f13.net

Submitted by a Mr. Mahrin Skel. (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1127872820&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&)

I'm cheating, because he gave me drafts of the article to read over the last few days. :)

"If they are currently pursuing goals that are less attractive to them,
it's because they are on their way to a larger goal that is attractive
enough to make it worth it"

Isn't it likely that sometimes they are pursuing less attractive goals because there's nothing else to do, or they are completely blocked from
their more desirable goals? This is likely a path towards quitting, of course. :)

"If the player cannot make this transition of viewpoint, either because
of the presentation (text vs. graphical vs. 3D), or because of avatar
selection (attractive vs. unattractive, humanoid vs. vehicular), then
they won't stay."

I am unsure that this assertion is true. There's certainly a lot of MMO players who treat avatars as just pawns. The 3rd person games are
reportedly preferred by players who objectify (I have seen data showing that females prefer 1st person, for example).

"...and treat the other players as real."

This seems to be glossing over the issues of disinhibition and lack of empathy, the whole "it's just a game" thing.

"The system inherently assumes that an individual player has only one
primary approach to playing the game, and will engage in others only if
absolutely neccessary. This simply doesn't correspond with how players
actually behave, where they will shift strategies and goals from night
to night, or even several times in the same playing session, even when
the "primary" path is still open to them."

I'm not as comfortable as you are with this statement. It's directly analogous to your above statement about how players pursue goals, yet here you arrive at the opposite conclusion. Think of the playstyle as an end goal for enjoyment; the shifting between approaches may merely be coping tactics to reach the nirvana of always playing the way you like. The primary path may be open, but not optimal; for example, roleplayers leveling up obsessively rather than chatting in the tavern may be because they are including in their decisionmaking factors like whether they will suffer level separation from their roleplay partners.

Mind you, I am not saying that I agree with Richard's somewhat absolutist model, but I do think it permits more flexibility than what
you paint it as doing.

"it is difficult to understand how adding more communication functions
will cause non-socializers of any stripe to depart. "

Relative development time emphasis? After all, development time is a fixed resource. Should one lobbying group repeatedly fail to get their
concerns addressed, while another group does, then they may well exit.

That said, my reading of the original paper is that the feedback loops are explicitly laid out and are not all equivalent. Richard laid out a
few stable configurations, and a bunch of unstable ones. It wasn't as simple as just pushing one to primacy.

"The system equates motivations and means, assuming that those who spend
most of their time chatting are in the game to chat. This leads to
Warren Spector's charge of "Why not just make a better IRC client?""

While I agree with the main point you're making, to be fair we have to point out that in the HCDS paper, Richard specifically says that the
socializers need the gossip fodder of the killers and achievers in order to thrive.

"It failed to detect a motivation that is at least the stated prime
mover for most online game designers, as well as many players: The urge
to explore strictly for the sake of exploration, to know things about
the world and its systems unknown to others (possibly even including the
developers)."

Didn't some of his later stuff start to see the emergence of a possible Explorer motivation? I seem to recall Nick went back and did further
analysis and came up with something.

On MAISE itself:

An interesting thing about these is whether they are internal or external validation. Mastery is external--it relies on the
acknowledgement of other players. No other players, nobody to master. Achievement is internal--the metrics tell you you have done well, and reliance on others is an option. It is completely empirical. Immersion is internal, it's measured in self-satisfaction, and socialization
external, in that it again requires other players to exist at all.

And then there's exploration, which is again odd man out. I wonder if there are actually two sorts of explorer--the researcher and the
teacher?

This cuts back to the comments I made earlier [[in reading drafts, and thse comments were addressed in the version you read]] about these being manifestations of status seeking. The internal motivations are less so.

"most of our games are essentially only designed for Achievement
oriented gameplay, with all other motivations being only accidentally
served."

By serving those motivations with a quantification mechanism, we merely turn them into achievement paths anyway, as with the social professions in SWG. Mind you, the folks who were truly interested in that path liked having the quantification anyway (everyone likes getting positive feedback), but once the paths were "demeaned by the grinders" they lost interest.

There's something interesting there, that relates to how motivations work. The self-satisfaction of pursuing that goal was diminished because of others pursuing the goal and succeeding at it without having the same motive.

"Frequently it has been assumed that if there was an optimum path to
Achievement, all players would pursue that path exclusively and
independently of any other."

By this do you mean the "take shortest path to the cheese" and "players do what they are rewarded for" sorts of things? Because I still think those hold true even whilst I completely agree with your path metaphor.

Clearly not all players will pursue the optimal achievement path; but I think it's also very true that it exerts a powerful gravitational pull.
And we've also seen players who choose to step off of that particular path end up feeling inadequate and quitting unless they get sufficient validation from another source. Lots of players quit because they feel like they are getting outleveled, shown to be inexpert or inadequate, and so on.

Nice conclusion, don't know that I have anything to add there.

One thing that seems related is the tyranny of dependency. One of the big knocks against SWG from some quarters was the interdependency between players--not a close dependency, but a somewhat distant one. "I don't want to have to depend on other players to buy my goods, I just want to sell stuff and get rewarded." "I don't want to have to depend on others for my advancement, I just want the game to reward me." There seems to be a gap between the clear sense of these games as social groups, and the desire to live apart from the group.

Such a large chunk for me to digest with such a small brain.

I came away from Yee's work on player motivations (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php) with a similar feeling that there was a better set of facts than Bartle had produced, but a lack of the design framework that Bartle created.  I like the MAISE framework better, than what Yee got, but it still lacks the natural clarity of the interaction of player types that Bartle hard.  I thinnk that part of that clarity is due to the simplicity of Bartle's dichotomous axes, which probably explains at least part of the reason that expanding Bartle's framework is less than satisfactory.

So if we run with the MAISE framework, what can we say about the interaction of player types?  My training in earth and life sciences leads me to a preference for systems which incorporate diversity as being inherently more stable than less diverse systems; a cornfield requires great energy to maintain, weeds grow on their own just fine.  Therefore, my instinct is to design to maximize the player types my system serves, although that service need only be sufficent, not perfect or equal.  How then do we maximize service for each type, and where do the service of the different types come into conflict?

