FreeRealms: Teaching Us All That MMO Quests Are Badly Written

This posting is a response to my recent exploration of SOE's new MMO FreeRealms. I couldn't help but notice that the quests in FreeRealms have highlighted to me just how painfully childish MMO quests are in theme and writing.

MMOs are famous for their quests which consist of vivisection and taxidermy of many fantastical beasts, and slaughtering dozens of foes for very childish reasons. FreeRealms really shows up so-called adult MMOs by asking the player to do the exact same things, for the exact same reasons.

Far from making their stories seem deeper, FreeRealms' quests shows just how dysfunctional and asinine a typical MMO quest can be. The writing intended for quick, tween-age consumption is the exact same as that for epic worlds with years of development and content creation under their belt.

I'll prove it to you. Guess which MMO uses the following quests?

A) A number of shrumblers have shown up in the spirit bloom nursery! The Matron of the Nursery has asked me to help save the spirit blooms by getting rid of the shrumbler worms.

B) I've got a real problem on my hands. I have a deadline looming for an order of lumber, and I'm running out of time. The wolves and bears north of here have chased my workers away from the bundles of wood that they've already chopped.

I've already talked to Deputy Rainer about clearing the animals, but I need someone to go collect the wood for me. If you could collect eight bundles of wood for me I might just make my deadline.

C) 'There's a terrible infestation of shrews to the east of here, beyond the Delving Fields, and they're burrowing deep into the soil and ruining the greenery! If you can find some of their burrows and close them up, that should keep the filthy little beasts from straying near to the town. It's your duty to help me with this, Bounder!'

D) "I don't quite trust you with the secret of how we shift our goods through the Warden's net. Instead, the Captain asked me to have you collect some ballast for our ship. She's coming in to port for a following tide departure, and we need to top off the ballast for the storm season."

"You need to collect the roundest stones from the ballast piles. They pack the best in our hold."

"Oh, and, well, watch out for the guards. They like to harass honest traders like ourselves. They'll want to 'inspect' you."

E) "... You're still here? Don't just stand there like a lump! Go get rid of those no-good Robgoblin Initiates! They're stealing from the camp, and that's just bad business! You know how to zap right?"

Your choices are: EQ2, FreeRealms, LOTRO, Vanguard, and WoW.

Full disclosure: I wrote one of those quests up there, though I'm a little ashamed of it now.

So let's look at these five quests. Taking them apart we have:

• A) Do someone else's job for them by killing worms infesting a garden.
• B) Do someone else's job for them by collecting lumber.
• C) Do someone else's job for them by stomping on mounds of dirt.
• D) Do someone else's job for them by collecting rocks.
• E) Do someone else's job for them by beating up minorities.

In all cases, quest writing consists of two things: doing someone's job for them, and performing a petty or ethically dubious task.

Seriously, collecting lumber? Finding rocks? Beating up ethnic groups? This is our best effort at telling fantasy stories? Are we really satisfied by spending hours in a world where no one has any personal responsibility, and our greatest impulses are presented in 512 characters and takes less then 10 minutes to complete?

The telling of stories is implicit to the act of creating entertainment. Stories may be simple, or complex, but no matter how they are told they stay with people for months and even years.

Many conversations with game players of all stripes yield memories of various games, and the stories I hear are detailed, explicit, and well-remembered - even after ten years or more.

For instance, I told a friend the storyline of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games. It took about ten minutes and I spoke entirely from memory. Later, I checked to see if I remembered the storyline correctly, and was surprised to see I had gotten it correct. These are games I played over ten years ago, and yet the essential storyline for the game has stayed with me all these years.

This is an opportunity, and it saddens me to see storytelling cut in favor of bells and whistles that are actually best used to help tell your story! The computer game industry is poorly captained in this regard.

With poor storytelling, many games (and I would argue every MMO) sound like tin whistles in comparison to the orchestral music of the movie, book, and TV industries. Simply put, MMO quests sound exactly like something a ten year old would write. I should know - I had ten year old students once who very well could put out the writing complexity of an MMO quest.

So, why are we in this mess? MMO quests are markedly simplistic because "no one reads them anyway" and "too much text is daunting to the player."

But wait, is dialogue and text the only ways you tell a story?

In movies, for instance, dialogue is matched with visual action - environmental activity, motion, color, shapes. Poor storytelling in movies is typified by a "talking heads" scene. And yet, this is exactly how we tell every story in an MMO.

In MMOs, we have a figure standing ramrod stiff, spouting text that is often unconnected to the overall story of the game, the story of the world, the story even of the region the player is in. Rarely is the text in a similar voice as that of other texts the player encounters in the MMO, and rarely will the quest text be a part of the stories the player will later tell of his exploit in an MMO.

