Raph's Website » Do players know what they want?

Do players know what they want?

July 2nd, 2008 (Visited 2050 times) Tags: game design, game grammar, game industry, muds, richard bartle

There has been a lot of criticism towards the game industry, accusing them of being unoriginal. Sequels, sequels, everywhere. Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, GTA 4, Halo 3, The Sims 3, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, not to mention the annual versions of various sports games. Why can’t game companies be more original? Because game companies are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, making the games that players want, and the players don’t want original games.

— Tobold’s MMORPG Blog: Follow the money

If I say to you, “do you want chocolate ice cream?” you probably say yes. If I say to you “do you want more chocolate ice cream, this time with sprinkles on top?” you probably still say yes.

If I say “by the way, there’s also this mango sorbetto,” you may or may not try it. But you aren’t going to ask for mango sorbetto without prior knowledge of its existence.

Players know what they want from what they know. And they don’t know what they want from the unknown. For all I know there’s a fantastic dessert eaten only in the Philippines that would rapidly become my favorite dessert ever.

From a game grammar standpoint, genre = game. A fresh game in a genre is really just ringing changes on relatively minor factors; the verbs are the same, you’re just getting different statistical combinations here and there. (New maps, new monsters, new weapons, new jump distances, new storylines). The addition of a new verb (hello Portal!) is a highly engaging experience that can pleasantly surprise us and be seen as a major new advance — even though adding or changing one verb out of a set of twenty is a fairly minor change.

Coming up with new sets of verbs, e.g. new games, is very hard. Meaning, it can be expensive. Many — nay, most — combinations don’t actually work and aren’t fun. On top of that, even the ones that are fun are fun only to a segment of the population. Figuring out what segment and how big it is can be painfully hard and expensive. Because of this, the true homo economicus, the corporation, tends to prefer instead to bet on sure things, often leaving vast quantities of money on the table because they simply don’t know how to pick it up.

When someone does it, however, in creating this new combination of verbs they are creating a whole genre. Suddenly custard exists, and players can start to crave varying flavors of it. Companies are often driven to this just because there’s so damn many people making these crazy elaborate ice creams with all sorts of nuts ‘n’ stuff mixed in them that it’s getting expensive to stand out.

Players will eagerly tackle a fresh new genre, when it’s offered and actually fun to a broad population. So saying that it’s the fault of players that there is no innovation is not really accurate. Of course players want chocolate ice cream. And every once in a while we get the custard genre invented.

The first challenge, to my mind, lies in designers educating themselves enough to know that ice cream is not the only possible sort of dessert. To get them thinking broadly enough that they can think of things like flan. The second thing that needs to happen is for companies to realize that rapid prototyping techniques exist that can prove out the notion of flan relatively cheaply.

And that’s why the whole text mud debate falls oddly on the ears of some of us. When you see a statement like this:

I think all MMOs are similar to the EQ model in the following ways:
- You have skills accessed from clicking a button.
- All the content for your level is contained within a short travel of each other.
- There is no permadeath, just a (varying in size) death penalty.
- NPCs respawn (Except that bloody wounded child in the Wil Lands of Zelata, eh!?).
- As you progress, you become stronger, but you can only progress further by moving on and fighting stronger opponents.
- The game focuses mainly on combat. Crafting, diplomacy, etc are minor aspects of the game. But my problem is - how would an MMO work without following that structure? AS far as I can see - it wouldn’t.

…it is almost exactly like reading someone who thinks that all desserts must be

cold
made from dairy products
served in a waffle cone
have chunks of chocolate in them
have colored sprinkles on top

My reaction is generally to feel sorry for this person, because they have never had banana cream pie or fresh berries with whipped cream… but my second reaction is “look up from your tiny frame of reference, people!”

But I can’t really blame them. In the end, it isn’t the players’ job to invent new desserts, and you can’t really get upset with them for not knowing what is possible with a blowtorch, sugar, egg whites, and cream.

Despite what Tobold says, homo economicus is increasingly considered a myth in economics. Players do not always do the rational thing, for many reasons. But there’s one thing that I do think people are logical enough to do: if we offer more kinds of desserts people will try them.

[?]
Type in a relevant tag, and click the button, and help organize this blog's information.
[More Help]

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

West Karana » MMO Gene Sequencer momentum builds… wrote on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:16 am:

[...] that the reason people flock to games similar to ones they have already played is because they have no easy way of finding the alternatives. I agree! That’s a HUGE problem! How can I convince anyone Pi Story is a good game when they [...]

Chrononautic Log 改 » Blog Archive » Who wants ice cream? wrote on July 3rd, 2008 at 4:17 am:

[...] an indirectly related note, Raph Koster has a perceptive post on the question “Do players know what they want? My reaction is generally to feel sorry for this person, because they have never had banana cream [...]