Multidimesional frameworks may produce more accurate descriptions of a complex system, but they are damn hard to vizualize without pretty pictures.  I guess the best way to employ the MAISE framework would be to take each motivation and posit it to be your preferred motivation, and then introduce support for other motivations except where that support conflicted with your preferred motivation.  Doing this for all five motivations shuld give you several examples of game designs, suitable for writing somewhere between 1 and 30 chapters of a book, which I won't be doing before I go to sleep tonight.

Nonetheless, I think that there is either a principle or process in there worth pursuing.  I think I shall sleep on it, and see what happens.


Edit: Oh good, Raph's said something while I was stuttering this out, so I can hide behind the beard until I have more of a clue...

A couple of quick thoughts on a couple of Raph's comments.

Style switching is something I often do explicitly and with intent.  Sometimes it is a matter of mood, sometimes it is a resource opportunity (eg, finding a really effective PvE leveling group and settling in for an extended pure achievement session), and sometimes I take pleasure from treating myself to contrasting mental frameworks (eg switching from intense action/achievement, ie PvE combat, to less intense immersion/socialization, ie chatting while quest running).

Adding social channels can, in and of itself be detrimental to those with lesser social interests.  If communication becomes too complex, with too many options, I find I tend to stop trying to master it, and ignore it for other aspects of the game, even though I like some degree of social interaction.

Ok, now I'm really going to bed.  Good night.

IMO, "Achievers" do NOT master the game; they master fighting stupid "AI" and memorize the best was to increase level.

Explorers MASTER the game world.

Killers MASTER combat.

Achievers run on a treadmill.

I have nothing to add to the article, really, because it seems pretty close to dead-on.  But I noticed this in Raph's reply and didn't feel right about it.

I prefer 3rd person, for example, but that's because it actually provides a higher level of immersion for me.  First person doesn't covey the sense of self awareness that we have in our daily lives, for both positioning ("How close am I to that ledge?") and appearance ("What shirt am I wearing?").  First person is terribly immersion breaking for me- less like I'm inside the character, more like I'm in a camera about 6 inches in front of the character.

I'm cheating too, I revised a few paragraphs after the last time you saw it.  On that one, I added "or habituation has made the earlier goals less attractive."  And they often don't have just a single motivation, making the alternative less incongruous than a strict classification would indicate.

People get bored with the grind, or with just chatting, or whatever, and want to try something different.
True enough, this needs more exploration.  But I still think that either "you" become your avatar, or you leave.
Cheated again: "Even the sociopathic behaviour associated with anonymity and “keyboard lycanthropy” draws it’s attraction from what the system allows “you” to do to “them”."

If the other avatars weren't real people, they wouldn't be any fun to jerk around.  Disinhibition may make people do things they'd never do in person, but not because the other people aren't "real".
So a larger goal (stay with the group) has pre-empted their efforts.  Where's the contradiction?
True enough, I do think that "community" is a dynamic equilibrium.  But I think it is *much* more complicated than Richard laid it out to be, and that the significant portion is that you have to avoid "vicious cycles", that seek an equilibrium of zero players.  Other than that, it will work itself out.  Otherwise, the motivational strategies will shift to achieve an equilibrium.  We have nearly as big a problem that our typical equilibrium is *too* stable, it discourages genuine immigrants.  In a game that's been around for a while, if you just pick it up and play, you're screwed, all the other people at your level are actually alt's getting powerlevels back up to a useful level, and they don't have time for a real newbie.
Do they?  Then how do we account for every online community that *isn't* strictly inside games?  MUD-Dev is a mud? Something causes the primary Socializers to choose *this* social environment, why can't it be that they themselves have secondary motivations to play?
If he did, I wish he had back-linked it to Facets.
If it's internal, why play an MMO at all?  You can get purely internal satisfaction in Diablo.  Sure, *some* players play Diablo as much as the typical MMOG player, but if more than a small percentage put in those hundreds to thousands of hours, Battle.net would have bankrupted Blizzard.  And Diablo is sort of a hybrid, how many play Final Fantasy (other than XI) that extensively?
Entirely possible.  I think that the motivations may be fractal, the closer you look at them, the more is going on.
Yeah, you imposed a Achievement metric over their goal system, and it didn't work.  But do you really *know* that was why they quit?  People rationalize their departures.
There may be an incompatibility of goal structures.  Bus I suspect it's something that could be finessed.
Lots of players *claim* to quit for those reasons.  But I never found any statistical evidence for it.  I find it easier to believe they were quitting, and rationalize the decision.
Player's main objection to dependancy is the idea that they be left high and dry, unable to find someone with the right abilities when they need them.  They screamed bloody murder over crafting in Camelot, but because a small number of crafters could service the needs of an entire realm, and the other player's need for their services was rarely pressing, it worked out fine.

--Dave

You're missing the point: Mastery is a separate motivation, one that nearly merges with Achievement in EQ-like games, but doesn't have to.

--Dave

I have a serious question about all this. (Bartle, Yee, etc.) What is the point?

Is something about these various systems supposed to help people actually make better games? It seems to me to be mostly an argument about terminologies and such. I mean, all this is fine, but what about very simple rules like:

If your players are going to spend 80% of their time on one thing, that thing should be fun.

Most games can't get this right, so I have low hopes they would do well trying to design around one sophisticated framework or another. It strikes me as a can't see the forest for the trees sort of thing.

Interesting writeup, Dave.

I'm suspicious of the "Achievement" category you defined.  Is there really a significant number of people  that play these games simply for the joy of watching numbers go up?  Usually I think that there's usually some other motivation involved; Mastery: bragging rights and proof of said mastery, Immersion: wider variety of options for appearances and activities, Socialization: keeping up with your friends, Exploration: seeing more of the world.  I agree that Achievement is important because it's what current games as the "sticky" part.  But, I'm not sure there's that many players out there really all that interested in paying a monthly fee just to see numbers increase, so I'm hesitant to say it's a motivation.

