This article doesn’t make sense but I believe that if you have the patience to read through it you could discover, or at least focus better, some core elements of game design (sorry for the amount of text but I’d still be interested in feedback).

This is an article that I started to write with a few points to follow on my mind. Through progressive and direct simplifications I try to reconstruct World of Warcraft success from the perspective of game design and the theory of fun of Raph Koster. The “mistake” is that while writing all that I finished with completely different conclusions. So this is a comment about the article. I began comparing MMORPGs to ‘hot chicks’ and it’s where I did the mistake. An hot chick is a monolithic goal, it comes all together. The basic difference with WoW is that this game is fragmented into an infinite amount of mini-goals. It’s pulverized.

While I started to focus on the “lack of challenge”, I discovered, going on, that WoW doesn’t need any form of it. Because what matters for the game isn’t the depth or scope of a single goal. It’s not important the challenge factor of it. What is important is the sheer number. So we have a game shattered in an infinite amount of mini-steps where each is just slightly dispalced. None of these goals is out of reach, so none delivers frustration. It’s accessible. At the same time the pulverization allows the game to be vary, so with the ability to renew itself through what is the classic grind but perceived in a completely different way.

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MMORPGs are like HOT CHICKS! (or not)

The topic isn’t really a banalization, it’s simply true. Everyone knows, without me explaining, that a girl that doesn’t show interest for you may become way more attractive and appealing than a girl that is after you and it’s all over you all the time (well, maybe I shouldn’t write this when the possible readers are all geeks…). The reasons behind these behaviours aren’t complex, it’s about a ‘desire’. A desire, by definition, is something we do not have already. This is why we look a magazine with an hot chick, or dream about an expensive car, or like super heroes who can fly and blow things up. We desire what is there, but slightly away from the range of our actions. At the same time the object of the desire loses this quality when it comes too near. When it’s within the range of what’s already available, the object of the desire isn’t anymore so. It vanishes. The desire is fulfilled. Not so interesting anymore because we can desire only what isn’t already where we are. So it’s about a space. A displacement.

MahrinSkel:
For the first time we have a definition of “fun” that is useful in an engineering sense. We can use it to direct our planning and evaluate our results, we can agree on methodologies for achieving and measuring it, and so on. I’m just saying it can’t be complete, because there are forms of fun that it can’t account for.

But it may point the way towards others, for example what he describes is ultimately an argument that the feeling we describe as “fun” is our brain’s way of rewarding itself for figuring something out.

The ‘jump’ I want to do is to tie what I said here again with the argument of Raph’s book. “The theory of fun”. The basic point where I completely agreed is that the pivot of the whole dynamic is “learning”. Learning is the core of everything. Learning is about a movement, it’s again a displacement, it’s an history. You were here before, now (and hopefully for the future) you are there and you’ll move again further. To describe all this I often imagine a man and an area. The man is at the center of this area but the area isn’t absolutely uniform. This area, from the center to its limits, is the space of possibilities of that person. The things that are “easy to do” are those near the center. They are at “arm’s range”, they are trivial, they aren’t compelling and lasting desires. As we move away from the center the difficulty increases, each new point will require an hard work, a commitment.

I believe that men are lazy. This is why the evolution needed a tool to push the men to do something, or they’d sit on their asses all the time. No really. This is a principle. The desire is simply a reward that makes the brain work. So it’s the fun. It’s the carrot on a stick. The carrot is there so that it keeps us moving to reach those points in our space of possibilities that are far away. The “Theory of Fun” of Raph plugs in here. I believe that something, to be fun, must be within the space of possibilities. The best fun possible is about something that IS possible. The best reward, for us, is to achieve those type of “conquests” that are near the border of our space of possibilities. It must be *hard*, but at the same time it shouldn’t move outside that space, or it becomes frustrating because we see it too far away (the perception of impossibility is equal to frustration, see the disclaimer of my site). The challenge of a game designer isn’t easy because peoples aren’t all the same. Something hard for me can be extremely easy for someone else and this is one simple reason why it’s hard to balance correctly the games. Even in the best case you need a ‘target’ that you assume as your audience. One of the reasons why the “marketing” isn’t completely to wipe as an element in the development of the game. The target defines the game because the target is the model on which you’ll calibrate the fun.

Now I link all this to discuss World of Warcraft again. This game lets you play it. It lets you love it and it doesn’t stab you whenever you do a slight mistake. Many have stated how easy is powerlevelling and I also directly attacked the trivialization of the content in the instances. Is it too hard? You can still call an higher level player and do it easy. This type of approach permeates the game. I already stated that this is directly a renounce. A renounce of challenge. If you set an objective without any form of rules, the challenge doesn’t exist. Because it’s a choice. You have to choose to enter an instance and NOT group a player high enough to do it easy. If you want the challenge you’ll have to deliberately group with lower levels characters and refuse to group someone a few levels higher. But this breaks the model because the challenge is by definition something you CANNOT choose. When you choose it you have control on it and when you have control on it you lose the property of a challenge because it is, again by definition, something that doesn’t depend on your direct choice.

