Innovation

[Raph]

Another lengthy screed.

http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=245

I figured the jaded folks ought to join in. ;) I was thinking of some of you when I wrote it!

[Shockeye]

I hope to have better RSS import/export stuff in place in the coming weeks, Raph.

[Fargull]

Raph,

"In the end, the reason this is then troubling is because it effectively caps the market. As fans of the medium, we may be choking it to death with our own fandom. Oh, we can’t see that right now, when WoW is on top of the world, but once upon a time flight sims were on top of the world too, and wargames were top sellers. Building only on what has come before leads to genre nichification because it excludes newer players from the genre, demanding higher and higher levels of skill and sophistication for mere entry."

I think one thing Blizzard does as a company is refine what has become stagnate (or nichification) and provide an easier and more accessable offering as a product.  I have quite a few friends that have not been able to make the leap into a mmog until WoW, mainly because the entry experience and ease of use was not there in the game.  WoW is much more accessable.

Fargull

[Arnold]

During this time, did poetry in fact lose its grip upon human life? Of course not. In the span of fifty years, it and its marching companions of jazz, orchestral music, and painting marched towards an audience of the elite. And yet, there are song lyrics galore being memorized by teenage girls in their bedrooms. There are raps being performed on street corners.

That's because poets are either too lazy, or lack the balls to become musicians.  I've had teachers try to show me the value of poetry, but I never have been able to see it.  It doesn't entertain me like a story, and it doesn't bring me joy, like a song.

Haiku is the one exception, because it is a game.  I can appreciate a good haiku, because I know the retraints the author has to work within, and tight they are, yet some incredibly humorous and wise things have been said through haiku form.


[edit]
OK, I should have finished the article before commenting.

The fact is that the disdain for “casual games” arises not out of the level of investment they require as their moniker implies; rather, we look down on them because they are simple in mechanics. We’re being elitist and saying that it’s not good music unless it has a complex time signature, not real art unless it makes an arch comment on society, not real poetry unless it reflecting sound poetry.

The longer games go on demanding player knowledge of every game prior in their genre, the more likely they are to end up where poetry did.

My haiku example fits right into the "player knowledge" part of the quote.  If I didn't know the rules of haiku, it would have seemed a cliche "Confucius say..." sort of thing to me.

[Nebu]

Games are failing by trying to be all things to all people.  This is what happens when business gets into bed with art (and yes, to some degree I believe that game creation and design IS art).  This creates a situation where the best designers will seek to work on projects given the best resources but will ultimately end up in frustration with the fact that they have to water down their ideals in order to appease business objectives. Now that the gaming industry has become such big business, all most game designers can hope for is that some niche product that they created will land them in the role of lead designer for some massive project.  With this newly found success they can generate enough momentum and credibility to get back to their niche roots. 

I just don't think it's possible to marry mass-market appeal with a high quality game.  You need the resources to make a high quality game, but you can't achieve high quality status while maintaining marketability.  I think that most designers are doomed to choosing between making quality nich games or massively successful marketing engines.  Most will allow their egos to choose the latter. 

[Arnold]

Sgt. Gabe

Evolution is fundamentally about hill-climbing. Adapting to conditions over time to improve one’s lot.

No, no, no.  I have a quote I drag out when people start talking about evolution, "Evolution is not a step-ladder".  It is not hill climbing.

Evolution is ultimately about surviving, or to be more specific, exisiting.  I'll let you in on a little secret, the meaning of life.  It's not to be happy, or better, or to have a big house, or whatever.  The secret "meaning of life" is, simply, to exist.

Reproduction, adaptation, evolution... they are all just means to an end.  Raph is right; people tend to connect evolution with progress.  It's mainly because we have the big brains to allow us to ponder our existance and to think of what makes our lives good or bad, happy or sad, etc.  But really, evolution is just a means to an end, and that end is the continuing existance for a set of molecules.

[Krakrok]

We haven't seen nothin' yet folks. Someone is going to luck along when the moons are aligned just right with some kind of 3D/MySpace/SecondLife/Mosaic system and become a top 10 site on the net -- only it will be a 3D virtual world instead of a 2D site.

