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Author Topic: Feature: A MAISE of Twisty Little Passages  (Read 24184 times)
MahrinSkel
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When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was bullshit!


Reply #35 on: September 28, 2005, 08:57:23 PM

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.
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

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MahrinSkel
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When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was bullshit!


Reply #36 on: September 28, 2005, 09:16:00 PM

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
« Last Edit: September 28, 2005, 09:17:38 PM by MahrinSkel »

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Reply #37 on: September 29, 2005, 02:03:06 AM

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.
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.

Brian 'Psychochild' Green
Former Developer, Meridian 59  http://www.meridian59.com/
Blog: http://psychochild.org/
HaemishM
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Reply #38 on: September 29, 2005, 08:29:51 AM

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.

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.

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.

Quote
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.

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.

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Reply #39 on: September 29, 2005, 09:54:21 AM

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

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Reply #40 on: September 29, 2005, 10:01:45 AM

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

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Reply #41 on: September 29, 2005, 11:00:56 AM

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.

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?

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Reply #42 on: September 29, 2005, 11:03:06 AM

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.

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

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

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Reply #43 on: September 29, 2005, 07:40:54 PM

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?
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.

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

Brian 'Psychochild' Green
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Blog: http://psychochild.org/
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Reply #44 on: September 29, 2005, 08:27:55 PM

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.
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.

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MahrinSkel
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Reply #45 on: September 29, 2005, 10:45:40 PM

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.

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Arnold
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Reply #46 on: September 30, 2005, 01:45:31 AM

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.

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.

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.
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Reply #47 on: September 30, 2005, 01:51:07 AM

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.

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.
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Reply #48 on: September 30, 2005, 05:09:01 AM

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.

MahrinSkel
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Reply #49 on: September 30, 2005, 05:36:13 AM

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.
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.

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Reply #50 on: September 30, 2005, 06:40:10 AM

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.

"It was a difficult party" - an unexpected word combination from ex-Merry Prankster and author Robert Stone.
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Reply #51 on: September 30, 2005, 07:01:37 AM

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.

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.

"I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit." John Steinbeck
HaemishM
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Reply #52 on: September 30, 2005, 07:19:34 AM

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.

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.


Quote
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.

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.

HaemishM
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Reply #53 on: September 30, 2005, 07:24:36 AM

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Reply #54 on: September 30, 2005, 10:55:16 AM

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.

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Pococurante
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Reply #55 on: September 30, 2005, 01:13:53 PM

(...) define my particular primary play style: Immersion.

Mine as well.  One of the reasons I like the virtual world sandbox - my imagination and I get along just fine.
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Reply #56 on: September 30, 2005, 01:25:57 PM

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.

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.


Quote
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.

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.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2005, 01:29:05 PM by Margalis »

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Reply #57 on: September 30, 2005, 04:29:46 PM

You had to pick the one major game that I've never played, didn't you?
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.

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

Wow, you managed to drag Psychochild out of hiding, I'm impressed.
To be fair, I haven't been hiding; 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,

Brian 'Psychochild' Green
Former Developer, Meridian 59  http://www.meridian59.com/
Blog: http://psychochild.org/
Bunk
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Reply #58 on: September 30, 2005, 04:45:32 PM

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.

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Arnold
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Reply #59 on: October 01, 2005, 01:06:22 AM

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
Arnold
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Reply #60 on: October 01, 2005, 01:12:05 AM

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!

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.
Arnold
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Reply #61 on: October 01, 2005, 01:14:51 AM

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.

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.
Quote

That's probably because most of my experience comes from UO and AC1.  I'm also rated a KSA (the achiever in me is quite a bit lower than the other to).  I "achieve" just enough to remain competetive, and I let the explorers figure the ins and outs of the game for me.
Tmon
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Reply #62 on: October 01, 2005, 10:07:51 AM

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!

...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...


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. 
Shockeye
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Reply #63 on: October 01, 2005, 10:43:20 AM

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.

Perhaps I should see about pulling in RSS feeds from various people's blogs.
Typhon
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Reply #64 on: October 10, 2005, 04:40:12 PM

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.
Samwise
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Reply #65 on: October 10, 2005, 04:50:07 PM

(fear and humour seem largely untapped in MMOs, although I guess you could say that death penalties try to evoke fear).

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.)

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
AOFanboi
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Reply #66 on: October 11, 2005, 09:19:21 AM

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.

Current: Mario Kart DS, Nintendogs
Samwise
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Reply #67 on: October 11, 2005, 10:57:15 AM

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.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Typhon
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Reply #68 on: October 11, 2005, 03:53:39 PM

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.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2005, 04:01:41 PM by Typhon »
Evangolis
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Reply #69 on: October 13, 2005, 02:55:22 PM

Just as an aside, PlayOn has done some studies lately on Social Network Mapping in WoW.  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.

"It was a difficult party" - an unexpected word combination from ex-Merry Prankster and author Robert Stone.
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