Buying your way to the top, again
This new gaming site Cafe.com is taking more than a few pages from the Korean model. Its a casual games site with a “game console” — the games are all embedded within this console. This is a common sort of feature in Korean games — the Korean version of Albatross 18, aka Pangya, had a whole desktop, for example. (BTW, I find it amusing that it’s hard to tell the game is about golf from the Korean site anymore… is that a guy drawing a sword over on the right?)
But that’s not the only tip Cafe.com is taking. You play through the “console,” and the reason is that it offers 3d avatars you can use to chat with others. And of course, there’s microtransactions. You can spend money in order to get in-game advantages at multiplayer clones of Zuma, Pipe Dreams, Puzzle Fighter, and so on.
Yes, you read that right — in-game advantages.
It’ll be interesting to see how well this flies with the Western audience. My recent suggestion that
I am increasingly unsure that the very notions of āearningā āpositionā make a damn bit of sense in these games. Itās a psychological thing, I recognize, and thus unlikely to change, but the constant measuring of oneself against the other people participating seems increasingly foolish ā itās like comparing the number of times youāve been down the waterslide at the water park. Why do we give a damn? Only because the gameās feedback tells us that we should.
met with reactions ranging from dismay to outright scorn. (The latter, of course, from my huge fans over at Fires of Heaven. š I wanted to reply to the thread, but alas, they’ve never approved me for posting on their forums!).
The commonest points here all have to do with the notion that comparing oneself to others is a fundamental incentive technique, which is quite true. Jeff compares it to giving prizes, which is dead-on. But I’m most interested in the undercurrent here, which is the question of what game we’re giving the prizes for.
In the discussions at Jeff’s blog, for example, the debate quickly centered around raids. As Jeff put it,
In a game all about killing monsters, the valued prizes are ones that help kill monsters, and milestone demonstrations of the ability to kill monsters. A raid isnāt really a ride, but actually is a challenge: they actually are kind of hard, frequently result in failure, and itās a big deal to win.
It doesnāt seem all that silly to get excited over a successful raid: those frequently do fail, in a game where improving your ability to raid is about all there is to do.
And over at FoH, there were a few posts that similarly emphasized raids, using the old phrase “the game really starts at…”
There’s no doubt that raids really are games of skill — the game is one of high-level team coordination. Everyone must execute perfectly, or the team wipes out. In some ways, it’s less like sports (which do rely on execution but don’t have quite the razor’s edge of success and failure — and have ever-fluctuating opponents), but than it is like certain sorts of exhibitions of coordination: team waterskiing, or circus performances, or group juggling, or musical theater. (I am sure that I will now get quotes calling me an idiot for comparing raiding to musicals. Oh well). Like most activities of this sort, preparation relies on endless amounts of woodshedding, of practice.
Under circumstances like these, RMT-purchased characters, or indeed RMT of any sort, absolutely encourages disdain. And it should; buying your way into the juggling match sure doesn’t mean you are going to be able to juggle at the level required. If you try, someone’s gonna get hit on the head with a flaming twirling bowling pin.
Early in his career, Eddie Van Halen turned his back to the audience whenever he played solos, supposedly because he was afraid rivals would steal his techniques. Had he insisted on doing this forever, very few people would have cared about his music. (We would probably assume “Eruption” was performed on a German synthesizer built from the spare parts off a fire engine.) People needed to see how his fingers worked. Only then could they understand that Eddie Van Halen was doing something they could not understand. His guitar was not a primitive machine that made it easier to meet girls and get free drinks; his guitar was a futuristic machine that was f***ing hard to f***ing operate. You can fake being cool, but you can’t fake being good.
That’s a quote from an article Chuck Klosterman wrote about the rise of guitar virtuoso videos on YouTube: the fact that suddenly, there’s a way to have extreme virtuosity, often of the cold, calculating, unmusical kind, on display and appreciated.