Games famous for their more adult storytelling, such as Half-Life, use much more of the game world, lighting, voices, and actions to tell their story. Far from asking you to kill ten rats, the basic story of the game and world are told in the principal goals given to the player, and the needs of the player in fulfilling these goals.

It is for this reason I advocate a re-thinking of how stories are told in MMOs. Eliminate text, eliminate stiff NPCs, engage the player in the action of the world and create fewer, richer quests that use this more active world. Create needs in players, and they will drive the story. A need is not "I need experience to level." A need is "I need to explore this dungeon to seek an item I need to craft a weapon of power to strike down the being causing the skies to go dark." The experience to level is a reward, not a purpose.

Take a page from television, or from movies. Heck, take a page from Bioshock if need be. More voice. More active NPCs. Less quests. I walk into a new region and instead of a christmas tree of stiff NPCs asking me to do murder on their behalf, I learn of a threat, and some clues to the solution. Make the story the gameplay. Make the player feel the need to engage the bad boss at the end of the dungeon for a single reason other than the massive sword he leaves behind when he dies (and strangely, does not use when he is alive!).

It is more than possible to build a quest with many sub-chapters and more than ten minutes of gameplay. Make the carrot of finishing a quest a goal of an entire playsession, rather than part of the minor rewards for playing the game. The same planning that goes into a massive dungeon space should go into telling one story for that same dungeon. And the quests attached to that story? Not 512 characters of throw-away dialogue that leads the player to a goal unconnected with the story.

Take away "kill ten rats", and tell a real story. If an MMO is not out to give the player a story, or if that story is matched by a game aimed at 'tweens and teens, then we can't start calling what we do art. We can't call it more than just spreadsheets and throw-away imagination.

(Answers to quiz above: A - EQ2, B - WoW, C - LOTRO, D - Vanguard, E - FreeRealms)

FreeRealms: Turning Social Connection into a Farmable Resource

As an avid casual gamer and an MMO player who likes to watch movies on one screen while playing in a virtual world on the other, I have enjoyed playing Sony Online Entertainment's new MMO FreeRealms.

Despite a rocky launch, missing jobs, missing features, and some fascinating bugs, the game has a core of familiar, fun gameplay that should appeal most to traditional MMO players who enjoy the slower, more social aspects of virtual worlds.

Alas, SOE has made some decisions that hamstring the social aspect of the game for those players, by having turned the tradition of making friends in an MMO into a resource that has direct benefits. This has created a divide amongst social players in a way I have yet to witness in an MMO.

When a friend is online and on the same server, you can instantly teleport to their location. Even in this game-world filled with teleportation nodes ("Warpstones"), there are many locations that take a few minutes to get to.

Thus, the lightbulb goes on - if I have many friends, then the chances that their usefulness as a portable teleportation target goes up! This is especially true because there are three important requirements that must be fulfilled:

• Friend is online.
• Friend is on the same server.
• Friend is somewhere you want to be.

Players are efficiency machines, and thus the friend invites go out - anyone who talks to me at all sends me a friend invite. Standing in one spot gets me friend invites. Showing any sort of high level equipment in a lower level zone gets me friend invites.

And the fact is... I accept them all. And I do the same in reverse - people who happen to be standing around in a location that I know I will need to get back to quickly are apt to get an exploratory friend invite from me. If they accept and stay put, I just shaved minutes of running off my schedule!

When you think of other players as resources like this, then the inherent rudeness of sending these requests begins to fade before the rationality of efficient play.

Traditionally, social requests such as duels, friend requests, and guild invites have been relegated to risky behavior. Without clear signals from the recipient you are just as apt to be reported for harassment as you are to make a friend or have a fun mock battle. With FreeRealms, the sheer usefulness of the friend-resource greatly outweighs the riskiness of making the request. And the friends list grows.

With the Warpstones and the ease of teleportation, even a two minute run in the world carries the harsh feeling of wasting time and the boredom that only overland travel over familiar territory in a game world can bring. Sure, it's great fun to run around a new area, but when you've criss-crossed this area for hours, any simple technique to speed up the process is embraced.

In a way, the ease of teleportation makes the desirability of friend-resources very high. The easier it is to travel through most of the world, the worse you feel when you do have to take to running.

So... to the controversy. In a recent thread on the FreeRealms forums, I observed the battle lines get drawn - between players who saw friends as a ticket to ride and thus sent them out en masse, and the players from the older mold that took friends lists as "serious business" and actively disliked anyone sending these requests out.

The social realm had been invaded by gameplay.

As a friends-resourcer myself, I can't help but wonder if pure labelling would fix this. Basically, in FreeRealms it is very difficult to chat with other players - and if the other player is a minor, then they can't read what you're saying to them anyway. Being on or off the list doesn't ease communication in any way whatsoever. The only tool that a friend gives you in this game is that of "teleporter target."

