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Player Ingenuity
By Corvus | March 24, 2006
Preface: This post tries to cover a lot of ground, and quickly. I’m limited on time this morning and want to let my fingers dash ahead freely. I expect there will be follow-up posts which drill down on certain elements in more detail. Feel free to influence which aspects of it get follow up first by arguing, questioning, or encouraging, in the comments.
A while back Raph Koster asked what people wanted from MMOG’s and he received an onslaught of very interesting replies. Jeffool has posted a response of sorts on Outside Looking In. Jeff describes an idea for a MMOG which, quite frankly, I’d sign up for without hesitation. His design contains many elements that synch quite nicely with our plans for the Drachurae Cycle MMOG, including some strikingly parallel types of play. You should give it a read (link).
I was tossing his post around, thinking of an angle with which to reply, when Jeff, in a comment on the post, said:
I long for a game in which player ingenuity is as high a relevance as statistics when it comes to action.
I think that this request is a powerful, damned powerful if I may be so bold, commentary on the state of MMOG design and a call to action for anyone sitting down to design a new game for the MMOG space.
My February Carnival entry, Devil Designer (link), addressed designers that feel MMOG creation is an “us against them” field and, at worst, penalize players who work the system to their advantage or, at best, use pejorative terminology to describe their actions. I suggested utilizing a narrative approach to service, which would praise, or even reward, players for being clever enough to find weak points in your design.
But, really, it needs to go even deeper than that. Let me share a little secret with you. It’s a secret that every designer needs to be aware of when writing code and when interacting with their communities.
Your audience is smarter than you, always has been, always will be.
Now, you may have some incredibly smart people on your team. You, yourself, may be Mensa material. The most vocal of your audience may be loud, opinionated, high school drop outs. Doesn’t matter. The audience, collectively, will have an IQ which outranks you. Unless you earn enough to hire one Phd per paying customer, you don’t stand a chance. No matter how controlled you try to make the experience, they’ll find a way to produce unexpected, and perhaps undesirable, responses from the system.
So you have a choice. You can fight a loosing battle, trying to craft a game which can’t be tricked, fooled, or otherwise manipulated. Or, you can design a system which relies on the fact that the audience will, at every opportunity, push the limits of your narrative* You can rail against the chaos that ensues whenever a horde of people is unleashed on an environment, or you can embrace and delight in it.
It’s more than just a personal approach, it’s a design approach. Every element of your game needs to take into account that players will try and use that element to their advantage. No wait… not take it into account, but rely on it. Focus on every rule, every situation, and ask yourself how you’d turn it to your advantage if you were the player. If you can’t think of a single way the player can use the element to their advantage… throw it out. Let me be clear, if it’s specifically designed to hinder any audience member’s enjoyment of the game, get rid of it. It has no place there.
But what about griefers?! What about ninja looters and the abusively rude? What about the hackers and what, Corvus honestly, what about the Gold farmers?
Well, first off, decide who your audience is. If professional Gold farmers are your audience, then please make sure they enjoy the experience. To my mind, of the above list, only Gold Farmers fall completely outside the scope of the the game player audience, as they’re not participating for the play, but for the 1r7-1007**. Whether or not the audience you appeal to includes hackers is a bit beyond your control. Almost assuredly, there will be people writing software to take advantage of security holes in your system. We plan on making it more rewarding to tell us about the security holes than to exploit them for yourself.
All the rest of the styles are perfectly valid methods of play expression. Instead of penalizing players who behave in ways you feel detract from the players around them, try guiding them to areas of the game where such behavior is the norm. When a players is flagged as abusive, have the entire system react to it, affecting prices and NPC’s willingness to provide tasks. You don’t have to be all things to all people, but be as flexible as you possibly can and design a system which allows for the player to triumph, even in unexpected ways.
I have, over the past year, written a great many posts which obliquely address this issue, from PJ’s Attic’s “reward desired behavior, discourage undesired behavior” design principle, to the utilization of plot vacuums,or aji as Craig Perko more cleverly refers to it (link), to removing the reliance on levels and level caps and the narrative dissonance they represent.
You see, a MMOG is not a static, unchanging, piece of art you present for the audience to merely interact with, but a fluid, participatory environment. Even in the relatively static game worlds of the current MMOGs, the audience’s participation with the environment effects change in the game experience. Playing Vendetta Online (link), which has an in-game mentor program designed to reward positive interactions with lower level characters, has been a remarkably different experience than WoW, which inertly condones a wide range of negative interactions between high level and low level characters.
Afterward: All right, I’m going to trail off here and let this stew in my brain for a while. I expect there to be plenty of follow up soon. For example, this post was originally titled Player Ingenuity and Cooperative Play, but as I obviously didn’t get around to the Cooperative Play portion of the topic, I’ll save that for another post. Every shift next week is a closing one, which I expect will mean plenty of time for meaty posts in the upcoming week. Have a great weekend!
