Category: General

General

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Persistence of This One

A couple weeks ago, Andrew, a blogger compatriot at Systemic Babble, responded to a problem I was having with single-player games. Namely, I was not playing them because of their lack of persistence. It was an off-handed comment to emphasize my uninformed thoughts about the Vindictus beta, where I thought that the beta characters would be wiped on a live launch.

There are two points I want to discuss. The first is in response to Andrew’s last paragraph:

On the surface it’s tempting to say, like Ravious does,  that this online gaming is more meaningful than single player gaming, but it isn’t.  The persistence in an MMO is exactly as ethereal as that found in more traditional single player or online games:  your contribution only lasts so long as your interest in the title holds.

At the outset, I want to clarify that I did not say online gaming is more meaningful than single-player gaming. It is for me, sure, but there are plenty of activities that others do that are meaningless for me and vice versa. It’s not up to me or anybody to tell you what should be meaningful in your luxury gaming time.

Continue reading Persistence of This One

Most Typical Member

Prototype theory holds that we conceptualize through categories in which some members are more central than others. If I ask you to name a piece of furniture, you are quite likely to come back with “chair,” “table,” or “sofa”; if you immediately thought “armoire” or “ottoman,” you are weird; if you went with “Charles, or Susan if it’s a girl,” you are very weird. If you asked an American for the best example of a bird, the most bird-like bird around, you will get far more robins than penguins and almost no emus.

The usual concept of a western MMO seems clearly descended from DikuMUD, through EQ and terminating in WoW. I would tend to insert DAoC in there, sometimes described as “EQ without the parts that suck,” but I may be atypical. Perhaps I am uncreative, but I do not see much more room for the Diku model to evolve. It has reached its full flower in WoW. You can have refinements and variations (-raids, +PvP, +story, -classes, +Tolkien, -fantasy, +F2P), to say nothing of lousy clones, but it will take something massive to change the view of the most typical member. There is a lot of room (and money) in WoW’s orbit, but if you do not want to be (seen as) conceptually subordinate, you need to head a good distance away.

We have some less typical members, most notably EVE Online. You all know how I love to pull out “here is how City of Heroes solved that problem,” or how I mix a dozen niche games into my bloviations. These can be annoying in the MMO blogosphere when commenters contribute them independently, not in the sense of “here is an alternate way of implementing that” but rather “your entire argument is invalid because it does not apply to my game (or playstyle).” It is as if you were complaining about birds pooing on your car, only to have a passerby disdainfully remark that there are not any penguins in the area and they could not have flown over your car anyway. Well, no, that is not what I meant by “birds,” but thank you for contributing.

Continue reading Most Typical Member

It’s All Cosmetic, It’s All Mini-Games

I have one social networking game left, and as I clicked things in my imaginary restaurant, I remarked to myself that I use my imaginary currency for gameplay-relevant items rather than cosmetics. Then it struck me that there was only vaguely potentially gameplay benefit from perfecting my 132nd recipe, even though that is pretty much what you do in the game. I look at some of the cosmetic items and wonder why you would spend that much (real money) on something that does nothing for you, then I wonder what good it does me to be at the level cap. Heck, I have so many “gourmet points” beyond the level cap that I am instantly at the new level cap whenever they raise it. So what does that do except for putting an 85 next to my name in a game relatively few of my friends even deign to notice?

I am rigidly gameplay focused. I am not visually stimulated enough to care about most cosmetic options. But there are no meta-ethics that privilege gameplay over other aspects of the game, nor any that say you should care much about any game. Why should anyone be impressed that you have 6 level-capped WoW characters? You know there are people who will actively look down on you for it.

I am not much of a raider. I have dabbled, but I am not drawn by what boils down to online choreographed dancing. I am drawn to crafting, but I do not expect you to be terribly impressed by my ability to grind out 600 fields of imaginary strawberries. I do not hang out at the Prancing Pony, and while I appreciate in the abstract that someone might be one of the most respected RP leaders on the server, it will not mean much to me, nor might you much care about my time writing for the events team on A Tale in the Desert a few tellings ago.

