One of the things I mentioned in my previous post is the way that powerful players -- those with high scores, cool gear, and achievements -- serve as role-models to new players.
It is often not, strictly, the players themselves. It's not like they spent their lives getting good at a sport, or a musical instrument. We're talking gamers that spent too much time in a raid dungeon or playing their XBox and so did something that nearly anyone else could do, given enough time. "Role models" isn't the right word; I guess I'm hunting for a better one.
When I was playing WoW, I took a break after about a year of playing, then came back a couple months later. I remember talking to a new level-60 priest and he said I was regarded as one of the best priests on the server. I was definitely one of the best-geared, having played on that server since opening day, but best? How does he know?
I've felt the same way myself, about other accomplished players. And friends. I see someone with high scores, cool gear, etc, and I want to match them. Their accomplishment is a challenge to me, to do better myself, to match (or surpass) their score.
Knowing something is possible is a big part of the incentive to me; it's knowing that I could be even better. It's like, I think I do well and then see a bigger score, and say, "hey, I'm a good player, too, I should have a score that high." I want to have the high score but I'm not as concerned with letting people in my real life that I'm the one with that score; for me the draw is testing myself against a known measurement.
There's a lot of different incentives, really. One of the other incentives for me is closure, which drives collecting. It is an encouragement to get a full set of Tier X equipment in WoW, or to collect all the Pokemon, or have a full set of Magic: The Gathering rare cards from a certain set, etc. Other goals include wanting to be on top; to measure themselves; to crush other players; accolades; or keeping up with siblings or friends. I mentioned jealousy and greed yesterday.
These are all drives that come from seeing other players that have already achieved these goals; I'm not talking about the Achiever/Explorer/Socializer/Killer spectrum here. This isn't really just an achiever thing either -- at least, I don't consider it to be. My point isn't that players want to achieve these things, it's that they see other people that have achieved them and are motivated by that to go do it themselves.
The Lesson here is: make your achievements visible. Give players a chance to show off their
accomplishments. Make sure new players are exposed to the wide variety of power-ups in your game.
And the ways of going about that are plenty: leader boards, flashy gear, XBox Live-style achievements, and providing some way for high-powered and low-powered players to mix.
Showing posts with label status. Show all posts
Showing posts with label status. Show all posts
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
Status as a Game Mechanic
Note: I've been using "mechanic" to refer to what the game does "behind the scenes", and using "gameplay" to refer to what the player does with his time. However I'm used to using "game mechanic" and "core mechanic" to refer to what I'm now referring to as gameplay... I think I need to revise my nomenclature. (See my previous post on game design theory for some discussion on these terms.)
Definitions
Players give many reasons for playing games, but do you trust your players? Are they all sufficiently introspective and educated to understand their own motivations? They know if they enjoy something, but I'm talking about why they enjoy it. I'll go into my own theory of fun at some later point, but for now, let me say that one of the reasons that players enjoy games is the status that they can show off for their achievements.
I'm not talking about achievement directly. If happiness is the achievement of value, then a well-adjusted person is happy (and enjoys a game) when he achieves game goals that he values. But that's not status -- status is telling your buddy how you did in the game last night, or riding your new mount through a capital city in Warcraft.
The issue is a bit complicated becomes there's both showing others as well as knowing that you achieved that status item. The braggart doesn't care about getting a status item except to the extent that he can brag about it. The latter is like the guy I mentioned above, someone that has internalized the game goals as his own values and enjoys the status symbol as a record of achievement.
My point is that it doesn't matter why a given player wants a status item -- just that he does want it.
The lesson is obvious: put status items in your game.
Examples
Many games have implicit status items. In RPGs, it's your character's gear. This is one of the great driving forces in WoW: do you have your dungeon 3 set? A flying mount? An epic flyer? Tier 4? Tier 6? Legendaries? Status in MMOs also comes from the group you play with: has your guild cleared Kara, Gruul's, or Black Temple? How far are you through the Plateau? I'm calling these status items implicit because the only obvious score in the game is your level - and is the same for all players at max levels.
In platformers, progress through the game and the accumulation of collectibles and tokens are status indicators. The game tells you what the status items are, and how many you've gathered so far. Yet these items are intrinsic to gameplay; the game is essentially nothing but pushing your status up.
In multiplayer first-person shooters, your status is your standing on the leaderboard. There's not much else to the game other than that score. Single-player shooters might also have a leaderboard that's shared; XBox 360 games typically have a Live component that shows how you measure up against the playerbase. (Level-based shooters have implicit status measured as progress through the game.)
The 360 brings up another way of gaining status: achievement points. I was playing Guitar Hero with a friend last weekend and he was going for a bunch of easy achievement points to push his Gamer Score over the 20,000 mark. We were joking about the arbitrariness of the achievement, even while going for it.