[Arnold]

We haven't seen nothin' yet folks. Someone is going to luck along when the moons are aligned just right with some kind of 3D/MySpace/SecondLife/Mosaic system and become a top 10 site on the net -- only it will be a 3D virtual world instead of a 2D site.

You are so right.  I don't really see the appeal with myspace, but people 5 or more years younger than me do.  Even my little brother, who is 7 years younger, and not a computer guy, sort of does too.  He's not a myspace junkie, but friends told him about it, and he did use it to hook up with this girl in one of his classes.

What you are talking about is what The Sims Online should have been.  Someone is going to make a mint with a product like that.

[schild]

So, a 3D version of This.

I'm hoping Alter Life from NCSoft turns out to be like that. But then, that game sorta disappeared into the ether.

[Krakrok]

So, a 3D version of This.

Sort of. But more on the order of they distribute the 3D client (think Shockwave), the content creation tools (think Flash+Bryce3D+Spore Procedurals), and server software (think Apache) and you get to decide what you want to do with it. One instance of the server software gives you a Spore procedural planet of one inch macro zoom or some such and you get to do whatever you want with your planet. Then they prove the concept by building a 3D MySpace+YouTube+The-Movies+Geocities clone on top of it and give everyone their own free hosted procedural planet. For the win.

Multiverse.net wants to be this but it isn't.

[Swede]

Nicely written!

"..In his fascinating series of posts on game genres, DanC at Lost Garden describes the factors that lead to the death of a genre. He concludes that genres die when their template is defined, when the outline of the mechanics is established and a single “genre-king” game emerges that summarizes and defines the potential of the genre.."

- This could be said to be a good illustration how Shumpeter's creative destruction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction can transmake or transmute one "spent" genre into another more evolved one (as we have seen with the whole pnp -> mud -> uo -> eq -> wow -> ?), arriving at the same spot as you concluded.

"..We’re being elitist and saying that it’s not good music unless it has a complex time signature, not real art unless it makes an arch comment on society, not real poetry unless it reflecting sound poetry..."

- Are we being elitist, or are we being better at applying our increased knowledge of what actually is important in a product? I've had long discussions with my brother, who happens to do music for a living, if my assessment of music is less accurate than his. I know that economists have concluded that "expert" customers have a wider spectra of judgement (ie bad things gets lower mark than from new customers) as well as a more established cognitive functionality for appreciating things (kinda like a musician can distinguish a drum solo in a jazz song from the rest of the score, while someone who haven't experienced jazz have quite a problem distinguishing anything from the general sound picture).
  Maybe the fact that wow acts as an open gate for a new, unexperienced crowd, which in time will be just as jaded as the rest here  , will increase the total market so much that it no longer might be totally impossible to imagine that a developed nische game like "guitar hero online" will draw enuff ppl to warrant the money for its development.

[Kail]

Two things I can think of in reply:

One:  Comparing game design with evolution seems like a bit of a stretch.  With evolution, there's no real "goal," it's just a result of the way the world works.  With game design, there is a very clear goal (to make money, or to make fun games, depending on where you sit in the corporate structure).  It doesn't make sense to talk about evolution as progress, because evolution does not move towards some distant goal, but it DOES make sense to talk about game design as progress, in that games are making more money, and are becoming more fun (or even if they're not, they can at least be said to be making NO progress, wheras with evolution, it doesn't even make sense to measure it in terms of progress).  Thinking of the games today versus the games we had twenty years ago, it seems fairly clear that there is some kind of progress.  To keep the evolution analogy, you'd need to argue that games from twenty years ago were as good (twenty years ago) as games today are (today), which implies that people from 20 years ago would find our current games as much fun as we find 20-year old games (and while I enjoy the good old days as much as the next guy, I have to admit that I think I would have loved todays games back then, too).

Two:  Arts and poetry and so on have become increasingly impossible for the joe on the street to understand, and they've been pushed to the sidelines of pop culture because of it.  I agree about that.  But I don't agree that the same problem is befalling video games.  If anything, the more successful video games are often the ones which are MORE approachable, and there has been a resulting trend towards "dumbing down" games to reach a wider audience.  World of Warcraft you can just jump right in and play, as with a number of other Blizzard titles.  Eventually, you might get to the whole "LFM UBRS tank/DPS" level of jargon, but it's rare that the game (pr any game) is totally indecipherable to users in the same way that something like Sentinels of Fire is.  While there are probably some titles which have become unapproachably arcane in the last few years, I don't think it makes sense to say that all, or even most innovation takes this form.

