f13.net

Hi, my name is Raph and I am a gamer.

Why do we recognise that reference? Why are we ashamed about "Hi my name is Raph, and I am a gamer"? Why do we see that connection? Why do we have to defend gaming to people? Why do we have to explain to someone or justify it to why we do what we do?

A Theory of Fun came out of this: a back to basic process of why and how games work.

Watching kids play is a really startling process. It makes you look at yourself and how you play. Anyone here play Popcap games? I was playing Typing Shark. I'm a terrible typist, I do the five finger hunt-and-peck at 100 words a minute. I'm good enough at it to completely crush Typing Shark. Just demolish Typing Shark. Every level they add new stuff. Words that weren't visible until they reach you. etc. I blew through all of it, and the games said "You've beaten the levels, so we'll just randomly throw stuff at you that you've played before now", and so I quit. I also wondered why I quit.

Have you played Bookworm? It gives you lots of infrequent letters - x, q etc - that eventually stack up at the bottom and then you lose. I looked at it and realised this too, so I quit. I found it BORING. This is interesting. I find it boring when it's really easy, and also boring when it's really hard. What's that space in the middle about?

 This is what I came up with. People are really good at pattern-matching. I'm going to offer the vast oversimplification that what we think of as 'thinking' or consciousness is really just a big memory game. Matching things into sets. Moving things into the right place, then moving on. There are a bunch of really interesting stats around how much the brain can hold in memory at one time .. like that memory game where you look at a bunch of objects then try to list them. We're really, really bad at this. It's impressive how much we can train ourselves to see more when we're really naturally bad at this. If we can remember more than 20 things off that list, we're lying to ourselves, but if we can clump we can work it out. If one item is 12 pencils, it goes through. A really good example of this is faces. The amount of data in a face is enormous. Just enormous. We've only just started to figure things about about it in the past few decades; when a bird-watcher spots a bird, the face recognition part of the brain goes off. We see faces everywhere. I'm looking at the ceiling here and seeing bright glowing eyes and robot heads. We see the front of cars smiling at us, Chevron have made a pile out of this.

When we meet noise, and fail to make a pattern out of it, we get frustrated and quit. There are patterns everywhere. Static snow on TV. My kids have never seen that, by the way, which is pretty scary. Once we see a pattern, we delight in tracing it, and in seeing it reoccur. That's meaning, all of a sudden. The brain doesn't learn something the first time it sees it, it takes a while. You have to practice it. When you're a kid, learning to put on trousers. It takes a really long time! It's disturbing! It takes MONTHS! And children are way smarter than we are. I'm serious. As we get older it's harder and harder for us to build patterns. So when we see a pattern that we get, we do it over and over again. We build neural connections. Now this is what I call fun.

Building those patterns is necessary for our survival. If you don't have a pattern library, you are going to die. You won't be able to tell an apple from Draino. Fun is the feedback the brain gives while successfully absorbing a pattern. We need to absorb patterns, otherwise we die. So the brain HAS to give positive feedback to you for learning stuff. We tend to think of fun as being frivolous. The stuff that doesn't matter. And this is the serious games cheer line: I'm' here to tell you that fun is not only not frivolous but fundamental to human nature and required for survival. Therefore what we do is saving the human race from extinction.

Which brings us to games. What a cultural artifact they are. What a lot of them there are. Look “game” up in the dictionary, and it sounds frivolous .. there's lots of lofty academic stuff about it. But we need to dig into games and find out what they are. Games are nicely distilled patterns. Like the iconified smiling face. Games are the cartoon version of real world sophisticated problems. Snakes and ladders? It's Euclidian geometry! It's a Cartesian space. It has wormholes, for pete’s sake. Who here teaches physics? Superstring theory? Play a game! Games are distillation of cognitive schemata. That's. What. They. Are. They are prefab chunks - you can run through and practice without actually having to do it. Games are fundamentally forms of cognitive training. I'm using cognitive in the sense of how we know what we know. Some data we just learn as databanks: rote leaning multiplication tables for instance. There is a big difference between learning tables and understanding how numbers work.

 Games are training us to find underlying patterns. Games are teaching us to find patterns in a systemic way. The downside to learning is that you only get to do it once. Once you've learned something, you're done .. until you forget it, of course. Take Tic tac toe. It's a finite mathematical space. Any six year old can tell you that tic tac toe is a stupid game. oh that's dumb, it's always a tie. Read Blink, it's a great hi level intro to this. Once you've chunked this and figured tic tac toe out, it's time to move on.

