Giving them what they want
Over on the thread about the Worldcon panel on WoW, an anonymous poster engaged in a bit of sarcasm:
What?!?!?!?
This makes no sense!
Players apparently want to….. to play a game that’s…. that’s…. ‘fun’…?
They……. like……. combat????
They… don’t like waiting on other players in order to proceed in the game?
They… want to choose who they socialize with and when, rather than have it forced on them?
No no no, this is all wrong! These players must be wrong. Clearly they do not know what they want at all, because they cannot possibly want these things.
Of course, the sarcasm falls slightly flat, because it misses the point of the post, to my mind. But it does raise other questions.
Players apparently want to….. to play a game that’s…. that’s…. ‘fun’…?
To start with, fun varies per player. To many, myself included, the experience of “kill five wolves, kill ten wolves, kill fifteen wolves, kill five kobolds, kill ten kobolds, kill fifteen kobolds” (which is literally the newbie experience in WoW) is not fun, and hasn’t been for a while. Of course players want to play a game that is fun, but that game will be different for different types of players.
The most obvious example of this is “they like combat.” Just today I got an email from the guy at the panel who asked about giving respect to non-combat players.
I am hoping you someday design an SF MMO where non-combat players (as well as combat players) can participate, and feel that they have something useful to offer ingame. I would be great if this MMO also had Entertainers in it too — how I loved my slinky female SWG Entertainer Briana, and my chubby male Wookiee Entertainer TehWook (TehWook was the least successful entertainer in pre-CU SWG history — never earned a single credit, but I still loved the char)… There are thousands of [us]… on the wrong side of 30, are professionals, don’t mind complex MMOs, have the attention span to stay loyal to a good MMO for YEARS, and have the money to finance multiple char accounts. This is a gold mine for you as an MMO designer – you won’t get WoW numbers with such an audience but you will get a solid base of loyal, intelligent, high-income players if you ever designed another SF MMO that had socialization, crafting, virtual-world properties, and that got away from the awful combat-only model…
Now, I happen to think that this guy is wrong in one important respect. The niche activity is slaying kobolds, you see. It’s hard to see this, immersed as we are in the culture of games, but there’s a reason why the rest of the world largely sees gaming as tacky. In the wake of the Harper’s article, I have been getting emails from friends and family, and in one of them one of my aunts commented,
I loved the interaction, the thoughtfulness, the core ideas discussed and yet part of me felt completely outside – like I was in a foreign land and folks were speaking a foreign language since I don’t even know the games being talked about.
And this was in a case where half the table wasn’t up on games.
The commoner reaction, however, is going to be like another one of my aunts:
I had some difficulty moving into the article and your book right way for the simple reason that you begin with evil acts by not nice people or creatures. Why must life be about doing someone in? It is so violent. I dislike the fact that the little children I teach are being exposed to blowing up things, shooting guys and droppin people from the sky. I think it anesthetizes them from real life pain as they turn it on and off in a machine so when someone gets hurt they do not think to say “Can I get help for you?” In the book it was someone chewing toes off a person. Do you know how painful that must feel to a victim? The very description made me upset. Why must children be trained to think of that viewpoint?
I suspect the typical reaction on the part of a gaming aficionado is to say “crackpot.” But a bit of perspective should allow us to step back and ask the reverse. What exactly is “normal” about pretending to dress in skimpy obsolete armor, swing a big sharp sword or pretend to have supernatural powers, blasting away at innocents and monsters alike in order to count yourself more powerful, indiscriminately slaying wildlife without any real purpose and letting the meat and hide go to waste, enjoying gobbets of flesh being tossed about from the carcasses? This is heroism? Give me a break — it’s not, it’s a wish-fulfillment power fantasy.
They……. like……. combat????
So “people like combat.” Do we give them what they want? Or do they really know what they want? In history, “what the people want” has given us the spectacle of public hangings (a charming kid’s entertainment on a Saturday afternoon), slaves being ripped apart by hungry beasts in a circus arena, and the torture of animals tossed into rings with hungry bears to get torn apart.
Of course, it’s much better to have these things happen virtually than for real. But I’d like to think most people are fantasizing not about the gore and the power, and more about accomplishing things with that power. The games try, anyway, to cast you as a hero. They try, anyway, to be about doing the right thing, mostly. The players who follow fantasy tropes are reading books about heroes triumphing over impossible odds. Of course, what the game tells them is that no, actually, the reason you’re slaying the fifteen kobolds are something you skip over quickly because it’s irrelevant; what matters is how many of them you kill and how quickly, so you can maximize your advancement.
So “players… like… combat.” Whoo hoo. Sorry if I sound too lofty and high-falutin’ here, but it’s long past due that we examine some of these assumptions. Let me offer up instead this set of observations that replace that simplistic statement:
- Core gamers are more comfortable with combat than the general population.
- The best-selling games have tended not to focus on violence as their core attribute or mechanic. (Glance over this list and you will see what I mean; yes, Half-Life shows up near the top, but put that number in context with the number of people who bought Nintendogs, for example. Or Super Mario. Or Tetris.)
- What users are responding to isn’t just the combat, it’s the gear collection and the feedback cycle, both of which could easily exist without the pointless slaughter.
I’m not turning into a moralist on you here; there’s plenty of reasons to have combat, and I am not in agreement with my aunt when she says that the games are desensitizing entire generations. But when chasing after popular appeal, we need to keep an eye on the actual mass market. World of Warcraft is not mass market. It hasn’t even captured all of the target audience — at the Hugo Awards at Worldcon, they had to drop the videogame category because not enough voters bothered to nominate anything. WoW was in the lead — with a whole 13 votes total. This from a crowd that was organizing Regency dance lessons on Friday night, was avidly buying swords from the expo floor, and was running sessions on the best way to tie a corset.
I am not saying the combat is the issue; but it’s an issue.
They… don’t like waiting on other players in order to proceed in the game?
The issue here isn’t the waiting, it’s the assumption underneath that it’s about “proceeding in the game.” The point I was making in my commentary on the panel was that there’s an assumption that a game is all it’s about.
At the panel, Cory Doctorow posed questions to the panel that centered on the question of when the operators would start acknowledging the obvious, self-evident fact that these worlds aren’t just games. Of course, if you’re there only to play a game, then waiting sucks. (Of course, when I want to play racquetball, I have to wait a week for my next match. When I play chess, I have to wait for the other player to take a turn. Waiting runs through games all over the place.)
