Devs learning from gamers
The discussion with Moroagh continues, with the blog post Game devs learning from gamers (yes, I know it’s hard), part I. Alas, there’s no comment function over there, so I can’t reply directly in context.
The post is about the parable that Moroagh wrote a while back. The core point that Moroagh raises is a good one: designers have a strong tendency to say “the game should be played this way,” and to be resistant to alternate modes of play. I could maybe make the case that designers have that tendency because it’s core to their role: saying “the game should be played this way” is a decent, if not all-encompassing, description of what game design actually is.
That said, no designer worth their salt tries to change human nature, or assumes they have complete control. It’s just not in the cards. Moroagh is absolutely right to call designers on this.
That said, Moroagh’s laying out of the intent with the wife character in the parable misses why I said that the wife wants a playgroup, not Scouting. Yes, the wife is savvier about human nature, savvier about incentive structures, savvier about designing the experience in general. But this paragraph in the original parable is what undermines everything for me:
The scout leader’s wife pulls him aside and says: “Look, if I host a birthday party I don’t put the puzzle games right next to the chocolate cake and I don’t expect people to first solve the puzzle to get some cake. Some won’t like cake and some won’t like puzzles but that’s OK. Those that like puzzles will play it and those that like cake will have some. As long as everybody is happy and has fun!”
If there’s one thing that developing online games has taught me, it’s that “everybody is happy and has fun” is not only impossible, but foolish. A given game isn’t for everybody. Trying to make it for everybody is more likely to make it unsatisfying to all of them.
Further, the wife says,
The wife tries to calm him: “But hun, it’s like the cake and the puzzle, some like one, some like the other, some like both. Those that like to solve riddles surely will try to solve them even if notes are around. Can’t you be glad they shared with each other and enjoyed your story to the end? It must have been an amazing story if they wanted to read it all so badly. A story like a chocolate cake!”
First, there’s a fallacy: “Those that like to solve riddles surely will try to solve them even if notes are around.” This is just inaccurate, and again, it’s based on human nature. We take the easy way to the goal. The hard way is hard. And we are cognitively designed to find the easy way. It is very very difficult to have the self-discipline to always take the hard way. If there’s notes around, most of the folks who would have to tried to solve the puzzles will use the notes.
The second problem, though, gets to (dare I say it!) the age-old art versus entertainment question.
Can’t you be glad they shared with each other and enjoyed your story to the end?
Well, if you’re just out to make the boys happy, then yes. You’re an entertainer. You don’t have any particular thing to get across, you just want people to enjoy themselves.
But if you’re out to convey something via the puzzles, then absolutely not. Your work is a failure. It’s someone seeing Schindler’s List and saying “look at the pretty pictures.” The story is the irrelevant part to this scout leader’s mind. It’s not the point; any number of stories could have been swapped out. The immutable piece, the core, is the puzzles.
Now, we can argue back and forth whether the scout leader is right to feel this way or not. I don’t think that it is worth it. The kind of people who create for the sake of the puzzles never change. They are in it for a different reason from those who create for the entertainment. And just as it’s wrong for the game designers to force the players into their mold, it is wrong for players to force game designers into the entertainer mold alone.
Some commenters mentioned that all this has a lot of resonance for instructional design, and it does. Because this scout leader is consciously an educator. (I would make the case that entertainers are unconsciously educators). His instructional design is bad, because the challenge to be overcome is not organic to the objective. How to teach knotting? Not by having knotting as a stop-over point as people try to get the to the top of a mountain. It should be a mountain that cannot be climbed without knots.
There is no doubt that in the parable, the wife has wiser things to say. But the wife is not consciously trying to educate. Read this paragraph again, but try thinking if the scout leader is a math teacher:
The wife tries to calm him: “But hun, it’s like the cake and the puzzle, some like one, some like the other, some like both. Those that like to solve math problem surely will try to solve them even if the answers are around. Can’t you be glad they hung out together in the classroom with each other and enjoyed tossing paper airplanes at each other? It must have been an amazing class if they wanted to be there so badly. A class like a chocolate cake!”
No, the math teacher is not happy in the least. He knows that sure, maybe some kids who like math will do the math anyway. Though if the answers are laying around, probably not. And he knows that he is not happy that while they ignored the math, the kids all had fun in the classroom hanging out together and throwing paper airplanes. Indeed, next class, he’s going to remove the paper airplanes.