 All games are entertainment. Tetris: spatial relationships. Some games - Mario - teach you to explore. This is an interesting and subtle lesson to teach; the fact is as adults, as we build a large library of chunks, we get lazy. "I don't need any more chunks, I have enough to survive now". Then we get Alzheimer’s and die. Seeking out new information, hidden behind bricks, books, people, is actually pretty important. There's interesting work in early stage Alzheimer patients … learning a new language or playing videogames both retard the onset. Some games teach motor skills. A recurrent internet meme is this web based bubble wrap popping. I submit that this memegame and Quake 3 are the same game. Finding a point in 2d space and clicking on it...

We humans are also very good at seeing past the dressing. Games are dismissive of the ethical implications: the argument that games are teaching our kids to kill, for instance. The people arguing this are earnest people. I imagine philosophically people here don't necessarily agree with them but we have serious social concerns, yes? Here's the thing: ask a gamer about grand theft auto's hooker moment, they see this: pac-man eating a cherry. They've grokked it: it's a power up.
…

 We have a fundamental disagreement about what games ARE. They are not story, presentation, metaphor. These are all in games, but that's not what games ARE. The real social value comes from what games are. The distilled cognitive schemata inside games is socially valuable.

The dressing however is incredibly important. Remember that the rest of the world sees the dressing. The Sopranos is not about the mafia or a mafia family. Anyone here seen Die Hard? What’s Die Hard about? Explosions? No. Die Hard is about a man trying to reconnect with his wife. Why does Bruce Willis go through hell? Because his wife is in there, and they are estranged. We get told this in the first scene. It's all about the wife. If there's a movie we remember, odds are it's not because of the explosions - but the dressing matters, it's the first thing you remember. So yes, we objectify. We need to train people outside of our hobby that they need to see that Sopranos is about families trying to connect, and we need to train people to see what our games are about.
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 If you can't choose the battle, choose the battlefield. People are smart. If you follow the rules of duelling.. the evolutionary smart thing to do is count one and shoot the guy in the back. People come to games thinking the same way, which is why we get cheats and hacks and exploits. We try to game the system. We game designers react negatively to this, but it's a sign we're doing our job, as game designers. It's getting them to figure out the pattern, cope with it, deal with it, then reapply it. If a player sees an optimal path - an Alexandrine solution to a Gordian problem - they'll take it. Under most circumstances we call this lateral thinking and praise it to the skies. In games it's called cheating.


Players try to make gameplay as predictable as possible. Which means it becomes boring. Exciting can get you killed. Our civilisation has always tried to make life as boring as possible. We now do exciting things on the weekends. in carefully controlled situations. We're rather buy our roast beef in a store than hunt and kill a bison. By and large we'd rather have sensible shoes rather than blisters. We're optimising life to make it as boring as possible. Any of you who have suffered the pain and fear of a cab ride in Taipei or Boston ... I want that cab ride to be boring, not exciting!

Every game is destined to be boring so we can routinise it. Game designers are engaged in a hopeless task. Any of you play MMOGs? You've all heard of the treadmill. Well - the treadmill is the end destiny of every game. Every game is a treadmill, it's just how fast you play or see through it. Some gamers are so good.. they look at the first level of a game and they know how the rest will proceed, then they put the game down. “Another shootemup”. “Another feedback loop”. Not interested. The console manufacturers are currently recommending 8 hours of gameplay rather than 40. Because people get it already! The brain is trying to optimise the chunks away. Fun is the process of encountering bumps along the way. A new pattern to master. New data thrown into the mix. This is what levels in a shooter should do. They should teach you different data per level. I'm giving you a hammer and I'm going to show you every variety of nail under the sun. This is a "possibility space" and a game is iterating through the possible combinations. The problem is, computers suck at this. This is why, until the advent of the computer, you played games with other people. This is why with the internet space, we’re rushing back to it, to that social play. Other people offer a much more interesting challenge than an algorithm. People introduce a really interesting array of problems into the question. The game designer is going to try to fight this, because they're in the business of building formal abstract systems. They will try to control the players. Online worlds have the interesting problem that they're full of people and don't react in predictable ways.

What game designers are trying to do in all of this is make self-refreshing puzzles, emergent gameplay. Trying to make the game deeper.. the cognitive challenge greater. There's a fundamental tragic flaw in games: the need to have one right answer without interpretation. We need puzzles when there is more than one right answer, games that can be interpreted; if we want games to become art and not mere craft, we have to get beyond this kind of simple thing [cartoon of a child's drawing]. We need games with interpretation [cartoon of a master painting]. There are a lot of endeavours in human life like this. Writing a book. You come to it thinking you knew what you were going to say, but you learn a lot in the process. Music too. Things not expressed in the bare notation [image of score with notes] - music is a finite set. Music is very mathematical. All possible combinations could be computed. Thank god for interpretation! All these challenges involve communication. Talking to your SO. One of the great cognitive challenges of life. It is a puzzle with no right answer. Perhaps that's why we find it one of the most rewarding things life can offer. Fundamentally we have to regard games as being COMMUNICATIVE OBJECTS, as media. They say something.

