f13.net

Since Raph would never toot his own horn here, I'll do it for him. :)

Raph gave this great keynote talk at Austin Game Conference in 2003, entitled A Theory of Fun (http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/theoryoffun.pdf), complete with all these charming little illustrations he drew the night before.  It was such a great talk that he expanded it and made it into a book, which is now available for pre-order via Amazon.com:

US:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932111972/103-1049858-4876667
UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932111972/qid%3D1097607009/026-7687653-9827658

Highly recommended.

Bruce

Playing in several beta tests lately, I've been re-examining my own notion of what is "fun".

Am I playing MMORPGs to "have fun", or am I just lured by the carrot on that damn stick that is eternally out of reach?

Are my fantasy accomplishments a way of masking disappointments in failing my real-life goals?

I guess I've been feeling rather philosophical since seeing "I Heart Huckabees".

Interesting. I will slap it on my Wish list and reexamine my need for it when it is published =)

Thanks for the heads up!

Is it a "fun" read?

I guess I'm in a position that I should read it. Or I can pander for a signed copy. Raph?

Oh good idea. Raph is in San Diego right? Perhaps if I sit outside his office I can get him to sign my copy....

Will the book have pages that go from left to right and up to down written in a recognizable human language or will he seek to innovate and make the book all but unreadable until some promised fix that may never come?

All he needs to do now is write 'A Practice of Fun' and then apply it to SWG to stop it from sucking the very marrow of the Earth.

Well, I think Raph's initial thrust was that games are really about solving problems/exploring possibilities within a possibility space.  The current crop of computer gamers, unfortunately, tend to be the type that are so driven to sovle problems that they attack these problems with such methodicalness and sometimes inventiveness (cheating, min/maxing, optimizing, etc.) that they eventually "solve" the game, and it becomes boring to them.

The only solution is to come up with extremely complex games that offer so many varied possibilities that the gamers will never get bored; we'll always have stuff to explore and enjoy and solve.  You have to do this in a way that isn't arbitrary, though (you can't just change the rules all the time to the point where there's no predictability), and you have to do it in a way that's still fun for the player to play.  Eventually this is where game becomes art, because art is really about possibility spaces that are so complex that each person who tackles the problem comes up with something different.

There's a connection here with Earnest Adams' talk about how we're all crazy anyway because we're trying to apply logical people and logical techniques, Newtonian and Industrial and 20th century ideas, to create, as well as play in, spaces that are supposed to be fantastic, magical, mythical, creative, and meaningful in that more "artistic" way.  That sort-of "stuff between the stuff" that makes these things greater than the sum of their parts.

Bruce

MMORPGS are not fun.

Its called a human opponent.

This is indeed the Holy Grail of MMORPG gaming.  Unfortunately it seems the genre is moving more toward lowering the barriers of entry (complexity), in pursuit of the fabled untapped audience of "casual gamers" who could take the genre to a new level of popularity.  An ideal MMO could have both a low learning curve for beginners, and an enormously complex game to discover at one's own pace...  

Do any of today's MMO games begin to approach this ideal?  I would argue no.  EQ2 and WoW are the next generation, and if anything they are moving more toward a lowest common denominator approach.  

If a true next-generation game did push the MMO genre into the "art" space, I wonder how this would intersect with the economic space...  Would in-game creations and inventions gain significant real-world value, comparable to account sales on E-bay?  

Would a "creative powergamer" archetype emerge, where intelligence and creativity are rewarded just as much as time online?  Such in-game support for creativity would have to be complex and robust indeed, to defeat the proliferation of web-sites offering walk-throughs.  As soon as something was invented, you would likely see a "recipe" available within days.  Anyway, I've babbled enough...

I think Second Life does this. You can either "play(simple)" or "design(complex)". Granted it's much more of a MUSH than an actual MMORPG but it does have plenty of player made content like pod races and EQ clones built into it by players.

ATITD also offers this in that you can do simple tasks and work your way up into complex tasks. But again it is more of a MU* than a MMORPG. Nevermind the fact that it is a clickfest in the early game.

Can't say I've tried Second Life, but I've heard about it and I've messed with the free trial of ATITD.  

ATITD has an interesting model, with its "trials" which are mini-games within the game.  The crafting system is enormously complex, and it is possible for players to extend the laws of the world, possibly even create unique items.  However, it's obvious that neither SL nor ATITD will become blockbuster MMO titles.  They are niche titles oriented toward an audience of academics and purists.  Of course, guys like Raph will be designing the next generation of MMORPG titles, and these gaming intellectuals could revolutionize the genre...

The ideal MMO would allow your non-creative gamers to participate in the "micro" game of treadmill dinging/monster killing/etc...  Simultaneously your advanced players would be playing the "macro" game, leading while others follow.  They could potentially create micro games for other players, or even change the goals of the existing games, if not the rules.

Politics, crafting, trading... All of these are "games."  Politics should mean more in a game than "which guild gets to camp the uber boss mob."  Crafting should be more than "how much time and cash does it cost to macro my way to 1100 spellcrafting."  Trading should be more than "what's the going rate for a quality 100 arcanite BP" or "how much can I sell my account for on Ebay?"

Why not have something like a stock market in a game?  Place financial bets on game events, and see whether you win...  Why not have a material/crafting system that allows for invention of new recipes?  Why not include mechanics for a political system of alliances and intrigue?  All of these could co-exist with your basic level treadmill.

He's right.  Raph is right.

I've lately come to the realization that I only enjoy games to the point that I can figure them out.  Then (unless it's multiplayer or coop, or on the rare occasion an engaging story) I usually stop playing.

Communities can hold off the boredom, but the boredom is preordained. The key is not to focus on when you'll eventually quit, but rather make the most of the time you have.

Of course, that smacks of mysticism :)

Personally, I advocate players manage their own expectations, independent of artificial constructs like "but my guild needs me!" or "but I'm so well known!" If those are the only reasons left to play, then the game has become work and the likelihood of some really long,.ranty, and nigh-irrelevant Exit Statement(tm) that much greater.

Quit describing my SWG experience. I would have been much better off mentally if I had quit that game when the fun meter ran out instead of sticking around for Tian Bay.  Instead I got bitter and ranty towards the end, ohh well.  It was still a cool experience to behold.

Heh /agree.

Engaging story is big. Many people like to be told fun and interesting stories through movies and books. The same goes for games.

Nah, if that were true KOTR would've been a big seller. Oh...wait.

Actually one of my biggest issues with MMORPGs these days besides the whole mixing of PvP and Pve in the same game, is that they don't tell stories. Playing an MMORPG is closer to just playing with action figures as a kid than it is to experiencing a story. There MAY be some small story but for the most part you've made it up yourself.

WoW, and hopefully, EQ2, have some story in them through the quests offered.

Right. It's the difference between sandbox and... game? I might just have to pick up the book now because I've always thought that Raph was a huge sandbox proponent, but that can't be wholly true as there are games within his virtual worlds. Story goes a long way toward making a player feel immersed. The old "it's your story" is a copout for lack of writers. Granted, some things like SWG were meant to be "here's your shovel and bucket, now go play" experiences, but every game made should not become this. It's akin to an author leaving an unresolved ending to their novel because they want the reader to draw their own conclusions. That's an excuse for having no clue how your story ends. In the case of persistent games, the entire story doesn't have to end. You just need to constantly provide smaller stories within the context of your world to keep the player interested and immersed.

I come from an RPG background, whether tabletop (DnD etc) or CRPG. I guess I am too used to having a story of some kind or another. I'd say lack of a story along with time invested play mechanics are my two biggest MMORPG issues. The only game that I can remember that felt like it had a story was AC1 because of their monthly content updates.

In my experience, stories in quests seldom immerse me in the game.  DAOC had a *ton* of backstory if you bothered to read the many pages of text, but most people just skimmed the pages looking for the action text, i.e. [please help me by delivering this medicine to Sergeant Slaughter].

By contrast, if I recall the AC1 monthly updates sometimes dramatically changed the gameworld.  Wasn't there one update where a major city was destroyed?  It's hard to ignore that sort of story.

I never played "EQ Legends" but I believe they had fulltime staff devoted to moving some sort of story forward, if you were willing to pay some huge monthly fee.  I don't see why this cannot be done, without the huge fee.  If a game has 250k subscribers paying $15/month, why can't there be a *team* of developers and story-writers, constantly evolving a major story line?  Every week, the world could change in noticeable ways, players would be able to team up against the latest menace, and multiple plotlines could progress.

OK, I've been long-winded again, heh.

Well, and here I was just about to pimp it. :)

BoingBoing gave it a brief review today:

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/13/theory_of_fun_unders.html

The book IS somewhat innovative and weird--it's half cartoons, half essay. :) You can read just the thread of the cartoons, just the essay, or both together. BoingBoing posted one of the cartoons and an excerpt from the chapter "Different Fun for Different Folks."

On the story question, here's a brief excerpt from the chapter

You can have buttloads of story like DaOC and it won't matter if , one, it never changes and two, players can't have an effect on it, if not create it themselves.

The 'here's your shovel and bucket go play' is not an excuse if the players can actually use that shovel and bucket to make changes in the world around them. Right now most MMOLG's dont allow that.

IF is the operative word there.

Raph,

that is an interesting viewpoint you have there and I'd say for the most part you are right, particularly when it comes to such genres as FPS. However, let's look at RPGs. Let's go further and look at RPGs by Bioware. I'd say some of their stories are very, very good. Same with Square. I know we can't put this kind of storytelling into an MMO really, but, some sort of compromise would be interesting. Much like AC1 did. Actual changes to the world, actual events that make the players feel important.

I know it'd be hard but maybe this is the innovation games need rather than changes in combat code and such?

Indeed, games are not stories, but I think the MMO genre has much more narrative potential than most types of games.
1) AC certainly tried to have a developer-driven story, in which players participated.  Many players loved this, and stuck with the game.
2) I would argue that EQ and the "static" games developed quite an external storyline centered around politics.  The political feuds between the raid guilds were often epic, and you could find people with encyclopedic memories for the power dynamics on servers.  Yes, this is technically external to the game, but why should a next-gen game not build in an in-game political system for managing inevitable player conflicts?
3) How about the often bizarre world of fan fiction, based on these games?  Surely there are more ways that such creativity can be fostered in-game, by inventive developers.

