The Thousand-Hour Sim, Part 1

One of the ideas I mentioned yesterday was that there's only a few genres where a large number of players (10,000 or more) will be willing to spend multiple hundreds of hours playing the game. There's a lot of games were a good chunk of the audience will spend around 100 hours. Many single-player RPGs have that much content, and a lot of multiplayer games will keep players busy for 100 hours.

But take a game like WoW - there are millions of people that put in hundreds of hours every year, and probably millions that have put in over a thousand hours over the six years since the game has come out. Some of the friends that I worked with averaged six hours a day - usually spending a dozen hours on the weekends and a few during the week. That works out over 2000 hours a year. Even if they burned out in six months, that's a thousand hours right there.

Competitive games, like Starcraft and Counter-Strike, are another genre where thousands of people might spend thousands of hours.

What would you have to do to make a sim that could keep at least tens of thousands of players occupied for a thousand hours?

Summary of the FMMORPG Argument

There were eight factors I mentioned when I described Fantasy MMORPGs as the ultimate genre. They are:

1. environment variety
2. tangible, human-scale environment
3. non-trivial gameplay
4. opponent complexity
5. opponent personality
6. solo and group gameplay
7. inspiration
8. open end-game

The first factor means having a wide range of environments. The second suggests using an environment that can be rich. Gameplay needs to be complex, and getting to a really rich complexity means not just having a complex puzzle but introducing AI units into the game that introduce complexity, keeping the game fresh. The fifth factor, opponent personality, is like the second: it puts a face to the game world that players can relate to; an environment that produces stories. The sixth factor is about allowing players to play whenever they want, while also giving them team goals, where they can work towards goals larger than one player. Inspiration (and something I didn't mention, commitment) are ways of giving players long-term goals to keep them coming back. The final factor says that the game can't end after a hundred hours; allowing players to stay in the same game world for the entire duration of their play-time can keep them there.

The factors can be broken down into a few threads. I'll probably redo this list at some point. Obviously, this list isn't definitive; I'm building a model for game design and there are surely many other models just as suitable. Anyway, the points I'll cover today will be:

• Gameplay needs to be rich
• The game world needs to be rich
• The game has to enable stories and emotional moments
• It should allow the player to play, and make progress, whenever they want
• The game should provide large goals, requiring time and/or teamwork
• The game should have an anchor that commits players to the game

Some of these feel essential to me, others feel like caveats.

Positive Attributes

I think some of the attributes should influence the core game design. The game should be built around these principles. These are the things you should be trying to do when you design the game. The negative attributes, which I mention later, are a list of things you link at and think, is there something in this design that will drive away players? I think the negative attributes can be tweaked - that once the core game mechanics are nailed down, the next step is to go through a list of "gotchas" and make sure there's nothing there that would piss off players.

First I'll tackle the attributes core to game design.

Gameplay needs to be rich. This is the single most important attribute. Without rich gameplay, the game becomes rote quickly, and play-time becomes boring. I've talked about the essence of fun before, and my theses on boredom is that it happens when the player doesn't have to think about gameplay; if the time the player spends thinking about decisions is too small. As complex as the game might be, if the player has mastered the game rules then there's nothing more for him to learn.

Take a game like Halo. They introduce new mechanics throughout the game and, by the end, you've explored all of those mechanics. Once you've beaten a level, there's no reason to go back and play it again, except maybe to find a few hidden secrets or complete it faster. New sequels really just introduce a larger game world; they don't add new gameplay elements. Players spend 20-40 hours playing through the game, and then wait two years for the sequel, then spend another 20-40 hours.

Compare this to Grand Theft Auto. The worlds are about as large, but there's a richer variety of things to do. As a result, players can spend 100 hours in the world. There's only about 100 hours of "quests" in the game, though. If they added more quests, would you keep playing? Probably not, because without more mechanics, execution of those quests becomes easier and easier. As you play through the game, you pick up new weapons and learn new game skills - but you exhaust those skills by the time the game's done. That's what I mean by new mechanics: there'd have to not just be a new place to play (ie a larger world, such as in the expansion packs) but new ways to play.

The game world needs to be rich. I touched on this above. The world shouldn't just be large, but provide new environments. There are over sixty different zones in the world, and each one has many different sub-areas. Plus well over 100 different dungeons. The starter zones can be plowed through in under an hour, but by level 50, there's at least five hours of quests in each zone. The dungeons provide a couple hours of gameplay but can be replayed, too. Each of those zones and dungeons has its own creatures; usually dozens in each zone, and each creature type (like, say, furbolg) has several variants (such as warrior and shaman).

That means a lot of art assets, of course, but that's what "rich world" means! Players can easily spend ten hours in Stranglethorn Vale. Although the whole zone is jungle, the land ranges from the beach, to the river, to hills, to villages, to caves. Creatures include pirates, goblins, trolls, panthers, tigers, raptors, basilisks, and ... much more. Each little area has its own story (told through the quests) and there's a few greater storylines that take players through the zone.

Worlds are rich because of the variety of their assets and they stories they tell. Speaking of which...

The game has to enable strong emotional moments. Stories are a player retelling of emotional moments. The strongest emotions are fear, anger, and love. WoW doesn't really want to anger its playerbase, but anger does have a greater place competition-driven games (and therefore in the PvP aspect of WoW). Fear is the most common, but it's not often remembered as such. The most memorable moments for me in WoW were when I was running in fear from high-level enemy players, or in instances when our tank died and I was panicking trying to keep the group alive (I played a healer!), or close calls when I got attacked by several creatures and was running for my life. When these encounters ended well, that fear turned to extreme relief. I wanted to tell everyone I knew about what just happened, and the story got retold the next day at work, too.

Strong emotional moments make the game into a larger part of the players' lives. When we take those stories to work the next day, to the pub, into our dreams, its more than just a way to pass the time. Am I going to tell stories about that one time in FarmVille when I planted some corn? Ugh. We hate the boring coworkers that tell that kind of dumb story. NO. Yeah, sometimes those WoW stories are the same - but not always.

Players can feel love, or something similar, in these games, too. Probably a bit more common is respect, and dedication. Players in guilds might feel commitment to their guildmates, and want to show up on raid night not just because the raid will be fun but because they want to help their guild out. It's really cool to have a good tank in the group, or to have a great healer behind you, or an awesome DPS guy that is super-great about handling adds. I really respect those players and their skill with the game, and that generates stories that I want to tell, too. (But god I hope that raid is fun, too. See section one: gameplay should be rich.)

Curiosity can also be a strong motivator. Curiosity drives suspense novels and thriller flicks. It's usually not something that the designer would want to drag out for dozens of hours, but there are a lot of cases where a bit of curiosity keeps me playing for an hour, or to keep coming back to a quest line for an hour of play every so often. Some quest text can introduce a mystery, and either dole out new bits of story in each quest or give the player a chance to go exploring and find out the solution for themselves. This is a kind of meta-game; the game proper is combat, but if you've got a player hooked on a mystery they'll play through the combat to find out who done it! Yet another way of making gameplay richer, and in this case it works because of the emotions that the game makes players feel.

The final "core principal" is: The game should provide large goals. One of the things I've bitched about with browser games is that they don't feel like there's a larger goal. Travian actually has one, and it's a very appealing goal to me, but they did a crappy job of advertising that long goal. I played Lord of Ultima for about a week but quit mostly because I felt like I had no goals. Sure I can sit there building my city up, but who cares? Compare that to Nile Online, which I'm still playing: the goal is to get to a high enough level that you can "retire". When you do, you get a pyramid built and named after you! At that point, the game is "over" and one can leave the game, but at least it's a motivation to keep playing.

MMOs provide many large goals. To get to max level, to get into a raiding guild, to get to the hardest raid instance, to get awesome gear. Even just to complete the easiest end-game raid instances is a large goal, taking weeks of play to prepare and attempt. Single boss fights used to last a half hour or more though these days they tend to be 10-15 minutes. Each fight might take a few attempts to master, and there's around ten bosses in each raid. Throw in trash encounters (which can be tricky to master as well) and "raid night" is several hours of gameplay each week.

Accomplishing large goals tends to drive other gameplay. Preparing for raid night might mean running dailies to get cash to buy a new piece of armor, or to get enough faction to be allowed to buy a new piece of armor. Hopefully those dailies are fun and don't get too repetitive, one of the few places where I think WoW falls down. But consider this like curiosity: players will engage in hours of gameplay (hopefully fun by itself!) in order to achieve a meta-goal. They're not in combat to kill the creature, they're not killing the creature to gain rep, they're not gaining rep to buy new armor -- they're buying armor to make more progress on raid night. And they're doing that for bragging rights and to support their friends.

Non-Essential (Negative) Attributes

One can probably come up with a huge list of  rules saying "don't fuck up your game by doing X". I happened to extract two from my previous post; there's dozens more that I've thought of since (another post?) but I'll cover these two in some detail to explain what I mean.

Players should be allowed to play whenever they want. If your basic game mechanic is combat, then what would keep them from playing when they want? I heard EQ basically couldn't be played solo - which meant, if you wanted to play, you've got to wait around to find a group to join. One of the things that I think made WoW wildly successful is that it doesn't have this restriction. If you log in and want to play, there's always, always some solo task you could do. You can hop into a PvP battleground, go on a solo quest, do a daily, farm some crafting resources, or find a PUG instance to run.