Another twist on this conflict is how generational it feels. Younger players - the Facebookers, the "frenemy"-havers, the social networkers, do not see a friend as any form of commitment. These socially facile people are more open because the costs and benefits are lower than that of the older players, who equate friendship with commitments to adventure together, share loot, even share account information. Seen in this light, you can feel more sympathy for each side - if having a friend gives vulnerability, then trust is important. If having a friends list member is the social equivalent of saying "hi", then numbers are important.

So really, this friend-resourcing seems logical in terms of the target audience of this game. Players who would have no issue with handing out their name and location to hundreds of other players are definitely going to benefit - less travel, more direct gameplay, more... fun?

The Circle of Life in a Spawn Cycle

Who says you have to have the same thing (or things) spawn in the same place every time? I mean, other than the people who make a living creating theme parks.

Imagine, if you will, a patch of flat grassy meadow. What lives there? Some bunnies? Let's call this meadow bunny spawn "State 0."

Well, in virtual-world-land, what would happen to this bucolic scene? Exactly - some players would come along and murder the lot of them. And then they would come back, in 2-5 minutes, depending on the spawn timer.

But, imagine a more dynamic, programmatic, dare I say "clockwork" world in which the spawned NPCs have (very) basic needs, and can affect one another quite definitively.

The forest adjacent to the meadow has a bear living in it. Bears like meat, so it moves to the meadow and eats the bunnies. This goes on for quite some time, until the bunnies are gone. Now we are at "State 1."

What happens next? Well, the orcs in a nearby village require bear hides as part of their "basic needs" and happen upon the bear. Exit bear, and now orcs are in this meadow (State 2).

Who hates orcs? How about the elves of the forest? Orcs in the meadow mean elven defenders attacking the meadow. Now we have elves here. (State 3).

The elves of course have no need for the meadow and move away. (State 4).

Bunnies, being the opportunistic jerks they are, move in. We're back to... State 0.

The circle of life, my friends, in a spawn cycle. We start a simple cycle, and let it run, with players entering the scene at any given point in the cycle. This illusion of ecologic succession matches player expectations of a living world, and can have real consequences.

Need bunny fur, or are you a druid that requires herbivores nearby to cast a cool rain spell? Well, depending on when you enter this meadow, the different spawn state will inform your next decisions. I mean, you are the player - the actor - the one who gets to break these static cycles and bend and mold them to your will.

If you need bunnies and you are at "bear" stage, then you can kill the bear and camp for the orcs. Killing them breaks the cycle of elves (they would likely walk in, mill around, then move on quickly), leading to empty field... and bunnies.

This isn't rocket science, I realize. It would take some magnificent design chops to build such a living world and make it fun. But imagine trying to manipulate more than just a hotbar full of spells - but actually trying to manipulate the environment itself to suit your needs.

And now imagine player competition within cooperation. You need bunnies? I need bears. How do we resolve this? Can we hold things in between State 0 and State 1 - having both the bear and the bunnies at the same time? How fun would it be to see a druid in a field casting damage shields on bunnies while a ranger is shooting his bow at them as fast as possible to progress the spawn cycle? Would this be fun at all? An interesting design challenge.

Virtual worlds are already moving to more programmatic and dynamic ecologies, but we're stuck still in the belief that the ecology and the gameplay should have a major seperation - the scenery and the game should not be one and the same. Can we bring them together? Should we?

Hey, I got paid a bit ago, and other thoughts

Since my blog got used for a lot of "evidence" of trouble at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment (CME) and their upcoming MMO Stargate Worlds, I figure I should take a moment and state that CME has made good on their commitments to me. I assume this means things are looking up there! As Stargate Worlds was turning into a stellar game when I left, I can imagine this means good things are coming down the road from Arizona.

In other news, some may have heard I'm at a different company, and I am. I'm still doing tradeskills, and it's becoming a matter of interest to me to see all the ways you can make a tradeskill system and yet have the same general structure.

Players have a love/hate relationship between the items and content created by a TS system. It always seemed strange to me that this was so, since the hallmark of a good and healthy game is a variety of activities and streams of content. Ideally, the TS stream of content should complement and enrich the other systems entangled with it, instead of taking a front seat/back seat relationship as we see in so many MMOs.

Really, tradeskills are not the most logical extension from the killing side of things, but because of the investment of a very dedicated 10% or so of the MMO playerbase, it has become a design imperative for any modern MMO. It makes me wonder if we can pull this trick again for some other aspect of life that make up the world of MMOs...

Speaking of which, is there any interest to a follow up article on virtual world ecologies? I know I need to finish out my Mudflation Cessation Conflation, but that hits a little close to home on stuff I'm working on directly, whereas dreaming about more programmatic virtual worlds isn't.

Oh, and how about The Hunter? Amazing, yes? There is a lot of ecology packed into that 400 megabyte package!