One problem with your framework is that it's also slightly game dependent.  Someone who is a Bartle Achiever shows similar behavior in multiple games.  A person interested in Mastery, however, might have to do vastly different things in different games; in EQ it's all about the high end raids, in Planetside it's about the pwning, etc.  I wonder how applicable these motivations are from one game to the next.  If they aren't transferable, then you run into the problem of applying this to new game designs.

The point is that we're trying to figure out what paying customers want.  As much as you might hate to admit it, current games have done something right in order to get people interested and keep them interested.  So now we, as developers, are trying to maximize the number of people willing to play (and pay for) our game.  If we can determine a motivation, we can craft the game to suit the audience better.  "Players of type A respond well to X but dislike Y, but type B likes Y but hates Z."  The ultimate goal is to understand player motivation so we can offer (parts of) games to them that will appeal to them.  So, we know to offer X, but keep the Y out of player type A's sight so s/he doesn't hate our game.

My thoughts,

Fired up ProgressQuest lately?  For at least a brief time, it gives the same numbers-oriented "thrill".
I think that's a strength, not a weakness, the fact that the same player, with the same basic motivations, will play a diferent game in a different way, is our road to escaping the gravitational pull of the WoW clones.  I don't think we can pull *different* players through these principles, I think we can erode the sand from beneath the diku-inspired foundations of the mainstream games.  Eventually, once the market isn't dominated by first or second time players.  In the meantime, we can start exploring the rest of the possibility space for niche games with a bit more of a roadmap.

Need to elaborate a bit more here: Your dancers and other non-combat "immersion" oriented players wanted to stand out, and you flooded them with Achiever tourist and opportunists.  Of course they felt gipped.

--Dave

This article and the ensuing discussion is why I am a fanboi.  I  :heart: F13. 

I guess my question would be, how do you go about applying this sort of stuff?

I would be more inclined to try a bottom up approach. (Aside: I am a software engineer, and the way I typically work when given a problem is I go prototype it 3 different ways, then write up the way I think was best as the spec. Then when someone signs off on it I say "ok, it's done already" only half kidding) Why not make a huge list of things good and bad in various MMOPRGs, and see if you can distill that into something? Look for common mistakes, groupings of different problems, notice which players tend to report different likes and dislikes, etc.

I find this sort of approach works very well for all sorts of stuff. Any creative endeavor really. And it has many benefits. You have conrete examples you can use to explain and illustrate with - it makes things memorable and understandable. And if nothing else, if you just avoid the mistakes on your list and try to do some of the good things you are off to a great start.

For example to refer to what I said earlier, my rule: If a player is going to spend 80% of their time doing 1 thing, that thing should be fun. That's really the end result of a lot of various complaints, mostly related to combat. Each MMORPG talks about how it will have better combat, with skill chains and hero wheels and multiple mobs and whatnot. All of that is really the same at the high level: make the primary activity fun.

You can collect all the complaints about things like auction houses, buying and selling, etc. What types of players tend to notice those sorts of things, and what else do they notice? A lot of doing anything well is just following rules of thumb, the more rules (and thumbs) the better.

By the logic that a solid theory must work in all cases I have a question about the fringe activities of new players.

Let’s imagine for the sake of simplicity that the paths exist within a three dimensional space, a building. The floors of the building represent progression within the game, levels and such, and the breadth of those floors are filled with possible interactions, including ones which will cause the player to reach the next floor. The paths that each player will take will represent their experience of the game and will be closely related to others of their type (because they seek the same… cheese) but will diverge by a factor of their diversion from the pure form of their type. Furthermore all players will seek out their ultimate outcome, for example achievers will seek the fastest route to the top floor while socializers may plateau each time they reach a level that allows them to.

For the sake of argument let’s say that this is my first game. For an undisclosed reason I have purchased the game and have entered the game, I stand in the lobby of the first floor. Now if I was an MMOG player I would begin my way up because I would know where I was going. You and I would be clear on what my motivation is and your system would be able to predict my path. However I have not played before. I don’t know where I am going or that I am supposed to be going somewhere. What motivations draw me into the first level? Each one after that?

Would adoption of your classifications (or any others) cause streamlining of games to a point where every player is of one of the five types because they are one of those types, or are they one type because the game designers have only considered how to make a game for The Five Types?

To make a point through hyperbole lets say I was a player who for the most part played fighting games.  when I enter the game I say, "there is no twitch", or, "I cant stand that no matter how good I am, catasses beat me every time!" I leave. My path is one which many others have traveled before, but our path never leads to satisfaction. Which type of player am I? Is it possible that I am a player whose path is straight out the door I just came in? If so does that player type count? It would be easy to envision a game where even one of your five types finds themselves leaving, sometimes from the first floor and sometimes with more drama from the 30th. Perhaps Exploration types find that the game is a completely known entity by the first month or so. With no great pull from the other motivations all the players who are mainly explorers leave. Is it too far a stretch to suppose that there are those who remain outside your study's demographics because they are eliminated by design which focuses exclusively on the known entities?

Have you defined all players, or have you simply categorized those who remain?

Edit: superfluous third nipple

Your path doesn't exist in the game. It's primarily a path of Mastery, with some Exploration thrown in, but when you try to walk that way you find that some asstard named Catass has locked the doors, and his superior, Ping Time, won't give you the key. The system as it exists is not a means for retroactively charting the path a player has taken, but for proactively labeling the various activities in-game. It is entirely possible to want to go in a direction where there is no trail.

--GF

So let's make system SAMITE.

Socialization, Achievement, Mastery, Immersion, Teaching, Exploration.

It could probably be better-acronymed, because the real pairs are:

Achievement/Mastery
Immersion/Socialization
Exploration/Teaching

(Or system AIR MiST, if you want to call game-Exploration Research.)

Power, Storytelling, and Knowledge motivate these three pairs. The left side of the slash relates directly to the game; the right side of the slash relates to the game community.