 This means the process of game design itself is a cognitive challenge with no one right answer. It’s worthy. That shame and embarrassment of playing should go the hell away. Games are saying something important. They're capable of expression, and bridging the gap between people. This may be necessary to our survival! For our art form to become mature, the cognitive schemata that games embody need to convey the same kinds of complexity as the cognitive schematic in other media. Regard them as a valid art form and take them seriously. All media are for entertainment. Art and entertainment are terms of intensity, not terms of type. The difference between Cheers, Friends, and a medieval morality play are NOT THAT BIG. They are predictable. They are for reassurance, they are building cognitive schemata through repetition - seven seasons worth - and then sometimes you get Lolita. That makes us nervous. It's challenging. Breaks the routine. As long as we as designers and developers come into the process knowing everything our games say, games will be doomed as mere entertainment. We have to make something like Lolita. Schindlers list. Catcher in the Rye. That's the sign of a mature medium, a game that makes you think 'I don't quite know what this might mean..'.

 Some players will prefer Friends over Lolita, of course. Most people want their library of chunks and to be kept comfortable. End state of adulthood is tackling problems they know how to solve. If you know the route to work every day, and you have an important meeting, then one day the sea level rises by 7 feet, your current schemata might not apply. Where are the games teaching relevant skills to the modern world? Jumping over alligators is fun, I grant you. But where are the games that teach modern cognitive schemata? We need to broaden the cognitive schemata that our games are about. It's incredibly important toward developing games as a medium. We have to figure out games that don't have one right answer, and we face our own cognitive challenges here. Otherwise we know what the fate of games will be: they'll be the thing you stop doing when you're 25 and you get kids. We'll be missing out on a chance to improve the human condition.

So what I want to see: the games about curing cancer. The games about how do we restructure Florida when it's under water? That's where we need to go. In the end games stand on their own as the ONLY MEDIUM THAT TEACHES FORMAL SYSTEMS IN THIS WAY.  It is the only communicative medium that does this. It is the only fully experiential method of learning abstract concepts. We should not allow them to become tic tac toe. Tic tac toe sells, gets good ratings - which is exactly why this gathering is important.

Go forth. This is why games matter.

A Theory of Fun came out of this: a back to basic process of why and how games work.

Watching kids play is a really startling process.

I find it boring when it's really easy, and also boring when it's really hard.

When we meet noise, and fail to make a pattern out of it, we get frustrated and quit.

The games about how do we restructure Florida when it's under water?

In the end games stand on their own as the ONLY MEDIUM THAT TEACHES FORMAL SYSTEMS IN THIS WAY.

Tic tac toe sells, gets good ratings - which is exactly why this gathering is important.

I'm not familiar with anything Raph has said in the past,

GAMES
A Theory of Fun came out of this: a back to basic process of why and how games work.

PATTERN
When we meet noise, and fail to make a pattern out of it, we get frustrated and quit.

BORING
I find it boring when it's really easy, and also boring when it's really hard.

PLAY
Watching kids play is a really startling process.

FUN
A Theory of Fun came out of this: a back to basic process of why and how games work.

DIE
If you don't have a pattern library, you are going to die.

LEARNING
So the brain HAS to give positive feedback to you for learning stuff.

Was Raph's "theory of fun" something he spoke of and tried to apply in previous games, or has this "lightbulb" only turned on recently (i.e. after SWG)?

The whole reason for writing the book, as I have mentioned elsewhere, was getting beaten up over SWG.  Sometimes it seems like the more you chase lofty goals, the more you lose sight of fun--and vice versa. Since I am not about to give up on lofty goals, I decided to go back to basics on the fun part, and try to give myself a deeper understanding of what I was trying to do.

FWIW, I read Theory of Fun and I still liked the keynote - it was a very nice summary of the book.   :wink:  There's nothing more annoying that someone who assumes that you must have read his book, so I think it's not a bad thing for Raph to have written his keynote with the opposite assumption in mind.  It was probably correct.

As to putting innovation into application, one mantra that I'm starting to hear around is the 'execution over ideas' line.  It is very true that the first generation of MMOs had a level of execution that could charitably be called 'uneven'.  I think there will be an inevitable trade-off over the next few years between innovation and execution, with innovation getting the short end as people come to grips with how to execute these things more reliably.  As execution improves, I think the pendulum will then begin to swing back toward innovative ideas.  I think this dynamic has plauged all of the more innovative developers before this, and I think that Raph is included in that group.