That's the way the brain works
It's the way the brain works -- which is my message here. Even if you know you're shooting for an arbitrary or meaningless goal, you do it anyway. Some people gloat in their shiny new beemer or tier 4 set piece or gamer score, and for them status symbols are clear motivators. The rest of us kinda catch the same disease by association. We might not feel the need to tell everyone about our status, yet we seek it just the same.
It's the score, it's what you're supposed to do.
This ties in a bit with my previous discussions on open worlds. Be careful of removing any sort of status indicator, or your player might think he's stumbled on a toy and wonder what he's supposed to do with it. Obviously we don't want to play or design boring games that people feel stuck playing just because they're chasing some status symbol. However, if your game is good, that status symbol can show them the way.
Don't be afraid of character levels; players like them. Use them to point your players towards the fun stuff you put in the game.
Definitions
Players give many reasons for playing games, but do you trust your players? Are they all sufficiently introspective and educated to understand their own motivations? They know if they enjoy something, but I'm talking about why they enjoy it. I'll go into my own theory of fun at some later point, but for now, let me say that one of the reasons that players enjoy games is the status that they can show off for their achievements.
I'm not talking about achievement directly. If happiness is the achievement of value, then a well-adjusted person is happy (and enjoys a game) when he achieves game goals that he values. But that's not status -- status is telling your buddy how you did in the game last night, or riding your new mount through a capital city in Warcraft.
The issue is a bit complicated becomes there's both showing others as well as knowing that you achieved that status item. The braggart doesn't care about getting a status item except to the extent that he can brag about it. The latter is like the guy I mentioned above, someone that has internalized the game goals as his own values and enjoys the status symbol as a record of achievement.
My point is that it doesn't matter why a given player wants a status item -- just that he does want it.
The lesson is obvious: put status items in your game.
Examples
Many games have implicit status items. In RPGs, it's your character's gear. This is one of the great driving forces in WoW: do you have your dungeon 3 set? A flying mount? An epic flyer? Tier 4? Tier 6? Legendaries? Status in MMOs also comes from the group you play with: has your guild cleared Kara, Gruul's, or Black Temple? How far are you through the Plateau? I'm calling these status items implicit because the only obvious score in the game is your level - and is the same for all players at max levels.
In platformers, progress through the game and the accumulation of collectibles and tokens are status indicators. The game tells you what the status items are, and how many you've gathered so far. Yet these items are intrinsic to gameplay; the game is essentially nothing but pushing your status up.
In multiplayer first-person shooters, your status is your standing on the leaderboard. There's not much else to the game other than that score. Single-player shooters might also have a leaderboard that's shared; XBox 360 games typically have a Live component that shows how you measure up against the playerbase. (Level-based shooters have implicit status measured as progress through the game.)
The 360 brings up another way of gaining status: achievement points. I was playing Guitar Hero with a friend last weekend and he was going for a bunch of easy achievement points to push his Gamer Score over the 20,000 mark. We were joking about the arbitrariness of the achievement, even while going for it.
That's the way the brain works
It's the way the brain works -- which is my message here. Even if you know you're shooting for an arbitrary or meaningless goal, you do it anyway. Some people gloat in their shiny new beemer or tier 4 set piece or gamer score, and for them status symbols are clear motivators. The rest of us kinda catch the same disease by association. We might not feel the need to tell everyone about our status, yet we seek it just the same.
It's the score, it's what you're supposed to do.
This ties in a bit with my previous discussions on open worlds. Be careful of removing any sort of status indicator, or your player might think he's stumbled on a toy and wonder what he's supposed to do with it. Obviously we don't want to play or design boring games that people feel stuck playing just because they're chasing some status symbol. However, if your game is good, that status symbol can show them the way.
Don't be afraid of character levels; players like them. Use them to point your players towards the fun stuff you put in the game.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Power is Power
or, On Information Management as a Game Mechanism
Power is Power.
or
Power¹ is³ Power².
Power¹ is the ability to express complex ideas. Power² is power -- buying power, the power of command, the ability to get more done. What does "is" mean? Well, see, it means "is." Try to keep up here.
I'm still playing Travian. As part of playing the game, I've developed a complex information-management system that lets me assess what's going on in the game world and perform actions in a fast, efficient manner.
Specifically, I've created a map of all the other players in a 21x21 grid centered on my village. Once a day, I copy that map (it's text in a monospace font) and update all the population numbers. This lets me assess who is growing and who isn't. Also, I add in markers indicating the race of the player at that village, what guild they're in, if they're still in Beginner's Protection (and therefore can't be attacked), and, if I have already attacked them, whether it was a profitable raid.