Note that just because they're paired doesn't mean that they're necessarily connected. Take a look at the speedrun community (http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/) for an example of mastery disconnected from achievement.

--GF

My response as well.  FPP is a porthole and IRL I rely heavily on my peripheral vision.  Hence why I blew money on a widescreen monitor and run my games with the perspective fully pulled back.  The only time I zoom in is combat in close quarters or I want to take a few seconds to admire graphic detail.

Depends on the definition of "fine".  It's what drove me out of the game into another service.  As well as the other merchanting and artisan players I knew at the time.

That's called cockblocking. EQ was very successful with this model.




Actually, I see the explorer as someone who can flip flop along internal and external validation easily. Some explorers just want to see new things to see them, the kind of immersion-based achiever who goes everywhere solo because he can, because he wants to see new things. Then there ist eh socialization-based explorer who explores in order to share his knowledge with others. Think Allakhazam, EQMaps and those sort of people. Of course, these kinds of explorers may also be doing it to enrich themselves in the metagame as well.

Explorers are strange birds.


I don't think that just the addition of measurement metrics turned things like SWG crafting into achievement paths. After all, WoW gives experience for finding zones you've never been to and CoH gives badges for exploring areas you've never been to. It's only when those metrics can be used to compare/compete with others in an achievement-based way, such as making better gear to sell to other players, only when there is a profit involved (or in Dave's terms, an increase in power) does it turn into an achievement path.

Or, if you are building a game based on conflict, introduce support ONLY where those conflicting motivations exist. Introduce ways for the diametrically-opposed motivations to succeed at their specialities instead of herding them into the other side's specialities. This is one way I actually support allowing "zerging" in PVP games. Zerg guilds that rely on numbers to win are going to have to succeed at their socialization skills, or else the zerg is just a chaotic mob. Herding those cats takes a certain type of skill. Meanwhile, the "mastery" types, the people who are achiever-oriented and want to be the best, the uber types who only want to do raids with 40 people, they will have to succeed by being better individual and group players.

It's an attempt to codify matters of taste.  I can write my own huge list of things good and bad, and you can write yours, but they're not going to be the same, because we have different motivations.  When we "notice which players tend to report different likes and dislikes," it's much simpler if we can group the players into a motivational framework.

I am a Bartle EKA, and this is more how I see myself. I don't mind being able to spout useless knowledge, but it is the feeling of wonderment and awe in seeing interesting parts of the game for the first time that I crave.

Interesting article, Dave. It has generated a lot of good discussion so far, and will likely continue (this is gonna be a LONG thread by the time it dies out). I will have to go back and read it again when I am fully awake before I comment any further- it  was a lot to get through in my semi-coherent 1st-hour-at-work state.

But you are doing the grouping first. That's the problem.

I am talking about observing and then drawing conclusions based on carefully noted observations. These attempts at frameworks are often very short on real details and examples. It's make the framework first, then try to pick out things that fit it. If you read stuff by Bartle, it's quite clear he is pretty out of touch with MMOGs in general.

I can think of an infinite number of frameworks that sound ok on paper. All these attempted frameworks are based on some actual observations, but that observations are not listed, noted, verified or compared to anything.

What about twitch gamers? Can I make a separate category for those people? It sounds reasonable. What about people who simply want to be the most skilled? There are entire genres of games based on that, and I don't see that represented here. (Mastery here is essentially leadership and power, and achievment is character advancement)

I play Street Fighter 2 because I like being good at a purely skill based game. So do I not fit into any of these categories? It would be easy to make a MMORPG that I *did* fit into. That's what Koboshi was getting at. What about people who like a game to be relaxing, like sailing around in Wind Waker? What about people who prefer a certain setting? There are literally hundreds of categories I can think of that make sense.

So I now have:
Mastery
Achievment
Twitch
Skill
Exploration
Teaching
etc.

Hell you can throw in graphics & animation whores. It still makes sense on paper. I will make a bold argument:

There is no way you can advocate one framework over millions of others unless your framework has backing data to support it.

In a way it seems obvious. For all we know, graphic whores and people who want pure skill-based games make up 99% of the gaming population and explorers one percent.

For this stuff to be meaningful you have to be able to say: Here are my observations, and here is how these observations led me to this framework, and here is how this framework validates against real-world scenarios.

If someone can come up with an acronym for their system that spells CATASS, I'll be tickled.

I'd argue with this.  Status seeking seems to be a motivation of it's own, rather than the end goal of every other motivation.  It's probably more closely associated with some motivations than with others (PK's get bored without people to fight, for example), but if you're setting it up as the end goal for every path, you're implying that EVERYONE who plays MMORPGs is doing so in order to get some sort of status, and I don't think there's much support for that.

If I'm roleplaying, for example, I don't care if other players look to me for entertainment (has there ever been anybody, in the history of MMORPGs, who's achieved significant status as a great roleplayer?).  If I'm exploring, I'm not really interested in players looking to me for tips and advice, I want to see neat and interesting things.  I also doubt that the big draw for most socializers is that they desire a reputation as a gossip-monger.  Likewise with achievement and mastery; other players can be nothing more than points of reference to me; whether they respect and admire me or not is their problem.

I have to second this. The only way for the premise to be true is if you stretch the definition of recognition to include simple acceptance. Yes, I do seek to find my place in the world, if I didn’t I wouldn’t require the multiplayer experience. But I don't require that anyone care who I am, only that they let me play in their reindeer games.

Well there was Mr. Bungle.

But then we'd have religious wars over which S stands for which term.

I think there is also an aspect here of new vs. established game: A new player to DAoC, EVE and other games focused on the end game will have a harder time at the lower levels because there simply are fewer "new" players, and all older players (in the form of guilds) will want to power-level you so you can join their ranks, exploration and gameplay be damned. I will be dropping out of EVE simply because there is no market for my low-end gear, and the game seems to move further and further towards a wargame between established guilds and pirate orgs.