In WoW’s case, we have a game, purely and unapologetically a game. It is not a criticism to say that WoW drops by the wayside most everything else that virtual worlds have to offer. These are actually its strengths:
- There is no hint of political support in the game system (nor from the game administration, which participates minimally in interaction with the userbase). Instead, it is unapologetically a broadcast entertainment product, and the players are cheerful consumers.
- The game system actively works to limit a vibrant economy from forming. Trade is limited, as the most valuable goods can only be obtained by each user separately and cannot be traded. Microeconomies, independent merchanting, and the like are prevented by providing a perfect-information economy. Variation in goods is severely limited.
- The game system also actively permits independence, strongly limiting the amount of interpersonal interaction that is required to accomplish anything, until the higher levels. In fact, by ensuring that users are always on a task, chance social encounters are minimized. “Third place” spaces are not designed into the game’s landscape, and what passes for them (such as Ironforge) are less like neighborhood bars than they are like New York City streets.
Not to pick on WoW; many of the “gamier” worlds have these characteristics as well, and it’s been a natural progression throughout the whole history of Diku-based games. Again, these are virtues in this case; the goal is strictly to lead players from one entertaining fight to another, give them nice rewards, and make sure they never wonder what to do next. In fact, most of the time, other players are an obstacle to this happening, which is why instancing is on such a rise.
All of these points are of course 180 degrees away from the things that virtual worlds can offer as unique qualities. Those are the things that virtual worlds can offer than single-player games cannot. In contrast, leading players from one entertaining fight to another, giving them nice rewards, and making sure they never wonder what to do next is what single-player games do excellently.
The common statement is that “playing alone together” is the thing that people want. This may in fact be the case; actual interaction with others is just too damn time-consuming, and therefore not worth it. Right?
They… want to choose who they socialize with and when, rather than have it forced on them?
Choice is not a bad thing. But let’s be honest: by and large, WoW and other gamey worlds work by limiting choice. Limit classes, limit where you can go at any given time (the first time I died in WoW it was because I stepped five feet off the road; it’s a very unforgiving game if you don’t go where you are told). Again, this is a virtue for this purpose: it streamlines the experience and limits confusion on the part of players.
The ability to choose whom to socialize with is effectively a way to reduce the amount of people you come in contact with; it’s a paradoxical situation. Given the ability to choose, you choose only the comfortable, familiar. In the case of a heavily team-oriented game, like the endgame of raids, you need that to function at maximum effectiveness in the game, because it takes a lot of practice to execute well as a team.
There’s a flip side to this as well, of course. I’ve talked before about the issues with homogeneity and insularity; we even have recent study telling us that one of the virtues of MMOs is that they bring together disparate groups of people and expose us to alternate worldviews. One of the surprise hits of the year is High School Musical, a show about precisely how worldviews are a cage. Not to be too lofty here, but the political situation in the Middle East demonstrates this quite clearly as well; it’s exactly the fact that people are trying to “choose who they socialize with and when, rather than have it forced on them” that is causing problems writ very very large.
No no no, this is all wrong!
At Worldcon, Cory Doctorow and David Brin got into a slightly heated argument whilst on a panel about “whether science fiction can change the world.” David bemoaned the fact that much of popular culture is teaching the wrong lessons; as in his well-known essays bashing Star Wars, he pointed out that much of what is rising in media scifi and fantasy (and particularly in the games) is advocating outdated and actively pernicious social models. This is something that I wrestled with when doing SWG; the fact that a small group of players actually used the same phrasing as Nazi apologists did when explaining their Imperial roleplay bugged the crap out of me.
Of course, I already expounded on these invisible lessons once already.
Cory rebutted with the fact that we do see immense engagement on the part of users of cyberspace. Both of them are right, of course. David points out that having all-powerful superbeings like Jedi around, better, dreaming of being an ubermensch is, well, comforting, and also a lie. And Cory points out that users are participating and taking control more than ever; but people do want to escape from this world sometimes too, and passive consumption is still by far the dominant mode of interacting with entertainment. Answers always lie somewhere in between.
So yes, what World of Warcraft does right are also the things it does wrong. It’s all about what the goal is, and their goal is very specific: sheer escape. And at that they succeed brilliantly.
As I write this, this comment was made:
Raph, Raph, Raph… please just let go of it…. this whole “socialization” thing. You’re starting to sound like one of those cognoscenti that the world has passed by, leaving them to mutter to themselves in a corner.
WoW is a huge success because it does things right. Not because the unwashed masses like it, but rather because it simply does a MMORPG right.
As long as we agree that it does a MMORPG right, sure. One size does not fit all. It’s not about unwashed masses and cognoscenti at all. Rather, it’s about whether a given product design hits a given target market. There’s a large core gamer market for whom WoW hits all the buttons, for whom the concerns/strengths I listed are all in the strengths column.
But there’s two sides to every coin. There’s also a market for whom those items fall in the weaknesses column. There’s a market that is half and half, and so on. The relative size of the markets is very much in question. An audience comparable to that of WoW’s plays a game with no combat whatsoever.
In the end…
All I am saying is that all of these are viable choices. But let’s have our eyes open about why we make the choices — both on the developer side and the player side. Let’s be aware of the implications of the choices.
The natural trend of the gamey worlds is towards Guild Wars, the Korean “lobby game” model. The shared world is in many ways an impediment. WoW struck a very nice balance there, and is rewarded for it. If this model continues to dominate, then virtual worlds will continue to become like TV and other mass media, and will continue to acquire the characteristics of that, for good and ill (consumer culture, disposability of content, rapid cycling of hits, hit-driven culture, limited user participation, high production values, reassuring content, and so on). At some point, more will question why have the “massive” bit at all; it incurs a lot of cost and then gets designed around in the actual game.
The lesson of WoW, most fundamentally, may be that the unique things that online worlds bring to the table just aren’t actually mass market. The game systems that really exploit the scale of massive worlds are exactly the ones that are getting tuned down or phased out as the WoW’s live development progresses.
For those of us who like those unique things, well, there’s fortunately a large media landscape, and it’ll keep getting bigger.