Good players in Travian have a city that is constantly growing in population. It's how you get more power (military power, in this game). Hence, it's important to assess how strong my neighbors are. If they're not growing quickly, then they're weak players. If they're not growing at all, then they're inactive and I can then raid them with impunity. If they're growing quickly and allied, then I definitely stay away.
It took me the two weeks that I've been playing the game to move to my current system. It'll probably be tweaked further. I started with a post-it note, with the populations of the villages around me; I was basically only indicating which villages were active (by hilighting the population with, um, a hilighter). Then I switched to a text file. Then I made the map larger -- it grew from 7x7 to 11x11 to 36x48 and then shrunk to 15x15 (with two lines of 8 characters per village) and now to its current 21x21, five characters-per-village format. The width fits just fine on my monitor, allowing me to have the game open in one window and the text editor open next to it, with no overlap.
Basically the process I went through was to record different statistics and find out which were important to me. I was also subtly tweaking how I was storing and representing the information to make it easy and effective to use.
And all along, I thought, "why doesn't the game give me this information already?" This is precisely the sort of thing that a computer program would excel at.
I don't really need all this extensive record-keeping. (What does "need" mean, anyway?) (And I haven't mentioned the spreadsheet that tells me who to attack next, either.) Luckily, it doesn't take long to manage. It's unlikely that past winners and other successful players keep these kinds of records. At one point I was playing four games, though, and in that case these sorts of records are essential. But if you're only playing one game, chances are you can memorize what's going on around you without much effort.
The nice thing about records is that you don't have to memorize anything, and places where your memory might be fuzzy -- well, you don't have to worry about that. You've got the hard copy to tell you what's what.
But what if the game tracked all this stuff for me? Then I wouldn't even have to bother. And other players would know, also, if the players around them were inactive, or growing slowly, and what race they were (at a glance, without requiring bouncing through a few pages), and if they were under BP (without requiring bouncing through many pages), and how many other local players were in the same guild, and at a glance where all the big-pop cities were.
What if the game gave that information to everybody? I'd have a much harder time extracting profits from my inactive neighbors; everyone else would know about them. My opponents would make fewer mistakes, increasing the challenge. The game would shift from being one of good information management plus some basic strategy to being almost all strategy. I'm reminded of Costikyan's comments on Campaigns for North Africa: the game accurately simulates matters such as where individual pilots are and how much water each battalion has, but who cares about that stuff? Generals have staff that worry about that stuff. Strategy is hard enough without also having to micromanage pilots and water.
Some games, generally PC sims, wargames, and the like, depend to some extent on making the player manage these resources. It's busy-work. It keeps the player busy, thinking he's doing something meaningful (and, indeed, if he botches it, his troops die). But it's not a great challenge; it's a puzzle within the larger game. It doesn't lend color to the atmosphere of the game and often also has no effect on the outcome of the game -- unless you fail at the sub-task.
I think a hodge-podge of activities can work. I really enjoy Transport Tycoon, even after all these years and despite it's toy-ness, because the collection of activities in the game fit the theme of building transportation infrastructure. The game isn't really about building an empire; that's something that happens while you play the infrastructure-building game.
This is a perspective that should help you hone your game. If all of your gameplay is related to things that the Chairman of the Board would never bother with, then don't make your player take on the role of Chairman. He's the Chief Engineer, or Architect, or what have you. The chairman plays with toys -- he sets his own goals. If you decided to make a game, make the player's role match. If the gameplay fits the player as an Architect rather than Chairman, then maybe your product would work better as a game rather than as a toy.
Sim City is definitely a toy. In later versions, you micromanage stuff like water distribution, and to some extent playing around with the transportation network was Architect-y, but the gist of the game -- zone and wait -- is a toy. It's like a giant ant farm. Set some parameters and watch it go. If you wanted to take that product and make it a game, I think the mechanics would have to change a lot. When you want to give the player goals, you also need to give him ways of achieving those goals, and the more direct the better.
If Travian made all my record-keeping obsolete, I think it would change the flavor of the game. Diplomacy would be a much more obvious aspect. With stiffer competition for farms, keeping farms alive and eventually bringing them in-house would be more important. Wars would be fought over inactives, since everyone would know what pieces were in play. Mechanics would have to shift to emphasize strategy, or else it becomes pure diplomacy. Or maybe diplomacy would be the major goal!
Is your product a toy or a game? Is your player an architect or a chairman?
Power is Power.
or
Power¹ is³ Power².
Power¹ is the ability to express complex ideas. Power² is power -- buying power, the power of command, the ability to get more done. What does "is" mean? Well, see, it means "is." Try to keep up here.
I'm still playing Travian. As part of playing the game, I've developed a complex information-management system that lets me assess what's going on in the game world and perform actions in a fast, efficient manner.