And yes, the stories in DAOC were completely static, you'll hear no arguments from me...  The only "story" was the narrative of RvR -- who controls which keeps and relics, and which realm is cleaning up in realm points?  A very limited story, no doubt.

Anyway, thanks for the quote Raph, hopefully there is a big audience for your quirky book.

I may have to pick his book up I admit. As much as I vent at Raph over SWG I find his thoughts fascinating.

The point being is to stop thinking of story as developer driven...or trying to put a story into a game.

The real aim should be to 'have the game CREATE the story' or even better 'have the game BE the story'.

I can remember when I first started playing MUSE etc back in the day I was reading some history files on a Star Trek MU** and I commented to a player 'Thats pretty good story, who wrote it?' To which he replied 'Thats not a story thats what has actually happened in the game' at which point I was hooked. Even later on my character as he 'aged' would, as a roleplaying tool tell stories of past battles, adventures etc that we had actually expierenced in game

I mean lets face it who remembers stories of a EQ raid if your just gonna do the same one 10 times in a month.

In order to create stories in game, the developers have to think of the world as only a framework for stories, not a story in itself. Anarchy Online tried to make the whole game into a story, with pretty shitty results. You would have to have a sandbox world that can actually be effected, and let the players go in order to have them feel they were a part of the story. Without allowing players control over the world, including the world's NPC's, why would players feel a part of their story?

thats exactly what I mean, that the devs give the players a framework and the players play within it. That framework is one in which the players have almost complete control of the direction of the game world and its happening within it (or again they ARE the happenings within it). I believe that a game like this by its very nature is overwhelmingly PVP (and by PVP I dont mean just combat I mean ALL game interaction whether it be social, economic , political or conflict).

My question to Raph would be this: Do enough mmog players consider the storyline important to invest the resources in developing a storyline?  Another way of asking the same question would be to find out how many people missed the story were it not present in game at all.  

My personal experience in watching people interact with the storyline in MMOG's is often like the tired lab rat analogy: Most people that I have observed in mmogs are so interested in getting the treat/goal of a quest/story element that they never even read the text of quests, tasks, etc.  They simply click the highlighted words, say the pretext statements, or whatever task is involved and do what it takes to get teh shiny.  To take this one step further, I'd venture a guess that more than half of the people playing a given MMOG don't know much about the story behind the game.  I used to ask people story-related questions often when I played EQ and found most people had no idea what the underlying story was behind the game.

My anecdote both agrees and disagrees with what has been said above (and in other places).  It agrees in that story in mmog's has been so badly done that many people fail to even consider it a part of their gameplay experience (i.e. they are there to craft and/or whack foozles).  It disagrees in the fact that perhaps the story behind the world isn't even a consideration to a portion of the playerbase.  



I think this summarizes my feelings as well.  I think that games that place the protagonist (player) at the center of the world will find the most success. I think reducing the size of the world by zones and/or instances helps achieve this in that people feel like less of a grain of sand on the beach.

Sadly enough the only game I've ever played that comes close to that would be Sims2.

Hehe, funny that story excerpt. Been a particular favorite topic of mine for a few months, though I'm certainly not stupid enough to think I'm the only one wondering about it :)

MMORPGs emphasize game, expecting players to bring the rest. Trouble is, players aren't bringing the rest, as they'd rather have the game lead them. So we've got five years of games that have become more refined at controlling the players. This isn't wrong or evil, but is seen through those games deemed "successful" (or at least successful enough to spawn derivatives). Nobody's emulating Second Life.

I like the writing style from that excerpt though. Refreshing to read a book (which is pre-ordered) that reads like a forum post. Not sure why I like that style though...

I'm intrigued.  How much has he added to his original presentation for this book?

Well. the book is 250 pages and the PDF presentation is 51 pages. :)

Bruce

Maybe, but it's only $13.99.   Beats the snot out of the $50-$200 books on game design.    If it's more pages, I'm not complaining ;)

I ordered me a copy, I'll be able to give it a look in 3-5 days.

Sold!  Especially if the 199 pages is content instead of fluff.  Maybe he'll offer practical ideas for a game that puts theory into practice... dare to dream, eh?

I'll take a guess that the book goes to great lengths to come to the basic conclusion that what customers really want is Neal Stephenson's Primer.  If the book goes into detail on how to get there / why we want to get there, it might be an interesting read.

It's 110 cartoons like the original presentation. And 110 pages of text. The other pages are stuff like acknowledgements, intro, etc.

Of course I'll order it.  How often does someone I kinda sorta know from some place on the internet have a book published?

Ok, ok... so I have a really big bookcase full of them.  There's always room for one more.

Or in november when it comes out.

You play the cards you're dealt, and I'm sure Raph has to deal with internal company politics, budget restraints, etc. just like everyone else.  Is SWG something I'd like to play?  Nope.  However, he at least has the balls to push the envelope, and in a semi-attainable manner, unlike people whose desires far outpace their capability to make something a reality (Horizons, Battlecruiser).

For all of the things he's done that are questionable or ill conceived he's done 10 that are well thought out and innovative.  I'd take that track record.  And for what it's worth, I'm not even that enthusiastic about the "simulated world" idea, give me a game like City of Heroes any day.  I am able to recognize, though, someone who keeps trying to advance the genre.  When you're involved in something like that you're going to have misses, it's unavoidable.

The book website is now up.

http://www.theoryoffun.com

Did you do the art?

I am not saying this in a bad way, but that really looks like it would fit well in a child's book.  My boy loves that style.

Nice work on the cartoons!  Can't wait to get my hands on this thing now.  :D

I don't know if any heavyweights would visit the site, but you might want to say "Barnes and Noble Online".  

"Fine bookstores, and also Barnes & Noble".  heh...

Yes, I did all the art.

You make cute penguins. I like penguins.

(http://linuxsoftware.co.nz/lil_blue.jpg)

Radical, the little blue penguin above, approves your book.

That is the gratuitous penguin. He's labelled as such in a few places. He's sort of the books' easter egg. I have several pages worth of gratuitous penguins drawn. Alien penguins, super-penguins, sliced penguins, ninja penguins, etc. They aren't in the book though. Maybe they will show up in the merchandise (yes, I am going to have merchandise. Admit it, you want the "Online Roleplayers Rorshach Test" cartoon on a mug.)

Creeping Jesus, how'd you know? I am however happy that someone else in the world seems to enjoy the bizarre mutant that is the penguin as much as me.

LOL, I was JUST about to post this and comment on it:
(http://www.theoryoffun.com/images/page067.jpg)

I love it.  The square-jawed 80s-hair-band-looking guy with breasts on the end is just priceless.

Bruce

(http://www.theoryoffun.com/images/page035.jpg)

You're saying that the reason games follow a limited formula (eg kill bad guys to end of level. Kill bigger bad guy) is because our ancestors had to seperate the things that could kill them from the things that would keep them alive within their various environments?

I'd be interested to read the studies that this statement is based on. (Or read the book too, I guess)

Unless, of course, it's way past my bedtime and I'm reading this incorrectly.

Uhh... yeah, you need to read the whole book. Fortunately, Amazon has it cheap. ;)

What a salesman. :p

I'll be sure to give it a look at. Then prepare for my incessant need to discuss psychological theories. :)

Penquins!  Lordy Raph... you are as big a geek as the rest of us.  It's nice to see that a huge salary, fancy title and god-like dev power has not gone to your head.  People like David Bowman try to pretend they are not geeks anymore, but only come off as pretentious closet geek bullies.  You, on the other hand, still have the same silly qualities that my old time MUD developer friends have... it's a good thing!

Now that you've published a book on fun, go forth and make me a fun game to play.  SWG is the most fascinating game I've ever seen, but it's not fun.  It's freeken hard work!  We still maintain an account because I need to own what is, fun aspect aside, the most brilliantly constructed game I've yet to see.  It's like owning a Faberge egg... you take it out and admire it from time to time, but you wouldn't think of cracking it open and having it for breakfast.

I look forward to reading your book.  It's perfect timing as we have a nice, easy going Xmas this year with very few family encounters.  (the PvP in my family can be ugly)  Because of the penguins, once finished I will shelf it with my all our coveted O'Reilly books.  (Tim O'Reilly... another alpha geek)

All the gripes about fun SWG are a large part of why I did the original talk and why I did the book. Basically, you guys sent me off back to basics. I've spent much of the last year playing abstract boardgames, designing boardgames, and designing puzzle games on the computer--sort of an "ABCs of basic fun."

Does the book contain any SWG postmortem musings?  I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on what worked, what didn't, and what might have been possible with an extra 20 million dollars of development budget.  ;)

I would think it's the approach, rather than the lack of funds, that turned people off SWG.

No, it doesn't touch on SWG at all.

The range of reactions to SWG is fascinating to me. In particular, the ways in which some people see it as a top to bottom disaster, others as a mixed bag, and others as a success. There are many different reasons for those varied opinions, ranging from prior expectations to dislike of some basic premises to enjoyment of particular sorts of experiences. There's a huge number of folks whose dislike is almost entirely based in interface issues, for example. I spend a lot of time thinking about it. Someday I'll be better able to disentangle it all. I'm certainly not ready to write about it--it took me five years to really digest UO.

Hmmm, here's my perspective on SW:G which I've always talked about hating but never got into.

Pros:
I liked the interface. It was convoluted but I thought it fit in with everything we'd seen in the Star Wars universe.

I liked the customization. I LOVED the social aspects of the game. I.e. Having to go to the cantina to heal. You can meet a lot of people there. Til they figured out how to bot dancing. Then it was a waste.

I liked the size of the world - and would have liked it more if you all could have actually filled it up.

I liked having a house I could turn into a store/cantina/whatever I wanted.

Cons:
The entire combat system was an abortion. I'd like to see the original design docs on it.