In the end, it’s about purpose. I am not willing to concede the complete death of authorial intent, and I don’t think that is what Moroagh is getting at either. But I do think that fundamentally, game designers need to learn from gamers — and gamers need to learn from game designers. Neither one gets to skip out of the contract there.
Moroagh concludes with
…the theorizing of games will probably keep on having negative stereotyping all around (”0-calorie food”, “free epix”, “welfare epix”, “slackers”, “carebears”). For me, I’ll try to stay away from those debates. Rather than trying to understand different needs they reflect the need to demean and put down. Not a lesson I would support as worthwhile teaching.
I think there’s certainly some snobbery there — entertainment is, in its own right, a noble and very difficult pursuit. At the same time, there is a general recognition, I think, that experiences that are entertaining and educational in some manner are better. The form the education takes might be literal increases in knowledge, problem-solving, etc; better understanding of patterns, or human nature; merely inspiring people; or many other things.
I don’t really have any scorn for people who just want to “whittle” mentally, so to speak, to entertain themselves in a way that requires no challenge whatsoever. I do it myself sometimes. But I recognize that when I do, I am being lazy. We’re all lazy sometimes. And I do think that making content intended for the lazy is basically encouraging people to be lazy, and that is irresponsible. So I do have some scorn for content creators who intentionally create “zero calorie food,” and I do think the analogy is valid to an extent.
I am not at all opposed to having a buffet with both junk food and good food available. Fundamentally, the task of the good designer is to make the good food taste better.
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Devs learning from gamersThe discussion with Moroagh continues, with the blog post Game devs learning from gamers yes, I know it??s hard, part I. Alas, there??s no comment function over there, so I can??t reply directly in context. The post is about the parable that Moroag
I’m having trouble reconciling this perspective with the loose, more emergent play style of worlds like Habbo Hotel – where the designer throws “toys” into the environment knowing that players will come up with activities that are not rigidly structured game mechanics but still create an experience with more potential impact to them and the community. It would be easy to critique this as lazy from a traditional perspective. In social MMOs, even fantasy MMOs at certain points, there is play that happens that may or may not be a game. The social dynamic and emotional impact of emergent player-created “play” can be more meaningful than a designer-created structured game mechanic. Sometimes you just need to know how to get things started and when to get the hell out of the way.
Raph wrote:
Guy Kawasaki raises the same point about businesses in one of his recorded keynotes. I don’t think you can fault just designers for this mode of thought.
Often a business will launch a product for a specific market but a different market will pick the product up. Then, the business will act to repel their unintended market in usually a failed attempt to attract their intended market, again. (Sound familiar, gamers?) Guy humorously advises entrepreneurs, “Just take the money!”
Ironically opposite Moroagh’s position, Guy also says that a business should never try to please everyone; in fact, he encourages businesses to polarize people, as great products should.
Do you have any figures to support this claim? In my own playing, I always attempt to solve the puzzles on my own. I only consult walkthroughs when I’m stuck for so long that the game is no longer fun. The moment I feel like abandoning the game is the moment I “cheat”. At least in my case, “cheating” of this sort is nothing more than protection against sadistic game designers. Consulting a walkthrough interrupts the flow of the game. If anything, I’m more inclined to believe most players would prefer not to do that.
Puzzles should be challenging, but never so challenging that your intended audience feels compelled to cheat.
Chalk up the 3rd aspect as interactive Story, alongside the World and Game aspects. It’s hard to do well, and easy to punt on. But most every legendary video game has that aspect. It is a fine art. Different from games in that they offer no challenge nor learning. But how many people listen to music versus people who play games?
Going back to the Guitar Hero theme, my guitar is busted, I can not invoke Star Power. Which, is fine, except for the fact that I bought the game to play a particular song and I can not do that because I can’t beat Slash. I think it’s a great skill game, but I’m not too interested in that, personally, I’d rather just be able to pick from a wide variety of songs to play. If I’m on ez mode, I should be able to, don’t you think? Somewhere between looking for a cheat code and returning the guitar I lost interest, as I play on ez mode because I have one or two other things to do besides mastering the guitar duels.
As a person just starting off designing his ideas for two games, one an MMO, and one a single player action RPG experience, I will separate the two ideas.
For my MMORPG, “The Celestine Legacy” the world is >completely shape able by the players, Terrain can be changed, cities can be leveled, and towns can be forged… at least in my vision. To achive this, I would need to have a good GM to player ratio, GMs would be more like D&D dungeon masters, and have a project leader for each GM team.