The thing that bugs me though, is that Raph has been fairly consistantly against PvP.  Whether he admits it or not, he has through design decisions. 

Yes, Raph has long been an advocate of PVP, he's just constantly been under financial pressure to make sure PVP doesn't drive away most of the player base and cause a "It's not a mirror - Trammelize it!" to the MMOG he works for. It was his original design for PVP that got tossed out of SWG because it wasn't "mass market" friendly enough.

It's impossibly hard on one side, and impossibly easy on the other, meaning the pattern is uninteresting.

Outcasting. As in, certain types of PVP were acceptable (faction vs. faction), but PVP outside of that (like say an Empire guy killing an Empire guy), would cause the attacker to become "red" or "outcast." Every single character on that person's account, including other servers I think, was then outcasted, and attackable by everyone without any sort of penalty. I think it was similar to Lineage 2's system, except it flagged the account and not the player.

It had its holes, and I don't remember the exact specs anymore, but I remember Raph saying somewhere it was changed to the TEF because it was thought most people would object to being PVP'ed even if it affected the attacker in this way.

When it's my money on the line, I want execution first, innovation second. Innovation means fuckall if you cannot execute it solidly enough to make the innovation fun and non-crashy.

In short, I'd rather have an MMOG I can login into with similar, yet evolved gameplay, than innovative, fresh-thinking gameplay that I can successfully play 1 out of every 6 login attempts.

On PvP, I'll just say that lumping all PvPers into one group is like calling all PvE players bread bakers, shortsighted and wrong.

Outcasting. As in, certain types of PVP were acceptable (faction vs. faction), but PVP outside of that (like say an Empire guy killing an Empire guy), would cause the attacker to become "red" or "outcast." Every single character on that person's account, including other servers I think, was then outcasted, and attackable by everyone without any sort of penalty. I think it was similar to Lineage 2's system, except it flagged the account and not the player.

It had its holes, and I don't remember the exact specs anymore, but I remember Raph saying somewhere it was changed to the TEF because it was thought most people would object to being PVP'ed even if it affected the attacker in this way.

That got tossed out because frankly it was just another implementation of "player justice" and everyone and their dog knows this doesn't work. Hell griefers would take being outcast as a badge of honor.

Sure, games are patterns.  But a good many, and possibly most, players prefer an easy, repetitive pattern. 

That sounds like you'd have a full-time job justifying every single kill you ever made in PvP. I'm sure some asshats would make it their purpose to be litigous if they ever went down in a fight.

Yes... I forgot to mention that a gvt could give blanket kill permission to people within their territory too, so you wouldn't necessarily get any resource on those cases. and you would be able to see the rules before you entered someone's territory...

Basically, it's mostly automating the policing, in a way...

As for games are saving the human race, meh. I think someone read too much Orson Scott Card. The problem isn't the games, it's the society surrounding the games. Fix that, include others, and stop gunning for nerd factor.

1) Precedents include things like Lego MindStorms and the Sony Aibo dog.

Actually, the majority of VOCAL PVP'ers fit into your mold of hardcore PVP people. Since PVP is about competition, you will find a larger percentage of PVPer's, even the non-vocal ones are in the mold of "if it goes to 11, 10 won't do" crowd.

If you pkilled someone and they didn't enjoy it, they could "yank your PK license." This would make it so you could no longer initiate PvP.

Just to correct the description of outcasting:

Anyone could attack anyone.
If you pkilled someone and they didn't enjoy it, they could "yank your PK license." This would make it so you could no longer initiate PvP.
If you felt that it was done unjustifiably, well, you could go to the local player government and ask for your license back. The governments actually would have access to the log of the events leading up to the kill.
Some govts would forgive anyone. Some would be honorable. SOme would change over time.
The forgiveness only applied to that govt's territory.

So yeah, it was a form of player justice, but not one I have seen before.

I don't know, as much as some of your design choices drive me crazy, there is a part of me that would love to see what you could do given a few years, a large budget, and full control.

I suspect that game will have superb and very complicated crafting and economic system and not much of anything else.

... To me best PvP system is lack of artificial rules that introduce restrains on player behavior...

"artificial rules that introduce restrains on player behavior" - This is what games in general, and computer games in particular, are.

2) Player E wants totally closed off PVE only, never wanting to compete with other players for anything besides spawns

You can talk about unrestricted PVP being all this and that, and you can scream at the "carebears" all you want, but you'd better realize that open PVP is always going to be a niche. PVP with rules is always going to garner more players than PVP without boundaries

Yet, for some reason MMOGs don't take these two factors into account.  I've yet to see a good mechanic where the game supports semi-equivalency in ability.