So, again, words have precise meanings and “challenge” has the trait of “not a choice”. This trait becomes often a “rule”. By definition a rule is an imposition, something that comes before and you have to respect. In this case the rule is “not a choice”, so it’s about a rule NOT set by you. Where this leads? It’s simple. Challenge, in a game, is an imposed situation, within strict rules, that the players have to “solve”. They have tools and they have to use those tools to win. The more a developer has control on the situation, the more the difficulty can be calibrated. So the result is more or less fun as per above.

My conclusion is that WoW breaks many basic rules. The ease of powerlevelling and the lack of any form of restriction in the game makes the challenge a choice, so bland. It’s not how you do something, it’s that you do it “nonetheless”. The challenge in WoW is never an obligated path, it’s just a distance to cover, from here to here, from “x” experience and loot to “y” experience and loot. One-way, without returns (loosing progression is worst than frustration because not only it’s hard to learn, but you can also “forget”). The ease of the game made it insanely successful because what was before out of the space of possibilities of many players, now is within (like the ease of solo). But on the long term WoW is the type of woman that always please you, always says yes. It’s there for you, giving what you desire all the time. It’s easy. It’s at arm’s range. It becomes something you have already. Eventually.

It vanishes as a desire. This comment I’m writing is the result of the complaints about the endgame in WoW. What is a MMORPG in its true nature? A game where the players pay monthly. -> What’s the real purpose of a MMORPG? Keep the players in, so they keep paying on the long term. -> What’s the easiest way to keep them doing so? Take the gameplay of a single player game and stretch it so it will take a lot of time to finish -> a timesink.

Obviously I do not believe AT ALL that this is the only possibility but what I’m saying is that WoW is no different. We imagined it was but the endgame will reveal that Blizzard is still using a broken model. What happens when you are level 60 in a game world where the challenge is a choice and where the desires are always possible or accessible, eventually? That you need a type of gameplay where you HAVE to offer a real fun. The real fun is a real learning process and a learning process means a type of content that is always vary, always interesting on completely new premises. This is equal to -> an insane amount of work to pile up, reinvent and shape up the same standard mechanics of combat and encounters. The system cannibalizes itself because it devours the illusion of the timesink. There isn’t anymore an artificial boundary that prevents us to reach the next point. So WoW is more fun than a grind, a step forward. But to keep being fun in the long term it needs to avoid repetition and the repetition by recycling the same type of content is impossible, again by definition.

How many types of encounters based on the same mechanic they can possibly invent? How many different items they can push into the world? How many baits? This is where we finish at the end game. The 60 levels are indeed filled with fun content, at least if you tackle it at a right pace without an indigestion. At level 60, though, you’ll face what was pushed forward till that point: the lack of challenge. It has already been stated everywhere that all you do at level 60 is about hunting down that particular phat leet that drops in 0.1% of the cases. Guess what? Repetition. You’ll return here again, doing the same stuff a billion of times. Just to get the new carrot, again repeating the same mechanics.

The revelation is that they overstretched a model that didn’t fit in the beginning. It’s the best MMORPG to date but still founded on the same wrong premise done better. They just engulfed an insane amount of players that were out of the genre by tweaking the premises and following a plan that made sense. They made the game a possibility for those players that couldn’t play (hardware requirements to begin with). With a challenge based on achievement more than gameplay, but achievement that looks diverse through a well-thought quest system. There are so many steps, all these steps are accessible and vary. So fun. There are always more to achieve.

But the end? The end is a wall or an infinity. They are assimilable. It doesn’t directly matter. The point is that they didn’t solve the problem. A MMORPG is still an overstretched game. A game with an insane amount of content but still a game based on the same premises. A fat game but not a different game. The cliche’ returns in the end game. You’ll start to repeat stuff, you’ll see insane drop rates. Now they can rise the level cap, add tons of stuff to do but it will be again about overworking and overstretching. The game will become more and more fat and all the challenges will become less and less diverse. And back at EverQuest. Gaps between the players in a game with 100+ levels with better mechanics, better graphic, better atmosphere and all the rest, but still EverQuest.

So. Can a MMORPG really become a MMORPG? A genre with a specific quality that isn’t just about being fat? Offering a type of depth that isn’t about a timesink, a repetition or an infinite ProgressQuest? A real challenge? WoW is again a game that offers you all it has. It pleases you, it doesn’t trick you artificially away from the baits with the timesinks. So it’s more accessible because the desires within the game are always possible, more fun as a consequence of this and, so, more successful. But despite it does a step forward in the performance, it still does nothing to solve the “riddle”.

Or maybe there’s no riddle to solve. Blizzard found the perfect recipe through a pulverization of goals, all possible for everyone. The game sucks you in with just the pretence of leeching money for as long as possible. From as many peoples as possible.