For my second design idea, it is a completely static narrative about an opera singer who gets thrown into an alternate reality where everything is more vibrant than her old Victorian-era time/reality. She becomes unable to speak, with armor permanently attached to her body.
So, I do see what you are saying, and I think there is place for both styles of play.
And frankly, I’m tired of static “MMORPGs” where all the players go along the same path as all the players before them. How boring is that?
If eating the cake is stipulated on solving the puzzle then people will do whatever necessary to eat the cake and not solve the puzzle.
If you want players to solve your puzzles you simply can’t offer some other incentive other than the puzzle itself. I really think that is the root of the issue, because some people WILL want that cake, and even the ones who like solving puzzles like cake.
So you just have to send everyone who doesn’t like puzzles to some other game where they can eat cake and remove the cake from the scenario; then your puzzles will get solved.
You’ll find that the games where you do this are probably either one- single player where your rewards are not directly compared with the rewards of others or two- games where the puzzle IS the reward (ie portal) or both.
Adrian Lopez wrote:
Depends on the player’s motivation to play. I happily use cheat codes and walkthroughs for most single-player games. I know I’m cheating according to the rules, but my goals are not what the designer(s) intended for me.
For example, I printed out and followed a 1,000-page walkthrough for Final Fantasy VII and liberally “enhanced” the game with GameShark. Once you’ve played a few RPGs, you’ve played them all; at that point, the only substantial difference between them are their characters, stories, dialogue, and cinematics. I played FF7 to read and watch the story unfold.
On the other hand, I used cheats once or twice in online games, namely Quake 2 and Counter-Strike, to combat the players who cheated first. The controls for kicking players with a majority vote are useless when most casual players couldn’t identify sophisticated cheaters even if their lives were on the line. The only effective recourse, without leaving the server or having the ear of the administrator, is to bore the other cheaters into leaving. (In this respect, cheating can actually be an altruistic act.)
When you cheat in a first-person shooter, you behave much differently than when you play normally. For instance, even with only a wallhack, you’ll gaze at walls as you turn corners, maintain targets in your crosshairs through walls, and quickly point to targets through walls to test the alignment of your crosshairs with your anticipated aim.
A sophisticated cheater knows these behaviors and makes corrections, such as using peripheral vision instead of maintaining line of sight with the crosshairs, but will occasionally falter, sometimes intentionally to essentially throw the dogs off the trail…
People are more apt to trust seemingly random behavior than consistency, possibly because deep inside, they don’t want to accept that they are predictable. To identify sophisticated cheaters, you have to be observing them extremely carefully, limiting your tolerance to coincidental behavior and always questioning players’ motivations to act.
Interestingly, once you’ve cheated in a online game and returned to normal play, you’re often much better off than you were previously. I’d attribute this effect to the fact that you gained information about how other players behave that would not have been available to you without a lot of practice. You can see this effect nicely in competitive online games, but the effect undoubtedly occurs even if you’re just reading strategy guides or walkthroughs for cooperative online games.
It certainly can occur, just as much as the opposite. Cheating to completion certainly offers immediate benefit when the challenge rewards a token of skill rather than actually imparting skill. Cheating to completion and realizing the formula/solution/concept in play can certainly benefit you in later stages if you’re genuinely stumped. However, just as much as that activity can bridge a gap, it can become a crutch.
If you want to eliminate the cheating on the lessons, there may need to be a variety of ways to teach it.
Here, cram 30 kids in a room with one adult and expect all of their learning styles to fit the teacher’s instructional style. Which was put together in a curriculum by the department chair. Who’s overall approach is governed by a principal, and a superintendent, and a board, and minimum standards dictated by the government (2008 will be a fun year!), and so on.
A lot of game designers (I generally exempt most of those around here from this characterization) seem to think that works out great.
Kerri Knight wrote:
Well, not all game designers are Will Wright. Most are powerless to change the state of affairs.
Some people in the comment mentionned that they always try to solve the puzzle first. And indeed, i also think this only applies to certain games.
It does not really apply only to single player games and/or games where puzzles are not related to a reward or are the reward themselves. For example, you could have a really funny puzzle that is a part of a mmorpg and most players wont try to complete it unless it has a reward (experience, items…). And if there’s a reward, they’ll use spoils to complete the puzzle, because it’s more efficient.
