Raph's Keynote Address for the GDC.

[schild]

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.
…

 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.

Discuss.

[Krakrok]

Auto summarized in 100 words.

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.

[/size]

Nice. Thoughts...

Cheating is a meta-game, true.

The same theme of gamers as butterflies that he has mentioned before. Figure out the pattern and move on.

Games that tackle problems of mankind. Where is the realistic physics build your own sim space elevator game?

Two books this brought to mind were Xenocide by Orson Scott Card (the genius asian girl tracing patterns like crack) and A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (the slaves who are "focused").

And lastly, static game worlds have to go. The dynamic nature of Second Life is where virtual worlds need to move towards if they ever want respect.


It has taken, what, 11 years to get the general public to semi-accept the 2d web browser as a valid medium? Will it be another 10 years before 3D virtual space is semi-accepted by the general public as a valid medium?

[schild]

I don't like the fact that the autosummary is startlingly accurate.

[stray]

I'm not familiar with anything Raph has said in the past, so I'm just wondering: 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)? And if not, what exactly was his theory before?

How similar would a Raph Koster game made today would be to one made yesterday (of course, I'm not expecting anyone to answer this but Raph himself)?

[Tige]

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

You don't have to be.  One glimpse at his overly verbose musings, book or speeches is all you need.  Talk about patterns....

Games are patterns.  Games are educational.  Games are patterns.  Games teach.  Games are patterns.  Games teach patterns. Games are patterns.  Who do I give my travel expense receipts to.

[Murgos]

Formalizing a set of ideas tends to take a bit of repitition.  The generally accepted method is to state something, see who disagrees and why, incorperate those ideas and restate the original thesis with the new understanding.

In the end though if Raph keep up with it we should have a solid basis of the beginnings of understanding maybe some of the things that make 'fun' fun and if were lucky maybe even a few answers to questions that people haven't even thought to ask yet.

I agree with a lot of what Raph said there but I am going to have to think over some of it.

Also, I wan't to see that auto-summarization algorithm, that thing was surprisingly accurate.

[shiznitz]

Does Raph think Chevron makes cars?

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

[Paelos]

Yes, games are patterns. Yes, games are not fun when the difficulty level gets too hard or easy. Yes, by definition no game will remain in the middle of challenging forever.

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. As much as we hate it, the Sims was a good example of this. Mass market appeal. Opening the floodgates, etc. etc.

[Alkiera]

I'm pretty sure that the 'auto summary' was just the first sentence of each paragraph...  Which is why I wasn't surprised it made a good summary, good formal writing style indicates that each paragraph start with a 'topic sentence', which introduces the topic to be covered in that paragraph.  This is how myself, among many, many others, blow thru the verbal/reading comprehension sections of standardized tests so fast.  You just read the first sentences, reading the whole thing is a waste of time in a testing situation.

Shiz, no, but he knows Chevron made big bucks off a set of cartoon cars with faces that talked about how great Chevron gas was in commercials... heck, you could even buy plastic models of the cartoon cars to hang from your mirror if you wanted.

Thanks for posting this, schild, it was nice to read.

Alkiera

[MaceVanHoffen]

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.

[waylander]

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.

Personally I think that games that are huge time sinks to get anything done are losing loyal customers simply because we don't have enough time to play them.  Each tasks has gotten to the point to where it requires 45 minutes of ass wrangling to get a group, 30 minutes to run there, 2 minutes to get killed, and then repeat.  Leveling by questing (INTERESTING QUESTS) is much more fun than mob bashing, but there needs to be group + solo leveling tracks.

Put the fun in gaming, and take the job out of it.  Until you do that, you'll keep losing people who hit 25+, have kids, and get a real job.

[Evangolis]

I see this a a consistant development of Raph's thinking on games.  Agree or not, I think it is a fairly unique take on things, made to seem familiar by Raph's omnipresence and verbosity, ratrher than by triviality.

Does Raph make good games?  Argueable.  What would the MMO space look like without Ultima Online?  I can't concieve of it.  It is not just that UO was first, since it really wasn't, or that UO was fantastically successful, since it really wasn't, it is that UO tried so many things.  It failed at many, but it tried.  That isn't what you'd say about a lot of successful, even likeable products.  Friends was good, it was fun, it was enjoyable, but I don't think it will change western culture.  News footage of police dogs attacking demonstrators in Montgomery was none of the former, but did the latter.

