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Buying your way to the top, againFebruary 21st, 2007 |
This new gaming site Cafe.com is taking more than a few pages from the Korean model. Its a casual games site with a “game console” — the games are all embedded within this console. This is a common sort of feature in Korean games — the Korean version of Albatross 18, aka Pangya, had a whole desktop, for example. (BTW, I find it amusing that it’s hard to tell the game is about golf from the Korean site anymore… is that a guy drawing a sword over on the right?)
But that’s not the only tip Cafe.com is taking. You play through the “console,” and the reason is that it offers 3d avatars you can use to chat with others. And of course, there’s microtransactions. You can spend money in order to get in-game advantages at multiplayer clones of Zuma, Pipe Dreams, Puzzle Fighter, and so on.
Yes, you read that right — in-game advantages.
It’ll be interesting to see how well this flies with the Western audience. My recent suggestion that
I am increasingly unsure that the very notions of “earning” “position” make a damn bit of sense in these games. It’s a psychological thing, I recognize, and thus unlikely to change, but the constant measuring of oneself against the other people participating seems increasingly foolish — it’s like comparing the number of times you’ve been down the waterslide at the water park. Why do we give a damn? Only because the game’s feedback tells us that we should.
met with reactions ranging from dismay to outright scorn. (The latter, of course, from my huge fans over at Fires of Heaven. 
I wanted to reply to the thread, but alas, they’ve never approved me for posting on their forums!).
The commonest points here all have to do with the notion that comparing oneself to others is a fundamental incentive technique, which is quite true. Jeff compares it to giving prizes, which is dead-on. But I’m most interested in the undercurrent here, which is the question of what game we’re giving the prizes for.
In the discussions at Jeff’s blog, for example, the debate quickly centered around raids. As Jeff put it,
In a game all about killing monsters, the valued prizes are ones that help kill monsters, and milestone demonstrations of the ability to kill monsters. A raid isn’t really a ride, but actually is a challenge: they actually are kind of hard, frequently result in failure, and it’s a big deal to win.
It doesn’t seem all that silly to get excited over a successful raid: those frequently do fail, in a game where improving your ability to raid is about all there is to do.
And over at FoH, there were a few posts that similarly emphasized raids, using the old phrase “the game really starts at…”
There’s no doubt that raids really are games of skill — the game is one of high-level team coordination. Everyone must execute perfectly, or the team wipes out. In some ways, it’s less like sports (which do rely on execution but don’t have quite the razor’s edge of success and failure — and have ever-fluctuating opponents), but than it is like certain sorts of exhibitions of coordination: team waterskiing, or circus performances, or group juggling, or musical theater. (I am sure that I will now get quotes calling me an idiot for comparing raiding to musicals. Oh well). Like most activities of this sort, preparation relies on endless amounts of woodshedding, of practice.
Under circumstances like these, RMT-purchased characters, or indeed RMT of any sort, absolutely encourages disdain. And it should; buying your way into the juggling match sure doesn’t mean you are going to be able to juggle at the level required. If you try, someone’s gonna get hit on the head with a flaming twirling bowling pin.
Early in his career, Eddie Van Halen turned his back to the audience whenever he played solos, supposedly because he was afraid rivals would steal his techniques. Had he insisted on doing this forever, very few people would have cared about his music. (We would probably assume “Eruption” was performed on a German synthesizer built from the spare parts off a fire engine.) People needed to see how his fingers worked. Only then could they understand that Eddie Van Halen was doing something they could not understand. His guitar was not a primitive machine that made it easier to meet girls and get free drinks; his guitar was a futuristic machine that was f***ing hard to f***ing operate. You can fake being cool, but you can’t fake being good.
That’s a quote from an article Chuck Klosterman wrote about the rise of guitar virtuoso videos on YouTube: the fact that suddenly, there’s a way to have extreme virtuosity, often of the cold, calculating, unmusical kind, on display and appreciated.
In guitar circles, and indeed in musical circles in general, we speak of musicality versus wankery — the latter being what countless teenage metalheads accomplish with sweeping, tapping, and a lot of hours spent in their bedrooms, whereas the former is often accomplished with the usual open chords strummed in the most basic of ways.
The point here being that we can give a badge for either sort of objective. Indeed, we can give badges and prizes for any objective the game offers. The choice lies in the hands of the designers. This echoes particularly in the case of the style of gameplay that FoH values most. Much of the discussion there centered on the issue of respect, and responses were all over the map.
Players understand the “earning” part – you respect someone a little more if they have incredibly nice gear, or are max level, etc (usually.).
…leveling has nothing, or extremely little to do with how skilled you are. There is no challenge in leveling your 3rd character to 60 (or 70) in WoW.
On a PvE server, with instanced content, I don’t give a shit if people pay for it or not.
On a PvP server with competition for spawns, artificial power boosts are complete bullshit.
The losers who actually respect people for in-game accomplishments? RESPECT? This is a fucking game.