Jedi. What were you thinking? I'd like one solid answer on this. Just like a blatent apology for inflicting the world with such a stupid treadmill. You guys had enough money to come up with something more creative.

Implementation. Everything I read was nice. On paper SW:G looks great. In practice - it's crap. I'd really like to see a nice long round table on what happened and why. Ever seen the documentary "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" for Apocalypse Now? I'd imagine that's how an SW:G development documentary would look.

Talk about a thread derailing.

I am unsure there is ANY good solution to Jedi in an MMORPG. A better answer would be to leave them out, but that would have angered just as many people (one of the commonest gripes I hear is that everyone should have been a Jedi). That's part of what I mean about expectations.

Most of the other things you mentioned largely come down to tuning, really. There aren't THAT many differences between the CoH combat system and the SWG one, really. And the difference between a tuned and an untuned system can be like night and day.

But your list isn't the same as the lists of many other folks. :)

BTW, editing this book sucks, it's incredibly painful. :P Sitting pondering every word here is taking me all afternoon for 6 pages. *sigh* (Blatant attempt to get the thread back on track).

Yea, the derailing was pretty intentional. I mean, why engage you about a book we can't read yet and don't really have access to as a whole. After it comes out I'm sure there will be lively discussion. But until then, it would be speculation - which does nothing but create fake buzz.

Or we can go the, ask you questions route - in which case:

Which part of the book speaks the most about you, in your opinion. Does it hit close to home, or is it something you've never discussed publicly? Elaborate.

Sorry,  Raph!  The derailing was UNintentional, at least on my part.

So... what are you wearing?

Raph,

Sounds like you've reached the editing stage where you need to give it to someone else to proofread/edit.  Best choices are someone you trust, who's in your target audience, but who isn't going to simply say nice things because they're your family member or friend or what not.  (The last part is not a big problem in the tech-related industries, but it happens frequently in others so it is standard advice.)

Bruce

Yeah, if Bruce is right you're to the point where you're trying to decide if your style is good. That's like trying to determine if the way you think is good. You can't do that. Toss it to a colleague?

No, actually, this is AFTER getting back that feedback, and going through all the redlines and making the decisions on where I agree with their feedback and where I don't. :)

GK Chesterton edited many of his works. They didn't entirely suck.

One of the reasons I've heard (I believe from you, but I may be wrong) as to why "everyone" can't be a Jedi is because of fiction; there really shouldn't be any left by this date, except for Luke (or was this before Ben and Yoda died?  Close enough).

Fine.  Pick another setting.  KotR did exceptionally well for a stand alone, yet it was nowhere near the timeframe of the movies.  Skip around or just before Ep 1, or a decade after Ep 6.  You've got a couple decades, out of tens of thousands of years of history, where there aren't any Jedi to speak of.  Yet you know the coolest thing about the SW IP are Jedi.

Yes, everyone should have been a Jedi - or at least, had the opportunity to become one without the game system griefing you for it.  Why?  Because that's what your customers wanted.  Have you seen some of the lightsaber mods for Jedi Outcast?  You could've had thousands of people hooked on whatever mission your guys wanted to dream up just to "dye" their lightsaber a different color, or show off a fancy new handle.

Thanks for the heads up on the book.

PS: raidal menus are teh debil.

Jedi was an easily, IMO, solvable problem.

Except that on one hand you had LucasArts insisting on a particular timeline and continuity that is set in stone for everyone except himself. On the other hand, you had the idea of game balance, which would be completely fucked by a continuity-laden Jedi class.

Had SWG been allowed to exist in the pre-Clone Wars or even the Clone Wars days, Jedi would have been a fun PVE AND PVP class to play, provided the game mechanics were solid, not to mention could have been done in a balanced fashion. After all, Jedi were da bomb, but a good professional like Jango Fett could give them a run for their money. But with most Jedi being dead for a good 10-20 years in the SWG timeline, there's no way you could get away with saying anyone was a match for a Jedi, other than as a game balance choice. And with the restrictive continuity....

Sorry if someone already answered this....but I think it comes down to the old caveman mentality. In other words, "if you can't fuck it, kill it". Unless Raph wants to get into making new gaming .....um....peripherals, that means that most of the action in MMOGs will involve killing stuff. You're either killing other players or AI, no way around that.

I mean, you can boil most automated quests down to a few simple formulas, and only a small chunk of the base is going to embrace the player economy or crafting.....so if you look at it with a wide enough angle lens, every game looks like it only has a few basic things to do.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

I've given up on Raph.  If I were to read his book it would only be for a laugh at his psychobabble bullshit or to gear up for another Raph induced Rant.  Raph reminds me of one of those complete posuers who come out of a fancy business school spouting non-stop crap about how things should work, but having absolutely no clue about how to realistically implement it.  

Beating him up about his arrogance, however, is boring.  He just doesn't listen and when he does he doesn't understand what he's listening to.

Good luck with your book, Raph.  I hope you get rich buffaloing another round of executives.  Your customer base, however, thinks you make shitty games and personally, I don't think you can define fun for real people.

Pot, meet kettle.

I've never noticed Raph being particularly arrogant, or maybe I'm immune to arrogance from reading this forum.  I do remember, however, Raph saying in a post above that he DID listen and that he wrote this book in an attempt to 'get back to basics'.  That sounds decidedly unarrogant, doesn't it?  I guess you didn't notice that bit, Faust.  I may not have enjoyed SWG but I find this bit of your post



to be arrogant, in itself.  

Enough people seem to play this game to make that statement erroneous, at the very least.  Anyway, the people who hate his game are not part of his customer base any longer, are they?  

What exactly made you this angry?

I'm guessing, of course, but it's possibly listening to all the fantastic theories of what SWG was going to be during the development process only to find that it was a complete turd on playing.

I mean, irredeemably bad.

I used the phrase 'sucked the marrow from the Earth' earlier.  It's really, really, really a BAD game.

And he told us it would be better.

To defend him somewhat, SWG is highly successful from a MMOG pov.  Many MMOGs are surviving with 50-80k subscribers, and SWG has several hundred thousand.  There's a lot I liked about it too; it was gorgeous, I thought the skill tree system was innovative, housing (which I didn't get to try) looked interesting.  But I hated its combat system, and PvP was an abortion, and those two points are deal breakers for me.  I don't need several hundred thousand other people if I can't challenge them and be challenged by them; everything else can be done (usually, for some reason, better) in a standalone.

If someone else could innovate combat in MMOs to make it more fun and then rip out the economy, auction, graphics, and crafting from SWG, the game is pure gold.

You are correct that combat, PVP, and to a larger extent the unnecessary promises of the devs that turned out to be just another grind were what killed the game for me. Oh, and the guild system majorly sucked at release.

It would be interesting to have a dual interview/discussion with Raph and Claus Grovdal(Darkfall).  Raph helped create the MMORPG era that many(including myself) enjoyed most.  It was also an era that heavily influences the philosophies that Claus holds.  From Claus, who is nurturing and progressing that era, to Raph, who has declared it a mistake(correct me if I am wrong), it would be interesting to see what they can teach each other.  We want to listen in on the conversation, though.  :)

I don't think there is one "right way" to do a MMOG.  It's obvious that something along the lines of a "carebear" game are enjoyed by consumers, even if it's something I and others here don't care for.  Many of the design choices are matters of taste.

I think that is the real reason that "good" MMOG's according to this community's needs will always be niche products, which I believe is something Haemish has expounded upon before. The idea that you can appease the masses will always lead to the LCD of gaming. That's why we get the games like EQ that have the massive numbers but don't appeal to the jaded gamer looking for more.

To get what we are really looking for, I doubt the game would ever have the same kind of massive appeal. Lots of people eat tons of Kraft processed cheese every year. That doesn't mean its the best cheese on the market for the educated consumer out for a great experience.

Alot of people buy Quake3 and Unreal Tournament 2004, and they are the best at what they offer.  For every remaining FPS that captures the remaining niche areas, the MMOG industry has a corresponding gapping hole.

Tomb Raider 1 sold like crazy, after blending genres to create a new hybrid genre.

I do think the key is to blend an existing genre, like a RTS or FPS, with the MMOG genre.

Don't give up.

To stretch the analogy a bit further, Britney Spears* outsells by an order of magnitude a lot of really good, solid, musically innovative bands.

Moral of the story: people like crap.  If you don't like crap, I suggest you buy indie (http://www.atitd.com) and/or niche (http://www.shadowbane.com).



*<old guy>or whatever the kids are listening to these days</old guy>

I would disagree, to a point.  Generally, people in the movie business have said the same kinds of things regarding sci-fi/fantasy movies.  That is, they are niche, and the big hits (Star Wars) are exceedingly rare.  Mostly, they don't do as well as the competition.  While a lot of people here are going to look on Princess' Bride with fondness (inc. me), it wasn't that great a film, either looking at it critically or financially.

However, I disagree that this means sci-fi/fantasy cannot or are not mainstream; instead, I feel that this means people don't know how to write good sci-fi/fantasy.  Star Wars should already be a good hint that this was the case.  Lord of the Rings should have blown that idea totally out of the water.  Many literary critics have tried for a long time to relegate those books to "niche" or "geeky" because of their genre.  They're either wrong, or people are a lot less cool than we'd like to believe.

I think we're in the same boat with MMOGs.  At one point, the RTS was considered niche - until WarCraft came out.  It just took a good RTS to make a game in the genre make money, and man did it make money.  MMOGs were considered niche, but that's a harder argument to make nowadays.  PvP is considered niche, but again, I think this has to do with design and not PvP as a concept.

Sure, some of the hardcore fanbase of LoTR disliked the movies, but most of them who I know (and I have followed LoTR for a long time - look up my handle) did enjoy them overall, despite their grievances.  I think PvP can, and will, hit the same point.  At some point, someone is going to take a serious look at why there is a sizable niche group who is touting PvP, and work out why they like it, most people don't, and make a good game to include most people on both sides.  The limiting factor here is the number of people willing to consider radically new designs, beyond the standard crop of PvP zones and switches.