Finally, I've been back into playing LOTRO. LOTRO has:

• among the worst tradeskill system designs ever put in an MMO
• many of the worst aspects of housing from MMOs (the "Mausoleum Effect" I have called it in the past)
• a fairly uninteresting set of character classes gameplay-wise (except the Runekeeper and Warden - they finally made some interesting design choices with their class gameplay, even if the Runekeeper is a failure lore-wise).
• which brings me to my reason for playing - setting. If more games would take a page from them and make actually existing in game half as compelling as LOTRO, I would be a happier camper.

A Year End Testimonial

The ending of this year has been interesting to say the least. After working hard for a year on Stargate Worlds (where I do crafting and minigame design), our company, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, ran into a funding hiccup. Talk about frustrating! We'd finally reached a point in which the game is coming together well - our internal play sessions were becoming a weekly highlight instead of a chore, and each system was being tweaked to make the game more polished and more fun than before.

But there was this hiccup, which turned into (I'm sure you all heard) - a lack of paychecks.

Some cynics would say this showed a fundamental flaw in our company, but in the end, I chalk up these issues to a faltering worldwide economy mixed with the inherent risks of working for a start-up company. While blame can and probably will be laid in all manner of directions, for me, not seeing the game come together at the very end was a major morale buster.

I certainly wasn't the only one. Bit by bit the daily grind became just that - a grind. Who wants to work when you aren't getting paid?

I kept coming to work - and I admit, the amount of work I did each day was dropping. As a systems designer, a lot of what I do is repetitive and can get boring fast if you don't get into the right mindset.

I tried taking a couple days off to center myself, but again, the lack of paycheck issue was too distracting... so I came back to work.

This isn't a "hurray for me" posting, but instead a testimonial of some things that happened that restored my faith in the industry, the fans, and friendships that can be found online.

Shortly after it became obvious that my company (despite what was obviously heroic efforts) wasn't going to be paying us immediately, I realized I would have to cancel my once-yearly trip to see my two children. Parents out there can imagine what this is like - literally waiting for an entire year and seeing this get shot down right before the year end was worse for my morale than any corporate troubles could be for me.

Also, my plans to give my kids a decent Christmas were rapidly going down the tubes. My son was finally getting old enough to play some computer games, and I wanted to be there for him with things like Spore, and Mario Kart, and more.

Needless to say, I was in a pretty bleak mood when I heard that the gaming site Ten Ton Hammer was performing a fund-raising drive to give parents at CME gift cards to buy their kids gifts.

The way it was reported to me, and the general cynicism of the office, made me immediately suspicious. TTH needs publicity to thrive, and it seemed to many of us that their gesture was a publicity stunt.

After thinking and saying some regretful things, a series of events happened that turned things around for me.

First, someone gave me an anonymous donation. Then another. Then a friend took me aside and helped me out as well. I don't know for sure where the anonymous gifts came from, and in the spirit they were given, I didn't look too hard. I did some math and realized I could survive the month, plus buy a little something for my kids.

Despite the troubles we were all having, there were still people at the company looking out for one another. It certainly lifted my spirits, and I began to reassess my situation... and my attitude.

Then the Ten Ton Hammer donation came in. At this point, things were definitely looking... well, not good, but not bad given that I had entered the month wondering if I would be evicted from my apartment, and ending it with presents under the tree for my kids, and most of my bills paid. So here I can publically thank TTH for their donation. I know now you are not doing it with the hopes of thanks, but I thank you nonetheless. My industry is a high risk one, especially if you work for the smaller companies, and for some of us, the risk is higher. TTH, as a site that shows the pulse of the gaming fanbase, has shown me that gaming fans are still the best fans in the entertainment industry.

After all, in the end I just wanted to work on this game. And the fans just want to play a good game. I'm gratified that groups like TTH and my co-workers helped me move from thinking about real-life economies to thinking about Stargate World's economy.

But the testimonial does not end there. A friend, from out of the blue, plopped down a credit card and paid for my plane ticket home to see my kids. This friend knew that once a year I get to be daddy, and play with the kids and see how they have grown (my daughter can read now! my son just tested to go into advanced classes!). The difference between an every-other-day phone call and actual flesh and blood can never be denied.

The thing is, this friend only knew me from my presence on the internet. I'm not the most even-keeled net-dweller, and yet this friend knew that the one thing I strive for each year is to spend time with my kids. I had never met this friend in person, and maintained a friendship based strictly on text... and yet she knew what made me tick and decided to help me out.

So this testimonial is dedicated to all of you who made 2008 end on a high note. To my co-workers' generosity, to Ten Ton Hammer and all the fans out there, to my friend Anne, who all showed once again that the internet is not a soulless place, and that the computer gaming industry is still and always the best family you can have.

Spore, SecuROM, and the failure of modern DRM

With the release of Will Wright's new masterpiece, Spore, my thoughts turn once again to the evils that are DRM.