48 Responses to “Giving them what they want”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
You have managed to sum up my thoughts on exactly what SOE (amongst other develeopers) should be told. I hate to go on about it like the thousands of other ex-SWG players, but trying to copy WOW with the assets SWG already had was a massive mistake. Lego Star Wars managed to be the single most popular Star Wars game ever for exactly the same reasons as WOW is the most popular online game ever (I hasten to call it “MMO” as it’s similarity to existing “MMO’s” is limited). It made an easy to follow game, with no real negatives, and polished it until it gleamed. Most MMO’s will never be like that, and MMO gamers accept the fact…even enjoy it.
The spreadsheet accountants need to stop thinking ‘licensed game + online monthly fees = $$$$’. Making games good for the sake of them being good is enough to be getting on with, trying to emulate the success of WOW too closely will only disappoint everyone concerned.
[…] Comments […]
WoW, I could see from first announcement, was making no effort to be a game that would interest me. So I never even bothered playing it.
I’m sure some people think it’s fun, but I’m not one of them, and I never will be.
Well said, Raph.
MMO gamers usually can’t see the forest for the trees.
I find it interesting that most fans of the “DIKU” style, Gamey MMOs consider any notion of Worldy MMOs to be loathesome. As if the very existance of a Worldy MMO would somehow wipe out all the Gamey ones.
Can’t we all just get along? 😉
[…] Raph sigue con el tema despu�s de algunas intepelaciones al art�culo original. Interesante lectura:EnlaceEl �ltimo p�rrafo es fundamental para entender las preocupaciones que los “mass media hits” aportan al contexto global:”The lesson of WoW, most fundamentally, may be that the unique things that online worlds bring to the table just aren�t actually mass market. The game systems that really exploit the scale of massive worlds are exactly the ones that are getting tuned down or phased out as the WoW�s live development progresses.” [ Editado Tue Aug 29 2006, 10:13PM ] �No obres nunca sino de manera que puedas querer que la m�xima que rige tu obrar se transforme en ley universal� […]
That’s a key problem. How can you have a game system that exploits the scale of a massive world when you are not mass market? How do you feed people broccoli when Bill’s All You can Eat Pork Ribs is next door? And how do you make them pay for it?
No it’s not. It never will be. While the formula might not be: ‘licensed game + online monthly fees = $$$$’, if it is run by a company, the end result is going to have to be the $$$$ part. With a small company, we might be able to whittle it down to $$. But the $ remains. Habbo still hasn’t turned a profit. Presenting that as a model doesn’t sit terribly well with lots of investors. $$$ now plzkthnkbye.
While combat might not be the thing for all people, it certainly does attract a great deal of people who are willing to fork over 15 bucks a month. Many of the people I have talked to about games like WoW, who don’t play video games balk at the whole money per month thing. Granted Habbo and others use an advertising model that seems to work in some cases, but advertising by its very nature requires large amounts of eyeballs.
So how can you monetize a small playerbase that is adverse to paying money on a regular basis?
Well, I am not privy to their finances, but I do think that not being able to turn a profit with 6m users in the trailing 30 days speaks to a mistake in the business model somewhere.
In terms of WoW, what it does is monetize content delivery to a targeted audience with pretty specific desires. That’s a recipe for a high price point. It may be that Habbo simply hasn’t figured out what its targeted audince will pay for. Hardcore fans of something have very little price sensitivity. I am sure there are hardcore WoW fans willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month.
Oh, and on your other point… you’re right that it can be hard to get people to “eat their vegetables” so to speak. I think there’s partly a question of what sort of purveyor you want to be — someone selling just empty sugar snacks, or someone who sells something healthier. Not that WoW is empty sugar snacks, but it does (to my mind anyway) have high fructose corn syrup as a key ingredient, so to speak. For that matter, it’s not like what I have done is short of sugar either.
There’s some sort of middle ground there.
I also think that the conclusion I came to, that the core qualities of MMOs are what limit their adoption, aren’t really the end of the story. I think there IS a large market for some of those things.
“powned”
lol.
And to the above Poster, All of that is just “all about what the goal is“.
Depends on what your Goals are.
I’ll be watching. For all its faults, pre-CU SWG was a fascinating place to be. Without the weight of a massive license, and with a more stable platform, I’d be eager to recapture some of that.
I would welcome a game which encompassed a very large world but did not rely on combat. Why must every uber-character be the guy with the most Hit points and most expensive armor/weapons? Why couldn’t a player become just as powerful as the political leader of his town? Or, the finest artist in the region? or even the most productive farmer on the continent?
Many games have included these other aspects, but they have never allowed you to become actually “powerful”. Only the high level warrior is powerful. Everything else is just dressing or diversion.
In another article from a day or two ago, someone asked what the future would be. Would there be countless WoW clones?
Here is what I offer. Keep WoW. It works, that much is clear. But complete the thing. Add in the other world elements. Allow players to exist as any character they wish. Offer them the ability to create secondary characters that might fullfill NPC roles. I would have a great time building my reputation as town drunk!
There is more to the world than soldiers. There should be more to a virtual world than just warriors.
I wrote the original comment (or “flame”, if you prefer :).
First I want to say, Raph, I admire you for taking my extremely snarky and critical post and, rather than simply dismissing it entirely as an extremist flame without any worth, recognized the (somewhat) valid arguments I had embedded in it, treated it as a challenge to yourself, and responded to it in order to clarify your own views.
In fact, you’ve done to me what I’ve been doing to you – I rarely agree with you, but I continue reading your blog because A) it makes me challenge my own assumptions about game design, and B) I know that I can sift through that which (I think) is worthless and still find an occasional idea that’s a “diamond in the rough.” So, thank you for not “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”, and actually responding to the seed of truth in my comment.
Your answers are mostly very valid, though I still have some strong reservations. This time I’ll put them forth without sarcasm. 🙂
I feel that you constantly make a mistake similar to what Ernest Adams described as “bottom-up design.” Adams describes programming projects which were “cool software”, but not fun games at all. Similarly, I feel that you focus so much on making “cool virtual worlds” that you very nearly forget to put a game inside of them.
In other words, I feel you tend to want to create virtual worlds which are more gratifying to yourself as the creator (or, at best, to other outside spectators of the virtual world) than to the people who actually “live” in that world.
Your mention of Economic Systems in virtual worlds is a prime example. It’s very cool to have a virtual world with a fully-functional, naturally-evolving economy, in which inflation and recession are possible. But it’s not all that cool to the players of the world. Sometimes, it’s cool (just as a novelty)… a lot of the time, it’s basically irrelevant… and sometimes it’s an outright pain in the neck. To some extent, the same argument applies to Political Systems: they have some possibility of being fun, but just as much possibility of being a headache.