Damn Roac stole my thunder.
Just because something is commercially a success doesnt mean it has to be bland crap.
There are plenty of good bands and good movies out there that DO make bucketloads of money. Sure they are rarer than the bland commercial crap but its not tHAT uncommon.
There are also different dynamics to a MMOLG as compared to bands/films so it doesnt make a perfect analogy but I truely believe that different types of games wont be niche forever.
Right now its a convienent excuse (and yes a commercially viable one) for game designers not to push the envelope.

Necromancy, Jedi, & everything in between.

Then you are also to blame, Faust.  It only sucked because you experienced the suck.  Had you not chosen to play those games, you would have been blissfully unaware of the suck.  You and Raph are equally at fault.

I hope I made you both feel better.

See this is the one point of your generally well thought out post I disagree with. PvP enthusiasts continually insist that if PvP is made well enough that PvE enthusiasts will suddenly convert and come to enjoy it. This is not necessarily true. I for one would be very, very hard to convert to PvP because it is frankly not what I play MMOs for. I think alot of other people are the same and this is why PvP is a niche.

The issue with PvP isn't so much design (though that is a huge issue since modern PvP is all about time invested and not skill ) but with people. The only game I can think of that came close to fixing this issue is DAOC (and possibly WoW since it seems they are going the route of not letting the factions talk to each other). The problem is, in PvP, the lowest common denominator is going to set the tone. Period. There may be lots of decent people who enjoy PvP but it's the little retards that everyone remembers and that make it so only a small crowd will enjoy PvP.

Solve the human element and maybe, just maybe, you'll see pvp grow. Of course, the day you do that is the day we achieve world peace.

It could be.  You play MMOGs to have fun, regardless of the details.  If there was such a thing as "fun PvP", at least in your mind, you'd play it.

I'd certainly argue the point that MMOGs often present an atmosphere that make PVP unpleasant to otherwise PVP-willing players.  I am not talking about everyone that plays MMOGs, but I am refering to those that enjoy FPSs, yet don't find anything remotely as balanced or action packed(time spent preparing vs reward of fight) in a MMOG.  

I experience more fun, memorable moments in one evening of non-MMOG games, then I do in a week of playing MMOGs.  Does this mean MMOGs are not for me?  No, because I like what I see.  And I really like those moments that I do occasionally get.  But a MMOG cannot give me enough of what I want in any reasonable time period.  It is crack being drip-feed to me.  Part of it is intentional timesinks, and part of it is design issues.

I do agree that you have to be aware of the lowest common denominator.  That is why I think that the Planetside/Savage approach works so well.  Everyone is balanced, but success equals more options.  One might argue the same for Counterstrike.  I have yet to play Guild Wars(so I might be way off base), but it sounds like there might be a similiar approach, only allowing a certain number of spells at a time, to be carried out to a fight.

MMOG persistance can add housing/storage, guild functionality, matchmaking, and longterm goals ontop of the existing shortterm FPS goals, and you have a solid foundation to later build on. Imo.

There is such a thing as fun PvP. I get it in FPS and RTS. I don't believe it'll ever be present in MMOs.

It is a matter of this:

FPS/RTS:
1) No time investment in my "character"
2) Skill = win

MMO:
1) lots of time investment in my character
2) Time invested = win

Actually you could argue for both that "Time invested = win". I used to practice my QuakeWorld CTF skills 8+ hours a day and I got pretty damn good at it. And you read about the top Counter-Strike clans and they play a lot together honing both their individual and team skills. Being a top FPS or RTS player is more than just having excellent hand-eye coordination. You have to spend the time to learn the nuances of all the maps, learn lots of different strategies and tactics, learn how to anticipate your opponent's actions and so on. So even in FPS and RTS games, the more you play the better you get. The difference with online RPGs is that time invested also raises the starting power of your character so the playing field usually isn't even, and then there's the issue of uneven teams.

I still think there can be a medium.  For example, if a mage or a warrior can only take 10 spells/special-moves/slots out onto the battlefield.  Each slot is fairly balanced, be it defensive, offensive, buff, counter, etc.  The MMOG-timesink nature of the game can still use timesinks and character development to help players flesh out their characters with more options.  No leveling.  No uber spells.  Just different approaches to each slot.  Depending on the type of game(RPG, sci-fi/action, etc), you can split some of those slots into seperate skills and inventory slots, to help maintain RP feasibility.

Big, but slow fireball.  Rapid fire, disruptive fireball.  Long-range power fireball(straight shooting).  etc.

Like Planetside:  access to more weapons and vehicles.

Like Savage:  access to better weapons and "tank" classes.

Longtime players just get more options.  Sure I can have fun with fireball, mini-heal, cure, and feeblemind.  But I am more effective with access to Lightning, Greater Heal, Reasurection, Reveal.  I can flesh myself out in ways to fit my playstyle.

Longtime players get housing/storage, status/rank, customization perks, etc.

Personally, for me, if a game has enough unique areas to make placing a house in an area feel special, that hook alone will keep my account open, even during slow periods.  I don't want to lose my house.  Add on resource control, and you add value to certain areas.  Add on player-created towns to let guildmembers live near each other, and that further enhances the housing hook.  Housing is the only hook that works on me.  Keep timesinks away and the fun coming.

Sounds a lot like planetside, and will probably have the same durability. If you can't offer some form of progression the range of carrots you can offer is drastically reduced.

I can't wait til the day that Planetside's player skills and action meet MMORPG's persistance and mythology.

How the fuck did you come up with that full of shit argument ?

I have no idea what you mean. Mythology in MMORPG's is entirely optional and disposable. WoW with it's quest centric progression will probably be the closest to having lore tied to action but even there most tasks devolve to repetitive action. As is inevitable because of the volume of content a player will consume.

In any case planetside, as I understand it, has both lore and persistance. And it also has a terrible retention rate. That's because adrenal oriented players get bored easily. Whereas strategically oriented players will happily do repetitive tasks as steps to a long term goal. That's why there's flat progression, no crafting, minimal travel time and low set-up in planetside and it's why your idea doesn't fly.

I was going to say something like that in the other thread you started, but it had already got far too surreal for me.

First, I need to address some issues that plague Planetside, as it stands by itself.

The continents and bases lack any specific meaning, personality, or reason for players to "feel at home".  The landscape is meaningless and does not envoke any strong feelings, like one would have for defending their home terf.  I don't know if it was/is game engine issues, or network code issues, but the game still remains a standard form of CTF, and makes no effort to bond the player to the territory they battle over.  This all takes place over a non-interactive landscape.  The landscape design makes little attempt at any form of grandly-designed battleground.  Buildings are non-deformable.  There is no constructable, strategic structures.  Except for the Vanu, a few aspects of the Core Combat expansion, and one, maybe two, landmarks, the game's alien mythology fails to show itself in the world.  One continent plays fairly much like the next.

These all contribute to retention issues, albiet at a smaller, more subtle level.

I think there can be a medium between Planetside's lack of retention methods/larger-goals, and the stop-gap goals MMORPGs have to come up with for retention reasons.

Just for the sake of arguement, lets say that this future, theoretical, medium-finding game is set in an RPG-ish setting.  You can have fast, realtime combat between mages, archers, warriors, thieves, tamers, etc.  There is no level-based combat, instead a skill system, or a slot/certification system, giving more toys for players to use on a level playing field.  You can have territorial control over resources, and all the conflict that arises from that.  You can have crafting of disposable items (or even non-drop items, if the game takes that approach).  You can build and destroy structures.  You can build player towns, and enjoy the protection that having friends around you will allow.  Your housing and/or banking allows a certain amount of storage/packratting.  You have a game designed around PVP, but allows plenty of recreational PVM.

You have longterm territorial goals, and shortterm conflict.

Now I have just inadvertently described Darkfall.  Because Darkfall may have found that perfect medium.  It is still abit to early to tell if Darkfall will have enough retention factors for the playerbase it is aimed for.  But I can tell you that it has plenty of retention factors that both offer me the enjoyment of Planetside, and keep me playing longterm.

This might not be what you are looking for in your next game, but this seems to be an approach many have been asking for.

When DAOC introduced "trophies" for houses, I was utterly amazed at the response.  Some of the most serious powergamers on the server switched their focus from RvR and powerlevels, and suddenly became collectors of bug heads and mounted skeletons.

Of course, there was a limited supply of these things, and once everybody had gotten a dozen or so, they went back to their usual pursuits.

So it occurred to me, what if a game had no levels, but had *thousands* of silly "collectible" items, mainly for decorative and prestige purposes.  And the developers added a couple dozen such items every couple of weeks, so that the hunt never ran dry...

I could picture a game like Planetside or Guildwars, adding such an "itemquest" concept, and it would be a huge hit.  PvP is all about competition, and collecting silly junk is just another less violent form of competition.

This is why *thousands* of collectible items won't work.  Most people only want "a dozen or so" -- or less -- of things like this.  Thousands just cheapens them and makes people want them less.

Not that I think it's entirely a bad idea. For example, look at the UO rares market.  There are enough rares for everyone who -really- wants one, but they are still rare enough that they command high prices.  Voila, a cottage industry is born.

But if you flood the market, I think you'd find that demand would drop significantly.

The best thing about rare items, is that you can screw people over by buying them online using paypal's loophole for non-physical merchandise.

I was trying to be kind.  Obviously, I need to work on it.

If somebody is willing to pay real $$$ for a wall trophie or pink panties, probably they deserve to be screwed over :P  I'm talking about silly decorative stuff, not the Megawanker Enhanced Ballblasting Sword of PvP Gankness....

Maybe thats one reason people keep playing ww2ol, there is at least a historical and real world geographical context to the towns we capture and defend. Nothing like defending tienan'grad' for two weeks straight, allied moral usually goes in the crapper when we lose Brussels and Antwerp etc. Its still not perfect either but the addition of the NA theatre should make things interesting.

The way to fix that is to give people ultimate player justice, and I think that would extend as far as to give the community the ability to ban someone for repeated griefing acts against the game. Nobody has figured out how to implement the idea of player justice yet because the penalties players can inflict upon others are very very minor. You'd need a player driven system of laws that could be voted on and enforced by the community to help alleviate the retard problem.