This principle is better expressed in the negative: don't add anything to your game that would prevent players from playing when they want to. Not being able to play is frustrating, and one of the things in browser games that piss me off. I'd enjoy them a lot more if I could play at my own leisure. Having the game say "sorry, go away, we don't want you" makes me feel bad things towards the game and that's a great way to lose players before they hit the 1000 hour mark. And it kind of means that they can't hit 1000 hours. It's basically admitting that you don't even have 1000 hours of stuff for them to do!

I'm probably going to play Nile Online til I get into the top 100 (and then retire), but there's no way I'll put 1000 hours into it - it just won't let me. It would take me years of play to get that far, and I'm far more likely to find something else to do. If I can retire after six months, what's to keep me coming back again and again? Hence:

Players should feel committed to the game. One thing that kept many players subscribed to Ultima Online was their houses. They had a lot invested in their house, and they didn't want to give it up. This is a great example because a lot of those subscribed players didn't even play! They'd log in once or twice a week to prevent their house from falling apart, but they wouldn't actually play. Imagine how many more players they could have kept around if there was something else to do?


But really my point is that commitment itself is strong enough to keep players subscribed.


Summary


So I didn't even talk about sims at all in this post, and I've been hacking away at this post for hours. In part two, I'll explore how to apply these rules to the sim genre and see what I come up with.


Meanwhile, I'm gonna go pass out... zzzz

Gameplay Complexity and Opponents

Yesterday in my praise of the fantasy MMORPG as the ultimate genre, I touched on the notion that a game that involves human-like opponents has a lot of natural potential for rich gameplay. Today I want to expand on that a bit.

Game genres range from racing to shooters to RPGs to slot-machines to sims to platformers and on. Multiplayer games obviously pit you against other humans. Some of them have single-player variants, where the part of the enemy is played by AI that tries to act as close to human; ie, the opponents have the same range of actions and strategies as humans do. Others pit you against a puzzle, or simplified enemies with very constrained actions.

Puzzles - No Opponent

I'll start with the last. Puzzle games like Tetris don't have "opponents". It's just you against the puzzle. Simulations, including games like SimCity and Roller Coaster Tycoon, pit you against a complex puzzle. Simple puzzle games have simple mechanics; the complexity of the game is how the rules fit together. Some such games are like skill games - gameplay at the higher levels of Tetris require the player to have internalized the gameplay rules effectively to the point that it's like a sport, and where reflexes and the ability to think a few moves ahead are important.

Skill games are rarely complex. Coding their game rules is simple. Design can be difficult, however; the process of coming up with rules that are amenable to skill is tricky. Back during the golden decade of the FPS (the 1990s), many game companies tried to make competition-worthy FPS games, but most fared poorly. For a single-player game, something that's going to provide 15-40 hours of gameplay, the game mechanics don't need to be very rich. Elements that would lend themselves to longevity as a skill-based competition are hard to design in, and the economics of the game industry often mean that the people that would have experience with competition-style gameplay aren't the ones that are chosen to lead game design. It's one thing to say "we want a lively online community" and another to actually spend money and effort finding a designer that can do that well. There's a rich discussion there but I'll skip it for now.

Because my point is: the complexity of these games is usually the intricate ways in which a small set of game rules combine.

Could you turn a sim into something players would spend a thousand hours playing? How long could you play Roller Coaster Tycoon before you exhausted the whole game? Do you think you could convince a million players to each put a thousand hours into it? These games (on the PC) are lucky to sell a million copies. Most of those players might put less than a dozen hours in.

What would it take to make a sim or puzzle game that players spend that much time on? It feels silly to even think it's possible, since one hundred hours is a stretch for these games. Maybe there's some diehard fanatics that put that much time in (the Transport Tycoon community is one such example), but that's a tiny community. That's maybe a thousand players - not a million. I'd like to explore this idea further... and indeed I do in this followup post on the thousand-hour sim.

Platformers - Fake Opponents

Platformers have opponents, but they aren't anything like human players. Enemies such as the goombas in Mario follow very rigid rules. They don't even try to behave like human players. That's not the point; these are effectively puzzle games where part of the puzzle is an AI-controlled "humanoid" character with simplistic, predictable rules.

Usually there's not a lot of richness to these games. They're exploration and achievement games, with a little bit of skill thrown in. Gameplay is fun, but that's driven in part by the environments, not the opponents. The human (or sentient) appearance of the opponents just fills out the game world; makes it seem like a real place and less like an abstraction.

Recent Mario games (such as Mario Galaxy) do wind up being somewhat rich, but not too much. Most of the richness is in carefully timed execution of special moves. In other words, they are skill games. Puzzles are straightforward, the interactions of gameplay elements are rare, and the focus of the game is more on exploration than anything else.


Head-to-Head Action and Strategy Games

Whereas there's no real "opponent" in puzzle or sim games, and simplified opponents in platformers, other action games have real humans as the opponent. RTS games like Starcraft and FPS games like Counter-Strike fit this model. Even when you're playing against the AI, that AI is trying to act as human as possible.

Both you and your opponent have the same range of abilities. Chess is a simplified version of this model, where both players have exactly the same units at their disposal. FPS games are similar; often skill games (see above), but the richness in the game comes from the fact that the opponent is truly human and so not only has a huge bag of tricks but can also learn new tricks as time goes on.

RTS games rely heavily on the humanness of your opponent, but they often twist gameplay by allowing players to choose different "races." Starcraft is the standout in this model. Most Starcraft games are played by players of different races; Terran, Zerg, or Protoss. They are all basically doing the same thing - placing buildings, recruiting soldiers and ships, and sending them off to attack. Yet the units that they have are different, and their overall approach to winning is different as well.

The richness in FPS games comes primarily from the human opponent. The fine balance of rules can make the game more or less balanced; more or less random. Yet it's the humans that make them great.

RTS games, however, add much more. There's a lot more strategy to RTS games. Choices made early - not just single actions, but choices to develop in one way or another - define the game. Do you try to tech up? Rush? Expand early? Press to aerial units? Fake one build but go another way? Where FPS games often have rich tactical fights, RTS games also have strategic fights.

RPGs

RPGs are a bit like RTS games, in that you are facing human-like opponents with skills and actions similar to your own, but with a different strategic twist. In Starcraft you have Protoss vs Zerg, in WoW you'll have a Rogue against a Warlock.

Humans provide the richest opponents. Some are better than others; in RPGs, you might face someone that doesn't know their class very well at all. But most of those that engage in PvP know what they're doing. Competition ladders help great players find similar opponents, while allowing the crappy players a chance to win every know and again against other new (or... well, crappy) players.

RPGs add more to the single-player experience, however, by having a much longer stretch of new abilities. In an RTS, you'll become familiar with all of the units and buildings at your disposal over the 30 hours or so in the single-player campaign. In an MMORPG, there can be hundreds of hours of advancement before you've gotten to the top of the ability tree, learning new spells or abilities every few levels.

Instead of giving you a small set of tools with rich interactions, like chess, RPGs have a much larger set of tools, each with its own special purpose. The trick isn't to learn how the abilities interact, but usually which ability to use when; how to fight against certain types of opponents. The huge array of possible opponents is what makes the RPG rich.

Human-like Opponents with Different Tactical and Strategic Choices

My goal here was to explore the game design choices that produce a game that players could enjoy for hundreds of hours. Leaving aside the diehard fanatics that might stick to their favorite title long past when the majority of the market has gotten bored, we're left with three major avenues.

The first approach is to build a game that requires player skill, whether solo or competitive. Players spend their time getting better at those skills. Games like Counter-Strike and Tetris are the best examples, but even then they point out the weakness: although both have audiences larger than (say) Transport Tycoon, these are still relatively niche titles. Lots of people love them and (relatively) lots put in over a hundred hours playing the game, but there are bigger genres out there.

The second approach is to create simple mechanics with extremely complex interactions. Chess is the canonical example. Players have a chance to learn ever more complex interactions. Every time they play, they probably learn another new trick. The success of this genre depends on the size of the market, however. There can't be hundred of Chess-like games, because the complexity of interaction depends on the size of the market. Not everyone has the talent to be a grandmaster, and in order to even get grandmasters, you need enough people to push the curve that far.

The third approach is pitting player versus player. Whether you've got a skill-based game, one with simple rules but complex interactions, or complex rules, pitting humans against each other means that rich gameplay will evolve. You'll either need to do a whole lot of playtesting and balancing or be willing to tune the game after it ships, but with PvP, humans will figure out complex strategies.

Personally, I think the two richest game genres are the RTS and the RPG. The best, longest-lived games in both genres have PvP (sometimes simulated), complex gameplay interactions, and a measure of player skill. If you want to create a game that pulls in players for hundreds of paid hours, you'll need more than one of the approaches.

Most Awesomest Game Genre Ever

WoW is tremendously popular, and it's easy to see why. One can play solo, so you don't have to wait for your friends to show up or get online. Your accomplishments can be witnessed by a wide variety of players, so the game's achievements are very rewarding. Team encounters give players a chance to show their team spirit & coordination. It has a ton of content and actually has an end-game, so you can play forever. It's very approachable, unlike many other MMOs.

But it's also the most awesomest game genre ever.

A friend an I were brainstorming game ideas for the iPhone, and I spent some time after that going through a bunch of game ideas, fleshing them out, and thinking about how to make the game more appealing. At the pinnacle of game development is something like an MMORGP, which requires complex technology, precision game design, and tons of content. But more than that, there are elements to the design of WoW that place, in my mind, the fantasy MMO as the ideal genre.