(When you think about it, aren’t Economics and Politics two of the prime examples of the exact sort of boring, annoying real-life bullshit that we specifically go to games to escape? In real life, Economics and Politics are necessary, but not important. In an ideal world, I would be able to focus on what was important – spending time with my family – rather than what was merely necessary – keeping my family safe and fed. So I would have no need for a government, nor for money. Both of those things are necessary evils… and we go to games to escape to a more ideal world where they are, at least, less necessary or less evil.)
Your articles about UO’s resource system were another example of this tendency, I think. You describe a system which was really brilliantly-designed, and probably would have had a lot of “emergent behavior”; but in practice, it would have made very little positive impact on the player’s day-to-day experience of the game. Though I think the system was cool and fascinating, I regard its omission from UO as a correct decision: everything that system did could have been (and was) replaced with much simpler mechanics.
So I think your design philosophy tends far too much toward the ivory-tower, fascinating-but-impractical side. But, I acknowledge that we need a good dash of that in this industry: experimentation is the only way that new things are discovered, even if 999 out of 1000 experiments are flops.
Still, I feel that you would do well to focus less on “fascinating virtual worlds” and more on “fun games”; and be willing to actively remove elements of a game which contribute little to the latter, no matter how much they may enrich the former.
I would say that the problem lies in with who you were trying to target, people that do not play video games. Of course they would not be thrilled to pay a monthly fee to play something that they have always chosen not to partake in.
I would say that instead of using them as the example for people that like non-combat, you should look at players that enjoy things like The Sims. It does, after all, top the list in the PC section that Raph linked to. In fact, I have seen many variations of that list and the Sims series are always on top. They have demonstrated that they are not shy about forking over money for the various expansions to that game.
I might like combat, if it were more interesting. Killing 20 kobolds is dull as dirt. If I’m on a PvP server, I will actually wait for an enemy player character to heal up and be ready for a fight, before I attack him. Weak targets are not interesting to me. He should have an opportunity to defeat me, or at least flee. 40-man-raids sound like a collosal waste of time, to me. I am not a factory worker in an assembly line, stamping the same shape over and over. I am not a cog in the machine. I don’t really enjoy joining 39 people, attacking some collossally dangerous Disneyworld animatronic behemoth that should easily be able to sit on the entire army, but seems to have less intelligence than a thrice-crushed cockroach. I find the whole thing mystifying.
Combat-focused games dominate because we need something for the computer to mediate. Without some sort of computer mediation, we lose a lot of the reason why people visit and, more importantly, pay to play our creations. Bringing people with similar interests together can help, but it’s limited in how we can monetize that without becoming obnoxious.
So, the goal here is to find something that we can have the computer mediate without it feeling unnecessarily artificial. Combat works nicely because it’s a bit messy to get into “real” combat in the offline world. Modern people also rarely get into life-or-death combats with melee weapons, so we don’t have much of a frame of reference to see if something is “realistic” or not. (Well, a person should be able to tell that smacking an opponent with a weapon for a minute without them dying isn’t terribly realistic, though.)
Trying to mediate social interaction, being the likely next most popular activity, doesn’t work because we do have that frame of reference. Trying to define relationships purely in terms of mathematical terms doesn’t work. If it did, then we would have kick-ass AI already instead of still having to rely on boring dialog trees.
Raph wrote:
There’s some sort of middle ground there.
Yeah, there is. But, there’s a lot of room for failure. Too often developers try to try something that becomes the equivalent of “sugar-coated vegetables”. This just ends up being unpopular as it still turns off people interested in sugar, but it also alienates people who actually want to eat their vegetables for good reasons.
This is where a good designer really needs to get things right. The main thing the poster Raph replies to in the main post misses is this: sometimes people don’t know what they want until it is offered. Did the masses living in the 1500’s know they were missing out by not having television? Would many people have said, “I wish I had a box that transmitted images of entertainment straight into my house”? Probably not. Yet, TVs were invented and I’ve heard that they are pretty popular…
My thoughts,
This point seems to crop up often in the discussion of “what makes a popular MMO?”
It’s interesting to see that the MMO’s which use the world system of playing (such as SWG and EVE for example) are often the ones which put off many gamers initially; the popularity always seems to lie with the more hardcore gamer, who is prepared to put in the time to build their own reputation, as it where, within the world community of the game. SWG and EVE both managed to create player/characters who were infamous amongst the playing community, adding content to the game which cannot be matched.
I agree that many devs, Raph for one, enjoy crafting these detailed worlds in which they release the player to do his own thing. IMHO, these worlds are much more interesting. WOW does not strike the balance between the “led by the hand” and sandbox game types, but the dev team that can bridge the gap between the two forms will clean up amongst all online gamers.
Well, Anonymous, thanks for coming back. 🙂
Ah, well, there’s two parts to this. First off, I see virtual world design and game design as being two different (though overlapping) things. As I have said before, games get embedded into a virtual world (which might be very barebones and only there in order to serve as scaffolding for the game, or might be highly elaborate).
So this also means I see myself as both a game designer and as a virtual world designer, I suppose.
That’s doesn’t answer the critique, of course, but it should help explain where I am coming from. I quite agree that I have, in the big MMOs I have done, ended up spending too much on the world and not enough on the game.
That was part of the motive for writing the book, actually. To force myself back to game bootcamp.
No, I’m really not trying to “ant farm” as Damion Schubert puts it. The end goal is enjoyment for the users. If I only wanted to ant farm, I wouldn’t engage in all the effort; a sim would do as well. The point behind the systems is to provide things to do, fun activities.
Again, this is a fallacy. Stating that it’s “not all that cool” when there’s tons and tons of gamers who enjoy games centered around economic simulations (like say, the entire branch of Tycoon games) seems silly. What’s more, we’ve regularly seen lots of users engage in complex economics activity in these games. At one point, 50% of the entire userbase of SWG owned a shop. Saying that things like price variability is just a novelty ignores the basic psychology of shopping, for example.
These sorts of activities may not be interesting to you, I grant you. Heck, shopping isn’t all that compelling to me either. But looking at it from an audience point of view, I recognize how popular an activity it is for others. I never have played the complex economic game either — it’s not my cup of tea (my own cup of tea is roleplay, and some light combat, mostly solo; you’d think WoW would be perfect for me, but…).
