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The game without treadmillsApril 23rd, 2007 |
for (iLevel = 1; iLevel iMaxLevelAllowed; iLevel++)
{
currentMonsters.hitPoints = X * iLevel;
currentMonsters.attackStrength = Y * iLevel;
currentMonsters.graphics = GetMonsterGraphics(iLevel);currentTreasures.value = Z * iLevel;
}
The above came from a Slashdot thread about LOTRO, and was pointed out to me by John Szeder, who followed up with the question, “Why haven’t more people looked at making games without treadmills?”
Coincidentally, this comes at the same time as there’s a long and detailed discussions about human motivations, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, and similar topics over on the Mud-Dev2 mailing list. So it’s in the air.
Well, people have made games without treadmills, and usually they fall into two broad categories.
- Games of skill. The treadmill is usually defined as playing a game that requires minimal skill, doing a fairly repetitive task over and over again in order to receive arbitrary rewards and climb higher up a ladder. Effectively, the treadmill is designed to reward devotion; you cannot really fail at it if you just persist in whatever you are doing. Games of skill, such as a player-vs-player game of any sort, are usually not classified this way, because there’s real odds of failure.
- Gameless games, which are presented purely experientially; there’s no rewards, no ladders to climb, and so on.
Each these has its virtues, of course. The skill-based games are in many ways more involving. They offer up real challenge, and often as a result, the sense of real accomplishment upon beating the challenge is more substantial. There’s unpredictability from the human opponents, so as long as you don’t feel bored by the overall broad mechanic of the game, there’s an endless and continually surprising range of challenges offered.
The experiential games offer scope for emotions that we usually fail to tap into via other games. They are about journey, not reward. Players feel free to express themselves and to do things that the designers did not expect.
But there are also reasons why these two sorts of games aren’t the dominant sort in the market.
Skill-based games lock the door against most players, precisely because they demand real skill. Skill is something that is a rare commodity, and it takes time and patience and a willingness to fail to develop it. A lot of people simply do not have the time and patience. Right off the bat, for any given type of game, there’s going to be a lot of folks who simply will not get in the door because of the skill threshold demanded.
This gets worse when you’re dealing with a multi-player scenario. Picture a group of six people in a multiplayer game. One of them is 10% better than the others. He therefore wins. His win record is now 1-0, and everyone else’s is 0-1. He’ll continue to win most of the time — though not all — and his win-loss record will be tilted towards the wins side — say, 8-2. But most people in the group will have 0-10 records, and a couple might have 1-9. A small margin of skill is enough to make a cumulative record look devastating. In competitive arenas like this, most people lose most of the time.
I’ve described this before as “the average user is below average” — meaning, the median user lies below the mean on the win-loss curve, because the win-loss curve turns out to be a power-law distribution. And what happens to people whose average experience is humiliation, frustration, and defeat? Well, they quit.
For all the publicity noise around pro gaming and the like, the fact is that there’s a reason why most multiplayer games include a single-player campaign, and why most users never play multiplayer and when they do they mstly play on LANs or with friends only, and not in the wider Internet.
Experiential games feel directionless to a lot of people. The lack of goals they generally imply leaves many users feeling aimless and frustrated. They know there’s good stuff out there, but they don’t know how to get to it. The people who enjoy these sorts of games are the ones who are capable of developing intrinsic motivations to perform the actions the game permits. But games are by and large built on offering up feedback, and the commonest form of feedback is an extrinsic reward.
Since games are models, and specifically they are models that teach patterns, the type of extrinsic reward most commonly offered up is a new tool for understanding the model. It’s a new ability, a new stick with which to poke the beehive. In a Mario game, you learn to jump, and then when you do, you discover that you can bop out stars. The stars are an extrinsic reward. Then you find you can bop some blocks repeatedly, and get stuff that changes your size, which opens a new means of interaction. You find you can land on things, kick things, and so on. Each successfully completed task opens up a new way to interact with the model.
An experiential game may have this to some degree — a good experiential game certainly will — but without a challenge presented by the model, it’s hard to get on this path. Unless Mario gave you enemies to land on, or blocks to bop, you might never know. Without the impetus to get to the other side that the game offers via the goal of rescuing the princess, you have little motivation to move in one direction versus another, or to defeat the enemies.
Treadmills exist because they address these issues to some degree. They are a hypertrophied version of basic incentives. The reasons why people hate them are also their strength:
- Anyone can climb the ladder. This makes for an accessible experience
- You always know what to do next, which also makes for greater accessibility.
The flip side is that they are frequently designed in such a way that they do not present variegated challenges nor truly new ways to interact with the model. This is why players get so annoyed at “Fireball VI”: that’s not a new stick to poke the beehive with, it’s just a bigger stick with exactly the same properties and responses. It doesn’t keep the user learning. Where the learning stops, the fun does.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a treadmill-style design with varied challenges or with new abilities unlocking. It’s just more work to make it happen. But it can be done. None of these game styles are inherently bad — there are just degrees of implementation.
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