In guitar circles, and indeed in musical circles in general, we speak of musicality versus wankery — the latter being what countless teenage metalheads accomplish with sweeping, tapping, and a lot of hours spent in their bedrooms, whereas the former is often accomplished with the usual open chords strummed in the most basic of ways.
The point here being that we can give a badge for either sort of objective. Indeed, we can give badges and prizes for any objective the game offers. The choice lies in the hands of the designers. This echoes particularly in the case of the style of gameplay that FoH values most. Much of the discussion there centered on the issue of respect, and responses were all over the map.
Players understand the “earning” part – you respect someone a little more if they have incredibly nice gear, or are max level, etc (usually.).
…leveling has nothing, or extremely little to do with how skilled you are. There is no challenge in leveling your 3rd character to 60 (or 70) in WoW.
On a PvE server, with instanced content, I don’t give a shit if people pay for it or not.
On a PvP server with competition for spawns, artificial power boosts are complete bullshit.
The losers who actually respect people for in-game accomplishments? RESPECT? This is a fucking game.
I don’t think the word “respect” means what you think it means. Why the fuck would I respect someone who gets max level in (insert game here)? What the hell did this person do that I have to respect him? Spend time in a fucking videogame?
All I see here is a bunch of QQing from people who don’t have the time to play games anymore.
And so on. Part of the divide here is a disagreement about what the actual game is. For one it’s the actual levelling process:
Would I ever buy a character? Absolutely not – the end game is boring to me for the most part, its all about the adventuring on the way up.
For others, well, it’s not.
Granted they could have cut alot of 1-60 out, and just let you play for ~20 levels then you’re 60 playing with the big boys
Yeouch. The tail wags the dog: raiding, this extra appendage of an elder game, considered more important than the actual game. Or actual alleged game. Or alleged actual game. Whatever.
To bring it back to the guitar analogy, an FoH poster said,
Ā … [a] timesink is comparable to practice. People need to ‘practice’ playing their class so they can contribute and be productive when they are with their friends, and especially when with strangers.
It’s like playing the guitar. You can’t pay someone to learn some hard song for you and then you go rock out and wow the crowd. You have to practice for hours a day and learn that song yourself.
Part of the reason why it tends to be teenage guys who woodshed endlessly is because they’re the ones that have the time; part of the reason why raiding gulds tend to have the sort of players in them is because they are the ones that have the time. There’s real work going into achieving that sort of coordination, and of course these sorts of players have a strongly negative reaction to someone who buys their way in. But this is just one sort of player, and not even a sort of player who will always object. If they have “paid their dues” with another character, for example, and still want to play the raiding game, then they often do want to skip ahead with their alt. After all, they went through boot camp once already. Nobody makes them relearn scales just because they decided to pick up a second guitar.
Which also raises the point that the “boot camp” we tend to offer, the process of levelling, is actually not really great training for raiding at all. The games are different — sort of like how swimming laps and water polo are both played in swim suits and involve swimming. The unique and interesting challenges in raiding are not things that you learn just from group play in groups of six.
We were as an industry to design practice and training for raiding, it’d probably look pretty different: we’d gradually mke the groups larger, up through to raid size. We’d tend to always put you in raid situations, not quests or open-area grinds. We’d present problems to you that involved higher degrees of coordination. We’d make the typical encounter be one that you can rerun over and over identically in order to hone techniques.
And most importantly, the badges we’d give would be for doing it well, not for just doing it at all. After all, we aim to reward execution in a challenge like this. We’d want to give elegance points, perfection points. Do the raid without losing a man. Without losing a hit point.
To bring the discussion full circle, the issue is what we choose to give rewards for.
In the case of something like Cafe.com, or Pangya, or other games where you can buy points that actually let you do better in a game than someone else, what we’re seeing is a completely different incentive structure. It’s not about doing well at Cafe.com’s individual games. Success in the games is the prize, not the challenge. The challenge is something that requires hardly any woodshedding at all: committing enough to pour money into the company’s pockets.
