GDC07 - Raphing It Up #2

[Slayerik]

If you are looking at the mass market of "gamers" then I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the number of Sports (real life... baseball, football, basketball etc.) gamers of a certain age-group vs the number of computer gamers.  I would guess that there is a huge cross over, and that is why games like Madden still sell every year.  But the point is that there are a LOT of people in this country who play or enjoy watching others play any number of sports.  We are a competitive group.

The thing that I see missing from so many games today is that issue of Competition.  Yes I would love to be the hero in a story where I make decisions that alter entire universes... but I would be satisfied with so much less until someone manages to come up with a way to let me and my closest 1,000,000 friends be That hero in the same "world".  I am almost completely a MMO player these days mostly because I enjoy competing in some way against other humans even when playing computer games... but so few of them offer meaningful ways to compete.  Arenas and Battlegrounds on WoW are, admittedly, designed for just this thing... and I probably could have stuck around to play them if not for the pre-requisite 200 hour+ progression through dungeons in order to get the gear I need to actually Compete and not just play "cannon-fodder".  But, what about things like Poker in an inn where 5 guys sit down at a table(most games now let you do that... but it leads nowhere except to a stupid graphic of your character in the "sit" position) and one offers to start a group.  INstead of a Combat group UI you have a Texas Hold'em UI pop up.  8 guys are standing around outside an inn... one guy grabs a ball out of his pack, another drops a set of cones on the ground... and a pick up game of whatever-ball starts.  Things like items/money/whatever could be agreed upon beforehand, or you could just play for bragging rights.

Competition does not have to mean, "2 men enter, 1 man leaves" in a combat arena.  Nor should it just be "Wooohooo we got to the 15th tier boss on the 11th dungeon before YOU did!"

I guess this is one area where I see the free, web-based games excelling... as they are really just mini-games.  The old-school RPGs had those (I am thinking of FF2, Might and Magic, etc) and I wonder why they have not crossed over more to the MMO market.

Good post. I feel the same way about competition, otherwise I'd just play some lame single player game :)