Rethinking Thinking « Tish Tosh Tesh wrote on September 23rd, 2008 at 3:37 pm:

[...] My navel-gazing aside, though… if these things have been known problems for a while now… why aren’t we seeing change? Tobold asks “Why don’t we play innovative games?“, and called for a “new vision” a while back, Saylah muses that gamers don’t really want revolutionary games, and Wolfshead and Cambios (among others) have some pretty severe beefs with the state of the genre. If little old me, an artist worker bee in the game industry and lifelong game player, can see some of these issues with no real “street cred” to my MMO career, what are other consumers seeing? Obviously, some are just seeing their monthly statement with $15 going this way or that, but what do MMO players really want? [...]

Tim said on July 2nd, 2008 at 9:39 am:

It seems like the whole indie/smaller/lighter/tighter approach fits this call for more kinds of deserts. There’s a big risk for going outside the bounds of normalcy, but big rewards if you happen to come up with something novel, new and good.

Peter S. said on July 2nd, 2008 at 9:41 am:

I’m tempted to just say “THIS” and leave it at that. I agree completely with your insight, Raph, and I will also be stealing the term homo economicus for my own future use.

There’s also the more controversial thought that players will ask for sprinkles even if they don’t plan on eating them, either because it’s perceived to be free or because of the association that the good ice cream they had before had sprinkles, then sprinkles are “obviously” a part of good ice cream.

Raph said on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:04 am:

I will also be stealing the term homo economicus for my own future use

Not my term — I added links to Wikipedia.

It really is an increasingly out of favor concept — investors do not act rationally, for example.

Tachevert said on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:26 am:

I didn’t know I wanted Katamari Damacy until I started singing along, unable to get the theme out of my head. And yet, I DID want it.

Jason said on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 am:

“If we had asked people what they wanted they would have said ‘a faster horse’.” - Henry Ford

Or, if you really want to make your brain happy, spend twenty minutes watching Malcolm Gladwell on consumer choices.

jason said on July 2nd, 2008 at 11:04 am:

I think every major game company needs to maintain an “indie” arm where they try out new game types and styles on limited budgets, much like Hollywood studios do with their films.

cliff said on July 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am:

Funny, but the statement about all MMOs resembling EQ in certain ways ignores entire sub-types of MMO. The biggest being the purely social MMOs, such as There, Second Life, Habbo Hotel, The (now defunct) Sims Online, and so forth.

A rather successful sub-genre, I might add.

Of coz, if the statement actually meant MMORPG, then that would be slightly different - but the resemblance they list is part of the nature of role-playing games (especially on the computer), and is not tied directly to the massive nature of the beast.

Heck, I think one of my all-time favorite MMOs was Motor City Online… but unfortunately I wasn’t in the majority enough on that one.

Peter S. said on July 2nd, 2008 at 12:06 pm:

@Raph

Thank you for the link and clarification of the term. Also, ick. I was taking the term to refer to the virtual person of the corporation, and not… well, not as a term that has baggage. So, thank you for clearing that up for me.

Darniaq said on July 2nd, 2008 at 1:14 pm:

Raph, you’re totally wrong. Your entire point is mitigated by not knowing it’s Vanilla most people want!

Seriously though, spot on. You don’t go ask consumers what they want. You study the forces and adjacencies of their lives and deliver something for them. And invariably the first attempts fail for being too early, off-concept, whatever (see late 1800s automobiles vs 20th century, or the first locomotive, or first methods of flight).

What companies need to do is what they already do: figure out that way of balancing invention and business to hit that sweet spot of innovation.

- That’s how you get a COD4, which is a sequel in name only, oh and because you run around with a gun.
- That’s how you get Portal, the primary innovation of which was bringing conventions from other genres to one suffering from sameness.
- That’s how you get Peggle popularity, another game from an already strong and “old” industry just delivered in a form palpable to people who hadn’t checked out prior casual download games like Bejeweled or Azada.
- That’s how you get WoW, which did about the same thing for a vast amount of people who were alienated by oppresive earlier games others loved.

Condemning sameness ignores business reality, and insults the companies that are straddling creation with the need to eat.

Morgan Ramsay said on July 2nd, 2008 at 1:17 pm:

Tobold wrote:

Because game companies are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, making the games that players want, and the players don’t want original games.

That’s not what most businesses should be doing. A corporation is formed to satisfy the economic wants and needs of individuals. A corporation is not formed to satisfy the whims of consumers. A corporation must discover what those economic wants and needs are to be successful. Asking only “what do you want?” is not research.

Raph wrote:

Players know what they want from what they know.

What I wrote in “Value Innovation for Video Games,” which was available for reading via the Heretic website until our unscheduled downtime, was that players know what they want from what they have learned to expect. From my talks with developers, and my observations of the “early-stage developer” community, most people involve themselves with development to create games they and their peers would like. They don’t go out of their way to create games that they themselves have never played before, which is why there are so many sequels and clones.