Game designers should learn to make games where the reward is the game itself : if a game is funny enough, i dont need an additional reward at the end of the game. In fact, an additional reward at the end of the game would break the stability of the game.
Also :
I knew some math teachers who were great entertainers. And it doesnt mean they were some clowns throwing paper airplanes around in the class. It was actually entertaining to learn math with those teachers.
See what i mean again ? “Learning math was fun” “solving the puzzle was fun”. Of course, if you add a cake in the equation, even if learning math is fun, most students will stare at the cake for the entire duration of the lesson.
Last thing, many people tend to oppose challenge and fun, but this is inaccurate. Something can be fun and challenging. People tend to believe it’s not possible because as long as you’re entertained, you dont see the challenge as something painful, therefore you dont see it as something hard, and if it’s not hard, it’s not being seen as a challenge.
This reminds me of the difference between “surface learners” and “deep learners” in education theory. Typically, the former have some particular end goal (eg. getting a qualification) whereas the latter have understanding the subject itself as their goal. In virtual worlds, we have the “surface players” who want to go straight to the end game and beat the big raid bosses, and the “deep players” who enjoy the journey. Teachers much prefer deep learners to surface learners, and designers much prefer deep players to surface players.
In education, most surface learners would probably like to be deep learners too; after all, if they want a qualification then they intend to use it to get a job in the area, so they must at some level be interested in the area per se. They just don’t understand the material as it’s taught, therefore they look for short-cuts.
Teachers will, under such circumstances, typically blame the students for not having the motivation to learn what is being taught. This is like a game designer chastising the players for not playing what was designed. The reaction to this is to blame the teachers: it’s their fault for not teaching what the students want to learn. For us, it’s the players blaming the designers for not designing the game that they, personally, want to play.
Ideally, a teacher should teach a subject in such a way that surface learners will become deep learners to achieve their goals. In virtual world terms, the surface player is shown through the gameplay the structure of the game, the point of play, the benefits of such knowledge, and therefore what the designer is trying to say to them. In the same way that deep learners learn more (and enjoy their subject more) than surface learners, deep players play more (and enjoy their play more) than surface players.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Richard
“A given game isn’t for everybody. Trying to make it for everybody is more likely to make it unsatisfying to all of them.”
Yes. There are no hard lines here. Songwriting can be commercial (see ‘Three chords and the truth” which resulted in the Nashville “Chord Police” producers), it can be artistic (see Kate Bush), it can be artistic but made to sell lots (see Joni Mitchell), and so on. It is author intent but also producer intent and promotion intent and so on. One might say, the more of those points of view one has to acommodate the weaker the vision. On the other hand, a song like “Iris” was a master stroke for hitting all of the above and this simply means hits are hits because they are rare and real standards (say “Louie Louie”) are even rarer.
A game designer for a game firm is in a commodity market. That is the deal for shredding the ‘natch. The average VRML hacker is making 3D worlds to express themselves and to learn. Both perfectly valid. An X3D designer has a different market, say ‘collaborative CAD’ and the game designer should be wary of trying to make a game of collaborative CAD.
What is interesting to me is that ‘cheating’ might exist in any of these but in some, will be more opportunistic and rewarded and in others, punished fast and hard. When I write about ‘results-oriented analysis’ it is my opinion that studying the class of the act is tightly dependent on the class of the reward and that is simply another way of saying ‘this is what I value’. Shared values are the means to determine classes be they games or communities of players. And yes, one person can be a member of multiple classes.
It sounds trivial when put that way, but I think it points out what is worth knowing when designing for ANY market: what are the choices and how do I as the chooser of choices (not making a choice, but determining the selector list), optimize the design for the market I want to sell to. The market may be a market of one and that is perfectly valid. Jeremy was not unhappy to be a nowhere man yet when he boarded the submarine, he adapted nicely.
Adaptation at the boundaries of classes both stable and in phase transition is the essence of strategy. This I think, is the interesting topic for the game designer.
Maybe it’s also because society is, in general, token based.
When you get a high grade, your GPS stays up and you’re more liable to get into that college you dream about. If you do community service, it goes on your record, so you can get into that college you dream about. If you do well in sports, you’ll be given a scholarship.. to go to that college you dream about.
When you go to your college, you’ll get a degree so you can have that job you’ve always dreamed about. When you get your job you can have all that money you’ve always dreamed about.