Nerd factor?  The Sims began as an architecture simulator.  It was so odd and nerdy an idea that nobody wanted to work on it.  Mass market appeal came later, because following a really wierd game idea, based on a book about architecture, led to a game people could write thier own dreams on.  As Will Wright has pointed out, the things that most people think thier Sims are doing aren't really happening.  People are imposing their own patterns on cleverly designed white noise.  The game reflects the player more than the designer.  That is its mass appeal; a mirror that looks like a painting.

Yeah, I can clearly see the path that Raph has taken to get here.  As has been severally pointed out, it's a path subtle as an eight lane freeway.  The question is, where is he going?  Nowhere, somewhere, into folly, into wisdom?  I don't know where, and I'm willing to wait and see.  What he has said so far was blindingly obvious, once he said it, but nothing that I noticed before then.  Doubtless others see things ahead more clearly than I.

[Daeven]

Games are quite clearly mathmatical state models, which provide varous Functions for us to fiddle with. The more interesting the Function, the more the Pattern Matching engine (our brain) likes it. It's nice to see that Raph is reading up on his Game Theory and Neuropsychology. It's to bad he hasn't really figured out how to translate that into games with Emergent Functions to stretch appeal.

[HaemishM]

I've read that already... in A Theory of Fun. I liked it then, less so when I'm being told it's a new speech.

[Krakrok]

It was a "new" speech to me since I didn't read A Theory of Fun.

---

I used the Copernic Summarizer for that summary but Microsoft Office has a summarizer built in to it as well. They are a little more advanced than just giving you the first sentence. In a nutshell they index all the words per sentence, count them, and weight whichever words are used most. It probably gives a weight to the location of the sentence too.


Or there is a web summarizer demo here which spits out this summary:

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.

[/size]

[Mesozoic]

...and what happens when you run the summarizer on a summary? 

Perhaps:

Games:

PATTERN BORING DIE

[Samwise]

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)?

Lemme quote from something Raph said about three days ago on this very forum:

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.

Supposedly Raph's going to be doing a talk later at GDC where he discusses putting this theory into practice.  I'm very eager to read that one.

FWIW, I read Theory of Fun and I still liked the keynote - it was a very nice summary of the book.     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.

[Alkiera]

FWIW, I read Theory of Fun and I still liked the keynote - it was a very nice summary of the book.     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.

Agreed, especially if he's going to do a talk later which developed from A Theory of Fun.  This way they all know where he's coming from when he starts the new thing.

Alkiera

[HaemishM]

I thought this WAS the talk that was derived from ATOF. Hence, my disappointment.

[Samwise]

Stay on target, Red Leader.... stay on target...

[Evangolis]

It seems to me that Raph has been chasing this particular rabbit since at least the Keynote he gave at the first AGC.  I've seen it change a fair bit over that time, and I expect it to change more as it goes forward, but you can see the consistancies in his thinking as well.  I suppose it would be more interesting if he had a higher rate of epiphany, but I can wait.  It's not as if there is nobody else having ideas that I can think about.

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.

[SirBruce]

First, I was at the keynote.  I have also read his book, and saw the one at AGC before that inspired the whole thing.

Raph actually stood up at the beginning of the keynote and said, those who had seen the AGC talk but not the book, would see a few things new in this talk.  But that those who had read the book probably would not.  He was mostly correct, although he did make some interesting examples during this keynote that he hadn't used before.

The talk was much more enjoyable with the slides to go along with them.

Raph's real "follow-up" to the book is tomorrow, where he tries to identify those "atomic units" of fun that we find inside games, and which can be formalized for use in game design.  That's really the one I'm looking forward to.

Bruce

[Samwise]

Yay!  The "atomic unit of gameplay" was the term that confused me most when I was reading the book.  I'm glad it wasn't just because I'm dense.

[Roac]

A lot of what he said is right on, particularly about pattern matching.  The thought is far from new, but far as I know it hasn't been championed in the gaming sphere until him.  He goes on to grand stand a bit, with gaming saving the world and all.  Whatever, write that off.

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.  Keep in mind too that PvP need not always be "walk up and kill you" - any competition could be dropped into that category, only that few types of competition are fleshed out as well as combat.  Yet here he is, going on about how other players are the most interesting thing about pattern matching, and how playing against other players makes neat (fun) patterns.

Well, not always.  Letting a high school team play against the Jets might be a game, it might be techncially fair, but it's no fun for either side.  Raph hits on the reason though - difficulty.  It's impossibly hard on one side, and impossibly easy on the other, meaning the pattern is uninteresting.  On a related note - the goal of most sports franchises has been to make it where "any team can beat any team".  A game can be fun when one side is better than the other, but not when one side will knowingly crush the soul out of the other.