Most creative awards ceremonies, from the Academy Awards to the Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, do not recognize change. They don’t recognize innovation. They recognize things peers like. They’re self-congratulatory. There’s a lot of that in Hollywood where everyone from the highest-paid actors to the lowest-paid gaffers and grips are awarded for their achievements. There’s a lot of peer-only recognition in advertising, too, which is why you should never hire an agency that promotes their awards because they care more about obtaining those awards [from their peers] than helping you achieve your goals.

There are people who decide that they’re going to completely diverge from the timeworn path. They create something truly original, something that achieves a modicum of success, but then, of course, they keep extending that property until the value is lost. They fall into the same old trap once again. Having hedged all their bets on that property, their publisher cancels the project, and their business turns to rubble—all within five years of starting up.

Morgan Ramsay said on July 2nd, 2008 at 1:28 pm:

Darniaq wrote:

I’d rather be starving and successful than fat and complacent.

That’s how you get WoW, which did about the same thing for a vast amount of people who were alienated by oppresive earlier games others loved.

Praising World of Warcraft for innovation is akin to praising Disney’s movies for originality. They’re all great products with great marketing, but they’re also inherently formulaic in that they rely solely on tried-and-true best practices.

I’m unfamiliar with the other games, except Call of Duty 4, which I’ve mostly ignored as I’ve done with all games with overdone graphics since Gears of War. Neither are models for the future of interactive entertainment.

Richard Boehme said on July 2nd, 2008 at 1:32 pm:

Knowing what you like and knowing that there are new things out there is very hard. Part of the problem is assuming that something’s not going to be fun. If you take the concept of something like Nintendogs, for example, mentally I would hit a huge roadblock: how will taking care of a virtual pet be any fun?

It takes a lot of creativity to take something that’s not fun and realize that it could have potential to be something more than we think it is. What do you do with it? How do you use it? Take something like ‘examining plants for parasites’. It sounds boring to me - but we can probably lay games all the way down the concept. Check for bugs on the ground that hurt the roots, learn what to examine, how to get to the tops of trees, etc.

Sins of a Solar Empire took the RTS and 4X strategy game genres and merged them semi-successfully. It’s enough to create a very successful game, but there was a mental barrier there that they took advantage of in their marketing materials - they took two very closely related genres of game and merged them. In terms of advertising, look! A new genre!

Lateral thinking like that is really risky and hard, but the payoff is superb if you get it right. Just look at the Wii.

Peter S. said on July 2nd, 2008 at 1:58 pm:

@Morgan

On the other hand, you could look at WoW as deducing what people want by seeing what they are settling for, and then bringing tried-and-true best practices to bear to rarify, refine and distill that want, discarding any unwanted bulk in the process. To be overly generous for the sake of making a point.

I. Kachang said on July 2nd, 2008 at 3:45 pm:

“For all I know there’s a fantastic dessert eaten only in the Philippines that would rapidly become my favorite dessert ever.”

It is called Ice Kachang: shaved ice, syrup, red bean, aloe vera, variety of jellies, peanuts and corn.

sprinkles are so boring… I almost feel sorry for you.

And the place would be Malaysia, but at least you were close.

Morgan Ramsay said on July 2nd, 2008 at 4:03 pm:

Peter S. wrote:

On the other hand, you could look at WoW as deducing what people want

World of Warcraft is not intrinsically distinct from other MMORPGs. Extrinsically, however, the success of World of Warcraft is largely propelled by the corporate brand, product development strategy, and built-in audience.

I’m not impressed with World of Warcraft’s subscription numbers, and I don’t conflate those numbers with perfection of product design. In my opinion, World of Warcraft’s 8-9 million subscribers worldwide is a small success.

I’d be more impressed with a 20-30 million subscribers figure, and only then would I look for what World of Warcraft can teach us about designing online games for the mass market. World of Warcraft is still very niche.

I. Kachang said on July 2nd, 2008 at 4:06 pm:

hmm… my Filipino friend has just informed me of Halo-halo. I cannot vouch for this one.

Bart Stewart said on July 2nd, 2008 at 4:11 pm:

< you can’t really get upset with them for not knowing what is possible with a blowtorch, sugar, egg whites, and cream.

If you’re talking about crème brûlée, I wonder what that might be like with egg whites instead of egg yolks….

But maybe that’s just another example of people being oblivious to interesting possibilities because they’re so used to following a recipe.

To put it another way, maybe the tendency of gamers to say they want only those features they’ve already seen is another example of Bastiat’s parable of the broken window, which illuminates how what obviously is tends to blind us to those things which might be.

Crimson Starfire said on July 2nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm:

Ralph, this is a seriously good article. It was a pleasure to read it. I agree with you completely. Keep up the good work.