I don’t think the word “respect” means what you think it means. Why the fuck would I respect someone who gets max level in (insert game here)? What the hell did this person do that I have to respect him? Spend time in a fucking videogame?
All I see here is a bunch of QQing from people who don’t have the time to play games anymore.
And so on. Part of the divide here is a disagreement about what the actual game is. For one it’s the actual levelling process:
Would I ever buy a character? Absolutely not – the end game is boring to me for the most part, its all about the adventuring on the way up.
For others, well, it’s not.
Granted they could have cut alot of 1-60 out, and just let you play for ~20 levels then you’re 60 playing with the big boys
Yeouch. The tail wags the dog: raiding, this extra appendage of an elder game, considered more important than the actual game. Or actual alleged game. Or alleged actual game. Whatever.
To bring it back to the guitar analogy, an FoH poster said,
… [a] timesink is comparable to practice. People need to ‘practice’ playing their class so they can contribute and be productive when they are with their friends, and especially when with strangers.
It’s like playing the guitar. You can’t pay someone to learn some hard song for you and then you go rock out and wow the crowd. You have to practice for hours a day and learn that song yourself.
Part of the reason why it tends to be teenage guys who woodshed endlessly is because they’re the ones that have the time; part of the reason why raiding gulds tend to have the sort of players in them is because they are the ones that have the time. There’s real work going into achieving that sort of coordination, and of course these sorts of players have a strongly negative reaction to someone who buys their way in. But this is just one sort of player, and not even a sort of player who will always object. If they have “paid their dues” with another character, for example, and still want to play the raiding game, then they often do want to skip ahead with their alt. After all, they went through boot camp once already. Nobody makes them relearn scales just because they decided to pick up a second guitar.
Which also raises the point that the “boot camp” we tend to offer, the process of levelling, is actually not really great training for raiding at all. The games are different — sort of like how swimming laps and water polo are both played in swim suits and involve swimming. The unique and interesting challenges in raiding are not things that you learn just from group play in groups of six.
We were as an industry to design practice and training for raiding, it’d probably look pretty different: we’d gradually mke the groups larger, up through to raid size. We’d tend to always put you in raid situations, not quests or open-area grinds. We’d present problems to you that involved higher degrees of coordination. We’d make the typical encounter be one that you can rerun over and over identically in order to hone techniques.
And most importantly, the badges we’d give would be for doing it well, not for just doing it at all. After all, we aim to reward execution in a challenge like this. We’d want to give elegance points, perfection points. Do the raid without losing a man. Without losing a hit point.
To bring the discussion full circle, the issue is what we choose to give rewards for.
In the case of something like Cafe.com, or Pangya, or other games where you can buy points that actually let you do better in a game than someone else, what we’re seeing is a completely different incentive structure. It’s not about doing well at Cafe.com’s individual games. Success in the games is the prize, not the challenge. The challenge is something that requires hardly any woodshedding at all: committing enough to pour money into the company’s pockets.
This challenge has the virtue of being accessible to anyone with some spare change. In exchange for their commitment, they get positive feedback: specifically, positive feedback that very concretely shows others “hey, if you commit in the same way, you too can spank noobs!”
As I said in the comments over at Jeff’s thread,
…the idea that your accomplishment is trivialized because you have the shiny medal for the raid, and so does someone else who bought it… it arises in part because we push these comparisons on the players. We could randomize the reward. We could reward for the first time you do any raid at all, or the tenth. We could reward not for completing the raid, but for just trying. We could reward for all sorts of things, but we choose to reward for the things that are most likely to drive envy, because that’s what the structure of these games is set up around.
Envy is indeed a powerful incentive. But it’s far from being the only thing that motivates people. Even in the standard level rat race, there are many other things that we could choose to provide badges and prizes for. And even if we do settle back on making players always compare themselves to the Joneses, surely there are better grounds for comparison than how many zero-risk challenges they have completed?
And on the flip side — part of the attraction of something like Guitar Hero is that you can have the feeling of having woodshedded without the pain. Even guitar players like it. Surely as designers, we can also come up with a way for non-FoH-caliber players to have the wonderful feeling that comes from a fantastically executed raid? Does Guitar Hero trivialize the accomplishments of Eddie van Halen? Not at all, to my mind.
In the meantime, the RMT debates are unlikely to go away; but I suspect that over time, as more diversity of games come about, we’ll see the whole issue start to fade into the background, so that these different player types can play in their own ways in their own places. And maybe by then FoH will let me post on their forums.
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The quality of some of them really indicates that no ‘real’ thought has gone into the development and only into the money. But luckily there are more constructive things out there: Raph Koster’s website is one of those. His latest post, the one about Buying your way to the Top, Again, is one of those that opens up your eyes to things you took for granted but actually are different to what you thought they meant. I’m not talking about the way people actually buy advantages in games, but for me the article showed me more that what we
[...] There’s a fairly long discussion of the site (and similar sites) over at Raph Koster’s blog: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/21…the-top-again/ __________________ [Web Developer and RPG Fanatic] AW Dot [...]