The choice to have, say, a perfect information economy, for example, means that you eliminate the “merchant” form of gameplay from the world altogether, even though running a business is a very popular form of gameplay. So me personally, I’d rather find a way to have that experience available for those interested in it, without causing undue hassle for those who aren’t into it.
I see there being two levels of political system. One’s the “game” of politics. I think there are people who would enjoy it, but it’s probably very niche. The other is the REAL politics of participating in the game and dealing with the actual issues that crop up between devs and players, which a TON of people engage in, very actively.
Necessary but not important??? What world are you in again?
What I see when I look around is a zillion people daytrading for fun, running businesses because they’d rather do it than work for someone else, and spending enough time arguing politics in their free time that Instapundit and Daily Kos are among the most popular blogs in the world.
OK, clearly a major sidetrack there, so I won’t go there. 🙂
I suspect that this depends on what you were hoping the day-to-day experience of the game being. In the “sport” like gamey worlds, where people all line up to see if they can kill Bill the Dragon, and he’s a challenge to be taken on like a carny wrestler or something, sure. But for those who want Fred to take Bill’s place, the current systems of static resets are profoundly unsatisfying.
The whole point of doing a simulation (and mind you, I wouldn’t do UOs sim in that same manner today) is to allow users to have an impact. The gamey worlds are predicated on users never having any impact whatsoever on the game. Again, different audiences here.
Actually, quite a lot of the cool things that it did and could do were never replaced and still aren’t in any games today. Simpler mechanics replaced basic things like spawning, yes, but there’s still no purpose to your actions other than accruing points.
If I do, then there will be one less person trying to make worlds instead of games. And that would suck. 🙂
Seriously, what I want to do is have fascinating worlds with a broad scope of things to do, wherein those things are fun. I suspect that if all the elements are fun, that ALL players would prefer that. And the path you describe sounds a lot like barebones worlds with one or at most two fun things to do. And I am bored of those as a player, and as a developer, because we seem to only make the same one fun thing over and over.
I take some consolation in the fact that those barebones worlds seem to keep copying elements from the broad scope worlds and adding them to the mix. Crafting in EQ would not have happened without UO, and dancing in WoW wouldn’t have been there without SWG, precisely because they were seen as irrelevant.
Now, putting on my business hat:
zabuni wrote:
So how can you monetize a small playerbase that is adverse to paying money on a regular basis?
The simple answer is: you don’t. Why chase after a small market unwilling to pay money? Especially unwilling to pay regularly for a project that has ongoing costs? At the end of the day, unless the game has some historical importance, you probably don’t want to spend the time and money required to keep it running on bare minimum support.
At the end of the day, you are correct in that these games are businesses. So, you need to find an audience that is either large enough to extract significant money from, or dedicated enough to spend large amounts of money individually. (Note that not every person has to be willing to spend large amounts of money, remember the 80/20 rule.) The benefit of having a large audience over a smaller one is that you need to average less income per person in order to make the same amount of money.
That said, you can have a relatively profitable game with what is considered relatively modest subscription figures. Keep in mind that the original Asheron’s Call was very profitable even though it only peaked, briefly, at about 120,000 subscribers (according to MMOChart.com). The same business principles apply in the game industry: know your audience, plan your costs, manage ongoing expenses, live within your income.
Following these rules ensures that your game will have a long life, even if you have a very modest following for your historically significant game. 😉
We don’t actually need the computer to mediate. And there are many degrees of mediation. The computer is mediating the most important part, which is embodying avatars in a space and letting them communicate. Everything else is gravy.
Economics is probably the best example of something where we want less mediation, because the computer’s attempts at it suck given the developers’ poor understanding of what is going on. Combat (or rather, the typical combat game), with all its numbercrunching and highly abstracted sim, is one of the good candidates for mediating.
The anonymous user argues that economics is “boring” and unimportant, and that a world without government is ideal. Indeed, economics has been described as the “dismal science”, and we’ve observed and perhaps experienced the problems of improper governance. Until I encountered the following definition of economics, I had not thought economics to be important and I had thought government to be uninteresting.
The definition alone was not sufficient to clarify economics; however, I had also been presented with the notion that economics concerns the balance of power in universal decision-making.
When scarce resources are allocated to satisfy an unlimited want, those scarce resources can no longer be used to satisfy some other unlimited want. When people are moved from a manufacturing center to a services group, the services group benefits from additional resources whereas the manufacturing center becomes disadvantaged.
The simplicity of the concept "to give is to take" is genius. Welfare? Charity? What wealth do these activities displace? In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, the player is presented with a variety of choices including charity. At a certain point in the game, the player can be charitable to a street urchin and then view the result of the charity. The beggar will be beaten by another beggar who observed the transaction. Charity to one person displaces the wealth that another can achieve, and in some cases, the displacement physically hurts the recipient of charity.
Government then can be seen as a system of rules that are enforced to effect the economy, or rather, the environment in which people allocate scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants. The subject of government and economics then became far more interesting. Why are some laws enacted? How do they effect change in the economy?
In the game world, there are no scarce resources. There are unlimited resources to satisfy unlimited wants. For a designer, this is the sandbox. In this sandbox, there is no need for economics. There is no need for government. Unfortunately, this “ideal” world is completely uninteresting; therefore, a designer must craft a virtual economy and a virtual government to effect change in the virtual economy to provide an interactive environment in which players can accrue experiences. Otherwise, we’ll have a series of sandboxes in which every player is immortal, infinitely wealthy, and unlimitedly capable.
The fantasy is fun. The reality is not.
I think that combat is a weakening as a premise for MMO’s. Combat-oriented gameplay, I feel, is meant to fulfill the player’s achievement needs. Losing is not fun.
Getting your butt kicked by some anonymous player (who may or may not also behave in an unsportsmanlike way) is a big fun-killer. Kicking the butt of an anonymous player (whose reaction to that loss may or may not reinforce your victorious feeling) can be an empty and pointless achievement if there is no real reward for you (or penalty for your opponent).
WoW fulfills those needs somewhat, but I can imagine that such gameplay gets stale for a lot of people after even a short while.
As much as it may not seem like it currently, the real world is not all about fighting. A lot of mundane things go on every day, and I’m not suggesting that you try to model that dullness, but a lot of fun can come from non-combat adventures so long as an equal measure of focus is given to that aspect of the game.