This challenge has the virtue of being accessible to anyone with some spare change. In exchange for their commitment, they get positive feedback: specifically, positive feedback that very concretely shows others “hey, if you commit in the same way, you too can spank noobs!”
As I said in the comments over at Jeff’s thread,
…the idea that your accomplishment is trivialized because you have the shiny medal for the raid, and so does someone else who bought itā¦ it arises in part because we push these comparisons on the players. We could randomize the reward. We could reward for the first time you do any raid at all, or the tenth. We could reward not for completing the raid, but for just trying. We could reward for all sorts of things, but we choose to reward for the things that are most likely to drive envy, because thatās what the structure of these games is set up around.
Envy is indeed a powerful incentive. But it’s far from being the only thing that motivates people. Even in the standard level rat race, there are many other things that we could choose to provide badges and prizes for. And even if we do settle back on making players always compare themselves to the Joneses, surely there are better grounds for comparison than how many zero-risk challenges they have completed?
And on the flip side — part of the attraction of something like Guitar Hero is that you can have the feeling of having woodshedded without the pain. Even guitar players like it. Surely as designers, we can also come up with a way for non-FoH-caliber players to have the wonderful feeling that comes from a fantastically executed raid? Does Guitar Hero trivialize the accomplishments of Eddie van Halen? Not at all, to my mind.
In the meantime, the RMT debates are unlikely to go away; but I suspect that over time, as more diversity of games come about, we’ll see the whole issue start to fade into the background, so that these different player types can play in their own ways in their own places. And maybe by then FoH will let me post on their forums. š
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The quality of some of them really indicates that no ‘real’ thought has gone into the development and only into the money. But luckily there are more constructive things out there: Raph Koster’s website is one of those. His latest post, the one about Buying your way to the Top, Again, is one of those that opens up your eyes to things you took for granted but actually are different to what you thought they meant. I’m not talking about the way people actually buy advantages in games, but for me the article showed me more that what we
Nice to see that Klosterman article referenced. It is an interesting one.
As I understand it, Eddie turned his back to the audience to play solos because that was the headspace where he wrote them – standing in a room by himself looking at the amps. If he was looking at the audience, he couldn’t play them, because the audience was distracting. By turning around to look at the amps, he entered a comfort zone where he could produce the solos that made him the legend he is today.
The explanation that he did it so people wouldn’t steal his techniques has been invented because he often lied about his gear in interviews. Nobody understood why he would do this (his reasons were varied and complicated), so they invented this story that he was worried about people stealing his style. Over the years, people have stopped questioning this story altogether.
I am extending this point because it applies directly to game markets. Whenever a game does very very well, people try to imitate it. When this turns out not to make your game do similarly well, this is almost always blamed on some secret technique that the original game has – and it is. But the technique is not secret because the original game’s developers are hiding it, it is secret because you don’t know it when you see it.
Eddie could, at any time, have published a complete list of every piece in his kit. He could have photos of his rig in concert, so everyone would know exactly how it was set up and wired. And yet, if you duplicated every piece of that kit, you would not be able to play like Eddie van Halen.
But if you sat down and really busted your ass working on it, you could learn to play like that. You would not need his guitar, or his amp, or his effects. You would be able to plug any guitar into any amp with any collection of effects, and you would still be able to play like that.
Games are busily trying to copy the other guy’s setup, but they’re not actually investing any effort in trying to learn the magic. The magic is there, you just need to know what it is. WoW is the success it is not because it copied certain features of other games, but because it sat on the sidelines working out the magic until it had the answer. Copying its feature set will not teach you the magic.
Imitation is a basic process of learning, Caliban.
Basically, I think when it comes down to games, there are 2 ways to handle it.
RMT allowed, and RMT disallowed.
People who chose to play on RMT enabled games KNOW that is the environment they choose. This seems to have worked exceptionally well with the Station Exchange servers. Of course, the inability to purchase or sell goods in anything other than American currency kept it an amateur’s only server, and was effective at keeping bot teams/ige resalers out for the most part.