What you really want is thematically consistant PvP.  You want rules, but only so long as they make sense for the setting.  You don't want to stop pursuing your enemies because they have gone into a Safehold; you want to stop pursuing your enemies because they somehow stopped you.

I'm going to do something stupid and tell somebody what they really want.  What they want isn't unrestricted PvP, because truely unrestricted PvP means I can hack the server and it is OK.  None of this carebear rules stuff, if I get surprised or I might lose my tree, I can crash the server if I want.

What you really want is thematically consistant PvP.  You want rules, but only so long as they make sense for the setting.  You don't want to stop pursuing your enemies because they have gone into a Safehold; you want to stop pursuing your enemies because they somehow stopped you.

And if you want to be able to completely defeat the opposition, you don't want to play a persistant game.

You are trying to reinvent the wheel here, there is a term for "thematically consistant PvP" and it is open-PvP.

While I want thematically consistent PvP, the very term "thematically consistent" is highly subjective.  Because of that, I would break PvP'ers down into two groups using that term as the divider:

For most PvP'ers, "thematically consistent" means being able to kill at a time of their choosing.  They cannot conceive of a game or virtual world without some sort of descent into all-out war.  Nor can they conceive of villainous masterminds with more depth than simply killing everyone around them.  PvP is their theme.  In other words, they interpret "thematically consistent" to mean a theme that they invent regardless of the game milieu.

Then there are those of us who interpret "thematically consistent" as making sense in the context of a game.  They want a game that resembles another world in one or more interesting ways, even if it's not really a "virtual" world.  Villains do other things besides go on killing sprees for loot.  That's the kind of PvP'er Raph is, I'm assuming.  And because he's that kind of PvP'er, he assumes everyone is, or at least enough are that he can construct a game with free-for-all PvP without much regard for the consequences.

The fundamental difference between the groups is this:  The first group plays with the primary motivation of PvP-ing, while the second group plays with the idea that PvP is only one aspect of the game world.  Because of that fact alone, they cannot coexist in the same game.  In games that attempt to cater to both, one group will eventually dominate the other.

I think Raph's right that implementing PvP that doesn't break the magic circle represents good game design.  I just don't think the majority of PvP'ers really want this because it imposes rules on one's conduct that are too much like the real world, rules that they are trying to escape by playing an MMOG in the first place.

Unless hacking server is part of your game that will clearly be considered an exploit and has nothing to do with what open PvP is about.

You are trying to reinvent the wheel here, there is a term for "thematically consistant PvP" and it is open-PvP.

You shouldn't be able to take away ability to come back and try again from your opposition. Defeat - yes, stop from trying again - no.

Player E sucks. He's my first target in every game. And when I kill him I make sure to tell him he should be playing Pikmin or something on his Gamecube. Yes, specifically, the Gamecube. And it can't be Resident Evil 4. Wussy. *spit*

I <3 PK.  :-o

See, my theory is that Player E is relatively rare. I think most people start as an M. E's are created by the worst of the P's. (PKs.). They get so angry and so frustrated they want nothing to do with PvP ever again.

Talking off the top of my head when I should be asleep, I think I disagree about delivering PvP.

The absence of PvP from the majority of computer games is part of why these games are regarded as 'immature'.  Most non-computer games are in fact PvP games.  PnP RPGs were odd because nobody 'won', or everybody won, and either way, that sounded communist.  Football has winners and losers, although both sides generally need an ice pack and a discreet shot of painkillers afterward.

I agree that so far delivery of PvP has been lacking, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying to resolve the issue.  In the end, I think part of the mass market solution lies in provioding a fair, understandable, and robust PvP game.  PvP is what the mass market knows and understands, badly implemented PvP is what computer games have generally provided.  Closing that gap is a major part of the mass market puzzle.

There's no difference between an E, though, and an M who simply never chooses to PvP. 

So it's pretty easy to satisfy E and M without having PvP at all.

Bullshit.

Your whole player M thing is a goddamn myth...

Your saying the vast majority of players only enjoy games where there are pvp-on and pvp-off zones, or pvp flags?
Think about what pvp gets reduced to in the great games you've mentioned:

Daoc = Planetside, with crappier combat and oh yeah a bunch of horrible boring shit you had to do before you could even get to the part where you capture the same bases over and over and over with no real benefit to doing so.

I really hope that the majority of players are not so stupid as to doom all of us to another 5years of this type of crap

[
See, where I disagree is that PvP has a nasty tendency to bring out the fucktard in people. .... It's the whole anonymity thing all over again. When you don't know people and people don't know you, your inner asshole comes out.