TickledBlue said on July 2nd, 2008 at 5:14 pm:

Speaking as a player I would have to agree that, if asked, I’d request a desert made from ingredients that I know I’ve liked in the past. But I think there is a large number of us that yearn for a new taste and in some cases actively seek it out.

The problem is that, as a player, its harder to articulate what you are looking for that you feel is missing from the current menu laid out before you. If Raph thinks that coming up with a new verb is hard, what chance do we lowly players have? I can express a desire for something different, I can complain that the current game I’m playing is dissatisfying or I can just quickly get bored with it an move on to the next.

My disappointment with the player that Raph quotes and most of the other players that weighed in on the recent Bartle debate is that so few of them simply articluated their desire or yearning for something else. I guess you could read between the lines and see their fervant support of WAR as a hope that somehow this game will become the defining MMO for them. I think that player was clearly saying that they wanted something different they just didn’t know what it was. At least that guy hinted that he was open to widening their diet. Where my concern lies is with the player who violently regects the idea of their being other tastes, I have a friend of a friend who only eats meat and potatoes for dinner… every night, that’s their choice and they never change - that is where the true sorrow lies.

What I wonder though, is whether this is a true indication of the player base, or is it like game forums where you can guarantee that the posters only represent a small subset of a particular player type. I think there’s a large playerbase out there that is quietly sitting back looking at the debate, yearning for a new type of game, then looking at the vocal designers like Bartle and thinking to ourselves “Well? Put your money where your mouth is”.

Sanz said on July 2nd, 2008 at 7:36 pm:

This is really not a concept that only applies to games. Consumers consume what works and what is comfortable until they find something that works better and is more comfortable. Companies can either choose what works and be only mildly successful, or shoot for the stars, take a risk, and hope to become wildly successful. It’s about life and business. Not games.

Darniaq said on July 2nd, 2008 at 8:13 pm:

In my opinion, World of Warcraft’s 8-9 million subscribers worldwide is a small success.

WoW’s hugeness is relative to the specific competitive landscape, same way EQ1’s hugeness was around 2001: DIKU-inspired AAA subscription-based MMOs. Neither are huge in the grand scheme of things. It’s useless to compare the GTA series, for example, to WoW. There is crossover in the audience, but not in the businesses. Even closer-in titles like the Korean imports don’t directly compare because the business models are so different.

WoW’s “innovation” making a game about content, not time. The net result is the same, as the grind of pre-WoW DIKU-inspired titles was replaced with a rather thin veneer of quests and “voluntary grinds”. However, this did enough to make the game appealing to both the *craft/Blizzard fans and pretty much the rest of the genre. It was EQ1 for the rest of us… and the core. That EQ2 was doing the same thing is sorta lost to the launch of WoW, but that’s due to separate factors.

I think that player was clearly saying that they wanted something different they just didn’t know what it was

Most consumers are like this, which is why design and business modeling is both an art and a science

Moose said on July 2nd, 2008 at 8:40 pm:

There’s a mutual thing I think. Players somewhat hurt innovation by demanding sophisticated graphics, which cost lots of money to produce, thus driving up the cost of experimentation.

Morgan Ramsay said on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:18 pm:

WoW’s hugeness is relative to the specific competitive landscape

…and is pretty much irrelevant. I’ve found that people in this industry tend to underestimate their businesses, and tend to have a lower bar for success.

This behavior is an explainable phenomena, but it’s also fairly human. Societies tend to fall into a narrow line of thinking, and when that mold is thoroughly broken, the people who broke the mold are praised as visionaries.

Castles could have been shielded, literally, by mounting shields all around the exterior castle walls to reduce the impact of artillery fire. Trench warfare was a silly idea, and the folks who decided to simply go around were heroes.

Similar deal with “stupid warfare”—I can’t think of the right term now—where two armies would line up in front of each other and hope their very inaccurate weapons would hit their targets. The people who invented guerilla warfare completely threw those who fought the regular, directly confrontational battles completely off-guard.

As did those who pulled out pistols in sword fights. When you get impressed by World of Warcraft’s subscription numbers by looking at those numbers in relation to the direct competitors’ numbers, you’re the guy still fighting with a sword.

Tobold said on July 2nd, 2008 at 10:32 pm:

But all the other desserts are already on the table. There are tons of innovative, original games from small and indie companies. And nobody plays them. If they really were so much better, wouldn’t word of mouth on the internet already have turned them into huge successes? The reason nobody plays them is that these games are original, but not very good.

Btw: I love how you managed to get ice cream google ads on this page.

Morgan Ramsay said on July 2nd, 2008 at 11:06 pm:

The reason nobody plays them is that these games are original, but not very good.

You probably also think that great products sell themselves. A laughable fantasy.

Raph said on July 2nd, 2008 at 11:20 pm:

But all the other desserts are already on the table.

Goodness, I think there are many delectable desserts yet to be invented. Saying they are all on the table already is very defeatist…!