Viewed as a mini-game, MMO combat is usually pretty poor. Tab-1-1-2-1-1-4, next. Bejeweled requires more thought than solo WoW. But it is the central mini-game supported in WoW, with most of the other mini-games contributing to it. There are crafting mini-games that are even less dynamic. RP is a mini-game that can be entirely independent of the game mechanics. The economic mini-game of the auction house is probably the most thought-intensive, and that is a skill that carries over between games (and potentially into meatspace). But does it do you much good to hit the gold cap in WoW, or is it just decorative once you are past however much money you “need”? Well, does it do you much good to be at the level cap in WoW, or is it just decorative once you have enough levels to do whatever amuses you in-game? I suppose the combat and gear optimization mini-games help you with the other mini-games like completing achievements, collecting mounts and mini-pets, and having resources to buy your way to the end of some other mini-games.

Yay?

: Zubon

Randomness Helps the Weaker Party

I am still playing several rounds of Elements per day, and the perverse randomization really strikes me at times. If I could just have the expected value of my deck, I would win a lot more than I do. As it is, I have seen a 1/12 chance fail to come up 54 times in a row. Which has a 1% chance of happening, so it must be happening more often than I notice.

If you do not understand the math on why randomness helps the weaker party, it requires the assumption that “losing” and “losing big” have no different consequences. Let’s say the other person is 20% better than you, however you would measure that. On average, he should win every single time you two are opposed. Now add some randomness: if you both do better or both worse, it is a wash and you still lose; if he does better than usual and you do worse, you get crushed; if he does worse than usual and you do better, you win at least half of those games. Adding randomness lets the worse party win what would otherwise be a guaranteed loss.

This was first driven home for me in pen-and-paper RPGs. Randomness benefits the monsters, as do things that exploit it like critical hits and fumbles and auto-hits/-misses on 20s/1s. The average goblin may have a life expectancy of six seconds, but he still hits on a natural 20, and depending on your system/edition/house rules, that may also be a crit. If you just checked the attack bonus against your armor, every goblin would always miss. Similarly, if you hit a goblin with a critical hit, so what, it was dead in one hit anyway; if you hit a PC with a critical hit, that could matter. If the goblin fumbles, it dies unarmed instead of armed; if a PC fumbles, that could matter.

This is great for the player if something is really hard and you only need to do it once. You can keep throwing yourself against that wall until the dice come down ridiculously in your favor. “Achievement unlocked!” and you can move on. If you want to beat the last StarCraft II mission easily on the highest difficulty, you can save and reload every time the Nydus Worms appear somewhere inconvenient; those are random from a limited pool, so you can eventually get them to appear in spots where they will instantly be destroyed. It’s not sporting, but there are surely many who thought that mission was trivially easy, others who thought it was near-impossible, because of the randomization. On the other side, this is horrible for the player if the difficulty is high and then you add randomness. That can make it randomly impossible, with the added bonus of making you wonder whether you actually earned that victory or just got the lucky equivalent of that Nydus Worm save-scumming I described.

If you have a fair amount of randomness, adding more trials brings you closer to the expected value. This is why you play best-of-whatever. Over a large number of attacks, that critical hit chance might come to a 5% damage bonus. The longer the fight and the more trials, the more skill can overcome perverse random events. Compare basketball to soccer/football or hockey. Basketball games have scores like 96-84; if a referee messes up a call, oh well, that’s few-point swing, which is upsetting when it matters but it usually balances out or does not matter. World Cup games frequently end 1-0, and more than 10 goals would be a ridiculous game. One odd occurrence, one bad referee call, and that changes the entire tournament.

You will occasionally see books or movies that recognize the high randomness, high consequences nature of real life combat. These tend to be dark and jarring, but you would have thought one random bullet would have caught Batman in his utterly unprotected mouth by now. You will not find many games with one hit kills and no respawn (feel free to refresh).