*Remember that by narrative, I’m referring to the total game experience, not just the fulfillment of plot.
**I really need to stop resorting to leet speak, but by1r7-1007, I mean IRL Loot (i.e. cash).
March 24th, 2006 at 11:21 am
This is precisely what I’ve been talking about in many of my own posts: players are an incredible resource, GMs or designers are a limited resource. Games should be built to use the nearly unlimited resource of players to their best effect, rather than simply entertaining them. Plus, many players find that more entertaining than simply being entertained.
I’m having a very good day, so pardon this comment’s “me too”-ieness.
March 26th, 2006 at 7:17 am
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they shouldn’t remove everything that isn’t fun. There are instances where things that aren’t ‘fun for everyone’ but could make it far more interesting. Let’s say in WoW a pickup group makes it to the boss of an instance. The boss could make an attempt to make a deal with the players. The first two to leave their group and join his, if they win, split 3/4 of the gold that his super rare fancy shmancy drop is worth. Ninjas are possible in the game without breaking any game rules, and that makes being one as valid as any other play style. Some people are just greedy. And sure it can be discouraged, but imagine instead of looting, the players had to worry about that guy being not just a barrier to resources, but a possible foe. Besides, everyone loved Dr. Smith from Lost In Space.
Polling an audience of one (my brother LOVES WoW,) he said that while playing with a pickup group in an instance that if he found out that there was a ninja on the team, he’d dump them without a doubt. He’d rather play with a 99% chance of dying and getting no loot than a 100% chance of beating the instance and have a 1/5 chance of grabbing the loot because he has no reason to be afraid of death. But that gets me back to that whole use of multiple identities in my post. While on one level you have typical MMO deaths, there should be a looming feeling of more sterm consequences in which you lose something regainable, but missed. I don’t see it as punishment, just as incentive to be good at something before taking a huge risk. Though, nothing risked means nothing gained.
March 26th, 2006 at 8:41 am
You’re right, everything added doesn’t have to be fun for everyone. It’s just that nothing should be added to specifically hinder enjoyment by any member of your audience. Contrariwise, you should be including elements specifically designed to enhance enjoyment for all members of your audience. What happens when two different subsets of your audience want contrasting things? Well, find a way to appeal to both of them, if at all possible. For example, as you referenced: allowing players to drop from a group if there’s a ninja looter in.
I’m also not calling out any particular MMOG as having broken this rule (although I can think of several examples from a couple of them). I just feel strongly that it’s a good design principle to follow.
March 26th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
“Your audience is smarter than you, always has been, always will be.”
Wow, it’s been a while before I’ve fundamentally disagreed with you on something. Let me attempt to rephrase the above to demonstrate the cause of our disagreement:
“Your players are far dumber than you could possibly imagine, always have been, always will be.”
If a game designer counts on the intelligence of the players, they are (with a few narrow genre exceptions) almost certainly dooming their game to commercial extinction. Trust me, I run blind trials. Even intelligent people are stupid! Being stupid is endemic to our species.
However, the rationale behind your statement draws from solid foundations. So where’s the disconnect?
I believe the basic problem is probabilistic in nature. As I’m sure you’re aware, any probablistic population has in essence a Gaussian distribution. IQ is a marvellous example (with the caveat that the *sole* thing that IQ tests do is test people’s ability to complete IQ tests – there are many kinds of intelligence untested by IQ tests). The average IQ is 100. This is *by definition* true, since the definition of IQ is that the mean value is 100. Now remember that it is a Gaussian distribution. This means 50% of the people in that population are less IQ-ey than the people at 100. College graduates, for reference, average around 115. I hope that the implications of this are clear.
Robert Anton Wilson summed it up nicely by quoting JR “Bob” Dobbs: “You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.”
Okay, thesis, antithesis – time for synthesis.
“Individually your players are far dumber than you could ever believe, but collectively your audience is far smarter than you could possibly imagine.”
This has to be the way forward: You must design the game to support players who, *individually*, are either lacking in linear reason (which *does not* mean that they are not intelligent, as there are many kinds of intelligence), or lacking in game literacy, but if your game is community based, you must accept that the network effect creates an audience who, through the power of distributed thinking, will be far more smart than any individual or small group of individuals.
I hope I have made this clear. I agree with you, but I disagree with you, but I feel we can be in accord without too much argument.
Take care!
March 26th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Chris, we don’t fundamentally disagree, I just fundamentally didn’t express myself clearly. Thanks for giving me my second talking point for further posting this week!
March 28th, 2006 at 7:32 am
The conversation continues in Taking Advantage (link).