There are tons of innovative, original games from small and indie companies.

Well, innovative doesn’t always equal fun. But we won’t get the fun innovative game without trying lots of innovation.

If they really were so much better, wouldn’t word of mouth on the internet already have turned them into huge successes?

I didn’t say better, I said different. And no, there are many reasons why even something better might not achieve commercial success — happens all the time. See the saga of the Betamax for one example.

Garumoo said on July 3rd, 2008 at 4:53 am:

There are tons of innovative, original games from small and indie companies. And nobody plays them.

Even if these games were as good as the games players are familiar with, it wouldn’t be good enough. They could even be twice as good and it wouldn’t be good enough.

There’s this thing called the Endowment Effect, and the effect is well described in The 9X Email Problem (Harvard Business School):

We value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute. We mentally compare having the prospective item to giving up what we already have (our ‘endowment’), but because we’re loss averse giving up what we already have (our reference point) looms large.

Simply put, something new has to be 9 times better or offer 9 interesting innovations for every familiar feature they are taking away or side lining. That’s quite a tall order for small and indie companies.

Eolirin said on July 3rd, 2008 at 6:10 am:

I think the Wii and DS are effectively proof of this in action. So was the NES really, but that’s ancient history, and I don’t expect anyone to remember anything from more than 2 months ago.

But Wii Fit is currently outselling the PS3 in terms of units per month. It’s already outsold it in terms of lifetime total in Japan. What gamer would’ve asked for THAT?

Eolirin said on July 3rd, 2008 at 6:27 am:

Wii Fit? Brain Age? Nintendogs? And the latter two have outsold all of the big budget games of this generation and are still managing to work themselves into the top 20 from time to time, even after a year or more of being released. I suspect that in 6 months to a year Wii Fit will have outsold the combined totals of GTA IV for the 360 and PS3. What gamer would’ve asked for any of those?

len said on July 3rd, 2008 at 7:44 am:

Audiences usually don’t know what they want from the band. They are keenly aware of when they are bored. When enough seats empty, a change is made. I have to wonder if the game industry has the equivalent of the guys who go to clubs for a living looking for the ‘next new thing’. Bands always have a core sound, meaning, even if they play a variety of material, there will be thirty minutes somewhere in their sets that defines them because by aggregation of the talent, an attractor emerges that is the synthesis of their draw. The best producers have a talent for spotting that and pushing them in that direction for three albums. After that, the band or their manager or their girlfriends have to find the next new thing but it can’t be too far off the original genre. For that reason, entertainers in the same genre tend to hang out together the same way crooks with turf visit the same restaurants.

The easiest path to sustained success is to watch bands on the verge of success, steal their best song and make sure a sexier front person sings it. See the Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary and the bad blood over “Where Have All The Flowers Gone”.

Better packaging triumphs superior craft. Sometimes it is the only novelty left. The Beatles weren’t that good on their first album.

robusticus said on July 3rd, 2008 at 8:13 am:

Fairly elitist to think your customers don’t know what they want. Especially since Rush Limbaugh is still bigger than WoW even including the ~7 million cybercafe “subs”.

I thought the next post telling, they want better AI but production server data indicates gold farmers, and thus everyone, enjoys minmaxing. Hmmm.

At least we get a little strawberry now and again.

Andy Havens said on July 3rd, 2008 at 9:16 am:

Around 1994, the wireless company I worked for was offered an exclusive option in our market on the first cell phone with interchangeable, colored face plates. It was about 5% more expensive than the one without. We all in management though, “This is crap. Nobody cares what color their cell phone is.” We even had some data to back this up. Our competitors got the phone, charged even more for the extra, and took us to the cleaners that Christmas.

So… when ringtones first came out in the late 90’s, and a couple folks in the meeting said, “This is crap. Nobody will pay a buck to download a 10 second clip of a song as their phone ringer,” All I had to say was, “Colored face plates,” and everybody got quiet.

The truth is, you don’t know until you try. The Sims was an insanely different game than anything that came before, and did (ahem) pretty well. If you’d told me, even 5 years ago, that online suduko and similar games would be doing as well as they are, I’d'a laughed. I’ve played about 100 hours of Desktop Tower Defense myself, and I *STILL CAN’T TELL YOU WHY*

It’s not just that we don’t know what we want or why we want it, but that we don’t even want to know what or why. We just want it.

[Shrugs] Pet rocks, people. Pet rocks.

Peter S. said on July 3rd, 2008 at 9:21 am:

I think, if they gave WoW away for free, and did so for a few decades, it might get as big as Rush Limbaugh. Bigger, even.

Apples and oranges aside, there is a gap between what people say they want, what they easily form words around in casual conversation, and what they actually enjoy doing and find compelling in practice. It’s harder to articulate desire than you might think, and an accurate answer takes more introspection than you might expect.