[Venkman]

Stagnation is easy to achieve through constant emulaiton. However, MMORPGs are not just games. They're a relationship between gamer and game, to such a degree that two different MMORPGs do not need to necessarily compete for the same person (how many will jump from SL to WoW to Eve to GW?) Further, given the digital distribution intrinsic to the genre in the form of constant delivery of new content, and the rise of digital distribution/online ordering, retailers and their limited shelf spaces are no longer the arbiters of success. Finally, what critics think of MMORPGs is irrelevant outside of their core audience, itself separated between each game and each form of communication.

As such, it'd actually be pretty hard for this genre to stagnate. Forget WoW. Unless you're EA or Microsoft, you're not going to outspend Vivendi Universal. Scale your business to the target audience you want to deliver a game for and be as proportionally successful.

[HRose]

By contrast, today we make games in only a very few genres, and the thing preventing those others from finding shelf space is purely a matter of costs, not of viability as games.

I don't like the sound of it.

I don't want "innovation" as a completely different product. I want innovation in what I already like. But daring more to delve in the possibilities available.

I don't want games like Second Life. I want the *worlds* I currently love.

From that perspective I'm really not interested in that kind of "innovation".

[Margalis]

The longer games go on demanding player knowledge of every game prior in their genre, the more likely they are to end up where poetry did.

Is that what is actually happening though? Most games today feature much more tutorial information than past games, as well as online FAQs, forums, etc. WoW is popular at least in part because it *isn't* particularly arcane and difficult. For example the handy quest icons that appear over people's heads.

I agree with the basic idea, but I don't see that actually in MMORPGs.

There are a lot of genres where games make instrumental "improvements" by becoming more complex. Fighting games are a great example of this. What I would call traditional RTS games like Warcraft/Starcraft have done this as well, and are dying a slow death. But I don't see MMORPGs doing this.

It's also possible to bring new life to old genres. Look at tactics games on the GBA. There are tons of them, and people like them. I guess in part because they aren't about exploring some arcane corners of the design space but are made with broader appeal.

When SF2 came out it was really incredibly new and exciting. CE came out and let you choose the same characters and the bosses. HF came out and made the game a lot better, but it was just tweaks to the existing ruleset. Byt the time Super and ST roll out most casual people really can't tell the difference. You can tech throws in ST but not Super?? Wow color me excited.

Even as huge fans who appreciate such balance tweaks and revisions you begin to realize that the initial rush is gone and has been replaced with modest incremental improvements. And in the case of SF improvements that many people can barely notice.

The thing is, there were fighting games before SF2. It was not a new genre - it was just a radical jump in quality. It was light years ahead of previous efforts.

To me fantasy MMORPGs are in the same boat. They can be made better, but most games now get diminishing returns as far as actual improvement and the "oh wow" factor is gone. It's great that they are making kill-stealing harder or making loot distribution options fairer but those are again minor incremental improvements.

But, there is still plenty of room for a fantasy MMORPG to blow people away, just as SF2 did. Just as Mario 3 did. It just takes the right talent. True creative genius is the rarest of commodities.

[HRose]

But, there is still plenty of room for a fantasy MMORPG to blow people away, just as SF2 did. Just as Mario 3 did. It just takes the right talent. True creative genius is the rarest of commodities.

/clap

[Akkori]

I don't like the sound of it.

I don't want "innovation" as a completely different product. I want innovation in what I already like. But daring more to delve in the possibilities available.

I don't want games like Second Life. I want the *worlds* I currently love.

From that perspective I'm really not interested in that kind of "innovation".

I completely agree! Innovation is a foregone conclusion. But the problem is that some dev teams dont seem to want to apply that innovation to the core game they run. They want to put it in an expansion or to make a whole new fucking game out of it (NGE). There is no need to re-invent the wheel because you discovered a new kind of rubber. Just put the rubber on existing rims.

[Fargull]

Two:  Arts and poetry and so on have become increasingly impossible for the joe on the street to understand, and they've been pushed to the sidelines of pop culture because of it.  I agree about that.