I've played PvE and PvP MMOs, and I've generally noticed a fairly equal distribution of fucktards.  PvP provides another conduit for the furktard, but I don't think the frequency is any higher.  It is more about the anonymous nature of online play than about the type of play.

Bullshit.

Your whole player M thing is a goddamn myth...

Your saying the vast majority of players only enjoy games where there are pvp-on and pvp-off zones, or pvp flags?
Think about what pvp gets reduced to in the great games you've mentioned:

"I'm saying that however it is done, the majority of players want to choose whether or not they are susceptible to PVP on any given night or day. I'm not saying they can't get enjoyment out of other types of games. After all, single-player games are usually just story-driven versions of PVE"

I still call bullshit on that.

But say one faction became the haven of l33t dewd gankers, and all the other factions despised them due to their RPK ways.  Not only could every other faction just band together and kick the shit out of them but they would be put on every factions enemy list and taxed to the point where mining on anyone but their own colonies would be out of the question.  The police/military could hunt them down, or lock them out of major markets on earth by stunning them then pp checking them and sending them to jail on sight instead of only arresting if they commit a crime.  It would take a very specific set of circumstances for a faction that disregards all others and RPK's their members to get away with it, and if they did it would be a failure of the community/player base not the game.

Player justice can not be fooled by loopholes, it can only (and will from time to time) be abused by unjust players who somehow gain positions of authority.  But the same way RPK's will be kicked out of most factions due to the drama and political problems they cause, corrupt cops are kicked out of the LED for abusing their authority on a daily basis.  They already have an IAD department in the open beta who members of other factions can submit ss's and testimony to.

A majority of players dont want to be raped in the ass with no system to punish the rapist and no hope of winning the fight due to the combat system being so based on time spent in-game, they enjoy pve and pvp content.

If Open PvP to this point has been unable to deliver that, well then yeah open pvp has sucked for them.  That doesn't mean that everyone wants to play CTF with no score (daoc) or bind rush till one side gets bored (WoW).  If they do well then frankly we're all in for an eternity of shitty games...

Player justice can not be fooled by loopholes, it can only (and will from time to time) be abused by unjust players who somehow gain positions of authority.

No I dont, I just believe something other then what you believe.  But discussing things with you is tiresome.  You quote pieces of what I say and then tell me I'm wrong and insult me based on some stereotype you've made up in your head from when the bad men hurt you in UO.  All the while disparaging the immaturity of anyone who isn't a pussy when it comes to playing games, I'm getting kind of sick of that.

immaturity of anyone who isn't a pussy

You say he is insulting you, and then claim anyone who doesn't like PVP or open PVP is a pussy?

Pot, kettle, black.

-Almost every game that involves 2+ people is player vrs player.  Sports, board games, table top, computer games hell most of our entertainment on tv or in the movies are stories of competition.

I do think anyone who denies the fundamental truth that multiplayer games are almost always meant to be competition and competition is achieved from player vrs player conflict is a pussy who just can't handle losing a fight.

Again, you quote pieces of my posts and ignore everything else I say.  Yes you are pushing my buttons you are a E player that much is obvious.  I dont like people that deny that competition is what games are about and AI will never provide competition.  Also items/levels are what create E players, anyone who fears being attacked by superior numbers can travel with friends.  The problem with mmog PvP that causes so many players to become what you are is that a kid with more time on his hands will always be better then you are, then when he kills you (not because he has more skill but because time = levels/uber items) he will act like a kid and rub it in your face.  I can draw this conclusion as it is well established that for the most part younger players have more time for games, I know I have gone from playing 8+ hours to playing 6max and usually more like 4 a day and not at all on weekends.  The evil fucktard pk stereotype is formed almost entirely on the back of these truths imo.

Nobody, no matter what "player type" you consider them likes to not stand a chance in a fight.  The fact that most mmog's are designed with level determining whether you can even hit or damage an opponent makes it the obvious culprit for so much grief being caused by fights where one person stands 0 chance of surviving.  How do you not see that?  Of course the whole target + auto attack + mash skill buttons thing doesn't help either but lets not go there for now.

Saying that the only solution is to make a pvp on/off switch means you just have a limited imagination or are in fact a E type player.  You demand the on/off switch because you dont care if PvP is fair you want to be able to have no part in it.  I would say that puts you nowhere near the majority and you will not convince me otherwise.  I will agree that the majority of gamers do not enjoy open pvp using level/items > skill and target + auto attack combat systems, I include myself in that group.

I detest pvp in the current flavor of mmog's for the same reason you do.  But we arrive at different conclusions to the solution.  Neither of us likes to loose to some asshat because he has /played 2months and we have /played 3weeks.  I see that as a failure of the game to allow me to win a fight where I am more skilled then my opponent.  You want me to believe that the problem is you can't turn pvp off.