Otherwise, you’d almost be arguing that people are never disappointed or pleasantly surprised by things they try. “I thought I’d enjoy it more / didn’t think I’d enjoy it that much.”

Dave T said on July 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 am:

Great piece Raph!

What players say they want isn’t always what they actually do.
Blizzard’s ability to datamine player behavior has given them insights on player preferences, and they act on these insights not by adding new verbs per se, but modifyers.
One of the first quests players were offered when TBC launched was a bombing run quest from a flying mount. It was such a refreshing change that almost everyone I know did that quest a number of times, despite the fact that they weren’t rewarded for doing so after the first time (anecdotal, I know). The most recent content patch added 2 more such quests, and in the next expansion full-blown aerial combat will be introduced.
Launch-WoW had quests for 1, 5, 15, and 40 players, TBC brought “recommended players:2″ and “recommended players:3″ quests, to better suit the large contingent of the playerbase that played with a significant other (or others).
TL;DR: By virtue of the size of the playerbase, Blizzard is able to datamine without par and uses this analysis to increase the possibility space of the game incrementally, based on observed player behavior.

Yukon Sam said on July 3rd, 2008 at 11:43 am:

The games I’ve enjoyed most as a player have been less like desserts and more like a dessert bar - the designers provide the ingredients, but the player combines those ingredients into a dessert specifically tailored to his or her tastes. The artistry of the designer is to provide a wide and interesting selection of elements, and to arrange them in a way that the player isn’t simply overwhelmed by the range of choices. But the player is an artist in his own right, crafting an experience for his or her own consumption. That bears repeating: the player is an artist, an active collaborator rather than a passive spectator, and should be respected as such.

Yes, players will generally want to always find some core components that are familiar and comfortable… but if you provide that, you can add exotic elements for the more adventurous to sample. If you’ve chosen well, more and more players will start asking for the exotics and incorporating the new flavors into their diets. And even if a particular ingredient isn’t especially popular, there will always be a group of die-hards that love you for including it.

That’s not to say that you can’t be wildly successful by tossing the standard menu out the window and providing nothing but novel and exotic ingredients… but revolution is a trickier proposition than evolution, and potential customers may not even recognize the result as a dessert bar at all.

Besides… flan is pretentious. Got any mint chocolate chip?

Kevin said on July 3rd, 2008 at 4:41 pm:

If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. - Henry Ford

Mac said on July 3rd, 2008 at 6:36 pm:

For all I know there’s a fantastic dessert eaten only in the Philippines that would rapidly become my favorite dessert ever.

It is called Halo-halo, and yes it would.

Amaranthar said on July 4th, 2008 at 2:09 pm:

Nobody asked for the Rush Limbaugh show. And if I recall right, it took him a few years to get syndicated too. Had he believed what people might have said they wanted to hear on Radio, he probably would never have been heard from. I mean, I don’t think anyone would get to excited over his rendition of “Lets rock tonight”.

Alex said on July 4th, 2008 at 8:09 pm:

From my limited but long-time exposure to computer games I noticed that single player games come in a much larger variety than mmog’s.

While I fully agree that gamers do not know what they want from the unknown, it may be that “be fun & multiplayer” is a much stricter constraint on possible game design than just “be fun”. At any rate it seems obvious that at least it’s very different.

There are many many single player games that have a great story and couldn’t be made multiplayer and persistent in a meaningful way precisely because most players aren’t as good at playing roles and enhancing atmosphere as npc’s.

Furthermore, I cannot imagine mmog’s without any form of competition or cooperation, neither of which are necessarily fun for most people. Competition can be perceived as griefing at its extreme, cooperation is tough and can lead to elitism, segregation based on “maturity” etc.

Lastly most non-computer games are multiplayer and that creates great competitive pressure for mmog’s. One could say there are few design options that make a mmog compete successfully against soccer, hide and seek or life itself, which is also a very complex mmog. Single player games have created the industry and been hugely popular simply because there is basically no other interactive game one can play when alone.

Amaranthar said on July 5th, 2008 at 10:31 am:

You know, this is something that really bothers me. I grew up before computer games, and I was into sports. One of the things about sports was that it was supposed to teach life lessons. And it did. (unfortunately, cheats hurt there too.)
In sports kids are taught to be “good losers”, have some class, pride, and dignity even in the face of losing.
In MMORPGs it’s called griefing (along with true griefing, which only adds fuel to the fire). The petty jealousies are built upon. The me-me rules all. The lack of leadership under the rule of the masses reminds me much of the “Lord of the Flies”, in some ways.

Darniaq said on July 6th, 2008 at 6:05 pm:

When you get impressed by World of Warcraft’s subscription numbers by looking at those numbers in relation to the direct competitors’ numbers, you’re the guy still fighting with a sword.

This is red ocean thinking, and not necessarily wrong. It’s the essence of short term thinking, a way to make money quickly based on industry factors you know very well and know you can become successful at.