Playing on your average SOE/Blizzard/SE MMO server, and in competitive environs of both PVE and PVP servers, RMT can alter the game play. It contributes to economic spirals, which leads to tradeskill botting, loot farming bot teams, and mechanized mob camping. In order to keep up with the Joneses, you have to resort to illicit means. If there was nothing but cosmetic competition, thats not such a big deal. But contested content and pvp environments are NOT just cosmetic.
I’ll restate my first sentence. There are 2 ways to POSITIVELY handle it.
Offtopic: I really hate that FoH and other guilds seem to have the eye of developers. More and more they are catered too, and they are not even the majority. They are not typical gamers. /offtopic
http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27257-raph-koster-take-leveling-services.html
He isnāt out of touch with his playerbase
We are here waiting for him to build a game, if you don’t agree you arenāt his playerbase.
” YET THESE IDIOTS PAY LEVEL SERVICES TO PLAY THEIR FUN GAMES!!! HOLY CRAP!
I hope that others will see that when you strip away the fluff around the game and drop everything down to it’s most minimal presentation, raiding is comparable to musicals. Infact, I love that as a game concept, having to work with others to impress an audience, with choices of actions (Bow, give flower, faint, etc) rather than meleĆ© attacks or spells. I’m still not sure how you’d do it, but I think that would have a fair ammount of appeal to the right audience.
It’s interesting that Raph notes that the training one recieves in wow, if not most games, often differs from what you end up doing with other players in the end-game. Whilst following random links, I came across this master’s thesis which offers proof of what some may call the obvious – good in-game training improves player experience. It’s very much the same with DDR, which requires in my experience another player to teach you how to play it in order to be able to advance.
It all comes down to perception of value IMO. Players just want to have their hands on something that seems, in some way, valuable and special to them. It’s not so much that designers can’t come up with anything better to reward for or that they are focused on bringing out envy in players but rather I think it is the players who continually focus on whatever is scarce.
People just want what is hard to achieve. That is essentially how fashion is defined. In developing countries it is fashionable for a woman to be curvaceous as this is a display of wealth which is hard to obtain. In developed countries that is turned on its head and the models are all skinny. Because that’s what’s hard to attain.
And now to turn THAT all on its head, the problem is in defining a system where players can have something that makes them special even though, actually, they aren’t. Because most players aren’t special. Half of them are always below average.
Paying money to attain WHATEVER it is that is deemed rare or valuable is not the least bit new by the way. It’s not in the least bit new. Look at $100,000 cars, $1,000 purses or the array of plastic surgery options that are available today (with financing). It is in fact very natural for a society to start defining what’s valuable to “give a damn” because the “game tells them they should”.
The real challenging with synchronized juggling orchestras is figuring out how to motivate your jugglers to keep on performing and supporting each other for a very very long time.
Really though, paying money to spank up newbies will maybe drive venture capital to your company but at the cost of building a fishtank where the sharks rule.
Most of my dismay resulted from what I took to be hostility toward the current game and prize. Sure, it’s a one trick pony, but it’s a nice pony with a neat trick.
I’m with ya on getting new ponies, but can we keep that one, too?
I delighted in leveling-up faster than my guildmates: We explored to find good places to grind xp, stayed up late grinding them. I was a little proud of how long I could go without sleep, but the real accomplishment was finding those camp sites while all the other folk tripped over each other at the same over-crowded spots every other player was working.
I gambled that time spent exploring would pay off. Might not have.
Early on, people with good loot were proud of themselves for having been smart enough to do their offline homework, as compared to those with crap gear. Not proud of their character’s accomplishment, but of their own.
I just think there’s more depth there – ok, mostly unintentional and largely distasteful, but still there – than just comparing level to level, stats to stats and gear to gear.
There’s a lot of room for improvement just looking at what’s actually happening, and bringing it in-game; or seeing what intangibles can be made tangible.