SecuROM, bless it's flawed little heart, represents one of the fallacies of modern thinking about information properties - that producing a security layer for software will in some way curb enough piracy to offset the negative attention it receives. On the consumer side, opinions are strongly negative. In the front office, apparently, the opinion is positive enough that they keep using the product. As a game designer, my job is not affected either positively or negatively, but I have to admit a strong negative reaction to the paper tiger SecuROM represents.

And a paper tiger it is! Spore, released on Monday in Australia, was reported cracked within a couple hours, and is now pretty well distributed on the torrent circuit. Note that the game hasn't been officially released yet!

What does this mean? Well, obviously, the barrier to piracy has been hurdled without a second thought. Is there, then, a reason to not consider SecuROM a failure in terms of stopping software piracy?

The second argument for SecuROM and the benefit it allegedly provides is based on the concept of criminalization. Psychologically, according to this idea, the average person will encounter a crime deterrent and reconsider the theft based on the reminder of the possible consequences. This argument has value only based on the perceived risk of being caught, and the cost of being caught. Proponents of anti-piracy software bring up the "no one speeds in front of a cop" analogy - a person, upon sighting a police vehicle parked by the side of the road (or driving along in another lane), will not speed or otherwise break any traffic laws due to the high likelihood of being caught. The risk is high, and the reward (getting to the destination sooner) is low enough to deter the average citizen.

While a cogent thought, it simply doesn't work in terms of software piracy. A better analogy for the average user is equivalent to that of the average college student. In study after study, it has been shown that the average student will cheat on an exam or a paper to get a better grade. And why not? The risk of being caught is low, and the reward is well worth it! Further, the police officer in the next lane represents immediate punishment - if you speed, you are caught right away. Most of the time, when you cheat on a paper or even a test, the capture and punishment occur after the fact - when the professor compares papers, or sees a suspiciously well-worded response in a sea of poor responses.

A better comparison, I think, is DRM is an ineffective vaccine pushed too soon, and for the wrong reasons. In any given vaccine, the benefits of vaccination should greatly outweigh the costs - inconvenience, and sometimes harm in the form of reactions or death. In the case of current DRM technology, the vaccine (DRM) causes too much inconvenience (customer support issues) and harm (hardware issues and even failure). This isn't serving the customers, isn't serving the companies, is damaging the industry as a whole.

In closing, I'd like to necro a post by Brad Wardell of Stardock, who much more eloquently and effectively stated this case than I ever could...

Brad Wardell of Stardock, on the lack of DRM for Sins of the Solar Empire:

"Now, I don't like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales. But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don't think so. People who never buy software aren't lost sales."

"The reason why we don't put CD copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry."

"Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."

Oh, one final note to DRM proponents: I bought Sins as soon as I finished reading his post. I support companies that are good stewards to the industry and their customers.

ComicCon: (I play Spore!) [Teaser]

The San Diego Comic Con is unique among conventions in that you can be interested in one thing and still find plenty to do for an entire weekend.

For those who don't know, the ComicCon is big. Really, ridiculously, amazingly big. It's been said that the main hall is so large that you can't see from one end to the other - probably because of the curvature of the earth. And in all of this, you have otaku toys, movies, indie movies, really obscure indie movies, video games, card games, comics (a shrinking part of the Con every year, I note), artists (both good and very poor), and subcultures you can scarcely imagine. Oh, and celebrities of every stripe - movies, TV, comics, sports, books, you name it.

Part of the fun of ComicCon for me is watching the whole arc of it play out from Wednesday, when the Professionals, Exhibitors, and the most rabid of the 4-Day-Passers show up to pick up their badges, to Sunday, when people exhaustedly drag themselves from booth to booth looking for something they missed the first 2 dozen times.

So naturally, after getting my badges I went to the San Diego Zoo.

Thursday is commonly known as the chill day - or at least the dry-run day - before the rabid hordes show up and tear your sanity to pieces. In the most recent years the Con has been selling out of tickets and thus Thursday has been more and more like Friday.

So, Spore. After creating a few dozen creatures at my workplace and in the comfort of my home, I was eager to see Will Wright address the Con (for the first time) and get a hands-on of the game itself. Having planned my morning around going to see him speak, I was amused to see the Spore booth asking people if they wanted to see Will Wright speak - which seemed like a no-brainer until you remember that ComicCon attracts all sorts of folks, including, apparently, people who have never heard of Will Wright or the mighty Sim empire.

As an inducement to go see the talk, they were handing out Spore t-shirts - and even had my size - (which marks a convention first for me). I eagerly accepted the shirt and prepared to watch Will Wright speak (and since he is such a fast talker, see if I could follow what he said).

The Tchotchkes Begin...