Dismissing WoW’s success is ignoring history. This makes you less capable of learning from it, and identifying ways to make that history irrelevant.

That latter part is the opposite of the red ocean thinking, that being the blue ocean. You create success by entering a space that everyone else thinks they understand and then become successful for reasons the establishment don’t get until too late.

See the rise of browser based inexpensive MMOs vs the now-much-more-risky movie-budget ones. The blue ocean here wasn’t just realizing people would accept playing in a browser. It was that there was an entire audience untapped by the industry going through its own gentrification.

WoW’s success is not irrelevant. The learning here is that the AAA movie-budget MMO industry has achieved it’s win conditions. That audience knows what it wants (even if they can’t articulate) and those companies know how to deliver them (even if quality is still an issue). But that win condition comes with the realization that meteoric growth is either impossible or only with like-Blizzard conditions (game-centric IP, gamer-appealing company, as many worldwide territories/partners, as much dev budget, etc).

This is fertile ground for the blue ocean strategies that have already been popping up over the last four years.

Morgan Ramsay said on July 6th, 2008 at 6:53 pm:

This is red ocean thinking …

I don’t think you understood what I wrote at all.

If anyone wants to know what all this “blue ocean” and “red ocean” stuff is about, read Blue Ocean Strategy. People like to quote from that book like a bible.

len said on July 7th, 2008 at 1:27 pm:

That wouldn’t be anything like the Red and Blue books published by the NSDAP to document their rallies would it? The Blue books are rarer but much nicer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Rally

Weird how some marketing symbols recirculate with generational gaps but the same discriminators. Maybe Plato was on to something.

Kerri Knight said on July 7th, 2008 at 2:28 pm:

In my experience, elitism comes more from competition based systems than cooperative, as it inherently requires people to acknowledge how limited their peformance will be without others.

I recently went around with another poster on a forum who was asking “Devs, we need some kind of goal”. His request was specifically for more things to loot (which would supercede the crafted goods, but I’ll skirt that subject for the moment), more stat mods to accumulate, more quests, collections, or dungeons to crawl through. While all of these are fine things to have in your game world, I suppose, he continued on stating that

“MMOs are about competition and being the best (as is humanity)”.

I’ll ignore the obvious flaw in his request of adding stat mods making absolutely no difference in one’s ability to become the ‘best’ at something (as stat mods are typically a counter to some other stat mod and a rise in the theoretical maximums is equally available to all) for the moment.

When I get together with friends and the sports game gets popped in, I’m suprised by how, unless I persist upon it, the standard is to create some kind of tournament and spend the entire evening watching people goad and upset each other, even getting angry with their results. On those few occasions I can convince them to play in cooperative mode, we tend to have to pause the game about every 3rd or 4th play to watch the replays while laughing and cheering at our performance, or conversely making uplifting statements to each other when something goes wrong.

How people can continue to prefer endless judgemental relativism of one-another based on some arbitrary metric like performance in a video game (it can be anything, really…generally what is chosen is whatever metric confirms the author’s self-image whether entirely self-absored or self-loathing or anywhere in between) is beyond me. Yes, I believe competition can be fun, however as it has been implemented in game after game, it tends to become the winner slamming the losers face in the results for the next *insert period of time* as success is rewarded with further power disparities granted, in effect telling the person doing the griefing their behavior is welcome and acceptable.

Sure, some of this is human nature thats hard to change, but likewise knowing that is the case, it is hardly responsible design to endorse it. Games more and more seem to be raising people up as ’solo-superstars’ and of course, once you’ve given someone that impression taking it away will result in childish tantrums.

In short, I suppose…Our society as whole puts far too much emphasis on being ‘outstanding solo superstars’. When we don’t meet that expectation we lash out at ourselves and others. My observations show that we shine brighter and more often excelling at our given role in a group, supported by peers who’s company we enjoy than standing on a pedastal looking down over everyone ‘beneath’ us.

I just find myself completely at a loss to understand people who don’t do anything to actually better or change themselves in ways they would prefer, wanting someone else to give them a magical skill that will somehow signal they have ‘arrived’ at where they want to be. I’m also tired of endless ‘top 10′ lists and ladder systems which only further people’s tendency to step all over each other to get to the top (in the end, rewarding the most cut-throat and cruel among us rather than the actually deserving).

Sorry for sliding off into yet another of my sociological rants :9.

Wolfe said on July 8th, 2008 at 4:05 am:

Raph said:

From a game grammar standpoint, genre = game.

This looks a bit dangerous. Or perhaps once the topic is related to game you get, everything = game?

Why desserts fail

When you look at the innovative desserts that fail to become wildly accepted by the players they mostly fail on the quality of the restaurant that serve them. It is rather common that we come across these innovative creations served in a pile on the ground, next to that pile of things you rather not eat.

