Raph's Website » Monday (Tuesday) Mailbag: testing, complexity, a paper

Monday (Tuesday) Mailbag: testing, complexity, a paper

July 14th, 2008 (Visited 700 times) Tags:

This was supposed to get posted yesterday and didn’t.

Im a concerned mom and my son wants to sign up for $34.99 at www.igametester.com to get paid to play video games. My question is do you know if this is a legitimate company? I guess I come from the ol’skool and if you need people why should they have to pay to work for you?

I have never heard of the company, but you are absolutely correct that testing games is generally a paid job.

Sometimes there are large-scale beta tests where testers pay for the cost of the shipping on the disc, that sort of thing. But it’s fairly unusual and only for highly anticipated titles.

If it were my kids, I would say no.  Tell him that there are many developer communities and indie developers who would love to have additional testers. And tell him that testing games is NOT “getting paid to play.” It’s more like doing level 1 over and over and over again and always failing because the game is bad. Testing is painful, thankless work.

And point out what the FAQ says: “No, our guide will help you find a job but it does not guarantee a job. We offer the resources to help you find game testing jobs.” Sounds kind of like those things where they tell you how to get money for education, and send you photocopies of paperwork you could have ordered for free from the Federal government.

2-3 years ago i tried to found a company in Germany to create an MMO game with PvP enabled. It was supposed to be an UO-clone as opposed to all the EQ-clones that are popular today. My project got pretty far, i had cooperations with a university and a big publisher set up that would have been worth at least 500k in technical help (for example a good graphics engine) and i got public financing of 100k euros, but in the end we failed with the financing for our prototype. In my team i had several people with a technical background, but my background is different. I have studied social sciences and economics and have a totally different approach to social conflict than technically educated people use. Since i no longer see a chance to create this project i have written a paper to help other designers who are interested in social conflict and PvP. I tried to publish it at Castranova’s site but he never wrote back. I thought maybe some people here are interested in the subject or would even like to discuss the paper. Here is the download (as pdf).

Cool, thanks for sending it along.

When will “complex” stop being a dirty word for MMORPG developers? I enjoyed your blog post some time ago where you mentioned the coupling of moods / emotes with animations in Star Wars Galaxies. My feeling is these little details are what make an MMORPG experience whole. You understand that. It is unfortunate that much of the industry does not… I’m just interested in your opinion. Do you feel that the “little details” and ‘complex systems’ are too often ignored at the expense of a less immersive experience? Yivvits www.swgpodcast.com

Hmm. I have several and mixed responses to this. I guess the easiest way to handle it is with bullet points.

Little details are what puts something over the top and takes it from something people like to something people love. Apple is the current master of this, with stuff like the magnetic power cord plug.
But the underlying stuff has to be solid. And what’s more, it does have to be complex, because a simplistic product, in entertainment, is a short-term product. Say rather that it has to be deceptively simple — complex beneath the surface when you dig deeper.
Even little touches can be implemented in a good way or a bad way. Something may be a good idea and implemented in a way that makes things harder for everyone, and turn into a net loss. Oh — and it’s easy to confuse “little touches” with graphics — they aren’t the same thing.
There’s little doubt that risk aversion can drive towards familiar systems, or conservative ones. And something like a robust social system, which is a whole game for a significant segment of the audience, can be something that people who are just looking for combat don’t understand the value of because it’s “not their sort of thing,” so to speak. For any given segment, a given feature is going to seem irrelevant.

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Eolirin said on July 15th, 2008 at 2:04 pm:

But the underlying stuff has to be solid. And what’s more, it does have to be complex, because a simplistic product, in entertainment, is a short-term product. Say rather that it has to be deceptively simple — complex beneath the surface when you dig deeper.

I dunno Raph… is something like Spider Solitarie or the Mahjong tile matching game that ships with Vista complex? Because I can tell you that they’ve certainly had a much longer “shelf life” than just about any other games for my Mom. I know, for myself, some of the things that I’ve sunk the most hours into have been painfuly simple and didn’t actually have any hidden complexity; there was no extra layer to worry about.

I think I’ve put more hours into Ouendan (a silly japanese music game import for the DS) and probably 2 to 3 times as much time if I factor in the sequel, as I have any other singleplayer game, and I’ve beaten Xenogears, so that sets the bar at 80 hours right there. There’s absolutely no complexity at all in terms of gameplay; you need to know how to tap buttons on the screen, run the stylus along a line, and spin it in a circle really fast, and that’s it. But it’s still brutally difficult on the harder difficulty settings because there’s little in the way of give in the timing, and it’s hopelessly addicitve for me despite, or perhaps because of, that. Similarly I’ve spent countless hours repeating the same actions in the two DS Castlevania games, where the surface complexity in what I’m doing is all I’m getting, just to complete the soul collection and weapon leveling “mini-games”. There’s no complexity to them, not even hidden, you just kill the same stuff over and over again (the act of which does have some complexity to it, but when you’re doing this you’ve already mastered those skills, the games require you killing sometimes hundreds of the same enemies), but it’s still vastly more entertaining and I’ve spent more time with it than most of the other, more complex, games that I’ve played.

Sure, once I beat those games I didn’t really tend to go “back to the well” so to speak, and having hidden complexity would’ve extended the replayability perhaps, but without a multiplayer component you eventually end up in the same place long run anyway. It’s too easy to get to the level of mastery that you want in a singleplayer game and then be done with it. For multiplayer, you definitely do need the hidden complexity though, because otherwise you end up with a tic-tac-toe scenario where the winner is determined almost before the game begins. But, for singleplayer, complexity isn’t even remotely necessary; simple but addicitve, whether that addictiveness comes from a reward structure or from difficulty that challenges my physical limitations to react or from some other source it doesn’t really matter, seems to last longer, at least for me.

Then there’s also games as relaxation in which case hidden complexity doesn’t do anything worthwhile either, since you’re just using the game to zone out. We come back to relaxation tools time and time again as well.

Raph said on July 15th, 2008 at 2:45 pm:

is something like Spider Solitarie or the Mahjong tile matching game that ships with Vista complex?

More complex than an MMO combat system, in many cases.

But your point is well-taken. A lot of people do enjoy simple systems that they can “use like whittling” as I call it — just something to keep the brain busy while you coast.

Eolirin said on July 15th, 2008 at 3:19 pm:

That’s part of it at least Raph, the other part is that even simple systems can be made extremely hard to master, not because of the complexity but because they require extreme precision. There’s value there too. Guitar Hero for instance, isn’t built on complex systems, but how many people can perfect Through the Fire and Flames? And how many people keep playing a song just one more time to get a little bit of a higher score?

Morgan Ramsay said on July 15th, 2008 at 3:22 pm:

Keep in mind that “system” shouldn’t refer to just gameplay. There are also other components with their own varying degrees of complexity.

“The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” — Aristotle

Raph said on July 15th, 2008 at 5:27 pm:

even simple systems can be made extremely hard to master, not because of the complexity but because they require extreme precision. There’s value there too. Guitar Hero for instance, isn’t built on complex systems, but how many people can perfect Through the Fire and Flames? And how many people keep playing a song just one more time to get a little bit of a higher score?

I actually lump that under complexity… it’s still systemic mastery, just that you are mastering the system of your body, as opposed to the mental model.

ferum said on July 15th, 2008 at 6:30 pm:

Games with simple rules can still be complex. Just look at Go.