I tried to think of ways to design a game that was smaller than an MMO that had many of the same benefits. In the process, I came up with a whole bunch of factors that make the fantasy MMORPG genre appealing.

Environment Variety

Games like Tetris take place in one screen. It's a skill game, like many sports and first-person-shooters, and so that doesn't matter that much - but it's just one screen. Achievement and exploration games tend to have a lot of environment variety, and it's one of the driving forces behind platformer design (as I love to mention). Give the player a new environment every 15 minutes!

A Tale in the Desert (ATITD) is an interesting game for many reasons. It's an MMO but the environment is very dry. It's 99% desert. 99% boring, flat, monochromatic fucking desert. It's a great exercise to play the game and see how one can take one environment type (hint: desert) and make landmarks and environments that feel different. Yet the exercise reminds me of the pointless toy problems and artificial domains I studied in school. It might be an interesting exercise but it has little practical value.

Take a look at WoW: every zone isn't just yet another area using the same brown and desaturated green color palette; they're very different. It's not just forest, mountain, plain. The forests are hugely varied -- from the dark, Halloween-ish Darkshore to the mystical Ashenvale Forest to diseased Felwood and Plaguelands. Feralas feels kind of generic - but I had to hunt around for an exception. Elwynn Forest is an ideal example - a larger-than-life fantasy setting. You can't mistake Grizzly Hills for any of these other areas, and Silverpine, although sharing the same kind of haunted feel as Darkshore, is obviously distinct too.

Coming up with different environments is easy; making them look good is hard. Getting the art assets is expensive. But it adds a huge amount to the game. Where ATITD is able to take "desert" and vary it, WoW does the same thing -- within each zone. But then it adds another 50 zone types! Like console platformers, there's always some neat new zone to go explore.

First-person shooters like Doom have a hard time coming up with different environments; they're all variations on the "near-future industrial/research building" theme. But put people outdoors and the variety explodes.

I guess it doesn't need to be that way. You could make an FPS that takes place all indoors and still has the variety that WoW does, but you'd have to try for it. That's kind of my point with this post - I think games are better when they have these qualities. Half Life, as fun and varied as it was, was stuck with being realistic. Which means that there's not much variation between levels. City Level 1 looks just like City Level 2. You could throw Viking Village and Alien City and Native American Pueblo in there, but it loses its believability. Fantasy games like WoW have a huge variety in environments that's enabled by the willingness to say "forget realism, we want cool environments." Like Mario platformers, WoW throws away foolish adherence to realism in the name of fun.

Tangible Environment

But zones aren't just different - they're also meaningful to humans. What's space but a bunch of rocks, stars, and the occasional planet? You can make varied star backgrounds and different-looking planets, but they feel like meaningless decoration. Earth means something to us. Running around on the ground is meaningful. Even the abstract game world of 1980s arcade games took to this: Donkey Kong takes place in a factory (and/or construction site) - it feels like a place. It's not just naked gameplay, it's a part of a world.

I was thinking of bringing up games like chess here, but then I thought: Abstract games tend to be skill games. Either your game is about the gameplay mechanisms themselves, like chess or first-person shooters or sports, or it's a game that puts the player into an avatar and says, "go play in this world!" In that case, the world itself is one of your characters and it needs to be interesting!

I think that's one of the reasons why "space" and "sci-fi" are considered niche genres for games. You can make starfields and tetris blocks look different and varied, but they don't mean anything human to us. They don't resonate with everyday experience. We can perceive the subtlest changes in human faces because that's how we evolved; give us a bunch of subtly-different alien faces and the distinctions aren't noticed. The work that you put into it is wasted. They all look the same to us.

Lesson: Familiar environments can be rich. Novel, alien environments are cool because they're new, but you can't take that very far. Because they're just new; they don't make sense to us.

Gameplay

Same games have rich gameplay, some are like slot machines. I bitched a few days ago about browser games (especially the popular Facebook games) and how they're basically slot machines. What gameplay? Click click click, win a random prize! Compared to RPGs, there's no mechanism, no learning, to strategy. Strategy makes for a richer game.

Some people have addictive personalities. Give them a slot machine and sell them rolls of tokens and you can keep them occupied and make a lot of money. I don't think you're really making those sorts of people happy; you're just feeding off of their addiction. Encouraging that addiction. I think many people hate their addictions - but they're still addicted. Intellectually, they want to quit smoking, stop gambling, but they feel compelled.

To me the more interesting challenge, and the more rewarding pursuit, is making compelling games, not compelling slot machines.

If you want rich gameplay, WoW has it. The core gameplay element is combat but each class has its own take on it, and that take changes as the character levels up and specializes. The addition of mechanics like fleeing, rooting, rage, and combos add to MMORPG staples like aggro, pets, and mana burn. I'm not sure if there's any novel mechanic in WoW (one could take the Lorite approach here) but it does have the kitchen sink. Action games - including platformers - work with a far smaller set of gameplay mechanics. An MMO means hundreds (or thousands) of hours of gameplay, and that means an extremely rich set of mechanics.

Opponent Complexity

One of the things that started me thinking about this post was, how can I make a crafting-based MMO like ATITD? Crafting in WoW is "click a button and wait 20 seconds," but ATITD and Puzzle Pirates are two games that turn "crafting" into much more.

But there's no "opponent" in these games. The combat mechanism of RPGs is rich not just because of the variety of options that the player has, but because you pit those mechanisms against a parallel set - everything that the enemy can do. WoW players have to worry about enemy casters, archers, and fighters; melee opponents with quick attacks (hard to cast long spells!) and those with big, slow attacks; abilities like fleeing and calling for help; healers and high-DPS dudes. Multiple opponents. Not knowing what "class" an opponent is until you're in combat.

How do you make a crafting game like that? WoW combat isn't just a minigame - it's huge. And part of that is that it's set up like a competition; it's not just X choices versus a random-number-generator; it's your X against his X. This is definitely something I'd like to explore more, but for now I just want to throw out there:

• Whereas most games have X options, RPGs are X squared.

Opponent Personality

Not only does your opponent have a range of actions he can choose, but he also has personality. Who here hates murlocs? Raise your hands!

There's casters and healers, crocs and raptors, those pesky crocolisks and the goofy owlbeasts. Evil trolls and neutral zhevras that will be happy to ignore you if you ignore them. They each have their own attacks, idle animations, and deaths. It's not "simple combat opponents 1 through 47", they have shapes & sounds & animations. They have personality.

How can you do that with, say, a blacksmithing minigame?

Many other game genres do have opponents with personality, though. Action games from platformers to first-person shooters give you different opponents. Even shoot-em-ups like Galaga give you varied opponents. So this trait - opponent personality - isn't exclusive to Fantasy MMORPGs, but it is one thing that makes it a richer game genre.

Solo & Group Gameplay

I think good browser games are team games. Travian, for example, has a good bit of solo gameplay, but it's really a team game, and I think it's all the richer for that.

Skill games have both. One typically works on their own skills but measures themself against other players, either playing directly against other players or in parallel with them. FPS games tend to be against human or human-like opponents, including team variants like Counter Strike and Rainbow Six. I think those team variants are the richest.

And that's one thing that makes Fantasy MMORPGs a great genre - solo gameplay, so players can play whenever they want, but also rich, team-based objectives that they pursue with their friends.


Inspiration

I talked about inspiration a few days ago. Many games have it, and I think it's an important component. MMOs, though, have a great built-in mechanism for adding it. They don't all do a good job of it, but the opportunity is there; a low-hanging fruit.

Open End-Game

I've talked about how good games are entertainment that's powerful enough that players are willing to pay for it. I think there's a 1:1 correlation between profit and fun. (Addiction games would be an exception to this rule.)

Open-ended games are a huge profit center. Once you get a player to try your game, you can continue drawing revenue from them for years. Any game or sport that players enjoy going back to means a huge potential revenue stream. There's tons of tennis racquets, climbing shoes, skis, and other sports gear available and tons sell each year. WoW pulls in 9 figures every month.

Compare this to a console platformer. The player spends $60 and gets fifteen hours of gameplay. Kind of expensive (hence the huge aftermarket for used games), but cheaper than going out to the movies. It definitely keeps a lot of game development studios alive.

But with a long gameplay curve and a chance for play to continue for hundreds of hours, MMOs are like sports - in that players continue investing money in playing, year after year. A customer isn't a one-of-thing; you aren't selling a one-size-fits-all product. Some players pay their $60 and leave, others pay $15 a month for years. With microtransactions, some MMOs pull in over $1000 a year from certain players. That's the sort of market depth that sporting-goods retailers have: the people that really love your game can give you more than just $5 in profit! And they're paying all that extra money because they love your product; because you have an end-game, and one that's constantly being extended and improved.

Summary

WoW is the most lucrative computer game of all time. I think a lot of that has to do with the type of game it is - a fantasy MMORPG.

Stick an MMORPG in space and the opponents and environments get dull. Sure, Eve is doing well, but it's not doing 9 figures monthly. A game like Eve has, I think, a better opportunity of pulling in more revenue via microtransaction-like addons, but ... well, space is boring.

An MMO means team gameplay, inspiration from elder players, and socialization. You don't get a community for a game like Tetris.

And RPGs bring huge amounts of possible gameplay. I didn't even get into various metagames, like loot and set collections.

I think we, as game designers, can learn to make our non-FMMORPG games richer by looking at games like this, and seeing what richness we can pull from it to put into our own projects.