This is one of the reasons WoW is successful, there is actually a lot to do for people who don't want to power-level. It is also the reason I play it, despite all the people addicted to it, you can play it casually as well, which means it covers more of the bases, no matter which system you measure by.

An under represented type of player seems to be the Builder (or Creation) type which appears to mostly be reserved for the MMOG developers at this point. All of the types listed (except for maybe killer) are locked into a consumer of content mindset. MUDs contained significant worldbuilding capabilities yet Builder seems to be lacking from Bartle's categorization but Explorer is represented?

I'd sight Neverwinter Nights and wikis or even legos as examples of the demand for a Builder type. I'd also sight Civilization as a Builder game.


And what effect do American social classes have on or define people's motivations for playing? Are middle class people more inclined to be achievers? Are upper class people more inclined to be socializers or killers? Do motivations mirror or invert real life motivations?

I noticed this misinterpretation as well. Dr. Bartle's full paper (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) asserts that an increase in Socializers has no effect on Achievers or Explorers and slightly increases Killers. Something that enhances the Socializer aspect of a MUD should not cause anyone to depart.

In general, I think misunderstandings of Dr. Bartle's work come from a lack of experience in MUDs where the full range of player options are available. Particularly those rare MUDs with a rough equilibrium of influence between the four player types. Current MMOGs do not have that same range of player options. Witness some recent blog/forum discussions about the apparent non-existance of the Explorer type. In a balanced MUD they're not at all hard to find and identify.

That said, it's a good article. Lots of food for thought. I'll be digesting it for a while to come. Thank you.

I was the one who pushed the status-seeking thing on Dave. People DO seem to seek status either covertly or overtly in virtually every human endeavor. Many of the common emotions we feel can be traced back to forms of primate jockeying for status. I have trouble believing that you haven't seen roleplayers gain status via roleplay. For one, it happens constantly just within the roleplay group. For another, there's examples going clear back to things like Kazola's tavern and to more recent stuff like Leroy-Jenkins-movie-making.

Collecting
Achieving
Trailblazing
Avoiding (reality)
Socializing
Storytelling

It's not perfect, but there you go.

There's people willing to pay for that?  Hell, I'm gonna go code my next game this weekend and rake in the cash!

Oh, wait, you mean ProgressQuest was a joke?  The only people "playing" the game are status-seekers bragging about how long they've left their computer running?  Oh.

I think it's also a weakness, Dave.  Is the person leading a squad in PlanetSide doing it because he likes organizing people (Socialization), because he's the glue keeping the squad of friends together (also Socialization), because he wants more commander experience (Achievement), because he wants to be known as a good player (Mastery), because he wants to believe he's fighting a war (Immersion)?  All of these have the same external appearance, so it's hard to really determine what's motivating these people.

I fear this could have the opposite effect you want.  Developers could get afraid of developing new content because it'll take a while to understand what motivates people to use the systems.  Better to stick with the tried-and-true that we know about.

Some food for thought.

ON DAoC, in... I believe it was Percival, in Hibernia, there was a little level 4 or so character who was a Lurikeen, and he claimed he was the mayor of the town he inhabited, called Mag Mell.  I believe he hung around for well over a year, never passing level 4.  Everyone knew him.  He was well known and respected, and he never actually fought anything.  I don't think he even left his town frequently.  But everyone on the server (even those in other realms) knew who he was.  Hell, I knew who he was and I didn't even play on the same server.  There is absolutely status to be had through roleplaying.

Yeah, but to jump from the statement "I've seen some roleplayers gain status" to the statement "all roleplayers ultimate goal is to achieve status" is going to require some serious evidence, which I'm not seeing.  That some roleplayers (or explorers or whatever) also seek status is fairly consistent with what I think the intent of the article is: sketching out a classification system in which the different categories overlap fairly easy.  Unless I'm misreading it, the point is that it's easy to be a roleplayer and a killer, or whatever, so a roleplayer/status seeker doesn't present a problem.  The problem I have is the claim that everyone, no matter how or why they play, is ultimately doing it for status above all other reasons.

For some people, yeah, social status is a big thing, but it's not unheard of for people to sacrifice social status for a higher personal goal.  Especially when we're dealing with video games; a few of us grew up during a time when being a gamer was kind of a knock to your status (it was a nerd thing).  I didn't start playing games because they were going to make me popular, and I don't continue to play them in the belief that this will change.  Maybe people's attitudes today are different, I dunno, but if social status was my ultimate goal, I sure as hell wouldn't be screwing around with World of Warcraft for ten hours every day.

When I eat dinner, it's because I'm hungry, not because I want any kind of special "dinner eater" social status.  I can choose which restaurant to go to, or what to eat, based on status ("I can't go to McDonalds, or people will think I'm a peasant!"), but that doesn't mean that my ultimate goal in eating dinner was to attain status.  With games, for me, it's the same way.  Sometimes, yeah, I may want to make a certain impression... but sometimes, I just don't care.  What the theory presented in the article says is that people are always in one of five (or so) categories, and that the ultimate goal of each of these is status.  That means that no matter what I'm doing, no matter if I'm roleplaying or exploring or what, I'm A) always in one of those categories, and therefore B) always seeking status.  That doesn't correspond with my experiences.

What I'm saying is that the answer may very well be "Yes".  Yes, he's doing it for the socialization, and for the achievement, and the mastery, and the immersion.  Gameplay structures that can serve multiple motivations without stepping on each other are good.

--Dave

To answer a recurring theme here:  It is not only possible, but *certain*, that there are other, equally valid ways of categorizing and dividing up the motivations.  And many of them would probably be useful.  It is likely that there are motivating factors I didn't even include in those 5.

But these are not "types", I am trying to do away with the notion that there are distinct types, and gameplay aimed at one "type" is wasted for the others.  Different people will have a different mix of motivations, and just because one motivation may rarely be the strongest does not mean that it is not common.

Observation does trump handwaving.  These are the apparent motivations that seem to account for the largest possible amount of the player behaviour I have observed in a coherent way.  I'm not an anthropologist, I'm not going to keep thousands of journal entries documenting my observations.