Entirely a design decision.  Well, partly on the first; part of the point of persistance is to allow your time investments to accumulate towards something, but that something need not be neccessary for PvP, PvE, etc.  That leads into the second point; all MMOGs I can think of require a massive time sink to have any shot at competing with other players.  Even a relatively quick ladder such as Shadowbane requires a month or so out of casual gamers.

But it doesn't have to be that way; it's only that way by convention.  For example, MxO allows players to swap out skills they've learned.  Presumably, you could learn everything in the game (equivalent of like a 30x GM in UO), but you can only "equip" x skills at a time.  What if every character you started with got a handful of max'd skills?  Say, UO's equivalent of 4x GM.  Pick whatever you want, and reroll whenever you like.  A design like that would reward people who invest time with more options (and to fill out 7x GM, if we were to continue the analogy), but even a day 1 character is viable.  

To pick another game, White Wolf has something similar in their system.  A day 1 character, if well designed, has enough abilities to be a serious threat to a year-old 150xp character (you may get only 2-4 xp per week in this system).  It's a bit different here, in that everyone gets the same amount of hp (excluding the "huge' merit).  A lucky dice roll can outright kill or seriously injure a player.  Of course, the focus here is a bit different from most MMOGs; WW games presume that people don't want to die because if they die they stay dead, so tend to avoid combat if possible.  But, it's an example how design can influence the importance of stats.

UO does this rather successfully, and I'm surprised that no one else (to my knowledge) has implimented any sort of rares system.  Some things are true uniques (or of an extremely limited set, like 3-10 items), some are daily drops, some are given out yearly, some are semi-recurring, and some are just difficult to get.  And people love them.  I mean some people are downright fanatical about getting these rares and spend tons of their time going after them.

The DAOC trophies sound similar to the UO rares.  In order to make a trophy, you must hunt for components dropped off monsters, which are then combined by a legendary-skill alchemist to make a trophy.  The trophy can be wall-mounted or free-standing, and sits in your house.  

Some of the items are extremely rare, dropping only once every several days, and others are fairly common.  The common ones require less alchemy skill for the trophy.  I've seen the rare components/trophies sell for a fair chunk of cash, and there are definitely some fanatical collectors who cram a few dozen trophies into their houses.

Don't say nobody - nobody in the MMOG industry has implimented it, but various versions have been floated in MUDs for decades.  Before I continue, I'm going to note one item; player justice is not anarchy or a fully PvP+ environment.  Justice requires a method for limiting negative activities and bringing punnishment against offenders but NOT innocents.

Understanding player justice in this way, it requires code support.  There has to be some set of tools in place for victims to seek compensation and players to seek out criminals.  The former is required to be justice, and the latter to be player, as opposed to automated, justice.  A very simple such system would be to call up x number of players to be a jury for a crime.  I kill you, a vote goes up to the jury (all players, x random players, everyone in the realm where the crime occured, everyone in a kingdom, or whatever other criteria) as to whether I'm innocent or guilty.  I obviously killed you, but I may still be voted innocent if the jury feels I should not be held guilty; because there was an agreed upon duel, becaus we were at war, because they like me, or whatever.  It may be simple majority rules, or it may require a heavy majority (2/3 or whatever) to swing one way vs another.  Here, innocents never go up for trial, although the guilty may be free.  Punnishment is hard-coded (x gold, stat loss, etc).

Or it could be more advanced.  Victims may have to report their crimes before the process starts.  The jury could be automated, but the victim may have to be "brought in" by a player deputy in order to be tried, unless of course the criminal wishes to turn themselves in.  Laws may be global, or they may modified by player government.  For example, a player Guild Leader who rules a city and is a king may set the laws within his realm.  Killing Elves of any sort may be declared legal.  Assassinations under contract may incur reduced fines - if the assassin is caught.  War would void any relevance of a law system (all's fair...).  Certain criminal organizations may have their own "law" that crosses political borders.  Rogues would do well not to cheat The Organization.

Ignorance is bliss?

Imagine the Yew courtroom in UO, running on a Unreal-based client.  The prosecution fires up the Sony Trinitron crystal ball and the jury gets to watch a demo-style playback of the crime, played back within the client, like UT and Quake demos are, complete with exchanged verbal text.  Goofy and far-fetched, but interesting to consider. :D

edit:  typo

Wow.

Try Everquest. There is a distinct "rares" market there, in the things that aren't no-drop items. The Bazaar just facilitated that further.

As for player justice, it all requires that players think of themselves as responsible members of the community. IN A GAME. People won't even consider being responsible members of their community in real life by serving jury duty. You think people paying to play a game will want their game time interrupted for even a second to try to determine if Willie McCrotchensniffer killed Bobby Poopiepants legally? It won't happen, ever, in any pay-for-play schema that involves more than 200 people. As long as the particular people are just random pixels on a screen and someone not personally involved with jury members, no one will give a shit about what happens to other people.

No it doesn't.  If you use a jury, they can vote however the hell they want.  For some it may be like RL party issues - they vote guilty or innocent every time.  Some won't care, and may not even vote.  Some will.  Some may get bribed.  You can control some of this depending on how you narrow jury selection - for example, by picking people of the same guild/city/nation/realm as the defendant.

Or, go with an automated jury.  Should the defendant wind up in court, they're guilty.  The trick here would be to get them to court, which since we assume most criminals won't turn themselves in, requires a player bounty hunter / deputy.  Such people can be compensated for their efforts, with the amount being tacked onto the defendant's fines.  At this point, you have a system where every greedy bastard is going to hunt down the guilty party because they're greedy bastards.  Screw responsibility.  But if the "noble" guys want to play, they can donate their gold to charity or something.

As for the political law-setters, that's generally what GLs do right now, without a system.  If you're an asshat on the guild comm / forums / meetings, you get tossed out, sometimes with a knife in your back.  They also make determinations as to who is welcome, if there are any RP restrictions, who is KoS, etc.  The law-setting part is just an extention of this.



A few will, but most won't - which is why I prefaced the player jury portion with calling it "a very simple system".  At the absolute worst, that system wouldn't be any different than not having a system at all, because everyone would be voted free.  



Depends on who's involved, which is why I tossed in the suggestion of limiting who might be a jury member.  I very much care about what goes on in my guild, or with my allied guilds.  Unusual PK encounters wind up on our guild forums - and on the forums for about every guild I've been in.  "Normal" PvP encounters rarely make it past the comm/vent/icq, but usually get some notice.  No, I don't care two shits about something on the otherside of the map regarding two guilds I've never met.  Which is why I suggested limiting pools.

It's also why I'm more interested in justice systems that are a bit more advanced and take some of these things into consideration.

I think a jury system could work if it were coded in with a couple things in mind.

1) Getting on a jury would be a voluntary action, like checking a box on your profile or signing up on an in-game list.
2) Selection of jury members would be quasi-random. The qualifiers should be that everyone in either parties guild and on their friends list would automatically be eliminated from the possible pool of choices.
3) There should be a time limit on the appropriate response from the jury involved, and it should be a straight majority vote on the offense. For example, those selected for the jury would have the facts available to them via in-game email and could cast their vote through that system. Votes would be tallied after a certain period of three days after the jury was selected or so.
4) If multiple offenses exist on the same person, they should be tried together by the same jury to decrease time.
5) There would have to be standards that would keep members of the community from bringing frivilous charges against others without due cause, ie. (they killed you, you have a chat log of offense, they stole something from you, etc.)

Definitely, bail and bounty hunters are needed.  

As for making them "show up in court," obviously the average l33t ganker will simply ctl-alt-dlt out of the game, as soon as somebody tried to force him in front of a jury.  So you would need punishments that would be applied to an account, regardless of whether the player is online.

Hmm.  I'd disagree.  There are a couple things you can do; one, not have logouts be an instant thing.  Several (most?) leave your avatar in-game for a certain amount of time.  The design could even be such that the time limit (30s-2m or whatever) is a bit longer if the toon is in combat / in the process of being arrested.  If there is a non-immediate process for the "trial", just save the char loc in the court.

Aside from that though, I think there would be some level of satisfaction in being able to keep someone off the game server just by walking up to them.  I mean, if someone commits a crime and has to quit everytime a law man came into view, that would go a fairly long way to help with keeping the peace.

All this has been tried.

No matter what you do, it becomes a new toy for greifers to figure out a way to turn it against the innocent.  It ends up involving more greifers than simply doing nothing would, just for the challenge of turning a "justice" system into a mockery.

Eventually you end up with a system so Byzantine from trying to plug holes in it that no one can understand it but the dewds who use it against the innocent.

The one (possible) exception is the Justicar (or something) system that M59 uses.  I don't recall the details but I seem to recall it only being really useful in (guess what) niche game situations.

Paelos:
1-4, agreed.  I've seen a trial by jury implimented in a MUD and didn't care for it myself, but I wanted to toss the idea out since we're on the topic.  If it were to be built for a MMOG, I think all those are reasonable.

5: My thought was that the charges would be brought by the game system.  At least, that would be the simplest method, which is what I was trying to illustrate.  Alternately, victims would have to report crimes.  In that scenario, I'd suggest that the game system be the jury.

The reason to involve the game in one step or another is to limit abuse.  If the game brings up the charges to start with, there is no possibility of a false charge.  You already know the guy did it, and the only option left is whether you want to let him off the hook for whatever reason.  If the victim brings up the charge (my preference), you could for starters allow for a mini-game of investigation, if the criminal weren't known (you didn't notice the thieft, they used a disguise ability, etc).  In this scenario, the judge would be the game, and have perfect knowledge of whether the crime was committed.

One MUD implimented this second system, and players could indeed report other players for crimes they did not commit.  However, the accused could plead guilty, and the judge (having perfect knowledge) would indeed find them innocent.  The accuser could then be charged with false accusation by the accused.  The accuser could plead innocent, but the judge would always find him guilty AND raise his fine by some amount.