I don't agree with this statement.  I can think of two examples that cross this bridge to "the common man" or whatever...

One is the scene from the Shawshank Redemption when Andy puts Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" on the speaker system.  The summation by Red in that.. "Those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away."  Second to that one would be the rise of Marshall Mathers, who is nothing if not a poet, maybe not one to my taste, but he does have talent.

[Venkman]

In my mind, it's the elitism of success. The critics more in their role as non-paid advertisement than does the enjoyment of the target audience. This is partly because the critics are easier to predict. They are the last people to change in an evolution, particularly in entertainment. All change comes first from innovators, then gains acceptance by the target audience, and then critics change their expectations to match the new delivery.

Designing for critics is designing for yesterday, refining what you already know, banking on a predictable success, the sort of thing business people like because it's quantifiable.

Innovation is anathema to that.

[Soln]

Can you have novelty but crappy stories (in a MMORPG)?  I think you disagree, that game innovation requires both unique feature change and novel story-telling development? 

[Nebu]

Can you have novelty but crappy stories (in a MMORPG)?  I think you disagree, that game innovation requires both unique feature change and novel story-telling development? 

I'd argue that less than 1/3 of players even bother with the story in an MMOG.  I'm willing to bet that an MMOG could be a huge success with little or no story elements to it at all.  Most people I've watched play MMOG's cycle through NPC text to get to the goodies.

Innovation comes in finding new ways to "hook" players for the long haul.  It's easy for games to hold a player's attention for a few days/weeks.  Finding a way to keep them paying month after month is where innovation will fluorish... at least with mmogs.

[Raph]

I hope to have better RSS import/export stuff in place in the coming weeks, Raph.

What exactly will that mean? Are going to start aggregating dev blogs or something?

[Raph]

So, while I agree that WoW is more accessible than most of the past games in the genre, I strongly challenge that it is "simpler." Anyone willing to do a feature count, a system by system comparison?

Just as an example, WoW introduced a highly complex concept that only MMO vets will appreciate (everyone else will think "duh, of course"): differing classes having different methods of doing specials to the point of having different stat bars. It's undeniably a complication in the overall system design. It may also make things more intuitive, but it's greater complexity overall.

Complexity in design and intuitiveness aren't necessarily opposed. The design of a modern GUI is FAR FAR more complex than a command line interface.

[Swede]

Well.... the interface might have become more complex - but that doesnt necessarily mean that it has become harder to play the game.


Just compare it to everquest, which I've had the most experience with. Compare how you were treated as a new player (no maps, attack a guard and get killed, lose your "newbie note" and be unable to grab quests from your guildmaster, get killed and lose experience, get killed and lose your corpse, no clear description of what spells do, hard mobs mixed with easier ones etc. etc) and I would argue that WoW will not only go easier on you, but also actively prevent you from screwing things (cant attack guards, easy way of finding corpses, ingame maps, detailed spell description, no exploss the first few lvls, easier design of zones, easier, more forgiving mobs , spellline upgrades highly linear)

I dunno if I would consider changing the color of mana to yellow instead of blue a highly complex concept btw..)

[Nyght]

I think the buzz word was 'abstraction' from a little bit back.

And Raph, don't you have minions or something you can send off to count things?

[Venkman]

I'd argue that less than 1/3 of players even bother with the story in an MMOG

And I'd agree. Even good stories are ignored, which is why it's probably hard to justify spending time and money on creating them.

However, I think this is causal: knowing the story is irrelevant to the experience, so therefore not worth learning to individuals most nterested in maximizing their game play. If the story matter, if decision trees existed and their choices mattered, and if the results of your story made you different from someone else in ways simple stats do not, then people would start caring.

Just as an example, WoW introduced a highly complex concept that only MMO vets will appreciate (everyone else will think "duh, of course"): differing classes having different methods of doing specials to the point of having different stat bars. It's undeniably a complication in the overall system design. It may also make things more intuitive, but it's greater complexity overall.

A Warrior's Rage Bar and Rogues' Action Points are very different from the mana-to-action ideas of old (incidentally, CoH also now has a rage-like bar buildup for Blasters: the more you're hit, the more it grows, the more accurate you are). However, I don't necessarily feel they innovate the experiences any more than giving that player something different to worry about in an otherwise-similar experience. They are, at best, baby-step forwards to what other gamers already enjoy. I consider CoH's combat system much more innovative because of the true breadth of playstyles across every way to play.