I may have mentioned in this space before that I will be attending the San Diego ComicCon this year (as I have the past 3 years or so). While I am generally opposed to useless gewgaws, I do love branded tchotchkes. In my collection are many lanyards, temporary tattoos, shields, swords, a crossbow, a few chemical lights, and an awesome portable fan.

Us game industry folks also occasionally get swag for our own games - I have almost 30 t-shirts from various game companies and products (most of which have been converted to rags and pot-liners).

But I finally received my first hand grenade yesterday... yup, a bona fide Stargate Worlds hand grenade, which now sits atop my monitor in case of invasion by rabid Jaffa monkeys. If this tchotchke is any indication, I think we're looking forward to a fun convention season!

Mini-games... in MY MMO?

It's more likely than you think!

I've recently sat down and typed up a walkthrough on how I design mini-games for Stargate Worlds. Nothing earthshaking in it, but it was a fun article to write.

Link is here:

Movies, TV, and old C-64 games : Mini-game Design in Stargate Worlds, part one

Lessons from Kongregate

NOTE: As a Blogger noob, I didn't realize that recycling an old, unused post would retain the name, so while the URL for this posting is "puzzles-in-my-MMO" - it's actually about casual games. Sorry!

This is the start of a series I'll be doing on simple lessons from "simple" games. Kongregate is a well-known casual and amateur gaming hub which produces an amazingly polished variety of games using Flash. Created by Jim and Emily Greer, Kongregate is something of a "YouTube meets gaming."

As part of my current set of tasks to develop mini-games for Stargate Worlds, myself and the rest of our mini-game team have undertaken a fun survey of casual gaming to learn a little more about what Flash is good at modeling, and where it is weak. Along the way, I've taken some notes of various games as discussion points of success versus failure. In this series, I'll share one or two lessons from each game under discussion.

Game One: Particles (by Ragdollsoft)
Lesson A: Lack of feedback produces tension - sometimes.
Lesson B: Physics is one of Flash's strong points.

Particles is a relatively simple game that looks like a physics demo but has an addictive quality that comes from good music, clean animation, and - interestingly enough - a lack of feedback on the player's progress.

It is common to give the player some form of scoring feedback, no matter the game. Scoring is a means in which you give the player a sense of urgency and accomplishment while the game is still in play - with a glance to the score bar, the player has incentive to perform better. A game without a score is like playing poker with no money - it lacks tension and just becomes a mechanical exercise.

In Particles, the game deliberately hides the scoring until the very end, at which time it scores you with a letter grade and an amount of time played. By hiding the score, this game forces you to concentrate on the one rule of the game: avoid the (steadily increasing) red balls. A score interface would take the player out of the "emotional pit" of the game. Tension is thus increased - you know you are being graded, and the game will likely last under five minutes, so all attention turns to the action of the game itself. If the game were much longer than it is, and should the progression of adding more obstacles (balls) to the mix be slower, the game would likely fail, in my opinion.

Speaking of the action of the game, the utter speed in which the player can move their own ball, matched with the inelastic collisions of the red obstacle balls, produces some interesting and engaging physics effects. Watching for a group of balls to strike each other and slow down quickly became my strategy for the game - I would follow slow obstacle balls and use them as shields against more fast moving balls.

Simply put, object physics is fun, even if it smacks of unreality. Between my fire blaster and my energy blaster in City of Heroes, I choose energy every time because of the visceral joy of knockback, knockup, and throwing opponents around when you win. Other VWs should consider the investment to more robust physics - not only will the game feel less stiff (a common complaint of many MMOs), but it just might save on the animation budget as well.

Take home for creating virtual worlds: Tension is a difficult goal in any MMO or VW. Generally speaking, the most common method of creating and maintaining tension in the player is to build a box for the player(s), put them in it, and give them a puzzle to solve. Unfortunately, an MMO is both forgiving and unforgiving to players, in that it takes more time than in a casual game to recover from a poor decision, and adds the fact that the time scale of player investment in an MMO is such that any puzzle or tense situation pales in comparison with the many hours of non-tense gameplay.

Game Two: Doeo (by Raitendo)
Lesson: Collecting things is fun. Collecting things and watching the world change is more fun.

Doeo has a simple and slightly unsettling concept - pink Doeos appear in rapid succession, and your job is to simply mouseover them. Like Particles, there is a single axis of input and interaction, but in Doeo there is a payoff when Doeo are caught, and as the level progresses.

Doeo, in true Galaga fashion, appear in a preset pattern, and just like in Galaga if you catch them all before they settle in, you get a scoring bonus. Thus, this game triggers the part of our brains and personalities of "gotta catch 'em all." This, in and of itself, is fun, and the presentation of the alarming-looking Doeo makes this game a fun little production.

