[...] Raph Coster was recommended by Kim Pallister in the comments, and there is certainly a lot of really engaging material to choose from (going back to 1998!). Koster is, of course, the author of the influential ‘Theory of Fun’, but I’ll point out this nice little piece on ‘Do players know what they want?’   [...]

[...] bonkers; WAR and WoW and LotRO and EQ2 and Age of Conan and their Diku-inspired chums are all ice cream, just some have chocolate swirls, some have raspberry ripple, some have sprinkles on top, some are [...]

[...] 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? [...]

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.