P.S.  I do think anyone who denies the fundamental truth that multiplayer games are almost always meant to be competition and competition is achieved from player vrs player conflict is a pussy who just can't handle losing a fight.  I also think the lvl60's who go to redridge or stonetalon and massacre lvl2x-3x players are pussies, so what?  Both groups avoid true competition, one by picking on players who do not stand a chance against them the other by trying to avoid conflict with other players all together. 

but I don't think it's fair to back up any of the PvP positions in the debate by saying "WoW has huge numbers, therefore a majority of the players agree with the PvP concepts involved with that game".

Hoax, you're hopelessly deluded. There are 4 kinds of MMO players, and you seem to believe there is only one. What's the point? Fine you win. Only Killers matter. The other playstyles are totally invalid because they don't wish to be your victims. Let me know when you wake up and realize you and your playstyle are not the center of the MMO universe that in fact you are a small part of it.

Which certainly isn't what I have said. I said that PVP certainly isn't HURTING it, as many anti-PVP folks would like to believe. Your statement should be "WoW has huge numbers, therefore a majority of the players do not DISagree with the PvP concepts involved with that game."

Fair enough (although it wasn't just you specifically I meant), but honestly my gut feeling (unsupported by numbers, because they simply don't exist) is that for very large portion of "Joe WoW player"'s decisions to play the game, PvP didn't even enter the decision process.

It isn't JUST bad game design that creates griefers, there are truly people who do not deserve to be allowed to impact other people in an anonymous way.

If you believe that griefer gankers can be channeled into positive conflicts, you are talking about one of two things:

1) The game is full of griefer gankers, thus limiting its mass appeal

2) You have ignored the entirety of MMOG history

Griefer gankers need one thing to make them happy: sheep. Sheeple. People who are victims. Which means that in order to please griefer gankers, you have to provide them with someone they can exploit, with an entire set of players who will be unhappy with their social interactions. Because to the griefer ganker, if their actions are not causing distress, IT ISN'T FUN. Just being able to play monsters is not going to be fun for them, because that's just another form of player character. They have to be able to destroy something other players have built. They have to be able to easily defeat someone with no challenge to themselves.

If you really want to cater to that crowd, you are designing your game to be a game only for griefers. It isn't JUST bad game design that creates griefers, there are truly people who do not deserve to be allowed to impact other people in an anonymous way.

I have posted the slides for the "follow-on" talk, "A Grammar of Gameplay". They're at http://www.theoryoffun.com/grammar/gdc2005.htm

because I've yet to see designs/implementations that constructively channel these players into roles that turn into positive conflict instead of negative.

I have posted the slides for the "follow-on" talk, "A Grammar of Gameplay". They're at http://www.theoryoffun.com/grammar/gdc2005.htm

I have posted the slides for the "follow-on" talk, "A Grammar of Gameplay". They're at http://www.theoryoffun.com/grammar/gdc2005.htm

NITPICKING DERAIL ALERT!!11!
Am I the only person who hates the use of the word "grok"?  I realize that I am an old-fashioned snob, but it makes it very difficult for me to take the writer seriously (unless I know from previous experience that the writer usually has something worthwhile to say, like Samwise who nevertheless sparked this diatribe).  It isn't just that it is slang, it's that it is such an awkward word, and it is popping up more and more in gaming discussions.  Especially considering the fact that 99.999% of the instances of "grok" I have ever seen could be replaced with "master" and the rest with "understand" or "intuit." 

I'm with you 100%.

Shockeye was just being funny. He was saying "I'm with you 100%" instead of "I grok what you're saying."

El Gallo was just nitpicking. Again, the Tick live action, watch it.  :-D

"Grok" is four letters and a single syllable.  "Understand" is ten letters and three syllables.  Given the choice of two equivalent words, I will almost always use the shorter one, regardless of whether it appears in OED.

In addition, "understand" doesn't quite convey the meaning I am trying to express - you can "understand" a language without being able to express thoughts in it.  "Assimilate" is probably closest to the mark, but that's an entire four syllables, and sounds even sillier than "grok" thanks to the Borg-ish connotation that any Star Trek fan will undoubtedly assign to it.

Don't knock "grok".

is a word in a real, live language that you can plausibly expect other speakers of that language to comprehend. 

"Chunk" is possibly even worse, since its use is narrower (it isn't listed even as slang most places) and the word has many other meanings (hell, even urban dictionary defines it as an ethnic slur against overweight Asians before it gets to the gaming meaning)

If someone gave me one example of a sentence using "grok" where an actual English word could not be substituted for "grok" then I would perhaps be more receptive.