WoW is "more of the same" in terms of having a bunch of people doing their own thing in a group. They don't even have anything approaching FFXI's Renkai or EQ2's Heroic Opportunities, both innovations that truly capitalize on a bunch of people playing together, extensions of strategies and tactics players develop anyway. No housing, very little personalization, nothing that really capitalizes on it being "massive" at all.

It's a good successful system upon which to slap some creative thinking though. There have been examples of that, and I hope they channel their success to more of it.

[Soln]

However, I think this is causal: knowing the story is irrelevant to the experience, so therefore not worth learning to individuals most nterested in maximizing their game play. If the story matter, if decision trees existed and their choices mattered, and if the results of your story made you different from someone else in ways simple stats do not, then people would start caring.

Thanks for that, what I was getting at -- That innovation in anything feature-wise has to be coupled with novelty in the content as well.  Or at least in how the content relates to the player.  But maybe we're just so used to broken and meaningless storylines that having content that is actually meaningful to player advancement would be considered innovative.   

[Margalis]

Just as an example, WoW introduced a highly complex concept that only MMO vets will appreciate (everyone else will think "duh, of course"): differing classes having different methods of doing specials to the point of having different stat bars. It's undeniably a complication in the overall system design. It may also make things more intuitive, but it's greater complexity overall.

Bad example. The complexity only becomes apparent when you play a second class. For your first character there is zero added complexity. The fact that Warrior and Rogue work differently doesn't matter until you've played both. The initial understandability really isn't any different.

[Arnold]

I'd argue that less than 1/3 of players even bother with the story in an MMOG

And I'd agree. Even good stories are ignored, which is why it's probably hard to justify spending time and money on creating them.

However, I think this is causal: knowing the story is irrelevant to the experience, so therefore not worth learning to individuals most nterested in maximizing their game play. If the story matter, if decision trees existed and their choices mattered, and if the results of your story made you different from someone else in ways simple stats do not, then people would start caring.

Just as an example, WoW introduced a highly complex concept that only MMO vets will appreciate (everyone else will think "duh, of course"): differing classes having different methods of doing specials to the point of having different stat bars. It's undeniably a complication in the overall system design. It may also make things more intuitive, but it's greater complexity overall.

A Warrior's Rage Bar and Rogues' Action Points are very different from the mana-to-action ideas of old (incidentally, CoH also now has a rage-like bar buildup for Blasters: the more you're hit, the more it grows, the more accurate you are). However, I don't necessarily feel they innovate the experiences any more than giving that player something different to worry about in an otherwise-similar experience. They are, at best, baby-step forwards to what other gamers already enjoy. I consider CoH's combat system much more innovative because of the true breadth of playstyles across every way to play.

WoW is "more of the same" in terms of having a bunch of people doing their own thing in a group. They don't even have anything approaching FFXI's Renkai or EQ2's Heroic Opportunities, both innovations that truly capitalize on a bunch of people playing together, extensions of strategies and tactics players develop anyway. No housing, very little personalization, nothing that really capitalizes on it being "massive" at all.

It's a good successful system upon which to slap some creative thinking though. There have been examples of that, and I hope they channel their success to more of it.

Agreed.

I don't know if you guys remember this, but Turbine hired a guy with a masters degree in literature to write the backstory for the game.  A lot of that lore also carried into the first quests.

Most players didn't give a shit, but all that lore was there for the few explorer archetypes to find.  I'm not an explorer ype of guy, but to this day, I occasionally get the urge to replay AC1, from scratch, on a carebear server, just to experience all the love that went into making it.

I regret that they removed the original spell research system.  I'd also like to play through that.  I played on Darktide, and Splitpea was a necessity for competition.

[Righ]

Complexity in design and intuitiveness aren't necessarily opposed. The design of a modern GUI is FAR FAR more complex than a command line interface.

When referring to the most popular of both, perhaps. Emacs makes most modern GUIs look trivial, and object oriented GUIs make most command lines seem complex. Sometimes the GUI and command line complexity is there because of inherited baggage, just as in games design.