The key point I am making is that thinking in terms of "pathways of satisfaction" for motivations seems a stronger scheme for game design than strictly focusing on the categorization of players by the means they employ while playing. 

What is missing here is a way of testing for the commonality and strengths of these motivations.  If a motivation is rare and weak, trying to serve it in gameplay may be a waste of effort, if it is common and strong, then it should be considered.  How to do this except by observation?  There, it would help if I had sociological/psychological training. 

--Dave

But, what if it's not a simple "yes"?  What if this player loves Achievement absolutely hates Socialization and thus the concept of "forced grouping" required for him to see his Commander experience value go up?

I think this is the problem with most of the "motivation" systems; it's hard to really tell what someone's motivation is by observation.  You really have to get in there and ask people, and even then you might have unreliable responses.  The nice thing about Bartle's four types is that it judges based on observed behaviors, which is what Dr. Bartle had to work with during his many years of working on text MUDs.  For example, is someone killing something repeatedly?  Probably an Achiever.  Possibly an Explorer collecting data to test a theory.  Or, maybe a botter, which is a lazy Achiever.  I'm not saying Bartle's four types are the final word on it, but there's a reason why it's endured for all these years as the example we fall back on.

So, let's talk brass tacks about your system, Dave. How is your system of organization going to help us build better games?  To keep this grounded in the more practical side of things, let's talk about this in terms of a non-mainstream game.  PlanetSide is a good example, because it's the least like an EQ/WoW clone of the relatively well-known games out there.

Show me how one could apply your MAISE framework to improve the game.

I think roleplayers seek ATTENTION, and that status is a part of that. Let's face it, if you are roleplaying and no one is around to hear you speak, who the hell are you playing with? Yourself? Without an audience, roleplaying is just self-satisfying wanking. Of course, with others, most MMOG roleplaying is self-satisfying wanking, it just happens to be a social circle jerk instead of a solitary one.


But the thing is, there IS social status to be gained in WoW, even if it isn't the larger society. It's that community aspect that all MMOG's have, even WoW. I don't believe that gaining status is the ONLY goal of any player, but it can certainly motivate players to strive for things they might not have done if it was just a single-player game. Maybe it's a motivation modifier?

The gist of the article and the motivations is to say: Figure out the things you want to motivate the people you want to play your game, and build for that, instead of just guessing what your players want or hoping they'll want what you give them. You know, that whole "know your target audience" thing that is assumed in every other industry.

But what are the motivational differences between griefers and guild leaders?

I didn't realize there were any differences. /rimshot

Love the brass tack.

Got a question from it, that might answer your question Psychochild.  Could you add various checks to collect data and have the game itself adapt to the player's individual style?  Such that  as player 1 spends maybe a week in game and those checks show up to primarily push them towards focusing on explorer would populate quests based on that primary focus.

Does that make sense?

I had a simlar though to this.  I DO think it's valuable to keep these motivating forces in mind when designing game systems inbedded in the overall gamespace.  But, it's still seems the greater challenge is in the implementation of said good ideas.

There seems to be such a large amount of inertia in the development of these large online games that once a system has actually been coded and can be used by people to see if it's good, it's actually to late to change much about it.  THAT area I think needs far more attention than even player motivation.  How can you best translate was sounds good on paper into good code?

I mean it seems like using this method you would better understand WHAT you want to accomplish, but not HOW to get there.

Xilren

The problem is that code does a shitty job of determining intent.  I mentioned this above: it's hard to observe motivation unless you get in there and ask questions; even then, you're not guaranteed to get a good answer.  Using my PlanetSide example above, what if we assume that all squad leaders are Achievement-driven and want more Commander experience?  Then we might alienate other types of people that might be in that same position for other reasons, such as the socializer that was the driving force behind creating the group with little interest in commander experience.  Trying to determine what a player is like from a motivation point of view is really hard.  It's easier to determine grouping under Bartle's system, but then you have all the other problems Dave talks about in his article: people who defy categorization, etc.

Yeah, the implementation is still the hardest part.  Of course, people like Dave and myself always want to push the boundaries; we're looking at how you can break away from the draw of doing an EQ/WoW clone and still make a good game.  This is a very hard task on multiple levels.  I think Dave's on the right path, though, because the first step is to find out what the customers will pay for.  Trying to determine motivations is an important first step.  I'm attacking the system to make Dave either shore up the problems or abandon it as infeasible, perhaps even helping him out as necessary. ;)

Have fun,

Oh... hey.... no... Hell no... STOP! You just jumped from hypothesis to application in one step. I still have seen no reason to even accept the premise that any classification of player types is useful. Even if you knew that these were the definitive motivations of players, what would you do with that information other than hone the classic MMORPG dung pile to a potent fecal extract? The main complaint about the MMOG market is that too many of the games are virtual clones of each other, now you want to advocate the further reduction of diversity by "fixing" non-mainstream games. Please stop thinking this way!

Why are you even putting forth these hypotheses at all? Do you have any reason to think that you have figured out the classification, besides the fact that this sort of clicks for you. I have tried to say this with subtlety in my last posts, but I guess you need a more bat-to-the-head wording, I don’t fit your model. That’s not to say I don’t have any of the traits you mention in some form or another, but my main motivator is missing. Or to put it another way my main motivation leads me to leave your games.

But perhaps I am being a sore loser. I do see what you are classifying. You are classifying the final forms of an evolutionary progression. Let’s say that players represented separate creatures with different evolutionary adaptations, where each adaptation is a motivation to play. These creatures enter your world. Many soon die; they have no adaptations to this world. Soon after, other forms die, some hunted to extinctions by the super predators. Others are wiped out by significant events, like the evolution of pack hunting in other species, or significant environmental changes. What remain are those creatures with the most diversity of the successful adaptations, and/or those with the strongest of the successful adaptations. Those are the ones whose five motivations you have seen most often. It seems you are happy to ignore those who have fallen by the wayside. The problem is that these final forms don’t multiply. Sure they make multiple characters, but they don’t bring new players to the game. If you want to increase your subs you need to understand, not why those who are most likely to play stay, but why those who are most likely to leave play.