Killing Kobolds is like selling Girl Scout cookies after awhile.
Girl Scout cookies are tasty! Kobolds… not so much. 🙂
HAHA!
what?!
who died and made you arbiter of everyone’s opinions?
i believe the opposite is true. the economic game holds just as much, if not more, interest for the majority of players in a World. economic competition can be every bit as brutal as physical combat.
maybe the players in a Game don’t think economics is “cool”. but they’re only a portion of the overall population of people who want to escape.
I played an MMORPG which had survived much longer than it should have. Nearly every player had several maxed out characters and were working on others. The community is all that held it together.
The game had ceased to be about all the programmed in activities. No longer was finishing a “quest” even remotely challenging or fun. Killing off countless newbies did nothing but chase them away, causing the community to become smaller and smaller.
As a result of all of this the game changed into one of economy. Who could make the most gold. Who could barter for the most treasures. Who could have the finest armor and who could have the highest valued property.
These players easily transformed into online merchants, buying and selling at profit. Taking advantage of the less fortunante and gloating about their riches to anyone who would listen.
All of these aspects of the game far exceeded the game paramaters. There was no real game functions to facilitate these activities. The players made them up.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
The game in question is at http://www.terragaming.net
I don’t design games. The most I’ve ever done is contribute to some MUDs. Granted, I have a sketched out MMORPG design that I tinker with as a hobby, but unless I suddenly win the lottery and don’t have to worry about making sure my parents and I stay housed, it seems very unlikely to me that I’ll ever get to do it for real. Which sucks, because it’s something I’d like to try my hand at.
However, I play a lot of games. I’ve been doing it for years. And one thing I’ve learned about gamers during that time is that if you ask 50 different people why they’re playing a certain game, you’re going to get 30 different answers. Whether it’s an MMORPG or a single-player game, people key on different things that they like. I myself enjoy many activities, crafting and economics, in-game politics (guilds, alliances, cities), combat to some extent, exploration, and even socialization now and then. I prefer a game which provides me the opportunity to do all of these things in a meaningful way.
To focus an online game solely on only a few things that people enjoy in the genre as a whole, and then claim that your game fulfills the needs of the mass market, is just plain silly.
A truly mass market game would offer fulfilling, interrelated systems that every stripe of player could engage in. Those who liked combat could do combat. Those who liked economics could be merchants and traders. Those who liked being creative could be artists and entertainers. Those who liked being social could have houses and whatnot. Those who liked dealing with people could organize cities, nations, treaties. Those who liked exploring could visit the far corners of the lands. And every single one of them would have a rewarding and fun gameplay experience.
Oh wait. That’s not just a game. That’s a virtual world.
It depends on the person. People who really enjoy PvP often view the wins and losses in the same way that someone playing a game such as Asteroids might continually try to better their score. To them, the trash talk and immature behavior is just a reflection of the competitiveness of the activity. They don’t see anything wrong with it.
I’m a big fan of contextual PvP. One of the things I like about WoW’s implementation is the language barrier, although people still find ways around it. My favorite PvP system in any game right now is EVE online, because it is pretty much implicitly tied to resource acquisition and territorial control. This allows what in any other game would be a niche activity to evolve into something truly amazing – one on one battles become group engagements. Gangs of players fighting over territory become corporate alliances fighting for control of entire sectors of space. Individual skirmishes become wars. Diplomacy and espionage are carried out on all sides. Treaties are brokered and signed. All player driven.
If EVE did not have the space mining system (and the crafting/economics engines to go with it), and the territorial control mechanisms in the form of player mining stations and outposts, as well as the corporate alliance system, the simple act of a player pirate attacking another ship would never have evolved into wars that involve hundreds of players in dozens of systems fighting for the future of their corner of the galaxy. The entire metagame in EVE is player driven, specifically because the game does not try to lock people into one type of activity. People come to the game because it’s cool to fly a ship and blast other ships. They stay long-term because they become part of something bigger than themselves.
Beautiful assesment of WoW and it’s strong points (and weak points).
I think you may be right about WoW.
I’m a huge WoW hater, and a WoW subscriber. The truth is, WoW’s huge success is dragging down the rest of the industry it seems. Every virtual world is rapidly becoming this terrible “Kill monsters to get better items to kill more monsters” treadmill.
Personally, I would sell a limb to see a more realistic economy in an MMOG. An “economy”, however you define it, is a natural phenomenon of human society. If a game can create the proper conditions, then it can host a vibrant, complex system.
Personally, I play MMOs for the spectacle. They have a size and scope beyond ordinary games. Everything else is an aside to me.
You’ve taken something that’s a feature of the very early game and assumed it’s true for the whole game. The early levels in WoW are designed to guide you along and teach you how the game works while playing, and are thus very linear. The later game gives you a much larger number of choices about your character, preferred play style, and type of story you like. (Up to level 60 and a bit beyond, anyway – then the choices narrow again.) In fact, a number of people complain that by level 30 or 40, they have too many choices in WoW; they can’t do everything.
But this isn’t politics, or a war zone. This is a game. People play games to have fun, not to make the world a better place to live. If socializing with people you’ve never met isn’t appealing to begin with, forcing socialization won’t make the basic idea more palatable.
I like the option to socialize in massive games. That doesn’t mean I want to do it all the time. WoW’s strength (and the strength of a number of other games) is that it provides the option, but doesn’t force it. (Once again, this changes at 60, which is why there are so many complaints about the post-60 game.) Sure, that means there aren’t always people available when you want to socialize, but games that force socialization have a much larger weakness – the lack of options. If I can’t do anything entertaining on my own, the game will only be appealing when socialization is what I want. If I have the option to do other things, the game can be appealing for a much broader spectrum of fun.
The problem here is that the “unique things that online worlds bring to the table” aren’t particularly… unique. I can get all those things in the real world, interacting with people I meet in any metropolitan area. I don’t need to play a game for them. I do need to play a game if I want to fight monsters, save people from eldritch darknesses, or unravel hideous plots. Doing those things with others is fun, often more fun than doing them on my own, but I don’t particularly need living political systems or robust micro-economies to enable those activities. (Not that politics or commerce in a world or story line can’t enhance the experience, or be fun on their own.)
The unique thing about a multiplayer game is that you can interact with other people, not that you must. Games where extensive social activity is mandatory are a subgenre.