Grok means, best as you can term it, "to understand something entirely, completely, and in its asolute, unquestionable true nature", or something to that effect.  The implication runs quite a bit more deep than "I get it".  Use outside the book is going to be more loose than that, but still implies that "I get it" is too weak.

Zoxr egro monf donth krorb reeb.

Don't be so hard on yourself!   :cry:

]Uh, no, it's not referring to a D&D die roll.  Chunking is a psychological term relating to how people retain information in memory.

Because the meaning of grok is tied into one of the deeper plots of a modestly old book, there isn't a word that could replace grok.  Grok means, best as you can term it, "to understand something entirely, completely, and in its asolute, unquestionable true nature", or something to that effect.  The implication runs quite a bit more deep than "I get it".  Use outside the book is going to be more loose than that, but still implies that "I get it" is too weak.

Exactly my point.

Well, I guess we're having the happy accident of both going away from the thread feeling like we have proven our points.

Really?  I assumed you knew you were being ridiculous and I played along.

I mean, I could have instead posted that it was an obviously different thing, since "grok" has been around for decades, is part of the vocabulary of many English speakers, and can be looked up (several links have already been posted in this thread), whereas what you posted was in a language known solely to yourself and invented a few minutes ago, but I didn't want to insult your intelligence by doing so.   :oops:

Really?  I assumed you knew you were being ridiculous and I played along.

I mean, I could have instead posted that it was an obviously different thing, since "grok" has been around for decades, is part of the vocabulary of many English speakers, and can be looked up (several links have already been posted in this thread), whereas what you posted was in a language known solely to yourself and invented a few minutes ago, but I didn't want to insult your intelligence by doing so.   :oops:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man

Please keep going.  This is like watching 2 dogs meet for the first time, growl and posture, sniff each others asses, then walk away satisfied that each one has defended his territory.  It's saving me a DVD rental!  If it helps I can make up other words whose canonicity is questionable! C'mon!

I never read the book

How many people do I need to get to say "zoxr" before it becomes legitimate?

Though they only surface in their home state of North Dakota, the vast underground network of the Mole People’s caves stretches throughout the nation, forming the backbone of the Internet. There really is no such thing as fiber-optic cable, but rather a legion of data-packet carrying Mole People. So before you hit the Stop button on your web browser, remember: a poor, hard-working Mole Person has probably already run halfway.

This thread couldn’t get any more derailed unless someone start talking about Sirbruce sexual tendencies or furies. Wait….

UO pwns, everything else suxx0rz.  Also, I hate fat people, and George W. Bush is Hitler reincarnated.

*shrugs*

Just pissing on the ashes is all.

I said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm almost positive that you'd like SWG.

SWG lets you kill a morbidly obese George W. Hitler?

Does Raph think Chevron makes cars?

So, make PVP fun for everyone and you will make a trillion dollars.

If Raph had ever made anything concrete that I thought was any good, I might give more credence to his speech.  Instead, I find it to be the ivory tower ramblings of a designer whose general appeal baffles me.  I'm not sure why he's thought to be so visionary.  All he's done is state the obvious using as many words as possible.

I would have been snoozing halfway through that speech.  Folks have got to learn the get to the point first, and then explain those points in more detail.

The difficulty part is why games like UO had such a rough time at it.  A lot of the people who played were going to lose, and KNEW they were going to as soon as they logged in.  That part is no fun.  Going up against a roughly similar opponent(s), however, is constantly cited as one of the most exciting parts of that game.

So.  We can all expect a massive overhaul to how PvP works in SWG come next patch, right? :P

Take PvP for example.  Hardcore PvP'ers look for easy marks, easy patterns.  They are uninterested in someone of equal skill.  UO, EQ, DAoC ... pick your acronym, and the PvP has followed the general pattern of "let's go gank newbies and get l33t" for more hours per day than most people work a job.

Not quite.  "Open-PvP" means a server full of retards running around and shooting each other screaming "OMG LOLZ".  (See: Faces of Mankind.)  This is certainly consistent with some themes, but not with any that would make a fun game for the average human being.

Faction systems, where factions can attack each other but not their own members, are one form of "thematically consistent" PvP. The theme in that case is war between those factions, as opposed to an open grief-fest.

The important thing here is that the games you listed are not persistent.  We've been around this issue a number of times, but let's take chess for an example.  I can start playing chess with my friend who is a very good chess player.  He will whip my ass.  However, every time he does, we reset the board and play again.  My prior asswhippings have no impact on current game.  I get better and better, to the point where I can win some games against him.

Wow.

Septuple necro post for the win.

I didn't even look at the date, heh.  I just saw a big, "new", post that I hadn't commented on, and went for it.