That was my “narrow” list… and be damned if I am going to try and explain general again Oh well… weak post by me

It may be that the newer games are losing this phenomenon; that might be why I have trouble meeting anyone in them!

Up to 50% of the time you spend in an MMO today is likely chatting.

You’d be surprised how many people play World of Warcraft without doing any chatting. And there are MMORPG that are played on consoles, and which don’t even require a keyboard. In FFXI you could do some basic communication with menu commands, with no actual typing required.

Please note that while I started the “Is WoW the last general game” thread, the reply with the short feature list is not from me. I would define “general” as being a game that at least tries to be everything to everybody, while some of the newer games have certain playstyles already excluded in their mission statement.

[...] What’s in a name? Apparently everything you need to know. So far the main argument against any debate on the purpose of the game is based solely on the name, astroWARS. Now if this was truly the case then we include the first half of the name as well, you know the “astro” bit. This gives us a game about Space Combat… so why do have planets, buildings, pop, alliances, NAPs, etc. after all these are elements of “farmers” or “diplomats”. We should just have a game that gives us an empire (holistic and not based off individual planets), a battle fleet, and of course a system to attack one another. But this game isn’t just “astro” – “wars”, it has many additional features, some of them emergent features which weren’t originally designed, but the players required. Raph Koster of SOE fame, recently ranted about what players thought MMOs were all about. What prompted it was that someone thought that a general game was “crafting, combat, dungeons, levelling, and loot.” Combat was the most important one, with the others supporting it. Now this isn’t really the case. There are more than that to an MMO, except that players generally only see the things that are fun, and not the things that might be needed. This where the designers and players figure out how the game should evolve, using each others views to cancel out the conflicting blind spots. Richard Bartle (co-father of MUD) wrote an amazing piece on the categorization of players within a MMO. It divided players into Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and [Killers]. Each of the categories could place on a graph like so: [...]

[...] [...]

[...] Blake on Feelin’ groovy (a rant) [...]

And yet, many of the people in WoW are driven by the goal of exploring Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Ahn Qiraj. They’re very happy to get the loot, especially as that means they get to explore how their character scales with better ability scores. However, the repetition required to advance through the content often results in players leaving prematurely when they are less concerned with flaunting.

I understand where Darniaq was coming from with respect to the ‘getting versus being’ and I think that he has a valid point, certainly with respect to some of the systems in persistant games that offer non-combat activity. While we may be social creatures, and interested in playing massively multiplayer games, we dont always play those games in simple social ways. Virtual worlds are not simply places where one must be social to be useful – the persistant nature of them makes them desirable to people who dont want to be social at a particular given time. You come home from a rough day of meetings in the office, interact with a few thousand irate people on the commute, and log into a virtual world, only to discover that to be productive outside combat you must interact with other people.

Sometimes, even persistant worlds need to be social downtime, still requiring that the gameplay be fun, the reward seem valuable, the time sink be parcelled into small and accessible chunks and yet not revolve around solo combat. To date, nobody has done this well, and so the games fail to persist as well as they could.

I’m not in the mood to busk with my sax down at the starport for tips or shoot bunny rabbits for hides. Since I can’t be productive laying down some bass lines for my next album here, I guess I’ll leave the Universe and load up something else.

For me, the fact that originally in SWG, as one example, you were forced to sit and watch a dancer to ‘heal’ you in a sense wasn’t fun. Sure some people might enjoy dancing, and others enjoy watching them, but to ‘have’ to do it so you can then whack the next mole (if that’s your thing) is what made a lot of people angry. Forcing downtime/time sinks is a very bad practice.

I guess forcing interaction, in a predefined set of ways, is just as bad as not having interaction. Again I always go back to online gaming is just that, a game, not a reality/emotional simulator. You play them, and pay monthly to do so in these games, to enjoy yourself. There shouldn’t be one way to enjoy yourself, the dev-way in effect.

Have the social interactions, of various types, but don’t force a person to have to spend X amount of their time doing that just because you (dev team in this case) think they should. Reward those that enjoy the social interactions, and participate in some way, but don’t penalize those that just want to whack the next shiny mole because they don’t want to spend an hour in a virtual bar watching a spinning character in order to go on with their desired playstyle.

Balance is the key, and fun should always be the main thrust.

I would guess the mainstream TV audience has slotted their lifes into allowing groovy feelings to surface according to scheduled activities. Once you go to that groovy mood you start being naughty and neglect your duties, you watch TV and that is allowed.

Western culture has little room for people who dont support their society financially or practically. The people who are free enough from this standard culture to allow themselfs to feel groovy through non-standard channels are missfits, junkies or wierdos.

Expecting the quality of game design to be the source of breaking the “normal life” pattern is amitious. Its a slow process and its ongoing.