Specifically, I've created a map of all the other players in a 21x21 grid centered on my village. Once a day, I copy that map (it's text in a monospace font) and update all the population numbers. This lets me assess who is growing and who isn't. Also, I add in markers indicating the race of the player at that village, what guild they're in, if they're still in Beginner's Protection (and therefore can't be attacked), and, if I have already attacked them, whether it was a profitable raid.
Good players in Travian have a city that is constantly growing in population. It's how you get more power (military power, in this game). Hence, it's important to assess how strong my neighbors are. If they're not growing quickly, then they're weak players. If they're not growing at all, then they're inactive and I can then raid them with impunity. If they're growing quickly and allied, then I definitely stay away.
It took me the two weeks that I've been playing the game to move to my current system. It'll probably be tweaked further. I started with a post-it note, with the populations of the villages around me; I was basically only indicating which villages were active (by hilighting the population with, um, a hilighter). Then I switched to a text file. Then I made the map larger -- it grew from 7x7 to 11x11 to 36x48 and then shrunk to 15x15 (with two lines of 8 characters per village) and now to its current 21x21, five characters-per-village format. The width fits just fine on my monitor, allowing me to have the game open in one window and the text editor open next to it, with no overlap.
Basically the process I went through was to record different statistics and find out which were important to me. I was also subtly tweaking how I was storing and representing the information to make it easy and effective to use.
And all along, I thought, "why doesn't the game give me this information already?" This is precisely the sort of thing that a computer program would excel at.
I don't really need all this extensive record-keeping. (What does "need" mean, anyway?) (And I haven't mentioned the spreadsheet that tells me who to attack next, either.) Luckily, it doesn't take long to manage. It's unlikely that past winners and other successful players keep these kinds of records. At one point I was playing four games, though, and in that case these sorts of records are essential. But if you're only playing one game, chances are you can memorize what's going on around you without much effort.
The nice thing about records is that you don't have to memorize anything, and places where your memory might be fuzzy -- well, you don't have to worry about that. You've got the hard copy to tell you what's what.
But what if the game tracked all this stuff for me? Then I wouldn't even have to bother. And other players would know, also, if the players around them were inactive, or growing slowly, and what race they were (at a glance, without requiring bouncing through a few pages), and if they were under BP (without requiring bouncing through many pages), and how many other local players were in the same guild, and at a glance where all the big-pop cities were.
What if the game gave that information to everybody? I'd have a much harder time extracting profits from my inactive neighbors; everyone else would know about them. My opponents would make fewer mistakes, increasing the challenge. The game would shift from being one of good information management plus some basic strategy to being almost all strategy. I'm reminded of Costikyan's comments on Campaigns for North Africa: the game accurately simulates matters such as where individual pilots are and how much water each battalion has, but who cares about that stuff? Generals have staff that worry about that stuff. Strategy is hard enough without also having to micromanage pilots and water.
Some games, generally PC sims, wargames, and the like, depend to some extent on making the player manage these resources. It's busy-work. It keeps the player busy, thinking he's doing something meaningful (and, indeed, if he botches it, his troops die). But it's not a great challenge; it's a puzzle within the larger game. It doesn't lend color to the atmosphere of the game and often also has no effect on the outcome of the game -- unless you fail at the sub-task.
I think a hodge-podge of activities can work. I really enjoy Transport Tycoon, even after all these years and despite it's toy-ness, because the collection of activities in the game fit the theme of building transportation infrastructure. The game isn't really about building an empire; that's something that happens while you play the infrastructure-building game.
This is a perspective that should help you hone your game. If all of your gameplay is related to things that the Chairman of the Board would never bother with, then don't make your player take on the role of Chairman. He's the Chief Engineer, or Architect, or what have you. The chairman plays with toys -- he sets his own goals. If you decided to make a game, make the player's role match. If the gameplay fits the player as an Architect rather than Chairman, then maybe your product would work better as a game rather than as a toy.
Sim City is definitely a toy. In later versions, you micromanage stuff like water distribution, and to some extent playing around with the transportation network was Architect-y, but the gist of the game -- zone and wait -- is a toy. It's like a giant ant farm. Set some parameters and watch it go. If you wanted to take that product and make it a game, I think the mechanics would have to change a lot. When you want to give the player goals, you also need to give him ways of achieving those goals, and the more direct the better.
If Travian made all my record-keeping obsolete, I think it would change the flavor of the game. Diplomacy would be a much more obvious aspect. With stiffer competition for farms, keeping farms alive and eventually bringing them in-house would be more important. Wars would be fought over inactives, since everyone would know what pieces were in play. Mechanics would have to shift to emphasize strategy, or else it becomes pure diplomacy. Or maybe diplomacy would be the major goal!
Is your product a toy or a game? Is your player an architect or a chairman?
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