW, Success is a Matter of Time

What’s the difference between an average player and a WoW expert, then? It’s a matter of time. Both players can reach max level. Both players can get through dungeons without much trouble, though the expert will probably be a bit more frustrated as she attempts to lead her group of less-skilled players. Even the hardest dungeons can be overcome by an average player. It will simply take them more time because they’ll need to have better equipment which takes them longer to gain than the skilled player.

Because characters in WoW advance from being played at all, not necessarily from being played skillfully, any achievement is only a matter of time. Character advancement is dominated by time-spent—skillful play only marginally decreases that time.

Sufficiency vs. Efficiency

Skill in games has traditionally been a measure of sufficiency. The player is supposed to beat his head against a part of a game until he gains sufficient skill to advance to the next part. Advancing means facing more difficult challenges—maybe these challenges require mastering new abilities, or maybe they simply are less forgiving and require more precision from the player.

You may never see most of the content in game based on skill sufficiency. You may simply lack the physical or mental capacity to advance beyond a certain point in the game.

As gaming has become more mainstream, big-money games have moved away from exclusionary sufficiency-based advancement. Now most players can make it through games easily. The skill challenges have moved to efficiency. How fast can you beat a level? Under what odd constraints can you beat this level? The content has opened up to more players and made more than a modicum of skill unnecessary to get the full experience.

Likewise, skill in WoW is a measure of efficiency, not sufficiency.

This means that more players can have more fun. In a game that relies on large population numbers, you want the sufficiency bar to be very low so that everyone can play together. If sufficiency is rare, then the community stratifies according to skill, which makes it seem much smaller. If everyone can do most of the content and some of that content relies on a grouping, the game is more fun for most players.

WoW is easy for a good reason—players shocked at the success of dungeon-finder PUGs are finally realizing this.

Perceived Randomness: A Guide to Chance in Games

(As a primer, I’d suggest checking out Psychochild’s post about “good” and “bad” randoms, as well as my previous post about the role of chance in RPGs. This article digs a bit deeper than those two and tries to arrive at general guidelines for when chance and randomness fit into game design well.)

Perceived randomness has nothing to do with true unpredictability. True randomness is completely opaque: a perfect random number generator would generate a sequence of numbers that, when taken as a whole, has no discernable pattern. Its results would be completely unpredictable. We approximate true randomness through rolling dice, and this approximation of randomness is satisfactory to our perceptions as long as the dice are “fair”. When you roll dice, though, the result is not truly random. You can do some extraordinarily complex math, if given enough time, and figure out what face of the die will face up when the die comes to rest based only upon the force exerted on the die by your hand when you throw it and the composition of the die. We accept the outcome of a die roll as being random because, in common perception in the time-frame of the die rolling, we are incapable of forming and executing a process that will allow us to presage the side that will face up when the die has come to a halt.

Perceived Randomness as the Result of Theory-absence

On the level of abstraction on which a human being operates throughout his daily life, nothing is random from an objective view. For any event we can trace causes and effects into and beyond the conceivable and perceivable past.

If we’re diligent and use all the tools at our disposal, we can reliably form useful theories about events (e.g. theories that can predict the outcome of events given inputs we can gather from our perceptions) . In the course of your life, you will rarely have the time to be so diligent—you do as little work possible to establish theories about the world that are as effective as possible in the context of your everyday life.

When you can’t investigate the causes of an event and you cannot conceive of what the causes might be (or you don’t have the time to conceive of causes), you perceive the event as being random. We usually ascribe meaning to events that we perceive of as random because we do not like to feel as if we’re at the mercy of cast dice—it does not sit well with our teleological sensibilities. From this fact all superstition has grown. The seemingly insurmountable role of chance in life can also lead to hopelessness if taken too seriously. If all events rely on an external factor over which we have no effect (chance, in this case), why should we bother trying to effect certain outcomes with our actions? If some talentless hack can stumble into riches while I slave for my entire life for barely any money and recognition, why should I bother working so hard?

Perceived Randomness as Uncertainty

We know with varying levels of certainty how specific parts of the world work. If we don’t know well-enough how something works, we will perceive the outcome of that something as random.

If I’m certain that an outcome will result from some event, that outcome cannot be random with respect to that event in my perception. I know what is going to happen—the pattern is determined so the result is clear.

If I have no information about how what outcomes will result from some event (e.g. I am completely uncertain as to the outcome of the event), the outcome of the event is indistinguishable from a the event randomly determining an outcome.

If I have some moderate degree of certainty about the outcomes of an event, I still can perceive the event to be random, but with well-defined outcomes of limited variety.

This is a restatement of perceived randomness as theory-absence, but in simpler terms.

Gauging Perceived Randomness

Four elements that lead us towards perceiving an event or outcome as practically random:

• How much agency do we have in determining outcomes? If I have no perceivable say in the outcome, it might as well be determined by chance.
• What do we know about the process, abstractly? If I don’t understand how certain outcomes result from certain situations, those outcomes might as well be determined by chance.
• How much information do we have about this particular execution of the process? Even if I understand the process, if I cannot perceive details about this specific execution of the process, I still have no hope of making a prediction, so the outcome might as well be determined by chance.
• How remote in time and space is the outcome? The further away, the more uncertain, the more “random” the result will seem to us. As subevents resolve, the likelihood of the main event resolving in a certain way will become more and more easily perceptible and seem less random.

We can use these four elements to decide what parts of a game are best suited towards being procedurally or randomly determined.

• If the player has no say in some event’s resolution or introduction, that event is well-suited towards having elements of randomness.
• In Europa Universalis 3 there are some relatively fine-grained events that can happen within your kingdom that the player would have no way to cause or prevent, these events are introduced randomly as the game progresses.
• If the player has no way of gaining knowledge about how a specific event actually happens, it makes sense to allow some randomness in how that event unfolds.
• The player has no way of knowing how each magical item in Diablo II was made, so the player isn’t shocked when there are a wide variety of effects in a wide variety of magnitudes that are applied seemingly at random to items.
• In Civilization games, the actual tactics of individual units in combat are entirely skipped over, so it makes sense for there to be randomness in the resolution of combat.
• If the specifics about some particular event’s occurrence cannot be reliably shown to and understood by the player, randomness can play a role in deciding the result of that action.
• Dungeons and Dragons’ combat resolution engine generally does not care about how a sword is swung under relatively normal conditions. To represent the minor variations of the PC’s swinging motion and the opponent’s defensive maneuver, it makes sense to use randomness.
• Most RPG combat systems don’t make you worry about how exactly a spell is cast or a sword is swung. So we see a bit of randomness in the results of such actions.
• What happens very far away, very long ago, or very far into the future does not need to be resolved with the same level of detail as what the player is currently doing. Some randomness can reasonably be used to stand for that detail.
• In a TBS game like Civilization, a war between two far-off nations who are beneath fog-of-war for the player can be simulated more easily through a more liberal use of randomness. No need to move units individually when the player can’t see, for example.
• In AI War, the AI’s production and resource gathering operations occur in another galaxy that is inaccessible to the player. The game doesn’t actually simulate this universe’s specific resources and the construction of ships and structures as the game shows the player’s resource gathering and construction. AI War warps AI ships into the player’s galaxy based on some heuristics and some randomness.