In all these cases I'm advocating for a mix of player and game support of a justice system, because between the two, the game element can be controlled by the devs.  Out of the entire justice system, my feeling is that the judge/jury portion is not much fun to participate in, and leaves the most room for abuse.  If that's the case, it should be automated.  

Out of that system, I think most victims would like to be able to "report" their crime.  I do know that a lot of newbies in UO attempted to do this through the counselor system.  The advantage here is that it gives victims a way to feel empowered.  I do know that a LOT of people would enjoy playing the bounty hunter / deputy role, and there is no shortage of people who want to be criminals, to include being able to run away from the law.  

It also leaves open the issue of reimbursement.  If I steal from you, and you know it was me, you are likely to feel that I owe it back.  Here is where devs (kings/guild leaders/whoever makes the decision) can throttle crime.  The penalty could be anything; a simple fine, a stat loss, etc.  If there is monetary reimbursement, some of it could go to the deputy, some to the victim, and some as a gold sink.  "Court fees".  Base the penalty on anything; number of past crimes, amount of damages done, etc, level difference between the criminal and the victim.

Not in a MMOG.  The particular system I'm advocating (not the jury one), has been done extremely well in a MUD, and was well received by PKs and carebears alike.

MUDS are a) niche and b) frequented by more mature people (in general) than graphical MMOGs.

All the systems so far are full of holes that even I can see without playing around with an implementation.  Maybe though we should bring this to game dev and leave Raph's thread alone ;)

Comparing what may work in a MUD to what may work in an mmog is a tenuous stretch at best.  The two existed in very different eras and were populated by a very different player base/community.  An abstract analogy for me would be like comparing knowledge of literature between people that had read the books vs folks that watched movies about the books.  The community that frequented muds were often computer nerds, fantasy fans, or RP geeks that were usually very computer savvy and often above average in intelligence.  Today's audience is a significantly more varied by demographic.  

I'm not trying to imply that one audience is better than the other, I'm just stating that the target audience is quite different.  There are a number of models that may have worked well in the MUD days that would never stand up today.  For example, the concept of a donation pit or sitting in a tavern chatting are foreign notions to many current gamers.

EDIT: Looks like Jayce beat me to the punch while I was typing this.

This will be a sort of summary reply re: PvP

About the MxO archetype of having a few skillsets to pick from that can be swapped out. Ok, that might work for balanced PvP. Where does the feel of advancement come from in that scheme?

About player justice/jury systems/etc:

Why should I have to take time out of my playing to go to an ingame trial? Again it is the PvP playstyle intruding on my playtime, twice if I am killed then have to take the killer to court. I can gurantee that if I had a choice I'd check "no don't put me in the jury pool" as well. So would the vast majority of other players.

I suspect if this would work someone like Raph would have already tried it. Didn't he come from a MuD background? I'm guessing he figured that the different playerbase and the larger size of MMOs make this idea impractical.

It was done here, but it presumably doesn't count, because you don't have a Mac (http://www.deltatao.com/clanlord/index.html)

I never got around to actually playing ATitD, but I remember reading material on their site indicating that players had the power to draft laws (according to an in-game political process) that would be enforced by the developers if they passed through all the appropriate stages.  Sounded very neat.

ATitD doesn't prove a case for player justice systems working because of its size. 3k at highest peak. Total. With smaller populations, AND lack of the PK playstyle, a lot of things will work that simply wouldn't work when you start taking in all the scum of the earth with a credit card. As for jury pools, real life has taught us that most people avoid jury duty like the plague. When people are paying to be entertained, the vast majority of them will not accept interruptions on their play time, especially to deal with problems of grief. The larger the population, the more grief. In the end, you'd be giving griefers not only the ability to grief their victims, but MORE victims in the form of a jury pool whose play time is constantly interrupted. The very people you should be rewarded, those who accept the responsibility of jury duty, would be punished with play time interruptions. 10 seconds is too much time to take.

Griefers are best handled by a paid CSR with the authority to perma-ban the credit card holder. Additional means of curbing grief are things like making all characters on an account share a common last name, single-character servers (a useless gesture if you can't control multi-account holders). Making the players control griefing just makes griefers an even bigger interruption in the community.

Populations less than 500 may allow this to work. Populations over that I don't think have much of a chance.



Advancement would have to come in the form of accomplishments, not things like levels.

a) There are a handful of MUDs who have / have had more active accounts than the low end MMOGs, and I refer to these and not the 10-user ones.
b) Bullshit.

I disagree, based on experience.  I feel that a lot of the reason people make this claim (or similar ones) is because most MUDs have very small playerbases, with online counts being less than 50 at peak.  Nor do I feel that the date makes much difference; history has shown that it repeats itself.  The basic rules haven't changed any.  If you give people an opportunity to be an asshole, some of them will.  That factor scales squared to the number of people available to grief.  RL figured that one out millenia ago, when cities became crime centers with per capita rates far higher than what was found in sparcely populated areas.  Again, and again, and again, we have the same lessons beaten into us, but too many say in ignorance "well, there was nothing before to teach us these lessons."

According to their FAQ they don't allow non-consentual PvP, so I'm not sure how that applies at all to what I was suggesting.

In my idea of a justice system you wouldn't have to take any more time than to read the cases brought to you via an in game email and vote. That's it. You wouldn't have to go through some convoluted journey to a courthouse and listen to some guy bitch about how daddy-done-wrong. The way to get people to participate would be to put a small incentive on taking part in the judicial process. Small monetary rewards or xp gains might be enough to make people want to flag themselves as potential jurors.

As to the second part, that's a straight copout. Just because one person hasn't figured out how to work it in yet doesn't mean its impractical or impossible. Hell, by that logic I'd still be washing my clothes in a bin and hanging them outside. Innovation is always possible with the advancing stages of player interaction in these games, and something like a judicial system is closely approaching as a necessity when you create these virtual worlds.

But, roleplaying demands it (http://frontier1859.com/faq/frontier1859-faq-justice.htm)!

OK, I have decided to test the water with some merchandise. If you go to http://www.theoryoffun.com and follow the link for "Stuff" you should come to a couple of t shirts and mousepads. Did you really want this one on a mug? Let me know. :)

You're Raph Koster! You should have talked ot the people who make Gaming pads. Not the clothpad, secretary stuff. If you want. I can talk to them. ;) Maybe you could get a Theory of Fun Z-Board made.

Edit: I'd like the gator picture on a mug. But if you want it to truly be a theory of fun, send them shipped with 1lb of sweet sweet colombian coke in the cup.

For the mugs, how about quotes from the book and/or some of the graphics, and inside or on the bottom, the page number where that code is.  

Collectible mug sets and all that.

Er, there are MANY gator pictures in the book. Do you mean the color one that is on the website? That's from the back cover.

Ajax, I had been assuming people would mostly want the cartoons for the cartoons' sake...

Yeah, I imagined more like a fan-club for your book, full of fans who buy up all your merchandise, quote various phrases extensively, have trivia contests and insider jokes based on it, and so on.  ;-)

But I guess that has to be AFTER your book is released.

This is all so exciting.

I am going to assume that Signe wasn't being sarcastic--why burst my bubble? :)

A mug with the gator in color is forthcoming. :)

Awesome. Now put on some lipstick. Drink from the mug. Send it to me without washing. If you need a SASE, just ask.

Well, the mug is available, at any rate. You'll have to order it, then ship it to me (along with lipstick). :)

oooh errr!  This seems to be getting a bit pervy.  Now I really am getting excited!

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I thought I'd say that Amazon is now finally shipping this title.  Still says 11-12 days on their web page but they sent me an email saying they shipped mine yesterday, so I should have it Tuesday or so.

Bruce

I know many folks who pre-ordered it now have it. I am actually wondering if Amazon sold out and that's why they have such long delays (they only ordered 250, and almost 50 have sold thru my website link alone).

Ooh.

Raph, the press bunny assigned to the book through O'relly/TheOtherCompany hasn't returned my emails. I'm assuming there's been quite the interest in it. If so, congrats.

So now that it has gone past the speculative stage, is the book any good?

http://www.grimwell.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1233&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=01f4427848a41a8b2d16e2f313b06221

Schild, I'll ask and see what's up.

Heh, you just linked to something by Geldon. That's cute.

Who, me? I'm just blatantly self-promoting. :)

Whore. :)

I'm about halfway through reading it myself, so I was thinking of writing up a review of my own.  But, I've also got Return of the King extended edition DVD to watch.

Bruce

Okay, let me give this a shot.

Raph Koster's _A Theory of Fun for Game Design_ is certainly a book worthy of a place on any game designer's shelf.  For those who attended the original lecture that spawned the book, there isn't a whole lot that is new, but it's great to have it in book form.  For those who did not, the book can be quite revealing, particularly for those who have struggled to adequately define just what games and game design is all about.

Perhaps more importantly, though, is that Raph has written a light, frequently humorous, and sometimes touching book that should make a great gift to those of us who have parents or spouses who DON'T understand why we're wasting all of our time with games.  Rather than try to explain it to them, you can simply hand them this book, and they can come to appreciate the scope and depth of the subject without being overwhelmed.

And at times the book is quite poignant on a human level.  You can see Raph's genuine pride and love for his children nearly pour off the page when he talks about them, and his mention of his grandfather passing away while he was at GDC is particularly touching to me since my own father died while I was at GDC in 2000.

The book can essentially be read in two ways.  The first, simply by reading all the illustrations in sequence, is great fun all by itself.  Nearly every drawing does its job in illustrating the point it tries to make, and quite a few have charming little extra details that a gamer will readily appreciate.

The second, and perhaps more proper way, is to read the text and the illustrations together.  (I suppose one could also read the text by itself, but where's the fun in that?)  To summarize very crudely, the book makes the following assertions:

1. The human mind enjoys processing information from the world around it into patterns, procedures, schema, etc. that it can later apply with less thought in identical or similar situations.

2. Games primarily feature a core pattern(s) and mechanic(s) which players learn via playing the game.  This is fun for the mind.