Things I Hate About Web Games

I'm coding again, and somehow that also means doing "research" - playing new games for a bit. A friend suggested I check out Lord of Ultima, since I like Ultima and also played Travian for a year. I also wound up playing some Facebook games, and checking out some of the other online, browser-based RTS games, including Ikariam and Nile Online. I've played Evony before, and I checked into a few other real-time strategy multiplayer browser-based games, like NationStates and Monopoly City Streets.

I've got a few major complaints against these games. The time element tends to suck in these games. The facebook games are spam-based. Help and tutorials tend to be abysmal, and goals are rarely well defined. Tack on some obsessive play-to-pay rules and I don't wonder that they're not all making bank.

Time Element

The worst sin is the time element; you can't log in and play. Log in, hang out for a bit, watch, scroll around the map, contemplate your navel - then 10 minutes later you make a move. Great! Now wait another 10 minutes before you can move again. Most people play games because they want to play games; stuff like Lord of Ultima and Travian both are centered around a mechanic where you can't make any moves for hours. I'm on my fourth day of LoU and I have to tell myself not to play, because it's a waste of time. Come back in three hours.

Nile Online does this a bit worse, because the first thing you do is stare at the map trying to figure out wtf is going on. I'll get to that later, but when you finally do read the primer, it's basically "click some stuff for about 3-4 minutes, then go get caffeine. Come back in 20 minutes cuz you won't be able to do shit for 20 minutes." You read about it, looks like fun, sign up, play for 5 minutes -- then you're done. Quit. Go do something else now, please!

They like to compare themselves to a garden or other sort of tend-it-here-and-there activity. But if you wanted to, you could go out to your garden and weed & plant & water & fertilize & fence for hours, for a whole day. And if you run out of stuff, it's easy to leave for a day, because it's not a game. You can't really tend a real garden every 10 minutes, but these virtual gardens want you to do just that. Games are fun, and can be addictive - but an addiction that you can't feed is lame. Stupid. Why do you make me hate you?

The thing to do is to log in and chat with your buddies, possibly spending your evenings chatting - while occasionally making a move or two. That's what I did in Travian, and that game did tons of things right to make such socializing possible. Coordinating with other players is a big part of the game, and it's easy to make friends there. The stuff you have to do can be done in batches, once or twice a day, so it's easy to log in and putter around for a couple hours, chatting while you wait. Raiding, especially, is something that you can kind-of-actively do: send out some raids, wait twenty minutes for them to come back and chat while you wait. Poke around your other villages.

It sucks if you're lonely. One thing WoW did very right was to allow solo gameplay. Want to log in and play for a bit? Sure! There's quests, farming, crafting, the auction house - tons of stuff to do. If you're not max level, questing solo is cake! The game is made for it. These browser-based games? Bzz! Sorry, you're not wanted! Give your money to someone else, please.

spam

Facebook games are a bit better in the time-wasting department. They can be played in 20-30 minute chunks, then you run out of energy or mana or whatever. That's a great model; 20-30 minutes of constant fun, no waiting, and then a clear indicator that I should go do something else for four hours.

Nile Online was offensive with its 5 minutes of initial gameplay. After playing it for a week, I'm a bit more at ease with the 5-minutes-here, 5-minutes-there model, but it's not really a game. It feels like the tend-me-occasionally garden that it wants to be - but it's not really a garden. Guh. I'm not really drawn into that gameplay model. Maybe you'd like it, there's others out there that seem to like it, but I think my time with that game is over. Not my cup of tea, but at least I'm not saying it's a cup of piss.

Anyway, back to spam.

The big downside to the facebook games is that they're asking me to spam all my friends with a half-dozen or more posts in my 30-minute play session. Optimum play requires being one of those boring jerks that spams all their friends with crap. And I'm not going to be that guy; most of my facebook friends don't play these games. I'm not going to crap on their wall with what are, effectively, ads. Multiple times a day. In sets of 5+ posts.

Which doesn't address the fact that all of the facebook games I've tried so far are slot machines. I ranted a bit about that when I talked about designing fun, so I'll leave it alone for today. A slot machine that asks me to piss off my friends? Fuck you.

Help and Tutorials

Mostly these games seem to be built by companies that get the idea to clone someone else's popular game, shove it out the door, then start collecting money. Game design? We've got artists to make the pixels, that's game design, right?

Tutorials are essential in complex games. They're a way of taking what can be a forbidding mess and make it appealing to new players. Another alternative is to start with a simple, obvious game and gradually add complexity to it. One of my favorite city-building games, the Settlers series, does this great. It's the gameplan for PC-based RTS games: start the player off with a few tools, let him learn to use them through the play of a scenario, then add another tool or two in the second scenario. Somehow the makers of all these browser-games never learned that lesson, or didn't bother to apply it. They throw every single tool at you in the first five minutes. Confusing = lost = bored = quit = zero revenue. Negative revenue, after including the costs of hosting that player's little play session.

Nile Online has a Primer, not an in-game tutorial. It got me started, but it didn't mention the heart of the game: upgrade stuff, balance your workers, and upgrade your palace to get more workers. That's its core gameplay. Yeah, sure, you eventually choose a specialty good and make your mark in the world that way - but that's not what you do.

Games should explain what you do as well as what you strive for. They tend, generally, to put the shine on the game's goals, how the game can be fun, but don't teach players how to play the game. That's a great way to lose players! Someone went through the work and commitment to try your game out, create an account, and start playing - keep them playing! Show them the light!

Some of the games do have good tutorials, not all are necessarily bad. The worst documentation is reserved for the goals (see next section), but I wanted to split that out so I could talk about it more. Travian, Lord of Ultima, and Ikeriam all have decent tutorial/quest chains that get you started. They don't tell you where you're going, but they do tell you how to look busy.

Goals

Some games define their goals well (like Nile Online), others have good tutorials. The most popular games, though, feel like time-wasters because they don't explain their goals. Lord of Ultima seems to be grossly negligent in this way, mostly because it doesn't actually have a goal. The "goal", if any, is to "win" the game - apparently by being Rank 1 when it ends. Maybe it doesn't end? Maybe the server keeps going? Who knows? They apparently don't. So why are you playing?

"To have fun!" Ugh. These aren't games, they're toys - but competitive toys. Someone can come into your sandbox and kick over all your castles. That's one reason why people hate Travian and quit. It markets itself as a sort of multiplayer sim-city, but that's not what it is at all. That's a fucking lie. It's a competitive game. The goal is to help your alliance build up enough members, cities, armies, and allies to grab some plans, build a world wonder, and defend it against the other alliances. It's a team game! It's a fun team game! (One that just happens to have really bad time-demand issues.) Travian really should push what it's about. It doesn't. It does something really well, and they should brag about it. That's what I mean by goals: tell everybody what their goal is! Tell them how they, too, can be great!

"Do whatever you want!" I don't want to do whatever. I'm looking for a game - something with a goal, a way to win. What's your way to win? Nile Online does this somewhat well; it doesn't have a "win" condition per se, but it does lay out the promise of being a notable player. Everyone in the game has their own specialty; everyone can be special. That's a great promise, especially since everyone wants to be special and well-known.

To be clear: I'm saying it's a bad thing to refuse to specify goals. There's games, then there's toys - sandboxes. Trying to do both tends to piss off players; doing both well is extremely difficult, such that I seriously recommend not trying. Especially if you're gonna half-ass your way through the design process. Lord of Ultima is kinda bizarre in this respect, until you figure out what must have happened. Some suit must have said "Travian is popular, Ultima is IP that we want to make money from, throw a bunch of money at this!" They then refused to hire an experienced designer (or to listen to the one they hired) and built a pile of shit.

Play-to-pay

The idea of microtransactions is to give players some cool little doodad that they can buy with just a wee bit of money. Make it optional, so that people can still play your game for free (or cheap), but allow the guys willing to spend money a chance to set themselves apart.

Travian does this well. For about $5 a month, you can double your monthly growth. You only buy a small percent increase in production, but because the game basically runs on compounded growth, a small percent each day translates into integer multiples in strength each month. But if you don't pay, you can still contribute to your team's success. Plus, by spending a bit more over that, you can jump around a bunch of other restrictions.

The last is probably the worst microtransaction model. You don't want to make gameplay annoying, and then offer to make it less annoying for a small fee. The correct response by a player to that offer is "fuck you, I'm gonna go play a different game." This is one reason why WoW has gradually reduced the level when you get horses. Travel is a pain in WoW. At low levels, it doesn't matter too much because everything you do is right there. But at some point, you have "enough to do" in the game world that you want to travel further - and getting there by foot sucks.

But browser games often commit worse microtransaction sins. The thing you buy with money is the actual game itself. The facebook games I've tried are all like this. The game that you play for free is a slot machine version of Progress Quest: pull the handle, get your chips, and brag to all you friends about how many times you pulled the handle. (WoW is kinda this game, in that you get to brag about your level, but there's strategy to killing mobs; it's not just a button-press.)

Alternately, a player can spend $50 and get a sandcastle where they can build a cool little diorama to show to their friends! Now that sounds like fun. Give me some cool diorama parts, let me find (or better yet, quest for) some rare parts, and let me create something cool. Plus, show me other people's cool dioramas, so that I can be encouraged and inspired to create my own!

but wait! You gotta pay for that!

Ugh. It's bait-n-switch. It looks like a treasure-hunting game, or a farm sim, or somesuch - but it's actually a very expensive dollhouse. Why not just get rid of the slot machine? Or, better yet, let me choose to go questing for the parts I want? And replace the 'slot machine' with something that requires strategy?