I think I said over there, not 100% sarcastically, that’s also because they’d like to know how they are doing, and the game only ever says GREAT! YOU RULE!
I don’t think there’s an MMO out right now with a defined “endgame” (raiding, PvP, whatever) that effectively transitions players from the beginning solo/group activities into the endgame. More often it’s a “ok, now forget everything you knew and learn a whole new game” kind of transition. A lot more work could be done in this area I think.
If it were up to me I’d try to build in metagames rather than endgames. A person is participating in the metagame even if not aware, but as they continue playing they gradually become more aware of the metagame, and I start cooperating more with other players to influence the metagame’s outcome.
Even then, if you still wanted to have an endgame activity (I’ll use raiding here as my example), it’s still possible to construct content that does a better job transitioning players into the endgame. EQ2 has one raid instance that comes to mind that really does a good job with this. It’s a two-group dungeon, and right at the beginning you have to split the raid into two parties. Each party goes a seperate way and solves puzzles to open the path for the other party. When you get to the end, you fight the boss together.
If you make your raids events like this, where the focus starts out on the individual groups (which players are familiar with) and gradually transitions to the overall raid, you do a better job transitioning players to the endgame. So your transition in a standard 50-level scenario might look like this:
Level 1-8: Solo play, learn the basics
Level 9-15: Small group play, learn to work with others
Level 16-25: Full group play, learn group dynamics
Level 26-32*: Two-group collaborative play (focus on group)
Level 33-38*: Three-group collaborative play (more focus on raid, but still mostly individual groups)
Level 39-45*: Four-group collaborative play (mix focus on group/two-groups/full raid)
Level 46-50*: Four-six group raiding (mix focus on two/three-group teams and full raids.
* – Single-group play continues throughout all levels.
Back on the RMT topic – I agree that if a game is designed for it from the beginning and players know what they’re getting into, it’s fine. I look at it like playing Magic: The Gathering. You could always go buy more booster packs to try and get more rares. Everyone knew it, everyone could do it, and therefore you just did the best with what you could afford and when the other person played a Black Lotus or whatever that you hadn’t been lucky enough or rich enough to get, you just dealt with it as best you could and moved on. No reason an online game can’t be like that too, as long as players know on the front end that “this is an option that everyone has, and it’s not illegal”.
Sure…
We could do a badge for THAT, rather than just for the grinding! š
Hmm, I think the various embedded economic games and political games actually do it fairly smoothly.
But then whatever would I do with the rest of my time?
If you’re a game developer, what "rest of your time"?
If you’re a consumer, how much time do you have? š
I think it’s interesting that most replies here are talking about the whole money angle. The most interesting point Raph raised in my view is that what kinds of actions a game rewards defines the whole nature of play and interaction there, and that there are tons of possibilities for that other than the very few that have been explored by game designers so far.
It resonates very strongly for me with my most recent insight (or at least distillation of past thoughts into a short, graspable quote.) I think one of the very most basic truths a designer should embrace is:
GAMES ARE ABOUT MEETING PEOPLE.
This was not what games were about in the past. But they are increasingly what they are about now, and will be even more so in the future. Fail to recognize this reality at risk of being left behind in the never-ending race for “the ultimate game design”.
Following Dr. Cat’s line of thought:
GAMES ARE ABOUT MEETING FRIENDS TOO
Some friends like to buy things together (or whatever motivation shopping fulfills). Other friends like to compete or work as a team. There are many motivations that we can design to appeal to.
Cafe.com obviously is designed to appeal to the friends that likes to spend money together on game activities. Getting to the “top” in this game space is not the same as getting to the “top” of games like WoW, so the value and opposition to RMT will be different too.
Sometimes accomplishment is not the focus of the game. Sometimes it’s the journey and social aspect of the game.
For example, I expect casual and social driving games that have great graphics and real driving routes to be a hit in the Western markets. Winning races, getting the best gear, or other type of forms of accomplishment will not be the key focus for this game. Self-expression via car & avatar design, riding together, experiencing an event together will be the focus. And if they want to pay $1 to be able to experience virtually the winner’s lap at Indy 500, why not let them spend that $1.