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

[Alkiera]

Roac...

We won't see decent 'even' PvP until 'advancement' is no longer 95% of the game.  Even in UO during the most macro-friendly times, it took what, a week to max a character?  In every game to date, a starting character has a HUGE system disadvantage to someone who has been playing for a couple weeks, even if only an hour or two a night.  Characters are only consistently even in strength at the high end, whether you use levels or 'skill points', like UO/SWG.  A newb with 50% Sword and 50% Some Other Skill, and minimal starting str/dex/int is going to be wailed on by someone with 75-80% in those skills, probably pretty quickly.  Just the same, a lvl 1 has no hope of winning against a level 3 or 4 character in the level systems, nevermind one of the teens or 20's.

The only room for 'advancement' as a mechanic in PvP games are to increase non-character-power related things(NPC influence, titles, prestige, etc) and maybe slight increases in character power.  Otherwise, advancement causes newbs to be instantly completely inferior.  With a setup like this, you could even afford to do permadeath.  Sure, you're no longer good friends with Baron Soandso, but you can make a new character and be approximately as powerful(in combat) as you were before, assuming you take the same skills.

That's my plan, anyway.

Alkiera

[HaemishM]

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.

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.

[El Gallo]

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. 

Would that be the design decision to make UO bonedood heaven?  Or the design decision to steadfastly refuse to add anything resembling a PvP switch to UO?  Or the design decision to make just about every inch of iconic Star Wars content in a game called Star Wars Galaxies available only to PvP players?  Koster has been arguably the most PvP-friendly major player in the business for a long time.  Though I hear WoW will have battlefields sometime before 2008.

[HaemishM]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

Exactly what was the vision? Full-blown conflict? Holding cities? I'm guessing it wasn't TEF's.

[HaemishM]

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.

[MaceVanHoffen]

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

This is one of the points that makes Raph's arguments utter crap.  Sure, games are patterns.  But a good many, and possibly most, players prefer an easy, repetitive pattern.  And those same players will always attempt to find the easy subpattern embedded in any hard pattern.  Once discovered, the easy subpattern will be exercised into the ground.  Catasses are what the kids call those kind of players these days.

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.

Another example would be high-end uber mobs.  Again, the pattern is uninteresting, but for a different reason: the mobs do not change their tactics.  A foozle will spawn and have exactly the same abilities as the last time it spawned.  Players will kill these uber mobs over and over again for reasons that have nothing to do with patterns:  uber loot.  These players will carry pagers, screw over RL and in-game friends, and stare at their monitors until they are sterile not because they love hard patterns but because they want to exercise an easy, repetitive pattern to get some record in a database that validates their digital genitalia.

Raph's track record shows that he designs games with patterns that look good on paper, but devolve into easy repetition in implementation.  This is a problem for the whole industry, admittedly.  I just think it is going to take someone smarter and more innovative than Mr. Obvious to make real progress.

[Ironwood]

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.

If you're seriously asking for info on the PvP aspect of SWG as it was being designed, the man to talk to is Triforcer.  He had daily battles with Raph on the SWG development boards about the whole GCW aspect of the game.  Frankly, I think they both had extremely good ideas about where to go with it.

It's just they didn't actually implement, er, any of them...

On Paper, SWG looked like it was going to be brilliant.

[Evangolis]

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.

Yeah, I quite agree, which is why I tend to think of WoW as 'innovative' even though it seems to be pretty much an EverQuest clone, one which cleverly includes quests as a viable playstyle.  Execution is an innovation in the field, although DAoC did it sooner, but not better.  Eventually, if execution becomes more of a standard, innovation will become a competitive advantage, rather than just causing games to be more broken than usual.

On Raph's speech, it would appear that not everyone has become impatient yet: Alice Speaks

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

[MaceVanHoffen]

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

I don't think anyone on this thread has done that.  Not all PvPers are the same, and I myself enjoy PvP when it's more than a gankfest.  But I still assert that the majority of PvP'ers do fit a certain mode, and in MMOG's to date PvP has tended to follow a certain pattern because of that fact.  Nonconsensual PvP tends to bring out the inner smacktard in a lot of people, even those who claim to be "good" PvP'ers.  I rather like Haemish's quote (paraphrased): "We can't have nice things."

[HaemishM]

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.