And teachers wonder why students cheat, just as developers wonder why gamers do the same.
Pardon me, GPA not GPS… Hah.
I’m definitely in this camp. If you want people to solve puzzles, the reward for doing so has to ultimately be just further access to more/better puzzles.
When you put a sword behind a puzzle, a sword whose purpose is only to make killing monsters easier, you can’t act surprised (nor make sweeping generalizations about human nature) when people who care nothing for puzzles ‘cheat’. It’s not a failure of human nature, nor of the puzzle. It’s a failure of design.
Will some people do the puzzles? Sure. But odds are they’re going to be the minority, because most people who like to do puzzles will quickly determine your ‘kill’-centric design is not for them. The design selects out most of the people who enjoy puzzles and thereby skews your sample and erases your ability to make general statements about ‘people’ cheating puzzles vs solving them.
Thats where I was going with the curriculum, and the upper faculty, and the board. Practices in education range from 20-200 years old and there usually isn’t a lot of compromise, innovation, or time for attention to individual needs.
I see no conflict. That’s what the designer is aiming at.
Not from games, but from general psych literature, yes.
A succinct way of putting a point I have been trying to make. 🙂
Finally — Richard, that is an excellent point. Hmm.
What’s the context? The “psychology” of real life is more diverse than the psychology of games. What’s true of human behavior in the one context isn’t necessarily true in the other. This is also the case with different kinds of games. The psychological motives for cheating in, say, an MMORPG, are probably not the same as those for cheating in single-player games. If psychological differences exist, there will probably be differences in terms of player behavior as well.
PS – Do you have any references?
It boiled down to “if people thought they could get away with it.” It has been several years since I read up on it, but I am pretty sure there’s references to it in Cialdini’s Influence.
Its wonderful that the failures of designers are consistent across fields. I’ve been writing a bit lately about people in the security field who complain about customers not using their products the right way (or at all)… and how fundamentally wrong that is.
The “art” of good security design is to make your users willing (if not eager) participants in the process… it is the same with game design. You don’t want them to “go around” your system (cheat) nor ignore your system (play something else), but use it.
There’s a discussion on the general/pub section of mmorpg.com about the comment “the game doesnt get fun until level XXX” some players say sometimes about their favorite game.
Well, in fact, i would like to say that i have been very surprised to see the following comment in this discussion :
But in fact, such mentality is so usual nowadays, that saying it surprise me would be lying. In any case, i find such mentality very disheartening.
It’s disheartening, because participating in an activity for the sole purpose of being rewarded later, after the activity is completed, or during the process of completion (for example, after “milestones”, in our case milestones are level gains, “endgame raid success” : defeating a boss is a milestone) is basically the definition of a paid job… In other words : something you’d do because you have to do it in order to survive (and live well if you’re lucky) in our real world.
Personally, i do not wish to “work” in a game.
I have no problem with being challenged, but i want the game to challenge my intellect, my dexterity, etc. Not my resistance to boredom due to insanely repetitive and debilitating gameplay. The big problem with challenging intellect in a mmorpg is the spoils. Most players will search solutions on google, i think. But if the “puzzles” are never the same (in other words : created by the players), then spoiling become less easy, and potentially impossible, no ?
Last but not least… For example, WoW, players get rewarded to complete some reputation grinds. This is only an example, many other mmorpg are more or less based on the same example to me. Let’s say you complete the reputation to exalted, now you can buy your nice new items… And you’ve got nothing else to do in the game. So, it’s more or less like offline games that gives you the best and funniest weapons/moves at the very end, when you are about to kill the last boss, so you can have tons of fun for… 10 seconds ?…. Huh ??
@ David: I agree completely!
The endless grind that’s so common in MMORPG’s nowadays make the games feel more like work than fun.
Everything that happens in a MMORPG is a grind. First you grind for levels so you can join the end game fun. And while doing that you grind for in-game money, items, everything you need to keep grinding your levels.
Then you reach end-game and what’s there waiting for you?
You guessed it! More grinding!! Only now you start grinding end-game content with tons of other end-game characters grinding for end-game content….
That is not the definition of fun in my book… It’s just a virtual job to get virtual assets.
I play games to escape the real life chores, not to have virtual chores in addition.. Heh.
>”designers have a strong tendency to say ‘the game should be played this way,’ and to be resistant to alternate modes of play”
could also be written as
“programmers say ‘the code works this way’, and are can be completely blind to alternate possibilities..