3.  If the pattern is too hard to discern, or the mechanic of learning the pattern too difficult, players get frustrated and stop playing.  On the other hand, if players understand the pattern and master the mechanic too easily, they'll quickly become bored and stop playing.  There are other issues as well (relevancy, matching expectations, presentation, etc.) that come into play.

4. Most games have traditionally taught very basic life skills.  As children become adults, they've learned these skills, these patterns, and no longer play games since they are now out in the real world playing "for real".

5. Many of these skills, while useful when we were a primative people, are becoming less relevant, and even dangerous, in a modern society, where change is increasingly more and more rapid.

6. Game designers need to broaden their game designs, not only to encompass a larger range of patterns/skills/mechanics/lessons, but also ones which are relevant and helpful to modern society.

7. Game designers have an ETHICAL DUTY to do so.

(I've skipped over many other points of the book, which although unfair and regrettable, is necessary for the sake of length.)

Now, enough of the praise, on with a few (minor) criticisms.

I found the book paradoxically both too long and too short.  The layout of the work is to fill (nearly) every right hand page with an illustration, with the text on the left hand page.  This is great, because their are so many illustrations, but it means that the text on the left of many of the pages is often quite limited: 2 - 5 paragraphs, and usually short ones at that.  However, I am not saying that there should have been more text; often it conveys just the right depth and meaning for the particular point it is trying to make on that page.  But at times it does get a bit distracting; you get the feeling that these pages are only there because there are so many illustrations.

Yet at the same time, I felt the text sometimes got too repetitive, and should have gone deeper.  But the problem is you couldn't really dwell on one thing too deeply, because it was on to the next page and on to the next point (and the next illustration).  Really, the format constrains the book to a particular level, and I think part of this also comes from the fact that the book was largely original a presentation, where it is quite common for points to be made simply, and repeatedly, without a lot of additional exposition.  And I think if you accept the book in that context, you won't be disappointed.

One point that I thought the book did not give enough attention to was the element of chance in games.  Nearly every game features the element of random chance, yet the book explores this mechanic very little in relation to other core game mechanics.  When it does -- all of 2 paragraphs on page 56 -- it's almost dismissive of it as little more than a way to teach people about odds.

I would contend there's a lot more to it than that.  Introducing a random element into a game helps enhance the learning experience by prolonging the appeal of the game.  Consider a game mechanic which, if mastered, allows a player to win 100% of the time.  If the game is fairly deterministic, then once they've learned this mechanic, they'll quickly become bored with the game.  Now, consider what happens when you add the element of chance.  The player, even if they've mastered the mechanic, can still lose.  This forces them to re-evaluate their mechanic -- do they REALLY have the best one, or were they mistaken?  What additional patterns can they learn to help eliminate the effect of chance?  Does this teach us that in life, even the best laid plans can fail due to unknown and unpredictable factors?  And so on.

I would also add that the addition of chance helps ameliorate the problem of players playing the same game at different skill levels -- the inferior player still has a chance to win, even if it is by luck, but by winning is encouraged to keep playing the game and, perhaps, learning what the superior player already knows.

The other point of the book that I take issue with is at the end, where there is a rather sudden appeal to a variation Pascal's Wager.  This forms the basis of an appeal to ethical game design.  I find the whole insertion rather jarring, partly because I feel Pascal's Wager is thoroughly debunked (particular when you consider the wager fails to mention any costs relating to belief), and partly because it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.  If game's don't matter, than it doesn't matter if a game explores a particular behavior that is "bad".  On the other hand, if game's do matter, then surely it is important to have games that explore such mechanics as a way of learning about ourselves, just as more "ethical" games may explore other mechanics.  As Sister Wendy admitted, Serrano's _Christ in Urine_ was still valid art; it just wasn't particularly good (in the non-moral sense) art.

I also think it is difficult to expect games to illuminate the human condition and teach lessons at the same level as other forms as art for precisely the reasons cited earlier in the book.  Games are about a core mechanic/pattern that is learned, and the very nature of gaming compells one to look past the story and other contextual trappings to focus on the central gameplay.  Consider the moral of _Moby Dick_, which is about the dangers of letting one's obsession overtake them, or the destructiveness of the desire for revenge to others around you, or perhaps, according to some interpretations, the futility and hubris of denying God and trying to confront evil itself on one's own.  But a game _Moby Dick_, even if it contained such themes, would ultimately teach you instead about optimal strategies for hunting whales, or perhaps a formula for determing the true costs of obsession in lives lost.  And neither of which may be models that realistically describe reality, which calls into question their ultimate utility beyond the scope of the game itself.

But despite these lengthy criticisms, I can certainly recommend this book.  As I said before, I think it's particularly useful as a gift to non-gamers who want to know more about what we do and why we do it.

Bruce

Thanks for the review!

As regards Pascal's Wager, it's more illustrative than really intended to be the actual argument as to why we should act ethically in the process of game design. It's supposed to be the clincher on top of everything else said in the book, so to speak. Perhaps it's overemphasized. :(

Yeah, the format offers constraints. But on the other hand, it's also what a lot of folks seem to like most, so... tradeoffs!

Lastly, on



Hence pages 186-188. :)

I think partially it's just me.  Pascal's Wager turns me off, and I found it quite jarring as I wasn't expecting it at all.  For most readers, I do not believe it will be a big issue.  Whether or not those readers will accept it as a basis for their ethical game design remains to be seen. :)

Bruce

PS, post this on Amazon. :) I need more reviews!

To join the "Why don't we have better games" argument, Richard Bartle nailed that one, in my opinion: We're victims of our own success.  In the last year, the market has added nearly 1 million subscriptions to a base of about 1.5M, roughly 60% annual growth.  That means that around 40% of the market is on their first MMO (and therefore this is all new to them), another 25% or so is on their second (and just wants the new one to not have the sucky parts of their first).  2/3 of our market is newbies, so new games are designed for newbies.

There are a lot of things we *could* do besides keep elaborating and refining the EQ/UO mechanics.  But as designers and jaded MMO veterans, we are fond of subtleties that are wasted on the newbes, we long for depth and engagement on levels the newbie is not yet aware exist.

Is WoW anything more than a very well polished version of EQ?  Nope, and it doesn't need to be.  It's ridiculously successful being what it is, simply because that's what the bulk of the market is ready for.

In the long run, as these players get educated and familiarized with the formula, they will want something more.

--Dave

I get your overall point and agree.  As far as WoW I'd have based launch success on the previous ten years of brand awareness, and consider it far too early to judge WoW an absolute success.  The expectations of that brand awareness may yet end up clashing with a MOG implementation.

OTOH had you used CoH instead if WoW I'd agree completely.

I am looking forward to this book showing up on my doorstep.  I will write a review for Amazon, and I promise to be nicer than that SWG player's review on Amazon right now (it is worth a giggle though).



Yes


No.  Note the hordes of EQ vets flocking to WoW.  Because WoW is the first major western mmog since EQ was released that isn't even shittier than EQ.  

The reason Blizzard kicked everyone else's ass is because they treated their game as entertainment.  They asked themselves what was fun about prior games, what wasn't fun about prior games, and made a game that was actually better than the games that came before it.  Give the customers what they have already told you they want.  Evolution: it works!

Meanwhile, everyone else listens to the ~75 or so professional kvetchers here and elsewhere who are begging for some vague and undefined paradigm shift in gaming.  So they try and reinvent the wheel, and come up with some horrible abortion of a game.  Creation ex nihlo works well, if you are God.  Sadly, MMOG designer's ain't, so get that Jesus fish off the top of your design documents.

In short:
Blizzard's design process: I want to do what customers want.
Everyone else's design process: I want to do what will get me mad props on the MUD-DEV mailing list.  

Parable version:
When a competitor rolls in and pounds you into near-irrelevance, you can (a) learn from them or you can (b) sulk in the corner and cry yourself to sleep while chanting "the customers are wrong, they'll come back when they grow up and really, really understand."  PROTIP: try "a".

I'd revise it to this:

Everyone's (including Blizzard) design process: I do what the suits tell me I can do.

Hmmm, I have 500,000 - 700,000 in the past year, but it depends on what numbers one wants to use for WoW and EQII, which distort the yearly growth since they came at year's end.  That's still very impressive growth, though, and doesn't change the thrust of your point.  (Asian MMOG's not included).



Let us try to avoid the word "more"; that's the sort of snobbery that leads to the people who think Mozart is "better" than Motley Crue and Monet is better than Mapplethorpe.  Let us instead say "different" and leave it at that. :)

Bruce

Just like everyone said for COH, let's reasses that statement in 6 months. Hell, Shadowbane was wildly successful during the first month (when you consider what it was expected to do), and where is it now?

It's not that simple. Markets that have nothing but increasingly refined versions of what came before become commodified, and tend to suffer cannibalization of customers, lack of growth, and centralization of market share into a few hands.

As a case in point, I'd mention that the launches of WoW and EQ2 are the first time that we have really seen cannibalization hit the Western MMO market in any significant way.

You're also implying that what customers want is simply a fun version of what they had before, and that isn't accurate either. To start with, what customers want evolves over time; second, there's the principle of satisficing--customers will take what is good enough. If there were a game with the depth AND the polish, I do believe customers would choose it.

I’m only up to about chapter 6 or 7 now.  I’m giving this book the slow dissection reading pace in order to grok as much as I can from it.  (I have to say I haven't used the term grok nearly as much before reading the book.)   So I've gone back and reread chapters a few times to re-examine the ideas in the book, which partially explains why I'm taking so long.  (World of Warcraft and Neverwinter NIghts module dabbling have been the other reasons.)

Blizzard does have a fairly consistent tendency in development which would coincide with Raph’s Theory of Fun in that they attempt to implement a number of different patterns of gameplay in their games, as well as a level of unpredictability or emergent gameplay to keep things pretty fresh.   It’s tough to get bored of a Blizzard game when they keep redefining the pattern as you play.   (Just about every one of their games do this, except for Blackthorn, but interestingly enough I didn’t find that game all that compelling.)