However, the real lesson is this - in addition to collecting Doeo and scoring big when you get them all, the Doeo are integrated into the landscape and world of the game itself - as they appear and disappear, buildings fall, mountains turn to valleys, flowers grow, and generally the world mutates before your eyes in an artistic pattern that is just as pleasing as the game itself.

Thus we come to:
Take home for creating virtual worlds: Doeo would be fun but somewhat flat if not for the artistic ebb and flow of the game world itself. Pushing this game from a simple collection sim to a work of beauty, Doeo succeeds on a much more visceral level. In VWs, players, I argue, are innately unsettled by the unchanging "theme park" nature of the game. Some MMOs, such as Guild Wars and LOTRO have endeavored to give the player the experience of living through an instanced event that shows a fundamental change in the game world. I heartily endorse this trend - but look forward to the day when such changes are programmatic and player-driven en masse in addition to being a story-telling device.

Game Three: The Last Stand (by Con Artists)
Lesson: Fanatical attention to detail pays off.

The Last Stand is a fun little "fight off the zombie horde" game that succeeds in a strange direction. The gameplay is fun but lacking - the weapons need a balance pass, the zombies are varied but act in highly predictable ways, and most importantly, the bullet particles are a little buggy - causing you to shoot zombies across the screen when you were pointed diagonally at the head of a zombie munching on your barricade.

So why is this game such a winner? Well, zombies plus guns is an automatic win, but I think the subtle and fanatical attention to little details truly sets this game apart.

Most casual games have difficulty "lowering you into the pit" - introing a game, especially a casual one, is much harder than it looks. I liken the action to taking a picture frame and bringing it forward to your eyes - as the frame comes closer, your attention is naturally diverted from "far" to "near." Likewise with the outro of any game - you don't want to "game over" and kick the player out - you want to instead ease them quickly away from the picture frame, pulling away with a deliberate but steady pace to move the player's attention from "near" back to "far."

Last Stand, however, easily pulls you into the action, and sets a tone that never lets up in the entire game - everything about the interface between zombie waves and the resource management itself points back to the fiction of the game world. It's rare to see a player so eager to read a little post-it note between levels, but the messages therein show an almost movie-like descent from survivalism to hopelessness and back to grim resolve.

The survivors you collect are a resource to be used - they don't help too much in the zombie fight, but you can put them on the line to find more survivors, weapons, and repair your barricade. In the fight itself, they each look very distinct and act like they just stepped from a John Romero movie. I gave my survivors names, and actually chuckled when one would bite the dust in the process of recruiting their replacement.

The final feature of this game that truly highlights the attention to detail on the game world is the use of night/dawn/day as a level timer. In the heat of battle, I would watch for the lightening of the sky - just like I imagine my guy is doing while reloading the sawed-off shotgun. When the sun starts rising, I know it's mop up time, and I begin to relax, sharing that moment with my avatar in the bloody barricade.

Take home for creating virtual worlds: Players never beg for features like sunrise/sunset, or weather patterns, or in-game messaging that looks like it is scribbled on a post-it note, but each little piece of detail increases player immersion, and thus player retention.

Mudflation Cessation Conflation (Act Two: Death of a Thousand Fees)

In Act One of this discussion on reducing Mudflation, I discussed the concept of currency controls mixed with using "trash loot" to fund a player's activities (if you missed it, it's linked here: Mudflation Cessation Conflation (Act One: Currency Control).

In this Act, we'll discuss my thoughts on a "drive through toll" concept of playing an MMO.

As discussed previously, Mudflation occurs when the amount of buying power in the hands of the playerbase does not match an increase in the supply of goods and services in the game economy.

Unfortunately, the paradigm the industry has emphasized has been pouring cash and items onto players, but avoiding any systems that take things back from players.

So let me get this out of the way: it sucks when I have to pay for something. It sucks when I lose something. It sucks when games give me money, but also make me spend it.

That said, let's look at how we can remove cash and items, but keep the player from reacting so badly they do more than post angrily on some internet forum somewhere. We need to remove money from players (Act 3 is items...) and we need them to not cancel their accounts over it.

The player will never "enjoy" a system that drains cash or items out of the economy, but I believe that a major reason for this distaste is the obtrusiveness of such drains. Take repairs in WoW - this is a economy drain that is in-your-face, requires you to slacken your "fun" and in exchange gives you... nothing. Repairing equipment is a great example of how you can both make players hate an economy and give the players no real value for the money they spent.

WoW also possesses another economic drain that does have value to the player: the griffon system. As a time sink, it is quite effective at trading in-game cash for time spent on the griffon, but the most important part to consider is the fact that the service actually does succeed in trading cash for a valued service.

The evolution of 21st Century consumer spending has been overwhelmingly in favor of what I call the "drive through toll road" approach. Many consumers now have automatic deductions of their most common expenditures, and I would argue are less concerned about bills and less afraid to spend because of it.