: Zubon

Rarefied to Extinction

Gordon wonders to what extent MMOs are fun versus habit-forming. We have addressed this before, but I find it always a healthy question. For anything you do often, pause and ask yourself how much you are really enjoying it. A favorite book applies that to spending your money: was that worth it?

When I was experimenting with social media games, I found them immediately absorbing. It was an entirely new area to Explore, and it obviously appeals to the Achiever without all that messy “gameplay” getting in the way of watching bars fill up. Quite a few of them are very good at that structure encouraging habitual play. So one day my wife asks, “Are you enjoying that?” Huh. Good point. “That’s all it took?”

The core gameplay of many things is, quite frankly, poor. We cover it with distraction and decoration, but when anything reduces a game to its purest mechanics, you laugh for a bit then ponder how much an entire genre sucks. Progress Quest and Cow Clicker are important thought experiments. It is very easy to be busy with things to do, a digitally refined archetype of the unexamined life. You have your daily quests to do, some things to gather now that the timer is up, maybe a bit of grinding or a few scheduled and structured activities, maybe repeat that on a few alts, and oh goodness it’s past bedtime. Busy busy busy.

There are many games that get the crap out of the way and let you play. They remove the inconveniences and streamline everything. Some of those are some of the best gaming experiences around, minute-for-minute unbeatable. Some of them are just horrible, as you realize just how many fig leaves the genre needs to be presentable. And either way, its purity limits its ability to be habit-forming, so you find yourself back amidst the distractions, “getting your dollar’s worth” from a game where the content is dragged out. And that is where the dollars are, so that is where the industry trends.

: Zubon

Labels and Tooltips

A principle articulated in The Design of Everyday Things is that a label is a confession of failure. If you need to label the light switches in your house, they are arranged unintuitively, and this is especially a problem if the lights are off. The door could have a push bar/plate or a pull handle; if you need to write “push” or “pull,” you are compensating for a design that may look pretty but fails to make the use of a door obvious.

Sometimes labeling is required. There are rarely intuitive mental mappings between a bank of buttons and their functions. You label the button on the phone for hold or mute. Computer UIs are generally in this category. (Icons also count as labels.)

Within that, you can have better or worse. The arrangement of arbitrary buttons can be intuitive or meaningful. The icons can be suggestive. Aspects can be made more or less prominent as relevant. Remember to adhere to industry standards unless there is a good reason to try to re-route what people have been trained to find intuitive. Remember that you are mapping functions to the keyboard as well as the screen, and you rarely get to label the keys.

Tooltips are one of my favorite principles in UI design, one so common that I forget about it until the tooltips are not there. You have to hate a screen with forty buttons that expects you to memorize what all forty icons mean. If I mouse-over something, it should tell me what it is after a moment’s delay, ideally with even more information if I keep hovering. I should similarly be able to get information on how to interact with items and objects in the world, rather than trying to remember what key throws a grenade.

I look forward to augmented reality so that we can have tooltips in meatspace.

: Zubon

Works For Me

Every game, no matter how well designed and implemented, will have detractors. Almost every game, no matter how poorly conceived or coded, will have people who enjoy it. It is a matter of taste. If you do not like MMOs or FPSes or RTSes, the best example of its kind might rise to “decent” in your eyes. If you do like them, you might play a dozen games in the genre and appreciate their respective merits. If they play to your preferences, a marginal game could be your treasured classic.

There is some game out there for which you are exactly the target audience. It favors your tastes precisely. You enjoy its theme, its gameplay focus is exactly what you enjoy doing, and you do not really care about the areas where the developers skimped.

Not minding negatives may be more important to idiosyncratic preferences than enjoying positives. Almost every game has good aspects, and we get angriest when something stands between us and that nugget of joy. You would enjoy the game except that it is ruined by this subsystem, that color scheme, and those loading times. Meanwhile, Bob never cared about the subsystem, is colorblind, and is glad to have snippets of time for a book he really wants to read. My deal-breakers are your trivial inconveniences or positives.

While Game By Night inspired this post, I feel that Bhagpuss deserves special mention here.

: Zubon