You had to pick the one major game that I've never played, didn't you?  I'll have to think about your question for a while, which I can't do right now because I'm in Indiana at the Ludium.  Just letting everyone know I'm not running away from the question, just busy.

--Dave

Zergs are fine in PvP games, as long as skill counts for something.  It's a beautiful thing to see 20 people who suck, and run around in 20 person mobs because they have to (despite having the same character skills), get rolled by 5 people.

IMO, that makes you a "Killer".  Not all killers are random PKs.  A killer "achieves" by becoming better at fighting in the game.  Achievers become better by making a counter increase.

About the status seeking, I think that there's people who doesn't seek any status whatsoever. A good friend of mine who currently plays wow is a very good example of this. He has goals, but they're all trivial to 99% of the players. For example he grinded for A LOT of lvls for the dragon whelp pet, and I'm convinced it wasn't to show of in front of other players, but because he thought it was a cool useless pet. He's also totaly into fishing, which is a totaly useless skill in WoW, granting pretty much nothing. He lvls very slowly and always seems to have side projects with no "real" gain. I would classify him as an achiever, but he doesn't care for character growth, so he doesn't quite fit your description. I would also guess he fits somewhat into the Immersion cathegory, I've heard him being somewhat intrested in role playing, but he's never tried it.

Anyway, consider fishing for a moment in WoW, there's pretty much no "status" to be gained from fishing, atleast there wasn't when I played. Still it's a fairly popular activity in WoW.

The first step to enlightenment is admitting your ignorance.  Yes, Koboshi, there may be more motivations we should look at, things that haven't been on our radar.  I'm not proposing a closed framework, where everything we need to know about players can be boiled down to 6 paragraphs of Holy Writ.  Any other motivation that would tend to vary in meaningful differentiation of distribution in the population to other identified motivatons is a potentially useful tool.  In other words, MAISE is as much a declaration of what I *don't* know as of what I do.  Knowing what I don't know, I will know the novel when I see it, or so goes the theory.

--Dave

I'd toss in the general point that, along with better project management, a clear notation of game design seems to me to be a vital element absent from the gaming industry.  Currently we are designing in the dark, which is one thing that will vastly increase doing things because we have always done things that way.

Defining player motivations is one aspect of a rational  method of MMO design.

I am not sure I agree.  I think if you take your collection to low, then yes it will, but statistically over a sample you should get trending, not for behavior, but for repeated action.  If the character spends 80% of the time in PvP, but running quests for collection that do not involve the character being required to PvP the game should be able to track against and open quests for that character that involve PvP and collection.

I am not pointing to figuring out motivators, but using data from the game to determine (at least in some respects) what the end user thinks is FUN in the game.  If the game is not aiming for FUN, then it will not work.

Of course it's useful. It's all about trying to find out WHY people play these games the way they play them, and how to refine whatever gameplay you create to please those audiences better for longer.



Individuals don't fit demographics, because demographics are not about individuals. They are about observing the trends of large groups of people. While they will NEVER fit every person that falls within the demographic, they WILL do a decent job of getting many of the people within that demographic to follow a pattern, whether that pattern be buying a particular product, or playing a particular game. Understanding your audience demograhpics, the things that motivate them, is what can allow you to move that person to a particular action. The more focused your picture of that aggregate person is, the better a job you can do of making that person act on something. But that doesn't mean it will hit every individual, nor should it.

By the same token, it's also nice to see someone who can actually get those 20 grabasstastic monkeys with inferior individual skills to roll the 5 people with superior individual skills. It takes a good bit of patience and organizational skill to move those 20 monkeys into a position where they even have a chance to win. It's just a different type of skill than the 5-man gank group uses, because the 5-man relies more on the individuals acting perfectly in unison. If you can balance the 20-man vs. 5-man group to be up for grabs as opposed to a foregone conclusion, you've gone a long way towards making a decent skill-based game.

Wow, you managed to drag Psychochild out of hiding, I'm impressed.

I don't have a lot to add here, but I do want to say thanks for being the first person I've seen try to define my particular primary play style: Immersion.

I'm the guy who likes to play the lousy templates. I fought with a shepherd's crook in UO, because it fit my character. I played 35 levels in AC1 without lifemagic. Hell, I played a Hunter in WoW, going full beastmaster before the patch and not using Broken Tooth!!1!

To me, the immersion player is the type who tries to play MMOs the same way we play single person RPGs. Crafting my own character and trying to be unique is how I make my game about me. I don't want to be a cookie cutter "best" template copy of everyone else. I know I'll never stand out in one of these games through Achievement or Socialization. I don't think anyone has managed to really stand out in a game in Exploration  - at least not since the advent of Stratics/Thottbot/Allakazham type sites. Standing out as a Killer just doesn't appeal to me. So - I try to immerse myself in what the game offers and make myself unique in my own right.

Want a game to appeal to me? Give me choice. Give me a whole metric shitton of choice. Character customization, class customization, gear customization... And let me choose how much and with how many people I want to play.

Raph, I'm glad to see you admit that putting an objective and reward system in to the social skills in SWG basically drove away the type of players those skills were designed for. That's a good example of where these types of studies on player wants and behaviour can be applied to making a better game.

Mine as well.  One of the reasons I like the virtual world sandbox - my imagination and I get along just fine.

You make it sound like in MMORPGs there is a difference between those two. Becoming better at the fighting is irrelevant when you have exactly zero percent chance of beating someone double your level.

It would be like in SF2 allowing people to grind against CPU opponents to increase their health and damage. Sure, I might have more skill, but they have 100x my health and 100x my damage - no thanks, I'll go play a different game.



That was extremely obvious to everyone at the time. They kept trying to make things like Image Designers more "useful" and the players kept complaining. The boards were full of complaints. You don't ned a study to determine that sort of thing - you can use common sense or barring that react to a sea of complaints.