-conclusion-

Yeah, in conclusion: that last paragraph. I don't mind microtransactions. Some games, I am willing to pay a bit to be stronger, to get something cool. Others are diversions I don't enjoy enough to pay for - which really means they're sucky games.

A cool browser game would be one that's (1) not a slot machine, but requires some strategy in its play, (2) allows players to specialize the way in which they're awesome, and (3) lets me play in meaty chunks. Tell me (4) how to play, and (5) what my goal is.

Game audiences are a stochastic thing. Some people are willing to pay for the diorama. Others get caught up in building their little world and don't mind paying a bit extra for it. Others have addictive personalities and get sucked in by slot machines. And others are too stupid to realize that there are better games out there.

Like WoW. Bye, Treasure Isle / Lord of Ultima / Nile Online, time for me to start getting ready for Cataclysm.

Game Design: Fun Challenges

Fun & Happiness
Happiness is the emotion resulting from the achievement (or preservation) of values. Accomplishing something you don't value doesn't feel rewarding. Players are happy when they achieve something meaningful. That could be game-defined goals, player-defined goals, or even just learning.

What's the difference between fun and happiness? Grammar, for one: one "has fun" but "is happy". Does happiness come from having fun? Generally our culture views happiness as a longer-term thing, but I don't think that necessarily applies to game design -- I think players can achieve happiness from playing their game of choice. I also think that being happy isn't the same thing as having fun.

Fun is amazement, curiosity, bewilderment, happiness, laughter, vengeance, and a host of other emotions. I've talked about boring before: if you don't have anything to think about, you get bored. But being occupied isn't the same as fun. I remember working at a fast-food joint during rush hour. I didn't have time to get bored, but I wasn't having fun, either. Generally stuff that's safe (ie doesn't threaten any values) and produces a non-negative emotional response is fun. There was nothing emotional about slinging fries, but interacting with customers (especially the cute kind) was sometimes fun.

The two main groups of fun emotions are those responding to new stimuli, and those responding to positive values (happiness-related). Achieving a goal that you planned for and expected to win isn't as much fun as an unexpected victory; the emotion in the latter is stronger. I also think seeing new wonders - whether it's high-level gear or foes in Warcraft, or funky new buildings in SimCity or Travian - is stronger than happiness-related fun.

I've heard (and frequently repeated) that designers of platformers like to put players into new environments every 15 minutes. Warcraft follows a similar model (tho the time delta is hours not minutes), and RTSes and the like put players into new environments every 30-60 minutes. Players also like new games, new graphics, new expansions, etc. They want something new, because new is fun. These players are explorers, and I think it's the dominant type of players generally.

I love new stuff, new areas, exploring game mechanics, exploring the nooks and crannies of game worlds, new graphics, all that stuff - but I can also sit down and grind through some resource gathering. I turn that into a game: how quickly can I pave through this set of creatures and take their drops? How many can I kill in an hour? That's a self-created achievement goal. Some people are good at that, but most people aren't. I'm tempted to call it autistic-spectrum (the ability to focus on a narrow goal), but I actually think it's just a reframing skill.

This is achievement again. Many Asian MMOs are very grindy; players in that market are used to this type of reframing. They view the grind as an achievement path, and they can focus on maximizing their achievement performance. To them it's fun. American players, by contrast, tend to be the "fun fun fun" type that want distractions and new, shiny trinkets.

Difficulty, Perceived Difficulty, and Choice

If happiness comes from achieving meaningful value, then how does one quantify "meaningfulness?"

I think one really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get game challenges that aren't meaningful. It's a continuum, obviously, and I think it's related to perceived difficulty. Not actual difficulty; rather, how difficult the challenge is perceived to be by the player.

The Facebook games I've played are basically slot machines. There is no challenge; very little strategy. Do you dig in the open areas first, or go for the plants (which require more energy), or open up the gates (which require no energy and give some XP)? Ultimately you're gonna click every damn little grid square that you can. Whether you click them "smart" or not is maybe a 5% change in effectiveness. These games win on two fronts: the user can perceive some kind of magical ESP or mental brilliance in what they're doing, which is great for the vast majority of players that are fucking morons. (They play slot machines and farmville, after all.) And they get random rewards.

The two are really related. The human brain is wired to see patterns; we look for patterns, because they help us survive. Sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and even touch came into play for survival. Should I eat these berries, or wait til they change color? Does that sound mean a jungle cat is about to rip my spleen out, or is it just a harmless forest critter? Give a player a bunch of random stimulus and he'll think he sees patterns in it.

It requires a lot of discipline to avoid latching onto that perceived pattern - plus the experience to know that your brain plays these kinds of tricks, and that you need to do something other than sit there with your jaw slack and let the emotions roll across your brain. But that discipline is only useful when there's an actual pattern to be perceived. That is, in a slot-machine game, all the patterns you think you see will be fake. In Facebook games, there might be one real pattern in a hundred.

One might say "good games have real patterns for players to discover," but I'm not sure how much that's true. (It depends on what you mean by 'good' game, of course.) The facebook games are popular, even though they're just slot machines and epeen displays. I do think if you want people to pay money for your game that you need to get them to want it, to have some emotional pull to the game more than just what you get from a slot machine. (Though people do dump a lot of money both in casinos and facebook microtransactions.)

Facebook games have choice, but it's a shallow, meaningless choice. Even perceived difficulty is low.

I think perceived difficulty is better than actual difficulty. Games that are actually difficult can produce failure, and that leads to bad emotions. But without evil there can be no good: people value achievements that came with high cost. It's one of the reasons why hazing is still popular - paying dearly for something, even a gym membership, leads the human brain to bias more value.

Too many apparently difficult choices that are actually trivial can burn the player out to the point where they realize how pointless their choices are. I think I burned out of WoW once because of that. When a player realizes that all their clever strategizing was meaningless, they can shut off like a switch.

That marks your boundaries: make the difficulty too real and players give up in frustration; make it too much of a smokescreen and you risk players finding out and feeling like they've wasted their time on your game.

Challenge and Accomplishment

I want to say "the best games have some real challenge, some perceived difficulty, and reward players for making smart strategic choices." But what does best mean (i.e. on what scale)? Is this just my preferred game style? Am I just deluding myself into thinking I like challenge? I guess I'd rather be fooled into thinking I'm smart than be given a game that I can't figure out.

The point of making games is merely to feed our own values. The two major values are (1) money, and (2) the pleasure that comes from making others happy, or entertaining them. #1 is a measure of #2 - if players are entertained by your game, they'll pay you for it. The more fun and happiness they receive, the more money they'll give you. I don't think these values are separate, and it's one reason why I think discussions of "true" art and good games are pretentious and miss the point. Make a game that makes you money, and that's proof that you're making people happy.

You could make a slot machine. You could fool a bunch of ignorant rubes into thinking they're smart; give the ESP types a reason to believe in their magical powers; and amuse the easily-entertained.

Alternately, you could put some real challenge into your game. Give players choices that actually matter; where choosing wrong will mean failure. Make success cost a bit, so they value it, but not too costly to burn them. Make some choices look difficult when they're actually not. But most importantly, play with their emotions. Players want a roller-coaster ride. Give them both achievement and entertainment, and they'll give you their money.

Fun RPG Combat

see also: fun rpg combat part 2

I'm working on a retro, 2D RPG, so RPG mechanics are on my mind. I'll go into my plan and the game a bit more at some other time, but today I wanted to explore combat mechanics, and what makes for a fun RPG. But first, I want to talk about fun in general.

Fun

What makes for a fun game? What is fun? This is a big issue that game designers love talking about, but I'm not really sure why -- I think the issues are fairly straightforward. I'll lay out my thoughts and you can be the judge. :)

Let's look at boring first. Boring is when you've got nothing to do, nothing to think about. Mindless repetition is fun; the 'repetition' means you've figured out how to do a task and you're just mindlessly repeating it. Boring is mowing the grass, stuffing envelopes, fighting the same random creature encounter for the hundredth time. There's nothing about the task that's challenging. Maybe the first time, but now that you've figured it out you're just going through the motions. There's no mental or emotional commitment to the process.

Fun is the opposite of boring. But first let's ask: are there activities that aren't boring, but aren't fun? Some activities aren't boring because they require some problem-solving and/or careful attention, but aren't fun. Fun implies a positive emotional response; busy-work activities don't have that. You don't have time to let your mind wander and get bored, but there's something missing. Busy-work activities include writing uninteresting code, building uninteresting 3D models, doing your taxes. Not boring (you're too engaged to get bored), but definitely not fun.

This is pushing us towards fun, obviously. We know what sort of activities aren't fun, and in describing them it's obvious what they're missing. Intellectual interest, or emotional drive. Curiosity, achievement, happiness, social connection, fear, horror, thrill, suspense.... Horror movies and games push the fear and horror buttons; adventures like Indiana Jones go for thrill; mysteries and dramas often push suspense and curiosity. These movies and games like them are fun.

Interactivity

Games are different from other media in that they're interactive. Movies can't give viewers a sense of achievement, and (except for the camaraderie felt around the water cooler when you're talking about how much you love [insert favorite cult movie here]) can't give a sense of social connection either. Movies can pique curiosity, but they don't give you the tools to resolve it yourself. Games can try to hit the big emotional buttons that movies go after (like fear and thrill) or pique intellectual curiosity, but they can do more: they can provide challenges and reward achievement, let players build social bonds to achieve common goals, and let players explore play spaces and puzzles in their own time and way.