So, being a top game designer then means both thinking in program code, and being able to step back away from that elegant programming solution to look at it from a player’s point of view, or at least having the wisdom to get feedback from the people playing the game before making changes to “lock” people into the developer’s preferred strategy.
I know that no matter what the development team may have intended, players are going to try to find a more efficient method of “solving” the encounter. If there’s only “one way” to solve the encounter, the encounter becomes boring and dull very quickly, being reduced to an exercise of reflexes and button-mashing. Empty mental calories.
I remember the changes to the Hamidon encounter in City of Heroes. The players discovered the “one best tactic” to destroy Hamidon, and suddenly anyone who didn’t have the right archetype was being shunned in Hamidon groups, or were just standing around the sidelines while the few who knew the tactic executed it.
The development solution was not to “lock down” and invalidate the “one best tactic” in order to force players to play the encounter “as intended”, but rather to create multiple possible ways to take Hamidon down while at the same time making the encounter somewhat tougher if the players stuck to any single tactic.
In other words, getting the “cake” at the top of the mountain meant that you could take the lift up, but you still had to “know your knots” in order to remove the cage of ropes around the cake.
Yes, however they don’t have a specific objective for the player and they are not going to attempt to score or measure the outcome. Although cake in the example is a reward not an alternate activity, I find it easier to relate to the wife. The potential for emergence is better under her approach and more like the early childhood learning in preschool. (I might be just restating Richard’s point.) Although it’s not a solution, emergent play and cheating inter-relate in a completely different way as well.
Not to go too far off topic, however the balance between narrative and game mechanic is a common topic. I see emergent play as the third leg of that tripod and the interplay between structured mechanics and emergence should come up as a topic more often. It fits easily into the scouting metaphor with a few minor adjustments as well – instead of the cake, let’s just put a pile of meter/yard long pieces of rope with no specific instructions, ignoring the obvious danger :), and see what happens.
But they do! (Or I do, when I make a system/object like this). The objective is that the player do creative things, really, whatever they want, with the object. That is what the object is for. 🙂
In fact, you could sum up the three levels of game designer that way:
1. Designs stuff.
2. Also thinks systemically.
3. Also thinks from a player’s point of view.
It is very hard to pick up one of these three skills. All three is extra tough.
Speaking of parables, lets remember the wise sayings:
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
And going back to parables, and think about the meaning of this…
In biblical times, there would have been that one scout who studied all the knots inside and out, and then noticed similarities in nature itself in poetic fashion, and never actually reached the top of the mountain due to his revere in that poetic nature. And this scout would be taken under the wing of the scout master and gone on to bigger and better things.
I mention “biblical times” to stress the point that this is all as old as mankind itself is. And it’s not likely to change.
Yes, “just take the money”, and on the way collect the “deep learners” to help them mold themselves, this is what the wise folks do.
It’s how arches were made.
Playerbases have been coming up with far more elaborate collaborative efforts than designers initially implemented, intended, or envisioned since about….2 hours after MUD1 went live :9 (complete guess).
Server/shard culture impacting events have taken place that make beating some scripted AI in some copy of a dungeon that will be reset within 24 hours to shame. The playerbase can create their own scores, measurements, and even set their own personal benchmarks.
Scouts gain more than a badge when they’ve shown aptitude in a skill, they’ve shown a further step towards preparedness for complex challenges involving a wide array of those skills. Lets not forget, the whole thing is structure for interaction. Should a game be both a framework and the filler? Did the designer of your house pick your furniture?
The game is reaching out and influencing me, teaching me things, and providing social potential. Why can’t I reach out and influence the world a bit, teach some things to the game about me (feedback goes 2 ways, right?), and provide social content?
Much as in the real world, when someone (either through close social circles or some reason that has put you on a level of social awareness) you’ve never met before ‘recognizes’ you, its a bit inspiring. When I talk about badges being a display of personality more than viewed as a list of conquered enemies (I call those scorekeeping styles ‘pelts’), I see potential for people to make informed decisions about the potential of their peers’ interests and motivation. Like having a Bartle (SEAK) floating over everyone’s heads, only with a bit more granularity and maybe minus the floating right over their head :9.
I agree with your main point, however the smart designer creates an environment conducive to emergence. If the player community comes away with a feeling that they were the authors of the activity, that’s great. The designers often deserve a little more credit than is apparent because they often have a concept of what will emerge. That being said, some of the thing we take for granted in MMOs were likely created by players first. (Raph or Richard – Were guilds first created by players or designers?)
