At this point, everyone is talking about the Age of Conan issue with DPS. In short, they tied doing damage to a trigger in the animation sequence, which meant that slower animations would do damage at a different rate than faster ones. And all the female combat anims are slower, so all the female characters do less damage per second.

From a game grammar point of view, this is a clear example of getting the wrong end of the stick. Recall the distinctions between the “salad” and the “dressing” of a game — the “salad” is the actual game, and it can be represented in many different ways.

In particular, you can certainly take the typical MMO combat game, even the realtime varieties, and model the game proper with cards, dice, or numeric outputs. In fact, hardcore players often do the latter in order to analyze how they are doing, because it’s easier to run statistical analysis on text logs than on 3d graphics.

As I have said before, if you get the “salad” right, then the dressing — the storyline, art, music, characters, setting, theme — can only serve to enhance. Start with the experience design, and if your core is rotten or an afterthought, you’ll be putting lipstick on a pig.

Folks working on teams tend to push for the primacy of their own discipline, and these days, with so many games being primarily about experience design and not about game design, it’s easy to put experience design at a higher priority than the mechanics. An animator is not going to want to be told that his carefully crafted ten second animation may be sped up and played in one second. He will rightly point out that a human being making a motion in one second versus ten stands very differently, and distributes weight in a different way, and that therefore the animation.

But the only reason to do the animation in the first place is to convey that the action happened. It is a piece of systemic feedback, comparable to turning a Magic card 90 degrees, or tipping over the king in a game of chess. You might as well light up a green light over the stick figure’s head. For that matter, the question of whether or not the character is female or not is also purely an aesthetic choice. They could be red or black checkers and play the same.

Just yesterday, I was commenting that there are two rare and vital skills a game designer needs to acquire: the ability to see the game in their head with no dressing at all; and then the ability to see the game in their head with no mechanics at all, as a player sees it.