Author: Zubon

A friend in college had an unusual day in dance class: “run slowly,” his instructor said. He realized that, while he could run, he knew it as a single activity and had great trouble analyzing it to a series of individual steps and motions. He did it unthinkingly. Programmers and industrial/organizational psychologists will be familiar with the epiphany that writing an explicit process or algorithm is really rather difficult.

I think of this every time I see a routine where someone has clearly learned the individual motions and trained him/herself to perform them forward and backwards or in unexpected combinations. Contrarily reference celebrity judges on TV talent shows, some of whom are exceedingly talented performers with almost no ability to articulate why or how, as opposed to say Ben Folds and his self-consciously technical analysis on The Sing Off.

Which brings me to the question of when games train you to do something and then punish you for doing it. Do we like that? On the one hand, it creates interesting content with unusual mechanics like killing by healing or requiring you not to DPS too quickly. On the other hand, it seems perverse and just plain mean to reward something throughout the game then punish you for following that training. On the gripping hand, that seems like taking the “game as learning” experience to its highest level, where you not only know the techniques but know when not to use them and when and why to swap parts in and out.

I want to go with that as the final answer, but not everyone wants to get that deeply into their gaming, and it is still the case that you can almost always look up when you need to change tactics rather than learning something. That does not make the advanced learning a bad idea for the intended audience, but it may make it mostly pointless given the actual audience. If I could get a fourth hand, I might note that many games already design a lot of content for the top 5%, and the rest of the playerbase can participate in the intended spirit if it feels up to it.

: Zubon

I approve of the way the Guild Wars 2 Living Story achievements incentivize experiencing content. While a few of the mini-game achievements reward aberrant behavior, on the whole the achievements do a good job of directing people towards content, rewarding multiple styles of play, using new content to feature old content rather than making it superfluous, rewarding both exploration and completionism, and not encouraging unhealthy completionism.
Continue reading [GW2] Ride Guide

The recent talk of the internet is a series of reminders that humans are still social primates, a species known for pack behavior and escalating aggression against outsiders. The internet gives you a broader range of outsiders to reach and the digital equivalents of poo and punches to throw.

If you follow the links in some recent collections of stories about incidents, you will find an indie developer driven from the market, death threats for changing reload times in FPSes or advocating cosmetic changes to currency, and add rape threats if the target in question is female. Okay, that last one is slightly unfair: add immediate rape threats if the target in question is female, add rape threats against the men too if it goes on long enough. (“Long enough” can have very short values online.) Continue reading This Needs to Stop

kiantremayne comments:

There’s a problem with MMOs not valuing adaptability in general – WoW’s raids tend to be designed around characters that are optimised to do one thing well, and the whole ethos of the game and its competitors/imitators has been to push players towards making characters that are one trick ponies that perform that one trick very well. These players feel somewhat cheated if the game then throws them a curveball and that trick that has served them so well up until now doesn’t work. You would need a game where every fight is different right from level 1 to train players into expecting to have to vary their tactics. WoW doesn’t EVER do that – high level dungeons and raids tend to have a gimmick or a dance, but nothing that fundamentally requires players to vary how they play.

This is a good insight. You are trained to play a genre in a specific way. If the vast majority of North American MMO players have been trained to have deeply specialized characters, they will assume that this is just how you play MMOs and wonder what is wrong with you. And you know, I could be in the wrong here, and I certainly would be if I went into a WoW raid and expected each character to be well-rounded; Continue reading Responding to Incentives

A half-finished project is often worse than useless. A half-built house is exposed to the elements and provides limited shelter despite significant expenditure of resources. The prospect of the completed house and all its amenities drives us forward, but (as when you cross the uncanny valley) the resources become less valuable in an incomplete project.

In the age of perpetual beta, we are living in half-finished houses. Games go online incomplete with the first months’ revenue paying for getting the game into a fully playable state, then ongoing revenue carrying the game into a state that might qualify as “going gold” where the discipline of needing to ship a physical medium forces a relatively completed state. (I am well aware that many “houses” went gold by walling off the incomplete rooms and calling it “built.”)

I have previously commented on Cryptic’s exploration of how early in the development cycle one can ship. City of Heroes launched missing its last 10 levels, then City of Villains did the same, then we had Champions Online and Star Trek Online. Kickstarter has changed the pre-order equilibrium for some games, not shipping early but selling the game before coding has even started. That might actually help things — if you already have the customer’s money, you need not rush to revenue. “You’re only late once, but you can suck forever.”

There are merits to releasing half-finished. But testing always reveals that some of the early ideas were not fun, good, or workable. You are free to revamp those during testing, but if you already sold the game and people are already playing, they are going to feel betrayed when you change a fundamental on them. NGE might have been a good idea in terms of design and the long-term health of the game, but you must survive the painful transition.

As commenters suggested under the “releasing half-finished” link, while you do not want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, you also do not want the marginally-better-than-nothing to be the enemy of the good. “Good enough” is often not good enough.

: Zubon