Games are also different because they're typically much longer than movies, and usually longer than books. RPGs, especially. There are short RPGs out there and very long books, but in general games provide far more hours of entertainment. This is a bit of a pickle, because games have to figure out how to be fun for longer than 90 minutes. It's hard enough to make a good movie, how do you make 15 hours of fun on a budget a tenth the size?

There are ways of filling time, of course. Grinding is a bad way. But what's the difference between grinding (boring!) and fun? Yeah, well, asking the question makes the answer obvious. We want games that have fun ways of filling time -- or at least, not boring ways.

Games often fluff themselves out with skill challenges. Some games are primarily skill challenges, like shooters and racing games. Others, such as platformers, focus on exploration or figuring out how to get somewhere or kill a boss mob but also contain (possibly extensive) skill challenges. Starcraft is an RTS that's packed with skill challenges on the multiplayer competetive level.

I've mentioned exploration, too, and this is a great way to extend a game. Even in territory you've already covered, you might explore a different aspect of the world -- in Left 4 Dead, you check nooks and crannies for hiding zombies. Once you've played through the campaigns a few times you know the rooms and the architecture, but you don't know where the enemy is. Some games provide rich mechanics that the player is constantly exploring, such as RTS games where players learn how different units behave and interact.

Puzzles and sims both fill gameplay time with puzzles. In obvious ways in puzzle games, but I lump sims in here because, to me, most sims are long series of specific puzzles. Where do I put the next building, what troops should I train, where do I put my resource fields? I view Transport Tycoon, one of my favorite sims, as a series of four puzzles: where do I put the station? How should I build the line around these terrain features? What consist should I run between these two towns? and finally how do I optimize traffic? The player is constantly shuttling between one puzzle and the next.

High Points and Engagement

I think there's two things that makes a game fun: emotional high points, and near-constant engagement. Basically: add big, cool moments, and avoid breaking the player out of play.

If the game gets boring, tedious, or punishing, it can break suspension of disbelief or add enough of a punishment that the player disengages from concern for his on-screen avatar. Failure itself isn't necessarily a bad thing; some games are built around constant failure, such as roguelikes and shooters. Counter Strike doesn't suck even though you 'fail' (get killed) once every few minutes. That 'failure' frames the game and defines the challenge. The player isn't concerned about totally avoiding that failure as much as he's interested in maximizing the experience between those moments. (It helps that Counter Strike provides a social experience for dead players.)

Games without disengaging moments can keep a player at the controls, but an interesting game without emotional high points is equally unfulfilling. It can serve as a distraction but isn't at the same level of "fun" as a game that provides those high points.

High points are the peaks of emotional engagement. Gaining a level in an RPG is a single moment that collects all of the emotional buildup of previous play and hands it to the player at one, big, emotionally-charged moment. In level-based games (ie map levels, like Doom or Starcraft or Mario), finishing a level is that big moment. In adventures, there's often a big puzzle that's solved in each step of the game. Game designers know all about these emotional high points; they make the effort to provide rewards to players at them. Because of that emotional weight, these are also often the moments that players remember most.

Fun games keep players engaged and provide periodic emotional high points. Players enjoy play, and fondly recall the "peak experiences" of games past.

Recommendations

Those, then, are my two recommendations to game designers: provide engagement without boredom, and put more oomph into your game's high points.

In fun rpg combat part 2, I talk about applying this problem specifically to RPGs.

The Rule of Seven

Andrew Doull, on his blog Ascii Dreams, suggests that game designers should follow a moral code -- mostly by not creating punishing or boring game mechanics. One of his rules he calls "The Rule of Seven":

A player should be at most presented with seven options at any one time.

The reason for the number seven here is a reference to the magic number seven, plus or minus two, described in a 1956 paper by psychologist George Miller. The core of the concept is that humans can remember about seven different things at a time; that we can distinguish between seven different qualities or quantities before our capacity to comprehend is compromised.

Miller's Argument

Miller notes that we can get around this: we can count way past the number seven itself, as well as use thousands of words written with 26 different letters, because experience and tricks (such as using arabic numerals in a base-10 system) let us expand the range of qualities that we can express and remember. The point is really that, when faced with a new, unfamiliar group of items, we are at first stuck dividing them into at most seven categories. Never studied trees before? Then you'd probably be able to identify or describe seven types. Never studied breeds of dogs, or types of land animals, or crops, or minerals, or types of architecture, or music? Our natural ability lets us stick them into seven groups. Maybe only five, maybe sometimes nine, depending on the person's intelligence and experience. Until we start studying the subject, of course -- and then we learn all sorts of attributes that let us learn about more types.

And so when you design a game that has new creature types, or treasure types, or places to go -- your players will only be able to distinguish between about seven of them.

Until they learn your game. And there's the rub: how long are they going to play your game? For a short game, one that you finish in ten to fifteen hours, your players are unlikely to learn a lot about your game world, or want to spend time and effort building an efficient mental model to distinguish between all the types of Frobozzes and Gromixes that you've invented, or even to remember if Mithril or Truesilver or Adamantite is the better armor -- even if they've seen those names before.

Roguelike games start with the player in town. They've got ten buildings to choose from, plus stairs to go down and villagers to talk to. The player doesn't group this into "fourteen things" -- that's what Miller answered. The player will see this as three choices: enter a random building, talk to a random person, or head down the stairs. Because there's ten buildings, you've broken the rule of seven: it will take some time for the player to learn what those ten buildings are. If there were only seven, they'd do it quickly. The time difference between learning three buildings, five buildings, or seven buildings is tiny; trying to distinguish between ten takes exponentially longer.

Game Design Ethics

So how does this impact the game designer? It'll stress your players, and possily frustrate them, if you constantly tax their memory. Running out of time and have to choose the right one of those ten shops? Users will fail because they couldn't remember correctly. If you had given them seven choices, players would be a lot less frustrated.

Andrew Doull's basic point about clicklets is that forcing the user to do something boring and repetetive, mindless, without choice or consequence, or in a taxing way is cruel. And the main reason to avoid cruelty is to make a fun game; something that players want to come back to.

Some games frustrate me needlessly. It really turns me off of the game. If I sit down to play a game and am then bombarded with dumbass, frustrating rules and mindless clicking to get what I want, then I feel like a product I purchased for the purpose of entertainment has lied to me, and is subjecting me to pain and frustration. I find that unethical.

An analogy for a moment: Is it unethical to kill someone if you didn't know that what you were doing would cause their death? Out in the real world, we call that manslaughter, and it might be involuntary, but it'll still get you convicted and thrown in jail.

A game designer that builds a frustrating system is still guilty of frustrating his users. It doesn't matter if you knew ahead of time or not. Not knowing is negligence; it indicates a lack of forethought, of consideration. It's inconsiderate.

The idea of the ethics of game design is that: a game designer shouldn't build systems that frustrate, bore, or needlessly confuse their users. (I don't mean all confusion; some jokes and puzzles rely centrally on confusion. Work with me, here.) A designer shouldn't build such systems whether they know they'll have that effect or not; a designer is responsible for building a good product, and for learning more about his art such that he avoids such sinful mechanics.

Designing an MMO part 1

Designing a New MMO, Part I: Get Rid of Classes!

Everyone wants to make an MMO. They're fun games, and with WoW pulling in over a billion dollars a year it looks like an insanely lucrative market.

Except, of course, for all those failures. Like Tabula Rasa, which cost a hundred million to make and only brought in a sixth of that in revenue. Unless you've got 84 million dollars you don't mind never seeing again, jumping in should be done with care.

I like thinking about MMO design. I think it's like talking politics. It's not like me and the rest of the crew at the water cooler are going to run for office. Ultimately, the only effect each of us has is one vote -- out of millions. Does it really matter what I think about politics? At most, I'm influencing a dozen people. And I haven't yet converted any of them to the One True and Proper Political Party, so what does it matter?

It doesn't matter. It's fun, though. Likewise, us scrubs talk MMO design. It's an entertaining exercise.

Usually the first topic to come up is something like "classes are lame" or "levels are boring". I think this is a fairly fundamental discussion.

But I'll skip it, because Lum did a much better job than me. Go read that.

(There's no guarantee that I'll ever write a part 2.)

Reusing End-Game Content

I read a post on end-game content over at Player Vs Developer and was reminded of a suggestion I made to Blizzard long ago.

There are basically three problems that I'll address in this post: players want new content, they want a variety of content, and devolpers don't want to throw away old effort or see great content go unused.

Quake and CTF

One issue I had with Warsong Gulch (a 10-vs-10 Capture the Flag PvP zone) was that the map got boring. This is one issue with FPS games -- many players like having different maps.

Back when I played Quake, there were a handful of maps that everyone played on, and it was interesting to continue playing on the same map, over and over. I was actually learning new things about the maps after a year of play; specifically, I was learning player behavior. Learning where things are on the map is the first step; then one develops patterns; then one learns what patterns the enemy has; and then a metagame starts where players start trying to deceive their foe about what pattern they are running, etc etc. In Quake, I was learning very specific timing patterns, and how to juke out other players and make them think I was somewhere else. I was counting on my opponent knowing the map so well that I could play against that knowledge.

This is like tennis, or basketball, etc. Everyone plays tennis on the same court, don't they get bored of the same layout game after game? The answer is obviously no; the game isn't about the court, the game is about the other player.