Frank
@ Morgan Ramsay:
> Imitation is a basic process of learning, Caliban.
True, but imitating the tool does not teach you the craft. Look at Saint’s Row; it has almost all of the tools that make up GTA, yet somehow, it isn’t even remotely as interesting. As a game developer, I’m intrigued by some of the new systems they’ve created, and I like the way they’ve got some of the infamy and reputation ideas implemented. As a player, I laugh far too much when I ram into other cars and the drivers go flying through the windshield. There are good pieces in SR. A lot of good pieces. If you dissect it into a checklist, it’s got everything GTA has and more.
But it just doesn’t have the magic. There’s something missing. SR simply is not as good as GTA. Everyone who plays it knows this. GTA4 will turn SR into a historical footnote, but SR hit the market at the best possible time: roughly a year before GTA4 would release, and slightly after the message of “no GTA for a year” sank into the average gamer’s head. So lots of people bought it, and it’s certainly better than nothing at all.
The key element of imitation is that it is a process which forms PART of learning. You can’t learn exclusively by imitation. You must imitate, then ask why what you have imitated works, and how you can improve it. It is the improvement process which teaches; I can’t play Paganini’s 5th Caprice in A Minor, but I can imitate some parts of it, and I’ve learned a great deal about harmony and tonal structure by extending those parts in other directions. One such experiment led me to a series of connect-the-dots mutations that culminated in a sudden grasp of David Gilmour’s stylistic roots, and a series of original licks that might well have appeared on a 1976 Pink Floyd album. This process of learning is fundamentally different from the “woodshedding” I’ve done to learn the solo from Comfortably Numb; having done that some years ago, I didn’t really learn jack shit. I just chopped it up and dropped pieces of it into my playing, essentially sampling it. But what taught me to grasp the foundation of that style was a measure and a half of classical music combined with four to five hours of play. That “moment of clarity” kind of learning doesn’t happen if you simply imitate. Imitation is good, and can lead to great things, but it can’t stand on its own.
WRT Dr. Cat’s insight, ONLINE games are about meeting people. And it’s interesting to me that most online games are functionally about competing with those people, not collaborating with them. Even when we collaborate, it is to compete with other teams. I always preferred the MUSH style RP-based gaming, where your advancement was directly correlated to the frequency of productive interaction with others.
I’ve been unable to get Dr. Cat’s insight out of my mind this morning, because it’s nagging at some things I can’t express clearly. I’ll relate it to an anecdote, and hope someone else can glean useful information from it.
When I first picked up Vice City for my PS2, I had two friends over for extended periods of time. We constructed an elaborate series of rules for when control passed from one of us to the other, which could be boiled down to “pass the controller when you are wasted, get busted, successfully complete a mission, or have had control for twenty minutes” with a long series of “except” after each of the conditions. Between the three of us, we hammered the game to 100% complete in about a week.
This is the most fun I have had with a game since 1997 and to date. Think about that: the most fun I have had in any game over the past ten years was NOT built into the game. It was an artificial social construct which the game neither understood nor enforced. The average MMO tries to prevent this. You play for the goals they set, and any sort of meta-gaming is subject to disciplinary action when people complain. Indeed, account sharing itself is forbidden. This arbitrary limitation essentially limits the amount of fun players can have.
Dr. Cat is picking at the edge of a very important issue. If we get enough people picking at the edges, it will peel back and we’ll uncover something very important – a major part of the magic that can make MMOs much more interesting (MMI MMOs!) and consequently more successful/profitable.
Seriously, though. Look at how much time casual gamers spend playing casual games. Grinding on a camp wasn’t a whole lot different than playing a casual game for hours on end (and some of those gamers do).
Main point being, a badge grant there removes the gameplay I had been enjoying.
Though of course, other times I’d much prefer the badge.
Or some different casual games, for that matter.
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