MMOs that begin to match this paradigm will increase the drains on the economy, but not have as serious a backlash as developers currently fear. The vast majority of players do not want to have to do math - so let's take that pain from them with an automatic toll system.

An example:
Entering or exiting a city on foot/mount requires a toll. This toll is automatically deducted when a player enters or leaves the city. Since most "downtime" activities occur in the city, the player will need to enter this city often.

The tutorial for the game includes an explanation of the story reason why tolls are being extracted from players - the reasoning is pretty easy to sell, and really all we care about is making the game world's pay scheme seem like Disneyland - you pay to get in, then you can do what you want. After the tutorial, the game automagically extracts these tolls from the player - there is choice in the Options of the game to give a confirmation window, but this defaults to "off."

If the player has no currency, then they can trade items in their inventory for access, and if they do not possess any unequipped objects, then they have to perform a trivial task (such as "deliver this payment voucher to the Captain of the Guard").

Now, we build this up - put in plenty of these drive-thru tolls, and we develop a sinking system that hits players during ordinary gameplay, but isn't obtrusive - and more importantly - is matched to a service they are opting for.

Further examples of drive-through tolls:
- a griffon-like transit system, but you don't have to opt-in to pay, you just get on the bird, and the coin is deducted automatically.
- material components for spells
- ammunition
- zone borders
- enhancement of items
- mail (oh wait, this already happens)
- auction houses (oh wait, this also already happens...)

This sort of scheme works only if you take the curse of coin sinking off of things like "repair" and instead transfer them into a more invisible system.

Really, is there any difference between paying for repairing armor, and paying to enter a city?

In a game world where currency is in lower supply than usual, it can have two potential practical uses - one is for big purchases, and the other is for the utterly mundane. If you keep the supply of coin low, you tend to make players afraid to spend it on items, especially if you extract tiny tolls. This is not a bad thing - let tolls and drive-through costs soak up (and recycle!) the vast majority of the currency, since you're trying to soak it out of the player's coffers anyway.

What about buying items and spending money on the things you want? We'll discuss this in Act III: Recycling the Good Stuff.

It has come to my attention... (0-P GTAIV review)

... that not all of you have witnessed the fooken foury that is Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, and his Zero Punctuation series.

So in the interests of keeping the public informed whilst simultaneously scaring children, here is his GTAIV review in all it's breathless glory.



Think of the accountants. Please.

From GamePolitics: FTC finds it hard to buy M-rated games after all.

GamePolitics has posted a breaking news article about the latest FTC report on the ease of purchasing violent video games if you are a minor. Their underaged shoppers were apparently only able to purchase M-rated video games on average 20% of the time, as opposed to a 35% average for R-rated movies. You can read the article hence: BREAKING - FTC Study Shows Massive Improvement in Video Game Rating Enforcement

As a former educator (and current volunteer educator), I am overjoyed. The issue has never been the fact of the rating system, but the enforcement. As this is largely a voluntary effort, the burden lay on the sellers (no matter how much we say "parents are to blame!") to enforce the rating in order to give it legitimacy.

The fact that violent content affects children on a temporary basis is not in dispute with me. I've watched popular violent movies turn a normally peaceful playground into a line of kids needing minor first aid due to everyone "pretending to be Aragorn" or whatnot. If a parent took their child to go see a violent movie - or purchased for them a violent game - then right on, I'm not standing in their way (I took my toddler son with me when I watched Fellowship of the Ring - he fell asleep about 10 minutes in). If a parent is putting trust in a rating system to perform as advertised, then I say it's our duty as an industry to not pay lip service to this.

In the end, the video game industry is facing a lot of the societal pressures that movies did in its early days - that industry was pushing the bounds of good taste and propriety, and the general public was uneasy with this. The early adopters and free-thinkers lashed back at having to restrict movies, but in the end a working system appeared that allowed our society to give a large degree of freedom to the art. Thus it shall be with gaming, I think. As the initial generation of gamers become parents and decision-makers, and as the next generation grows up with games taking as large a role in their cultural upbringing as movies, a lot of these issues will become part of the background of life.

The first steps, however, are the hardest - as long as our industry keeps a fair rating system in place and helps enforce it, we have nothing to worry about.

Now I Twitter... ho ho ho

A few of you have noticed I added a twitter sidebar to the right side of this blog.

I've seen twitter used in three main ways:

- "Today I ate chicken marsala. The sauce was too spicy, and the chicken was dry. It reminded me of the scene in Poltergeist."

- "The Dow is up 314 points. I recommend you drop some cash into UNA, unless you are tapped out in currencies."

- "The fires are advancing up the ridge. According to the scanner, if you are on 1st or 7th street, your property may be in trouble."

All three are valid. I openly admit that I will be in the first group, though my nature probably will make me want to try my hand at industry wonkery as well.

I promise I won't ever do this though: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/