As an observer in this industry my duty is to analyze what happens from a personal point of view, that is equal to my sensibility and limited knowledge, and underline the tendencies. So that I’m able to anticipate if something is supposed to go in a good or wrong direction. This is the direct reason why I often play to foresee the future and predict how things will go. Peoples usually mock me (rightfully) at this point. In most of the cases what I repeat is glaring obvious as predicting that the sun will rise the next day. Now the point is that I’m still an observer, till the game companies will keep doing obvious mistakes I’ll have to keep predicting the obvious.

The fact that “the servers will crash” isn’t obvious till I won’t see the problems addressed at best. So I’ll keep underline it. How am I supposed to know what is “at best”? It’s simple. In the case of World of Warcraft I preached since August that their choice to divide the servers by timezones would make the overcrowding problems more serious. This problem isn’t trivial as it seems, there are a large number of implications. What was the result? The result was that what I predicted was ignored till Blizzard got swamped in the problem and had to start to suggest the players to log in servers that do not correspond to their timezone and relative peak times, disrupting directly their plan and even a few important design implications, like the 24h clock, GM support and scheduled downtimes. A couple of weeks later they released an emergency patch to remove from the UI the timezones.

Again, it was obvious. Again, it was ignored. Now let’s move on. The game is now released and we hit another prediction I made. Blizzard is not correctly prepared to sustain the scope of this project. They somewhat admitted it and I don’t have the knowledge to judge if what they are doing is the best possible or if they are committing errors in the process. But I can still observe the game and understand what it needs. The direction that will help it to improve and not just decline as all mmorpgs are supposed to with the passing of time.

Maybe, they aren’t committed enough to this game. Maybe they are moving the focus on other projects, leaving only a small, not adequate, team on this one. The reasons and the choices depend on elements that I don’t know and I cannot control so the best I can do is to point out a doubt and the reasons of this doubt. And I move forward of another step.

This another step is about a “direction”. The game needs work. As I often state the release is just the beginning for a mmorpg, the real development and challenge (with yourself, not with the competition) start now. But what is the best direction to move to? What will damage the game? What will improve it? These are the topics of this new step. Peoples everywhere claim for “content” but this path isn’t that obvious. I believe that one of the worst things that may happen to World of Warcraft is a rise of the level cap. If everyone reaches level 60 and starts to whine because they reached an endgame that sounds like a “game over”, the most direct solution is to push forward the finishing line. Let’s move the cap to level 70 or more.

This is a common process that can be assimilated to the concept of “mudflation”. The keypoint here is that the term defines in particular those games that are generally considered “content-intensive”, EverQuest for example. You aren’t supposed to complain about the lack of content in a world like EverQuest but the fact is that, concretely, the lack of content is its main problem. And here I said once again an heresy. The reason comes exactly from the meaning of the world “mudflation”. Its meaning is about an “erosion” of content. The mudflation is an active process *on the content*. It means that the elements in a game are replaced and made obsolete by something new. It’s true that *apparently* there’s load of content, but this content is actively eroded and forgotten.

Why does this process exist? Because it’s a recursive process. You cannot stretch too much the treadmills or you shatter the community. If the whole development is about adding terrain for the treadmill, it will become increasing hard for the new players to join the game and integrate themselves. The space between the first levels and the last increases exponentially representing an unending ladder to climb just so that you are supposed to join your friends and their activities. These treadmills are barriers between the players. They do not work by definition because they break the accessibility and uncover the true, emptied nature of the model. The mudflation is a process that exists to solve this situation. The mudflation is a positive “antibody” developed directly by the game itself to survive. It’s the only way for the game to remain cohesive, to not finish fragmented into too many pieces.

So there are two elements to consider here. The first is that the mudflation is a direct, positive consequence to fight back a process that was started “outside”. It’s an auto-defence of the game. It’s “wrong” only because it is reacting to a damage from the outside. The players still need a communal ground where to meet. Communal goals to achieve. Too much content would actively shatter this. Spreading all the players everywhere without them joining to reach their objectives. This would produce a dispersion, a desert. The mudflation is the consequence of a *problem*. This is the second point to consider. The problem is elsewhere, in a broken model of development. To excuse this development only new goals to achieve are added. These goals, to be considered worthy, need to become bigger rewards. The development model here is the one of a stain. The original release of a game is the center, then the developers keep adding stuff (areas, monsters, items) around it, like a stain that is slowly enlarging.

The mudflation is an antibody to this model. It’s an attempt to keep everything together. The erosion of content is needed to sustain the expansion. An expansion that isn’t mirrored by the expansion of a server. The players become just drifting ships on this stain. The more the time passes the more the ships will crowd the borders of the stain (the end-levels). As new content is released the stain will expand again and the ships blocked on the border will drift once again till the new border. This while the center is exsiccating. Noone looks the center anymore. Even if the center is the game. The center is the heart and, still, it’s ignored because all the ships are on the border, not anymore in the center.

