f13.net

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-10-30-the-utopia-that-never-died

Found this really interesting, I was vaguely aware that he was a bit of a socialist but I didn't realise how much of a driving passion that was.


He also says some stuff about F2P games (doesn't like them) and some things about the importance of encouraging both Achievers *and* Socialisers in MMOs that some modern MMOs could do with thinking about (Elite: Dangerous, for example, is so far completey ignoring socialisers).

If I recall correctly, he's also opposed to the idea of races in MMOs with defined characteristics - dwarves have a constitution bonus, elves have an int bonus etc - because he thinks they encourage stereotyping in real life.

His timing is excellent as always, a generation of gamers was on the verge of not knowing who he was.

Is he saying that dark elves are better at basketball?

Everfrost Barbarians can't jump.  :why_so_serious:

Not if they were born into middle class families. Then they're stuck with mushroom farming or excavation or whatever back-breaking workaday trade their mother is in.

I have fond memories of abermuds and the future of games seemed so bright. Why am I so unsatisfied now when there is so much more of everything and its so much more advanced?

Flying car syndrome.

Because the price of polish was limitations on choice. These beasts can't get funded without lowering the common denominator enough to attract millions. MUDs were for hundreds or thousands.

I don't think Bartle is wrong. But I also think people continually undercut the luminaries. There might be empirically better ideas out there. But the ones people pay for are WoW expansions and f2p powerups.

If you want to be awarded innovation awards, design the better experience.
If you want to be paid, design for the market as it exists.

Very few get to do both. Like handful-out-of-billions few.

He is actually responding in Massively Comments to a post about this article.  I can't see how anyone that has any power of opinion could possibly post in Massively Comments Section.

Here's the article. http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/10/30/richard-bartle-frustrated-with-modern-mmo-development/ (http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/10/30/richard-bartle-frustrated-with-modern-mmo-development/)

I haven't yet read his comments but if he wants to discuss it with other people, why not at massively?

Those who can't, teach. That's really all there is to say about Bartle.

We need small-scale MMO creation tools that aren't total ass. We need ZZT/Megazeux w/ online multiplayer. We need 'build your own MMO in MineCraft' kits. We need innovative ideas to not be hard-gated by the presence of programming/art teams.

People are already building their own worlds in Minecraft, with modpacks. See Feed the Beast or Technic for examples.

Every year this comes up. Every year the answer is the same.

We already have all the tools needed. We've had them since Penultimate shipped with Ultima III. You want big budget, pretty, and all that? Comes with business rules around getting the resources. Want SurvivalCraft or like Xanthippe mentioned: Feed the Beast? All the tools to do that yourself are out there. And they're free. Just takes willpower, time, talent, and a willing audience.

And I say "just takes" with all the weight that carries. Because it doesn't "just take". Game design is fucking hard. Game development is harder still. Game publishing, which includes getting anyone to give a shit about what you've spewed out, that's at least as hard and a completely different discipline. Doesn't matter what you build if nobody knows about it. Doesn't matter if people know about it if what they know is crap.

This has and will always be the case until we live in a post-scarcity future where we command a Holodeck terminal with "computer, give me an immersive virtual world set in the far future, make it fun for everyone, tell everyone aout it, and make sure I'm always in charge."   :oh_i_see:

Don't know that he has any power of opinion. Kinda hasn't in awhile. He's definitely smart, but we're past the point where companies are trying to figure this out from scratch. They think they already know, which gives them the comfort to spend money. This also lets them have the sort of special insulated snowflake culture of people who are "shocked and amazed" their ignorant vision didn't gel with what players wanted and were willing to pay for.

Some people have built MMOs in Minecraft, yes -- just like some people have built MMOs in Unity, etc.  That doesn't mean it's easy or supported. A lot of the supporting mods in question are proprietary to those MMOs, not open to an amateur with an idea to start placing things down and seeing what he can make. And when Minecraft gets updated, since it *still* doesn't have a mod API, they'll probably break unless a dedicated team is fixing the mods when that happens.


As a result, the MMOs I've played that are built with Minecraft mainly just look and play like shitty clones of every other DIKU.


I used to build worlds with ZZT/MZX all the time as a kid -- a kit with that sort of game design flexibility combined with a pre-built networking/small-scale-MMO layer would be massively simpler than using, say, MineCraft to build.

Forgive my ignorance, but when has Bartle ever been relevant?

Inventing the Killer-Achiever-Socializer-Explorer classification?

He wrote that a long long time ago (relatively), but it was only over a decade latter, during peak "MMORPG" as a business goal that the terms started to become commonplace in conversations with ignorant business people with more money and access to Second Life press releases than sense. I still see it every so often in powerpoints from marketing types who don't understand it at all. But they're generally talking to a room of people who don't either, which itself is fine because it's just a smokescreen for their "exactly like Y but with this tweak" project which is going to get rejected anyway.

In the very early MUD days when he co-wrote MUD2.  After that not so much, but the 40-somethings running companies now who grew up on MUDs still revere him. Which explains why they keep making the same asinine mistakes on every game.

Quite the opposite -- most MMO mistakes I see tend to be made in direct contradiction to Bartle's archetypes rather than because of them. It's amazing how often MMOs neglect, say, Killers or Explorers and don't understand why the Achievers they spent all their time on then burn out and don't stick around.

At least the Socializers have Facebook...

They praise Bartle for his asinine "gameplay" mechanics, not his player profiles. Few people seem to pay attention to those when creating games. Instead they, stick to the class archtypes and HP pools, etc which were just ripoffs of miniatures games and D&D.

The player archetypes are completely invented and AFAIK have no rational basis.

There's no evidence that gamers can be broken into 4 classes and that those are the right 4. (I believe it's 4) Actual classification would rely on something like factor analysis.

but WHARRBARRTL

Nick Yee actually did do factor analysis, and some of the types were somewhat validated, others not.

I'm not sure it matters whether they all map cleanly to real populations of players or not anyway; taken as a whole they basically are just a framework for looking at the various ways that people can interact with your game. That has a certain amount of value.

I am familiar with that work. It's not great but it's certainly much better.

I don't really have a problem with a vaguely intuitive model. In Magic: TG they like to talk about the 3 (or 4) types of players - I think that can be useful even if it's not scientific or exactly accurate. But if your whole schtick is pushing a model you better have some rational basis for believing you model is accurate and not just "it sounds plausible."

It's called intuition backed by practical experience in an emerging field without a lot of strong theorycrafting -- works as far as it goes.

I might use this in a meeting one day, if someone challenges one of my designs.