The Pastor wrote:
Trade and economy are not synonymous. The problems you described rest with economic problems in the game environment. Every decision that a player makes is an economic decision. Economics applies to far more than goods and services, markets, etc.
For an overview of economics in games, see Geekonomics.
For an in-depth accessible look at economics, read Freakonomics.
Aufero wrote:
People do play games to make the world a better place to live.
— Fifth Dimension has taught children math, science, and geography since 1981.
— The Virtual Reality Medical Center in San Diego, funded by the Office of Naval Research, uses virtual reality based on the military training game Full Spectrum Warrior to provide therapy for acute post-traumautic stress disorder.
— Engagement Skills Trainer 2000 from San Diego-based Cubic Corporation teaches marksmanship skills, squad-level collective defense, and judgmental “shoot-don’t shoot” tactics.
— America’s Army serves as an effective recruiting tool for the United States Army.
— PatrolSim IV enables law enforcement agents from San Diego Police officers to Navy SEALs to safely train for land vehicle operations on the road.
But that’s not all. There are games on sexuality, games for firefighters, games for hospital workers, games for biohazard management personnel, games for understanding politics, games for understanding the budgetary environment of France, games for fighting obesity in children, games for understanding diabetes, and there are even games that compete for the Nobel Peace prize!
People not only play games in pursuit of a better world; they create games to effect change.
Google: “serious games”
I started a long rant about business models and that the real money is made in merchandising and extention of the franchise.
I also ranted about no one being able to truely take advantage the unique Massive Multiplayer aspect of MMOs and using the scale of Civil War reenactment and European live-action roleplaying events as benchmarks.
Raph spoke of the tuning down of the MM component as WoW live deveopment progresses, but I see it really as WoW moving toward the sweet spot of mass market entertainment.
The benchmark of this development is the major spectator sport competitions, and the natural development of new spectator competitions like American Idol, game shows, etc. Following Pokemon model or making model, I won’t be surpise to see WoW become a negelected extension of WoW the Movie, WoW the cartoon, WoW the turnament, WoW-land, and lastly, but not the least, the interactive TV game that runs late night on your secondary TV/cable channels.
That’s what the mass market want 🙂
“the unique things that online worlds bring to the table” are VERY unique in terms of entertainment media.
online games offer something that television, books, movies, singleplayer or even multiplayer games could NEVER offer.
and you’re right. they offer exactly the same thing that real life offers. quite possibly on a much larger scale. but in addition to that, they allow you to bend the rules a bit.
unfortunately, so few MMOs seem to take true advantage of this unique offering.
pfft!
yeah. ’cause we’re not a social species or anything 😉
Aw, let’s face it, what people really want is Second Life in a strictly medieval fantasy setting! 😛
Maybe that’s true — some people are happy with hack’n’slash 2.0, but maybe a not insignificant number of people are looking for an alternate “reality”, but one that adheres to a certain fantasy setting (whether medieval, space, or whatnot).
I like being able to build in virtual worlds, although I’m not a fan of, for example, Second Life’s unlimited palette. As impractical as it would be, I want UO house-building in WoW with EQII visuals. I want “confined freedom” (how’s that for an oxymoron?)
Pretty much all MMOs widen up the choices later. But I stand by my statement. The choices gamey games tend to give are in things like “what tactics do I prefer to employ to kill things?” “Where do I prefer to kill things?” “Which things do I want to kill?” “Which gear do I want to wear to kill things?” and so on. Or do you mean to tell me that WoW opens up a heretofore unknown alternate mechanic? Compare this to a more worldy game like EvE, SWG, or UO, where the number of choices is far more substantive.
I guess the way I would put it is that the choices in WoW are like fractals — they are real choices, but they are all increasingly small elaborations on exactly the same choices as previously.
(Again, this isn’t unique to WoW. And again, this isn’t a flaw necessarily. It’s what we call “depth” after all. This is what fans of that particular mechanic need in order to hold their interest. Any other mechanic would need the same thing as well.
This one deserves a post of its own.
I agree on your socialization point; I cited it in the original post as a strength, if you recall. But I do think it’s important to have a nuanced view of the topic. The answer is not at one extreme or the other.
Then we should pack it in and go home. 😉 Seriously, from a design perspective, if that’s it, then WoW overspent dramatically on technology. There no need to build a virtual world setup just so people “can” interact with one another. You could do it with something far simpler, such as XBox Live or a more robust Diablo, as Guild Wars proves. Why have all the elaborated complexity involved?
If that is your goal, then you’re using an elephant gun to pound in a nail. What we ought to be doing is instead saying, “these are the things that this medium can do that are different. How do we create unique experiences with it?”
I feel bad, I don’t have the time to make as long of a post as everyone else =(
Drama vs. Comedey
Meat vs. Vegtables
Reno vs. ACLU
Let me just say;
At some point, this arguments read like an RTS designer arguing with a FPS designer;
“Players enjoy building a large effective base, through careful management of time, growth, and resources. Defensive and Offensive maneuvers however are also important”
“No! Players don’t want to have to be responsible for building the basses! The only responsibility they want is blowing them up”
…
Why is it every time someone says Guild Wars, or even World of Warcraft They feel the need to put in parenthesis (Not really an MMO IMO). Because we are in fact arguing the merits of separate genres.
Sports leagues, lobby games, whatever you want to call them, do not equal a full on virtual universe. They both however have a large online component. You know what else has a large online component?
Counterstrike =)
I enjoy Sim City, I enjoyed Half-Life, I enjoyed World of Warcraft, I enjoyed EVE-Online…
but for different reasons.
I have to go to my ethnic relations class.
I essentially agree with the first letter writer, but the entertainer doesn’t appeal to me. I want to be a spy. 🙂
Raph, I’ve enjoyed reading the comments resulting from your posts on the Worldcon panel. I will express a little concern, though, about my perception of a lack of focus in these discussions – I read through the posts, and it does seem like people are going every which way in their thought processes.
It then dawned on me, though, that these threads are a good summation of the state of MMORPGs, and why “focus” and “success” will ultimately prevail in this market. First, consider the tone and positioning of a lot of these posts. The “tone”? Lots of acronyms and artificial verbiage, theory and hyperbole. The “positioning”? Very exclusionary and basically elitist, as if the commentators are more interested in separating themselves from the “unwashed masses” than anything else.