In the overall shape of the underlying game mechanic, the average MMORPG does not seem to possess a game pattern that requires nearly as much time to learn as would justify the time they try to get you to spend playing them.    WoW’s fairly interesting in that Blizzard has implemented some entirely different game mechanics for the different classes.   EQ2, on the other hand, seems to have actually reduced the number of differences from it’s predecessor in that everybody has a health and power bar and executes hotkeys from it.   Still, neither game would really possess adequate time investment potential in terms of game mechanic.    Perhaps the real thing that keeps MMORPGs interesting might be the emergent gameplay that comes from having other people play, a reasonably infinite ever changing pattern that isn’t over the head of most people   (Although in both of those games, the gigantic quest selection helps.. at least until you’ve grokked the basic quest patterns down fully.)   That and possibly the massive volume of content.   Around chapter 7 Raph gets into different reasons why somebody may enjoy a game, and MMORPGs do attempt to meet many of them.

I certainly agree that satisficing is alive and well in this market (and many others).  Tastes do change over time, but customers are not always looking for revolutionary change.  I love my plasma TV, and I am glad that the guy who made it said "how do I make a better TV" rather than "how can I undermine the TV paradigm and replace those needs with a superior alternate product."  Note: I am also glad that there are people in academia and R&D departments asking the latter question as well; however, I am not interested in paying them money for their brainstorm projects.




If wishes were horses and all that.  Pulling that off appears to be orders of magnitude harder or more expensive than people think it is, because every attempt to pull that off has utterly failed.  Also, no offense intended here, but Skehl in this thread and you to a lesser extent here and elsewhere seem to really sneer at aiming for "polish" as some sort of lesser calling.

What makes WoW polished isn't just that most things in the game actually work and entire core systems and player classes weren't left undone until long after release.  A lot of the polish is the devotion to constructing an appealing and immersive atmosphere.  Before they got hooked on the community in EQ1, people got hooked on the atmosphere.  They got hooked on Everfrost and Neriak, and on Sol B and Sebilis.  The zones screamed out that they were lovingly handcrafted, and that really matters.

I think that's a big part of why WoW is doing so well, and why it has poachd so many EQ'ers.  Coming from EQ, most of the other worlds seemed amateurish, soulless or both.  SWG, for example, felt like miles and miles of empty, random-generated landscapes and a few cool POIs.  WoW took the time to handcraft the great majority of their content (they cut-and pasted some cave systems, which is one of my biggest annoyances with the game).   That matters.

I don't think I am alone in believing you can't randomly generate a world worth playing in.  Until WoW came out, the only person who had shown they could make a word like that was McQuaid, who was purged/decided to leave SoE.  And I think the relative lack of atmosphere in SWG and EQ2 (disclaimer: I only played eq2 for 2 weeks in its beta, and really wanted to like the world since I am somewhat turned off by Blizaard's art style)  has demonstrated that this is a rare and valuable skill, or at least a n almost-lost craft that most people don't spend money on anymore.  I think that's a mistake.

Anyway, don't diss "polish" in your quest for "depth."  Environments are crucially important, even if they aren't as sexy from a theory perspective.  They also take a LOT of time to create I assume, and to create a game like this you need to sacrifice a lot of breadth.  I think the results so far demonstrate that the customers are willing to make that sacrifice.



There's also an important distinction between breadth and depth, but I think that you may have been using depth as an umbrealla term here so I won't derail except to observe that while SWG had impressive breadth, it was not deep.  No single aspect of SWG was as deep as, say, EQ1's combat was.  I am not so sure that people would rather have a broad combat/economy/doll house/exploration/whatever game where each element of the game is much shallower than you could find in  agame devoted to one or two of those areas.

Tell me about it. Of course, when I trot out that justification, people usually lambast me, usually to the conclusion of "don't try."



I can't speak for Dave. But something I very well know about myself as a person is that I am more interested in new problems than in polishing. Focusing on polishing for me is difficult--just part of my personality.

I do not, however, regard it as a lesser calling. It's incredibly hard. When I focus on it, I feel like I do an OK job at it, but I am far from being the right person to manage that process.



And THAT is something that I do know how to do, and do fairly well; but have never gotten to demonstrate in my professional life. (Alas, whine whine, whine). I do think it's a competency that all the current MMOs need to improve on a lot.



Yes, of course, just as in all forms of entertainment. All forms of entertainment would also be impoverished if people weren't pursuing something more... it's always a a balancing act.



Yes, that's correct; I agree with your definition of breadth versus depth, and I have posted recently on that very subject on the recent blog discussions (I think my comment went up at Zen of Design, but I could be misremembering).



It depends on the person, honestly. There will never again be a hack n slash-only game that will capture me for longer than around 10 hours of play. But I know that I am not like everyone else in that respect, or even representative of the majority.

On the subject of polish vs. novelty: Like Raph, I find it difficult to work on polish directly, not because I have anything against polish, but because I personally am an extreme neophile.  I want to work on the "interesting" problems, the ones nobody knows how to solve yet, the ones that offer the opportunity for teaching me something new about my craft.  Following through with the execution of the minutiae of a solution I have already figured out is tedious and frustrating.  This is a deep character flaw that has caused me endless problems in life far beyond my career in games.

Polish is important, the problem is that it is also expensive and enforces a kind of creative conservatism that leads to stagnation.  You can create something new but rough, or you can polish and refine well-established mechanics.  Blizzard does the latter, they do it very well, and they make a lot of money from it.  When I say "WoW is an extremely polished version of EQ", I am not running down WoW, or it's developers, I'm simply calling a spade a spade.

The problem with the current formula is that it doesn't have anywhere to go, and it won't scale.  WoW is prettier than EQ, it's more polished in gameplay, interface, and theme, but it's not going to give anyone who played EQ for a couple of years anything really new for an experience.  And it was accomplished by putting over 100 content creators to work for over 2 years and had a price tag of over $25M, how do you scale that?  Put 200 to work, spend $50M?  At the end, would you have anything other than an even prettier, more polished, version of the same thing?  

What it comes down to is this: I think we have only scratched the surface of the potential of these games, yet we're already seeing signs of creative stagnation.  That's partly because they cost so damned much to make, but mostly because the market is not providing any incentives not to stagnate.  There may not be anything new in WoW, but since most of the market *is* new to these games, it's all new to them.

It's in the nature of business to be conservative, to pursue stability at all costs.  It's the nature of creativity to be radical, to pursue change at all costs.  Where the creative side of my nature sees stagnation, the business side sees predictability, security, safety.  Neither side is "wrong", each is simply responding to different imperatives.  Progress requires that the radicals occasionally carry the day and turn over the applecarts, but a business cannot survive in a state of permanent revolution.  People have rent to pay and families to feed, they don't want to think that some jackass with a vision is going to screw that up.

The problem is that this is an extremely young field, with a lot of growing up to do, and applecarts *are* going to get upset, the paradigm *is* going to get undermined, and "conservative" business strategies are doomed to fail as the assumptions they are built on are eroded beneath them.  Is the Diku formula the ultimate expression of MMO potential, and all we have to look forward to are ever more ornate and polished versions?

That's not what I got into this business for.  That's not what I started playing these games for.  More to the point, it's a dead end, if the industry can't kind a way to break out of the mold, then the MMO's will be only a fad.  After everyoe who might play them has burned out, we're done.

--Dave

Some unrelated points:

1) Mozart is better than Motley Crue, umlauted or otherwise. Mözart!

2) A lot of WoW's "polish" isn't in design (there's some design innovations, but they mainly revolve around making the DikuMUD model as painless as possible) but in implementation. It's been under development for a long time, and it shows.

A small example. You can always tell what game systems a designer implemented without much other help, because they involve ASCII art in the interface. If a designer doesn't have coding or art support, they do the best they can with what they have. Sometimes it's pretty good, but it will never appear polished.

Now, given the above, look at fishing in WoW. You "plink" your line in the water, in a random position to defeat macroing, and have to use visual and aural cueues given by the game to know when to reel in your line.

It comes across as very well done. It also took a designer to create the fishing system, possibly a server programmer depending on how much scripting support the designers have, definitely a client programmer to implement the random bobber things, artists to create the various implements, and a sound guy to make the "plink"s and other cueues. That's a lot of people.  Multiply that by every other system in WoW, and you have a very polished... and very expensive... game.

3) I really need to order Raph's book.

There were far too many notes.  I personally would have been happy had he removed some.

I'm that way as well, and I think most developers are.  If you look, IT shops are often configured with that paradigm as well; entry level jobs are doing QA/testing work, with senior roles being devoted to developers.  It's often the case that you have your designer/architect laying the keel so to speak, and doing the first chunk of code, at which point parts get farmed out to the "grunt coders" or whoever is most junior.  Maintenance often winds up in the hands of a junior dev group, with the senior guys having moved on to other projects.

Just as food for thought, I'll throw another design out there, where your senior guys are the QA staff.  They're now involved on the front and back ends; laying or at least approving the design, and doing at least the first round of QA.  Because face it, the polish part of development is hard/boring, but to get polish right you need the guys with the most experience.  There's something a bit backwards about getting the least experienced person(s) to critique the work of the most experienced.

That's exactly right, but what you see as stagnation is simply consolidation and reloading.  What we saw with Shadowbane et al was simply a genre way, way outrunning its supply lines.  The industry hadn't even figured out client/server optimization well enough to commoditize it and yet we were already running ahead to player cities and siege warfare.  If you're innovating, you're trying to build a spire on a foundation.  The MMORPG foundation is still extremely unstable, even at the bottom.  WoW is an attempt to consolidate and focus on that foundation, rather than leap off into the ether with grand new visions.  And that's great.  Out of that will hopefully come 2 or 3 similar efforts, after which the base levels of MMORPG technology. . client/server, crafting, monster behavior, etc, will be totally and completely commoditized and the customer base will be ready for something more.  And you can start building the next level. . player cities, deep pvp, multiplayer crafting, etc. . on a solid foundation.

I say this with all due respect because I am also a developer who obsesses on the new and innovative and finds refinement and commoditization tedious, but you have to understand that the value you provide only works as part of a big ant colony, where the refiners and consolidaters are just as valuable, and you have to know when to back off and stop building the spire when it's not the right time.