It requires a whole lot of dedication to evaluate the pile on the floor as anything more than garbage. This is something we can not expect the ordinary consumer to do, but people like Raph and other similar dedicated ones will sniff and prod at it to see what the ingredients are and if it has any value.

From here comes the problem that the majority of the cost of developing games that many players pay for lies with building a quality restaurant. Without a better grammar than the ice cream metaphor this gets difficult to talk about.

A few years ago the music industry spent a great lot of money on the music equivalent of what I consider to be the restaurant. That is “the sound”, with a good sound you could get almost anything to be properly consumed. Maybe not all the way to success but at least the methods for developing a good sound are well understood by people skilled in the craft. I believe the same is true for games, but the industry around game development does not share a unified concept of “sound”.

From the investors all the way down to the individual developer we suffer from lacking quality of communication. This is also a problem for the players, they can’t communicate accurately either.

len said on July 8th, 2008 at 5:55 am:

“the methods for developing a good sound are well understood by people skilled in the craft”

Quality of the recording? Quality of the tracks? Quality of the players? Quality of the ideas? Quality of the merchandising?

I know how to record well. Gain and a very good microphone are 75% of that. But a bad player is still a bad player. A mediocre song can become a brilliant recording. A novel idea at the right time can be recorded on a cassette deck and still be a hit.

A “good sound” is an elusive concept. I can show you terrible tracks made in crappy studios that became monster hits. I can show you brilliant tracks made at very high fidelity that lay there like a dead whale. I can show you very skilled marketing campaigns with all of the above and the song couldn’t punch into the top 100.

Timing and the zeitgeist. You can’t fool Mother Nature or buy luck.

Amaranthar said on July 8th, 2008 at 8:11 am:

I don’t know Kerri. I see elitism everywhere except in places where leadership works to avoid it. It especially arises when there is no leadership. Why? Because we are social animals, even if we try to pretend that we go it alone. It’s not so much as looking for a leader, it’s looking for what helps us individually, and finding that help in others. The pecking order is unavoidable once we “get together”.

The difference between competitive and cooperative is purely in style. Competitive has the competition to settle the pecking order. The cooperative has another form of competition, social interaction.

You right on the target here. While it’s good to use the “solo achiever” strategy to find strengths, at some point you have to work those strengths into teamwork. This does happen allot, it just doesn’t stand out to us like seeing someone fail to get into the team spirit of things. But also, your point, there are allot of people who simply fail to move on to that next level of working cooperatively. And it’s often something that’s enabled by others.
And in MMORPGs, this enabling is widespread. They are trying to mimic single player games because that’s what they know, but this competely skips the part where you use your strengths in cooperative efforts. Even so, though, you still see allot of people working in a team framework. These are people who either have learned to move past the singularity or know it instinctively.

Once MMORPGs figure this out I think there’s going to be another boom to the industry. A player can thrive in such a game so much better, when they can rely on others to help them personally, even if they aren’t in game. We do see the barest forms already, with trade auctions and guilds, and even with keep captures. But it’s far too raw at this level. On the other hand, some games try to control it so much that it hurts. Party sizes? Heh, they even pick their teammates like on a school yard.

Bart Stewart said on July 8th, 2008 at 11:49 am:

The difference between competitive and cooperative is purely in style.

I disagree strongly with this statement. Behind these two approaches to problem-solving lies a fundamental difference in worldview.

Competition typically assumes a zero-sum world of finite resources. In this environment, winning is defined as accumulating more of some scarce resource than everyone else. (There Can Be Only One.) Victory is achieved by redistributing resources to the most worthy or deserving.

Cooperation typically assumes a world of infinite opportunities. Winning in this environment is about adding to the pool of resources by creating new things, allowing multiple winners. Problems are solved through expansion.

This relates to MMORPGs in that the developers of these big gameworlds tend to try to guarantee fun by controlling the rules-based play experience. That control is a lot harder to exercise if you allow players to make their own content. So no major MMORPG permits players to make truly new kinds of things in the gameworld.

Since it’s not possible for players to expand the resources inside the game universe through creative effort, it becomes a zero-sum world by default. And in that kind of universe, there’s no incentive to cooperate except in pursuit of a redistributionist competitive victory.

Small wonder then that the behaviors typically seen in these gameworlds are so competitive — the gamers attracted to such a game will be those whose finite-resource worldview is being validated. MMORPGs won’t attract more cooperative players until the nature of the game universe is changed by offering features that enable players to create new resources.

If you want to attract cooperators to your gameworld, build it to be non-zero-sum. That will be a different definition of “fun,” but would it really be so terrible to have some alternatives to the tightly controlled rules-based play of current MMORPGs?

Do players know what they want?

51 Responses to “Do players know what they want?”

Meta

Recent Comments

Categories

Recent Trackbacks

Archives

Academics

Comics

Game devs

MMO devs

News/Forums

Other

Players