It’s not an unusual phenomenon – I first encountered it years ago with opera buffs and audiophiles, each looking for the most obscure references to demonstrate that they exist in some elite category. I called it the “cognoscenti syndrome”, and its cardinal rule is that if one likes the same thing as the “unwashed masses”, then one can’t be a cognoscenti, now, can they?! At least according to them.
That syndrome is applicable here because of how people position themselves in their search for “perfect” (or maybe just preferable) virtual world. I don’t think many of us like grinding, and certainly not killing x kobolds. Most of us want an environment that is creative and open – look at the number of diehards hanging on inside UO – but not too open (Second Life comes to mind). The great divide in this search, however, is that some people take a more pragmatic view than others, and this is where “focus” and “success” come into play.
Many of your readers seem happy to reel off a list of obscure, “elite” games that only the cognoscenti seem to know or care about (I can do that too: ATITD and Roma Victor – see, it’s easy). Many people get wrapped up in what these worlds promise and fail to see them for what they really are – mostly flawed experiments. Blizzard, for all its supposed faults, could never be blamed for lofty rhetoric: with D, D2 and WoW you get what you see. The developers focused on providing a world that is certainly not lofty, but is coherent and effective, and by doing that ultimately provide a more satisfying experience to all but the “cognoscenti”.
Your reader’s posts, going every which way, are like the scores of niche MMORPGs – nice ideas that ultimately appeal to only a handful of people. The economics of current technology allow these “sidepaths” to exist in some fashion, but “success” in the world of game publishing remains reserved for those who understand how to provide the right balance of personal freedom against structure. Most people might not want to kill kobolds, but they will for hours if the world in which the kobolds live is immersive, seamless, and offers a perception of personal freedom.
P.S: Where is this treehouse that you jumped out of? A very amusing story of your first day in Azeroth. There’s a lot more there if you give it time…
Quoting Raph:
“actual interaction with others is just too damn time-consuming, and therefore not worth it. Right?”
Right.
The 25-35 peoples, the very core of “people willing to pay for a subscription model”, have not enough free time to dedicate themselve to a virtual world. What they want, and are willing to pay for, is 30 to 60 minute session of escapism.
If you can wrap the concept of virtual world around meaningful 30 minutes gameplay session, then you can have a successful virtual world.
(Hint: timesink is the designer worst ennemy)
That’s not entirely true. People don’t just play for escapism, and they want more out of the game than just that. There’s hundreds of single-player titles that fulfill that need just as well, if not better than an MMORPG. But the time constraint is a huge factor.
I wrote this blog entry something like a year and a half ago on my guild forums, but I think it applies here:
I’ve never liked games that force you to have to spend a lot of time organizing groups, and I think that’s one of the appeals that Ultima Online still has for me. Class based games that force group interaction for character development are simply not fun, and that’s why I’m interested in games like Fury or why Guildwars generated a lot of hype in the PVP community before it showed its true colors as a PVE game.
People need things to go in a game when they only have an hour or two a night to play. Just trying to organize groups with all the right classes so your party doesn’t get wiped, and traveling to the the place you want to go can eat up most of that two hour block in many games.
Games are fun when you are doing something, and the biggest problem I’ve encountered over the past several years is that you are simply sitting there idle when you can’t or don’t have time to group. The non group based advancement is so slow that most people simply give up and quit when they can’t keep up with their friends.
Great topic and nice discussion.
Video games used to be just for kids and young adults. However, those of us who started playing console games in the late 70’s early 80’s are now closing in on 40 and beyond. We still find the time and energy to play games, but our desires and intrests are vastly diffrent from the younger generation of gameplayers. From my perspective, game designers have failed to eveolve with the gameplayers.
I agree with Mike W, often times these type of dicussions de-eveolve into arguments on what is fun, which is totaly subjective. I prefer Civilization and Virtual MMORPG/Virt Worlds over linear/directed combat and FPS. But I acknowledge their right to exsist as a form of entertainment for some people.
To the anonymous poster, there are scores of people that enjoy the simulated politics and economies that can and do exsits in MMOs. These are the things that gives a game that “real world” feel, and for me that is fun. I have grown tired of playing games. I want to live a vitual life through my avatar that is complex, frustrating, rewarding and unique, all at the same time. I want to have to depend on other players to accompish goals and gain the necessities for exsistance. And I want them to need to depend on me.
To make an MMO that I would want to play, the Virtual world would need to be built first, and then add the game functionality to it. I still like conflict and combat. But it means nothing if you don’t have anything to fight for.
And yet many seem to think it’s their best friend. I think it ties into the subscription based model, and into the designer-created content (instead of player-created).
Raph wrote:
We don’t actually need the computer to mediate. And there are many degrees of mediation. The computer is mediating the most important part, which is embodying avatars in a space and letting them communicate.
Yes, but our worlds need more. Despite what the 3D web people say, you don’t need avatars and virtual spaces to communicate. In fact, given the relatively primitive nature, it’s sometimes better to stick in pure text for communication; it can be less distracting. There are also a variety of alternatives to complex 3D worlds: if we wanted to talk, we could use IM, email, or even meet in person.
Everything else is gravy.
Everything else is why people pay to play in our worlds.
This is why we need the computer to mediate something. Combat and managing inventories of items seem to be the popular ones. Just mediating communication between avatars isn’t enough. At this point, it’s a commodity and it’s not as easy to make a money off of a commodity.
Economics is probably the best example of something where we want less mediation, because the computer’s attempts at it suck given the developers’ poor understanding of what is going on.
This isn’t a question of the computer mediating, rather it’s a question of the design by the designers. The computer will mediate the economy even without having a fancy design: it will track currency, allow trades, etc. As I said above, the computer can also manage inventories (or digital objects, if you prefer), and this seems to be the other function people are willing to pay for besides combat.
And there are many degrees of mediation [a computer can do].
That actually deserves its own post. =D It’d be nice to have something to point to every time someone brings up the erroneous idea of MUDs as RPGs with computerized GMs.
Nice post, overall; I’m still way too behind on my blog-reading to comment seriously. (Not that that stops other people…)
[…] Here’s one Raph Koster’s blog entries that might be worth a read for some. It is, of course, pretty heavy on design philosophy but raises some good points about WoW and its success.https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/08/29/giving-them-what-they-want/ […]
[…] m�daille a, bien entendu, son revers. Toujours selon Koster, les forces de World of Warcraft seraient �galement ses faiblesses. Car le fun n’est “fun” que s’il correspond � la d�finition que l’on s’en […]