[Arnold]

Complexity in design and intuitiveness aren't necessarily opposed. The design of a modern GUI is FAR FAR more complex than a command line interface.

OK, I'm going to quote a quote here, because I don't want to track down the original.

I disagree with Raph; a modern GUI is FAR FAR more simple than a command-line interface.  The GUI user is limited by what he sees.  When I played Scott Adams, ans Infocom adventure games, I tried everything.  The command-line lets you attempt anything under the sun; the GUI lets you cliick a lot of places.

[Piperfan]

I have read several of these musings of Raph's and I found this one more approachable than others, to my simple mind. I can't pin down why I feel that way, but I do. Good read.

If the story matter, if decision trees existed and their choices mattered, and if the results of your story made you different from someone else in ways simple stats do not, then people would start caring.

I started to reply that in all likelyhood the min/max'ers would determine THE route through your decision tree and no more would be known of the storyline than now. But you used the phrase "made you different" and I like that. It does not necessarily mean a path to stat_advance_A or gizmo_B rather it can mean a choice of path to either lifestyle Story_Landed_Baron_A or Story_Sea_Pirate_B (or C, D, Et cetera). And that is interesting.

I occasionally get the urge to replay AC1, from scratch, on a carebear server, just to experience all the love that went into making it.

When he reads that, in the next couple days, I am sure he will appreciate the thought.

[Samwise]

Complexity in design and intuitiveness aren't necessarily opposed. The design of a modern GUI is FAR FAR more complex than a command line interface.

I disagree with Raph; a modern GUI is FAR FAR more simple than a command-line interface.  The GUI user is limited by what he sees.  When I played Scott Adams, ans Infocom adventure games, I tried everything.  The command-line lets you attempt anything under the sun; the GUI lets you cliick a lot of places.

GUIs are usually simpler to use (at least in the ideal world) but far more complex to design.  I think that's what Raph was getting at.  If so, he is correct.

[HRose]

Can you have novelty but crappy stories (in a MMORPG)?  I think you disagree, that game innovation requires both unique feature change and novel story-telling development? 

But we KNOW that. Those two parts need just to be better identified and then placed where they belong. Just that.

There's SO MUCH innovation in the old school RPGs like Ultima than what I see in the future. The point is about taking both, what we had in the past and we lost, and the open-ended structure of the games of the future.

I'd argue that less than 1/3 of players even bother with the story in an MMOG.

Because these stories suck?

And I'd agree. Even good stories are ignored, which is why it's probably hard to justify spending time and money on creating them.

And where you have seen exactly these stories. Because I'm more than ready to demolish this argument.

However, I think this is causal: knowing the story is irrelevant to the experience

Oh, and maybe it isn't because these stories are irrelevant the reason why they are ignored?

Which confirms the point: they suck.

I'm ready to say that out there there are MORE potential players interested in interesting narratives than players interested in level up mechanics. We don't have the evidence of this just because the market is filled of the latter and has none of the first.

If the story matter, if decision trees existed and their choices mattered, and if the results of your story made you different from someone else in ways simple stats do not, then people would start caring.

False.

I can read a book and "care" even if I have no control over what the characters of the book do.

[Margalis]

I hate the discussion of story in MMORPGs, but I'll address it a tiny bit. To me there are a bunch of problems with MMORPG stories:

1: They are loosely integrated into the game.

2: They are not compelling. They use stock names, stock ideas, etc. The evil orcs from Gul'Thok fought the elves from Everwillow. Yes...we know.

3: The story doesn't match the atmosphere of the game well at all.

Most of the times it seems some third rate "lore" writer just did his thing on the side and they stuck his crappy writing into various tomes and special items and that's the "story."

MMORPGs are also terrible about "show and don't tell" in this regard, which along with things like the uninspired ideas and naming make the stories incomprehensible. So and so is allied with what's his face fighting the evil troll betrayers or some shit - just point me in the right direction to kill rats already motherfuckers!

One thing almost all good stories have is a compelling set of characters, and most MMORPG plots don't have compelling characters or even really characters at all. At best they are names in a chat bubble. Without any memorable characters the stories fall apart.

A story is more than words in a chat bubble or text in some tome you find.