Not so with online games like Quake or Warcraft because most players (especially new or casual players) don't want to become PvP pros. And many other players resent having to learn a map well, and instead just want to win without putting in effort. Don't underestimate your players' arrogance. Many players that suck don't believe it; they blame their losses on bad map balance, or the fact that their opponent knows the map 'too well', or some other lame excuse. Players suck. People suck.

When I played Quake on the LAN at work, I would learn the maps quickly (I'm good like that), or I'd remember the map from online play. I'd grab the rocket launcher and red armor and then start tearing people up -- in part because I also played a lot and was a good player. They'd get frustrated or bored, because to them the interesting bit was the new map, not the game mechanics themselves. They wanted a slot machine, where sometimes they won. They wanted to win; they didn't want to earn the win.

My point is that a great majority of people that will pay for your product want variety, not challenge. Don't force them to play competetive tennis; they want wacky new rules and a roll of the dice.

So am I now just bitching about WSG because I want to see new maps? Not exactly. Quake was played on a handful of maps; WSG only takes place on one map. Every time you want to play Capture-the-Flag (CTF) in WoW, you have to go to WSG. The other PvP maps have different gameplay -- Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm both have a Battlefield/Team Fortress-like base capture mechanic; Alterac Valley is a back-and-forth push to the enemy's base.

My PvP Suggestion

My suggestion to Blizzard was to make more CTF maps, then change the queue mechanism to be somewhat like Arena, so that when someone queued for "WSG", they'd really be queueing for CTF, and sometimes they'd play in Warsong Gulch, sometimes in Netherstorm Gulch, sometimes in Grizzly Gulch, etc.

The major problem with just adding those as separate queues is that it's hard to find players. Now, even with queues spread across an entire battlegroup, sometimes it's hard to find people to play in Alterac Valley. Imagine if there were three times as many PvP queues -- some of those games would never get started! Hence: group several WSG-type maps into one queue. You get more players funnelling into the same queue, and players get to experience a wider variety in online maps. (This is why most Counter-Strike and Team Fortress servers rotate through maps!)

Players Want More Content.

This issue with finding players is also a problem (now that a new expansion has come out) for old end-game content. Who wants to run Scholomance or Kharazan? Those instances are lame! There's level 80 content to do! As much as players want variety, they don't want to do irrelevant content.

Scholomance is old. It takes too long to do all those quests. Once you hit level 61, the content starts becoming trivial, and the rewards for the grind too small. The problem is the same for level 70 instances -- it was hard then to find a group that wanted to do Mechanar, or Arcatraz, or Botanica. There were too many places to go for there to be many people that want to do one specific instance.

One way to fix this is to rebalance Scholomance so that level 80s can do it. They did that with Naxx; it's a fun challenge for 80s and the rewards are appropriate. Yet if they did this to every 60 and 70 instance, it'd be a pain to find a group to do anything. It'd be the problem with Mechanar but far bigger. Especially with the way itemization works -- one person wants to get his hat from here, the next guy needs a pair of pants that drops off a boss there, and once they got their drops they'd never want to do the instance again. It'd be nearly impossible to find someone to do any one specific instance, just because there'd be so few people that want anything that drops from there!

One way to solve that is the token system used at the end of the 60 lifecycle and was fairly widespread in the Burning Crusade world: kill a boss, get a token that can be used by a handful of classes for a number of different armor slots.

Now imagine if you needed Keeper of Time rep for some level 80 gear that you could only get from the Keepers, but that you could get the rep from any of a half-dozen old instances (rebalanced for level 80) and that it also didn't matter at all which one you did. Now you could say "I want to do one of the Caverns of Time", and anyone that wanted Keeper rep could do it. It used to be that people wanted (say) Durnholde specifically because that's where their item dropped. What if their item dropped from all of those instances instead of just one boss in just one instance?

Now everyone could do Caverns of Time again. The developers could re-use end-game content, and players would have a wider variety of options for where to go. The developers could add in one or two new CoT instances, and maybe redo one of the old ones, and everyone (new and old players alike, ancient characters and brand new alts) would have a much wider variety of content to choose from. A group of five players could choose which instance they enjoy rather than which instance that itemization forces them to pick. Players would be far more likely to be able to play a new instance, instead of feeling forced to go do the same instance over again.

The downside to this, of course, is that maybe players are bored of the Caverns -- especially those that were playing before BC came out and have been playing since. I have a hard time believing that Bliz couldn't just redo each of those levels. Seriously. They're making billions of dollars a year on the game. And they could reset KoT rep to Revered, or maybe add something past Exalted, or add a new faction that automatically becomes Revered 0/21000 if the were Exalted before, etc etc, so players would have a reason to go back.

Players want new content. Players want varied content. Developers don't want to develop content, and then effectively throw it away because no-one is doing it any more.

The easiest thing to fix, really, is throwing away content. They removed Old Naxx from the game. They could remove Old Scholomance and who would know or care? Spending the money to develop New Scholomance would be trivial to them, it would be new content even to old players, and (with sufficient itemization eg through tokens) would give players a broader set of dungeons to explore, instead of hitting Kara week after week after week after week after zzzz....

Complexity in Game Design

My Travian game is coming to a close, ie nearing its one-year mark. I've been poking around at other browser games to assess the competition, thinking about switching, and it reminded me of one of the lessons of game design that I picked up long ago.

I remember playing Warcraft 2 and thinking, "you know, this game would be even better if it had even more upgrades and building types and everything."

A few years later, while playing Kohan, I realized that I was very wrong. WC2 was so awesome because it wasn't any more complex. Kohan (another real-time strategy game) had a different, but relatively straightforward, combat model. It didn't add more building types, or more troop types, or more upgrades -- it just configured armies differently than WC2.

Complexity is great for World of Warcraft because people play that game for thousands of hours. Yet at the lower levels, the game starts out very simple. Starcraft, currently enjoying years of professional play in Korea, isn't any more complicated than Warcraft 2. Chess is much simpler than both.

What makes a game fun is the interplay of choices. With a ton of choices, sometimes randomness sets in and dominates play. "Is unit A better than unit Z732? What about Z731, or Q986? Gah there's so many, forget it! Just build unit A!?" It's difficult to figure out a good strategy (or to be happy with the strategy you chose) when combinations start spiraling up.

Warcraft 2 and Kohan and Starcraft all found a balance with a small number of troops and buildings. Even then, they gradually added all their options in over the course of the game. They don't throw new players into the deep end (the full game); they work up to it over 30 hours or more.

It's like getting decent at chess and thinking, "ok, now that I've learned how all these pieces move, what I need now is more pieces! A larger board!" What makes chess interesting isn't those new pieces; instead, the game changes. The focus shifts to strategy and positional play, thinking ahead and mind games, learning the books and the endgames.

Part of Travian's appeal is its simplicity. If the game got too much more complex -- twice the number of buildings, more complex combat, etc -- then it would be a much harder game to get into. Part of its appeal is its chess-like simplicity. Even in that simplicity there is a lot of interplay, since so much of the game works on an exponential curve.

Good designs are simple designs. Let the fun be in the interplay of a handful of archetypes, not in the mindless proliferation of abilities and powers and resources and buildings and technologies...

Noobs and Information

Many games have large noob populations, and they suck. Dealing with noobs is a pain. They don't know what they're doing, they don't know what to ask, and they're asking all the wrong people in the wrong places.

I think the same thing happens in many domains, not just in online games.

The problem is that the noobs have no information. Games with strong documentation and community features reduce their noob load; games where information is spread out among third-party sources and where game mechanics are not explained by the developer have much higher noob loads.

Warcraft has extensive online documentation, but they still have a high noob load. 'Preventing' noobs requires addressing the needs of the noobs, not the needs of the marketing department. Keeping players interested, getting them to come back, giving them something to look forward to -- these are all great. But it's not what noobs need.

Travian has crappy documentation. There's a lot of different info sites, but many of them are paltry. They focus on a few of the major concepts in the game, and although often broad and deep, are broad and deep in the wrong places.

Single-player games tend to not have noobs. Single-player games tend to require that they explain themselves to new players or else players just stop playing. I've played a number of 'innovative' single-player console and PC games that just didn't make sense. Although these games hint at depth and complexity and something fun, they hide it. And if I can't find it, the game gets returned and I don't recommend it. And I expect they get bad reviews, too.

What noobs need is direction. They need to know how the game scores them. They want to know the roles that they are expected to take. They want to know the consquences of their actions, before they take them. They want a place to go for this information, plus a forum lively enough where they can ask obscure questions.

Direction

Single-player games tend to have scores or mission directives that communicate to players what it is that they're trying to accomplish. Warcraft is fairly open, yet there are a few major goals: get to the level cap (80), accumulate gear, and work through the hardest dungeons. A more subtle point is the things that they should look out for along the way; some guidance on which goals are worthwhile. Many mid-level players worry about gear, spending hours and days getting just the right piece. Then they out-level it a few days later.

Travian takes pride in its opaqueness, supposedly because it gives players 'freedom' to choose their own path. Yet there are a few paths that are extremely useful to the over-arching goal of winning the game. Winning the game is something that's done by an alliance, not by a solo player, or one player that happens to be in an alliance with some friends. It requires the cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds, of players. There are a few strong roles that players can take, as well as some rules for how to be most effective. Yet the publishers don't do any of that; they leave it up to players to discover all of that on their own.