I think it’s more accurate to say that players will take the fun way. In many cases this is the easiest way, but not always. A hard challenge can be fun! If this wasn’t the case, nobody would ever play games on anything but the easiest difficulty level. Ideally, you give the players plenty of options to fine tune the challenge to their abilities. If you don’t, they just might use cheats to do so. This can work both ways, as there are cheats that make games more challenging. As was mentioned, things do change when the game is multiplayer and competition enters the equation.
I don’t think math teacher is a good analogy for game designer, though neither is scout leader. Most people don’t learn math because they enjoy it, they do so because they are forced to in school. That math class isn’t optional in the sense that a game is. Its goal is education first, with fun as a secondary (if anything) goal. Personally I think games are the opposite. Certainly it would be very difficult to design a very fun game that also teaches calculus (though such a thing would be very useful).
I think people could use some encouragement to take a break and not work so hard, to be more lazy. I don’t think there is anything wrong with laziness. Even if I did, I think the average gamer does enough work (and learning) during a long day of work/school to deserve a break and play some entertaining games. When I was little (and even now) my alternative to gaming was watching TV, which I think is a fair standard to measure against. I don’t think games are any worse in that context.
So, in general I personally don’t care for games to be anything more than entertainment. In a world where everyone could play games all day long I might be more interested in holding them to higher standards. But for now I am happy to have games, to quote Onstad (of Achewood), as a “Momentary diversion on the road to the grave.”
Gene, I don’t actually know. But I can tell you that twice now I have had intreresting guild experiences.
First, on Legend we made some hardcoded guilds, for people to join. This was how many Diku-style games did it (indeed, originally, “guild” came from what character class you were). Players ran with these, but quickly demanded the ability to set up their own, and the system evolved into that.
On UO, we didn’t have a guild system at all at launch. Players started doing guilds anyway, and eventually I coded up a system that matched what they had come up with.
Yeah, we’re definately orbiting the same mass, here.
Every bit as much as the author deserves some credit for the vivid imagery that forms in your mind when you read a book. Ever been to a concert in an empty venue? Quite a different experience from one in a packed house. The great musicians are the ones where the audience is even more of the show than they are. I’m not just talking about rock or other loud music with drunken hilarity and stage diving, watch an audience in a quiet southern blues rock dive. Some incredible artists can work that indescribable magic into the air, and a lot of it comes through the audience in very subtle ways. Nearly every media can do it, a lot of them have the benefit of a few thousand years of advances in understanding that massive scale gaming doesn’t.
So absolutely, artists deserve their praise, you’ll never hear me say different (except when I get praise :9). However, I admit to being snobby about who I’ll call an artist and who I’ll call an ‘act’.
I think I just realized something….or rather have found words to a concept I hadn’t been able to express before:
The audience is a medium.
An interesting statement. Lately I’ve sort of lost interest in playing games that exhibit this tendency. I greatly prefer the opposite–immersive stories that contain gameplay to string them along, but where the stories are really the core of the experience. Examples: Okami, Mass Effect. I don’t expect anyone will figure out how to build MMOs like that anytime soon, though…
Yes, Kerri. The audience IS a medium. Sometimes they are a Large.
Now the really hard part is figuring out what to do when the audience is wooden vs water vs fire vs fat.
I wrote a blog on a lick I call ‘The Mean Drum’. I won’t reference it but it describes the problems caused when a band arrogantly pushes the audience to madness right around closing time. It’s a bad bad idea. Trolls do it in online lists.
There is a LOT one can say about gigs and types of gigs, how to control a night, how to structure the act so the audience has a good experience without the bad stuff, and what kinds of controls need to be in place when one goes South. A game with a storyline works similarly. There are transitions that you can think of as phases, emotions that can be artfully manipulated and so on. Functionally you will come down to type, frequency and amplitude which sounds sterile but isn’t, but also you will in music come down to the ear, the eye, and the feel for the room.
As I said earlier
“Adaptation at the boundaries of classes both stable and in phase transition is the essence of strategy. This I think, is the interesting topic for the game designer.”
Phase transitions and feedback mediated controls at the transitions should be a topic game devs study intensely. Musicians do it at every gig where they are free to pick their own songs. When they aren’t, the reasons for that are also worth knowing.