Hey, that's not my fault! ;)  I'm a bit surprised you haven't checked it out, though, given how much you posted in the past about being a Tribes fanatic.  I've been playing it a bit lately, and it's interesting in that it tries something else besides RPG.  Now, admittedly, I suck at FPSes, but it's still pretty fun.

Yeah, I figured.  Make sure to blog how that goes.  I had too many other things to do to even consider going to that.

To be fair, I haven't been hiding (http://blog.psychochild.org/); although, when I posted about my blog previously I got a bit of grief about it.  I just don't have as much time to sit and chat with you all as I have in the past.  Dave posted a link to this discussion from his own blog, so I came here to discuss his ideas.  He obviously spent some time working on this, so I want to help him work things out through discussion.

Have fun,

I just don't have enough time in the day to check everyone's blogs out there. After reading that post on the Katrina Magic cards the other day I realized I hadn't even looked at Lum's blog in about a year.

Oh well, nice to see you around.

I'm totally in agreeance; it's the best of both worlds.  People who aren't so good or are new to the game can zerg up and will actually go out and fight because it gives them confidence.  People who are good, want to work on their skills, or just plain have fun (zerging tends to not be so fun for vets) can jump in their small groups and still compete.

That's why I have a problem with games that don't allow much room for skill and where level amounts to everything.  In those games, the biggest group, with the highest level guys is going to win.  Of course, in ANY situation, a well coordinated group of 20 guys, like you mentioned, is probably going to roll anything.

I hear ya.  For my first character in UO, I refused to use archery, because it wasn't part of the character concept, and this was when bows were king.  I also refused to use mules, because I wanted to support the "world" approach and support crafters.  I also refused to use 3rd party programs.  It wasn't because I didn't know about these things; I had studied the game A LOT before I played it and I chose to play a certain way.  I was even participating in PvP with that character.

Later on I loosened up though.  I had been there and done that, the natural way.  Good vendors were drying up as more people got money and skill gain got easier, and I finally needed mules to support my PvPing.  I finally broke down and bought UOA, but it became legal a week later.

That's me as well.  I played UO for 3 years and my main never learned any magic.  I got around by walking and moon gate.  I like to try things that interest me and if they happen to not be the "perfect" template then I'm fine with that. 

Perhaps I should see about pulling in RSS feeds from various people's blogs.

This is going to sound like I'm being facetious, but I'm not.

Did you consider starting with base motivations (say: fear, lust, sloth, hunger, vanity, competition, social interaction, curiousity, altruism, and humor) and building archtypical motivations from there?

Some can be discarded as not being appropriate for consideration, for example hunger (although I guess /pizza says that even this shouldn't be discarded out of hand).  Combinations of the base drivers form some of your MAISE elements (e.g., vanity + social interaction = achiever, vanity + competition = mastery), but because you have enumerated the base elements that you wish to focus on, you can use them to think about modes that players may enjoy operating in that haven't been tapped yet (fear and humour seem largely untapped in MMOs, although I guess you could say that death penalties try to evoke fear).

I'm not sure if I'm going anywhere with this (if anywhere), but it seems like it would be easier to define the Mastery/Achiever-level motivations (which seem similar on the surface) as composites of baser motivations.  Also, I liked how "curiousity" can be used to help explain the motivation for the Explorer, while "Teacher" is likely a more complex combination of vanity + curiosity + social interaction + altruism.

Humor is pretty well tapped as well, though only at fairly juvenile levels - planning your city so that it looks like a giant wang when seen from the air, for example.  Or that WoW exploit where it was possible to turn your pet into a time bomb and then set it off in the auction house.  (I laughed my ass off at the video of that one.)

Oh, there's plenty of humor in WoW, like the Stormwind beggar with a Popeye reference ("I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today") or the Kharaons gnomes with the device to cure the poisoned gnomes of Gnomeregan - but which turns them into chickens.

But it all disappears into the powerleveling treadmill.

Oh, there's definitely humor in most games, but not in the way Typhon was talking about - he was talking about humor as a motivator, i.e. making you want to do something because the result will amuse you.  Having funny dialogue in a quest description, or having an unexpectedly funny side-effect when you complete a quest, doesn't count because humor wasn't the motivating factor - you got the funny thing whether you were looking for it or not, but the main motivator in finishing that quest was the quest reward or the XP.

On the other hand, pure random griefing usually has no motivation whatsoever other than (slightly twisted) comedic value, which makes it a prime example of humor-motivated gameplay.

Samwise is correct, I was thinking about humor as a primary motivation within a game.

I considered giving the Leisure Suit Larry games, where humor is very definitely a big part of the game, as an example, but that still isn't what I was getting at as players aren't choosing a path that maximizes their laughs, but rather there are laughs with every choice.  So even in those games, where it is very prominate, it isn't a prime motivation from a game mechanic perspective (although the audience that chooses to play that game probably chose it largely for the humor).  I am probably splitting hairs here.

But after thinking about it, I think the motivations should be considered by game devs whether they are prime motivators, or secondary.  WoW does have alot of humor, and it doesn't make the game suck.  The more recent trend of horror movies having funny moments, then slamming you with teh scary arguably makes the scary moments "brighter" (for want of a better word).

EDIT: ok, I'm not happy with the paragraph above. Of course game dev's consider secondary motivations.  What I am trying to say is that I think game dev's should consider trying to figure out how important secondary motivations are to players.  Reviews, word of mouths, and fond rememberances seem to indicate that a game that satisfies secondary motivations are "richer" games.  "Richer" games seem to sell better... and this seems to be a part of Blizzards formula - the first Warcraft (and every other Warcraft) included multiple saying upon "touching" a character multiple times.  This added real cost to the game (as opposed to an easter egg, which probably isn't specifically planned out), but ended up adding real value to the game.

Just as an aside, PlayOn has done some studies lately on Social Network Mapping in WoW. (http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2005/10/mapping_social.html)  They have some nifty diagrams.  It would be interesting if they could somehow map their studies of player motivation onto this data, which, alas, they can't, given the way their data is collected.