The discovery process can be fun, but there's two important concepts that limit where a game designer should put discovery: consequence (see below) and direction. If a player first has to figure out where he's going, then he's not discovering the game world, or developing strategy; he's figuring out what the user manual would look like, if the user manual had something more constructive than a simple list of all the units in the game and their cost.

Roles

Role is related to Direction. Whereas Direction shows the player what they have to do to win (what obstacles they have to overcome), Role is the set of tools that the player has available to do it.

A Priest in World of Warcraft knows about the spells that he can cast, but a good role is a bit more than "cast these three spells over and over." In a raid, a healer can stay focused on one target, heal several targets, look over a whole bunch of people and top them off -- or stick to some of the utility spells that they have.

Over a career levelling a priest, that player might go Holy (and heal in groups), Shadow (and focus on damage and mana generation), or Discipline (for... PvP?). Ignoring the accuracy of those descriptions, these are ways of telling new players: if you choose this class, you will have these roles that you fit into.

In Travian, roles could be as a Defender, Hammer, or Feeder; one might work solo or in a group. There's an infinite variety of combinations, obviously -- yet there are no general guidelines. Travian noobs wonder what they should be focused on. They try to do all things, without picking a role. They want to be offensive, but don't know how that plays out over a year. It's very frustrating to spend a lot of time on a game building a character (as in WoW) or a bunch of villages (as in Travian) to find out that you made fundamental mistakes early on, and that your current effectiveness is gimped because of it.

Giving new players guidance on the Role that they'll play can help players get started on the road to contributing during a game, rather than observing. Links to discussions will help them understand how other players feel about that role, letting new players find their sweet spot that much faster.

Score

Score defines direction. Score tells players how they win. It gives them feedback, and it's through feedback that players learn to play better. I don't like mashing buttons; winning for random reasons is not an achievement. Score tells me if I mashed the right buttons, so that I can see patterns in the game, start developing a strategy, start discovering the game world, meeting new people, and then killing them.

Open games sometimes have visible 'score' charts that measure inconsequential things. Statistics can be fun to browse; some people like that. I often do. But if you give everybody a useless metric (but one easy to manipulate), many will shoot to maximize that metric, even if it is a detriment to their play experience. If you put up a score-board but that score-board only applies to some players, or is completely irrelevant to the rest, you misdirect your players.

Travian shows village population for all the players. This is the major score rank in the game, since it's something that everyone has and it's relatively easy to see. Yet it, ultimately, isn't a strong measure of performance. But that's a problem with team games; how do you measure 'performance' when so much of the contribution one makes is building social networks, establishing trust, etc?

For vague, open games like travian, maybe the best way to communicate 'score' to players is to give them an overview of previous rounds. Show them the target, and how they measure progress, and then what last round's measuring stick looked like. They might choose a different metric, but at least with this kind of guidance they can make an informed assessment about how well they are proceeding.

Consquences

This was one big problem in many MMORPGs: players were 'free' to destroy their characters, spending hundreds of hours building a character that was sub-par. I remember putting points into Charisma in Dark Age of Camelot. As a Cleric. It did nothing for my character; they were wasted points. The 'freedom' to distribute points as I felt wasn't backed with enough information to make a good choice (unless I had been playing the game through to the end-game already, which didn't even exist when the game first shipped). Further, my choice was hard-locked; it could never be changed. This was a combination of asking players to make choices without sufficient information and then penalizing them, for the rest of their online career, for the wrong choices.

Difficulty Levels in Games

I enjoy a good challenge, but I don't like losing.

Most console games, e.g. platformers, have relatively low death penalities. Whether it's save points or infinite respawns, dying only sets you back a few minutes -- the time to run back to where you were before. Really challenging games might require that you re-run an especially difficult gauntlet -- the biggest setbacks might be ten or twenty minutes.

The Lego games -- Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones -- are prime examples. "Dying" means you lose some points, but you can get them right back most of the time. The biggest setback in the game is realizing you skipped a level, that you went through a one-way door and now have to replay the entire level to get back to a previous screen. Which is only relevant if you're trying to get all of the secrets/treasures/etc in a level.

I used to enjoy playing the Hardcore difficulty levels on FPS games, but the single-player portion isn't usually a skill challenge; it's more often annoying and time-consuming than challenging. I just want to see the content. After playing a few levels of Doom 3 on the highest difficulty setting, I decided to go back and play on a lower setting, just to breeze through it.

One of the side effects of that choice was that the game was much less scary. When the spooks and scares didn't suggest that I'd actually die, then I didn't need to fear them. It was actually fun, in a horror-movie sort of way, to conflate the fear of getting your progress thwarted conflated with the fear of the demons. Turn the lights on, play during the day, and crank the difficulty level down, and the game loses any emotional impact it might have had. If you like horror movies, you probably know seeing one late at night is the best time. When the house (or movie theater) is quiet, every little creak and groan can make you jump.

But the Lego games aren't about scares. They're about content. You get to play through the movies, which is fun, and you get to spend time looking for hidden secrets. Both are great fun, and neither one is the sort of challenge that can even have setbacks. I remember playing the old Sonic games, and Mario, and whatnot, and in those, death was a threat. But you only died while you learned a mechanic; after a while, death wasn't so much an ever-present threat as it was something to keep you on your toes. Ratchet and Clank, Banjo Kazooie, and Sly Cooper are similar. Dying (at least, dying several times and losing all of your Lifes) could set you back a good bit, maybe fifteen minutes, but you didn't die that true death very often.

As I mentioned in my previous post (about train tycoon games), I've been playing Railroad Tycoon 2 again lately. I bought RRT3 and Railroads! (aka RRT4) at the same time, and I'll go through them again later, but for now I'm playing through this high-rated classic game.

When you screw up in RRT2, you lose the mission. You don't have to win the mission. In fact, you could just Resign your way through the game and see what each of the levels is about. There's no content block -- the entire game is open to you as soon as you buy it. So what's the challenge? Somewhat like a toy, the challenge is up to you. You don't have to get gold medals, but it's the highest reward the game offers. So you've got a few choices -- play all the missions through, win or lose; win all of the missions; or win all of the missions with gold medals.

For me, getting the gold medals was my goal. It was a bit of a pain, because I had to learn how to make money. I played through all of the Canada mission (#6) and lost -- I had nowhere near enough money to win. I wasn't really sure why. I looked around a bit, and from the comments I saw, I realized that I needed to focus more on long-distance hauls, be less focused on getting strictly to each coast (going to Halifax early is a waste of time), and to spend more time supplying and exploiting the industries available. Another change I made in my second run-through was to be more careful where I laid tracks, exploiting terraforming and avoiding congested routes.

A lot of learning is required to do well. Unlike, say, Lego Indiana Jones, I can't just plow my way through an RRT2 mission and win. The game makes it hard to pay attention to elevations, but I can't just ignore them. The game makes it hard to mind consists and stations, but I can't ignore them either.

When I lost the Canada mission the first time, I felt like it was out of my control. I didn't know what I was doing wrong. When you lose a life in a platformer, it's usually pretty obvious what you did wrong -- there's lava there (oops, didn't see it the first time); you have to fight this boss a different way (and a few minutes of trial and error usually shows you how); or you need to time your jumps and swings and whatnot better. There are skills in some of those games, timing related skills, and usually practice is a trivial way to increase your skills.

In RRT2, I found out that it takes six years (about ninety minutes of real time) to send a train from Halifax to Vancouver. Geez! I started a year too late. Figuring out how long it'd take to send a train that far... is not really possible. The best you can do is to spend a half-hour testing and measuring, and that's a horrid waste of time. F that.

Platformers are often safe exploration games. Or, if you have good combat skills in the game, the challenge isn't too onerous. Once you defeat the foes, they stay dead, then you can go explore without hindrance. Other games force you to explore the mechanics -- how do you make money in RRT2? You have to tease the profit equation out of the game.

And here we get to what I ranted about in yesterday's post: the feedback loop for figuring out that equation is slow. Deadly slow. "F this, I quit" sort of slow. Lose the mission enough times and you go hunt down a FAQ. Why bother solving it by yourself? I kept losing the Whistestop Tour mission as my train ran out of sand, and I thought, wtf?! There's only one way to get the gold medal, and it requires (as the game often does) to ignore the help that the game offers. (That Whistlestop mission offers you an upgrade if you get to a town in time, but there's no way to get there -- none of the engines are fast enough to get close enough before you run out of sand.) These are trial-and-error lessons, but the downside is that you have to error a lot, and spend a lot of time doing so, before you move on.

Games should calibrate themselves to players. If a player doesn't have the skill or the knowledge to get a gold medal, platformers give them silver and bronze medals. They say, "thanks for playing, here's your twinkie" and tell you you did a good job and let you move on to the next game, brag to your friends that you finished, and score a few achievement points.

Telling the player "ha-ha! You lose! Now you have to do that all over again!" sucks. And it sucks in builder games where you build this big cool rail empire... then never see it again. You throw it away. As awesome and profitable and elegant as it was, it's gone. Oh, and cuz you lost? Yeah, you're throwing it away with nothing to show for it but some bruises and an admonition to try harder next time.

The skills you gain when playing sports and lose, at least, are something. Throwing away my cool rail empire and the hours I spent building it just to gain skill at beating the remaining levels -- that's not really a skill I want to be proud of. I can't say "I accomplished nothing last night but learning how to beat this game that I'm gonna play for a couple more weeks then never touch again." Who cares? Getting better at shooting baskets, or pitching, or hitting, and saying "well we lost and I sprained my ankle, but I think I learned a lot about the sport" is worthwhile.