Soon this heart will die but noone can see this because there are still the boys surfing on the borders. Where the game seems still full of life. The mudflation is a desperate attempt to counterattack this unexcused expansion process. To keep its heart alive this growing stain tries to cut away what it can. The less important parts are abandoned so that the life sources can still be focused elsewhere and sustain the unending, pointless and foolish enlargement.

At the end the moral is that this cannot be an optimal process. There must be something better. The games modeled on a stain give only the illusion of content because the truth is that they are kept alive thanks to the mudflation. The truth is that the erosion, so the loss of content, is the reason why they still survive. This rings a bell? How it is possible that an old game can only survive through a loss of content when that content is supposed to be its main strength? How it’s possible that this loss underlines a quality (and probably the only one it has)?

Those are the questions that is useful to answer. If they will remain unanswered the unacceptable and inexplicable destiny of these games will remain the same: die of age.

It’s always rather hard for me to understand Jeff Freeman’s point of view. I can understand what he writes but I find hard to decide if he’s being sarcastic or if he actually thinks what he writes. In the case of The top-five MMOs of all time he was sarcastic, or better, he believed in what he wrote but he didn’t actually like it.

Now the blogosphere thingie started again because of Dave Rickey. But it was already in the air. One of those arguments that keeps returning to haunt your nightmares, at least till you decide to solve it completely and exorcize it. Now, maybe, I’ll try to tackle this argument to at least define my point of view so that I can have a more solid stance in the future, when the issue will be brought up again.

Reading what Jeff wrote I believe the focus is at the start and the end:

The US Army is fighting back against payday loans, by offering payday loans.

[..]

Performing the services of delivering items, information and secure transactions to players (without damaging gameplay) is only something the developers – not third party operations – can do.

These services need to be integrated into the total package. These services need to be part of the service that we’re operating, if we want to deliver the entire service that the players are demanding.

So I believe there are two basic concepts (and again, if I explain in broken english what others wrote in a clearer way is just to help *myself* to focus the arguments, not to teach to others). The first is that it’s ridiculous to fight fire with fire, the second is that (if something needs to be done) it’s the direct responsibility of the game company to find a solution, without encouraging or supporting a third-party effort.

The discussion is rather complex. There are many elements included, for example this point of view can (and should) be extended to things like Cosmos (the UI mod for WoW) and Thottbot. Both are examples of third-party involvement that goes to satisfy a large “demand” coming from the players. I can develop this line of thoughs saying that WoW *already* improved the game by including in its design what was previously confined to external sites. So while you *have* to use a spoiler site to get a quest done in DAoC, in WoW (in general) you have more informations to understand what the task requires you to do. Not only, in general you also know what will be the reward, the difficulty of the task and a rather precise approximation of where you have to go to accomplish it. And beware, these are basic design elements that made WoW largely successful, they aren’t tiny or irrelevant.

Now, because I already named Dave Rickey, I’ll also say that this is *exactly* what he stated not long ago in a discussion about Thottbot:

Frankly, examining it makes me wonder why we didn’t have that level of data-gathering. Like most “benign” third-party tools, it points out a design shortcoming.

What he says backups the point I explained above. These third party tools identify a demand coming from the players and they “anticipate” the design implications that will follow. This because the actual development always lags behind. There aren’t many developers that know exactly what is going on in their games and they fail too often to see basic design mistakes, possibility spaces about improvements and all the rest. Till it doesn’t become GLARING. See all the recent thievery of basic ideas and Ubiq’s excuse about it:

Why did it take so long to do it? I posit that most revolutionary ideas seem easy and straightforward in retrospect. Before WoW, most people didn’t see quests as being all that important because… well, in the games in the past, they’re not. It took the revolutionary (and obvious in retrospect) idea that the quests needed to be front and center, rather than an afterthought.

Now, without derailing too much, it’s obvious that there are many “fronts” to consider about this problem. There’s a legitimate demand from the players, there are the design implications as a consequence and then there are all the problems about third-party operations that capitalize the need by taking advantage of a weak point of these games. Now what Dave says is that the industry should stop to fight against this latter point:

At the bottom of this is the fact that the “secondary market” exists, and it isn’t going to go away. And it’s not going to ruin the games, although it does create some very real problems when farmers and players are competing for the same stuff. Like I’ve been saying for years, we’re going to have to find a way to make peace with the item, gold and account trading.

But you CANNOT. And all the reasons are already there in what he states: “it does create some very real problems when farmers and players are competing for the same stuff”. The competition in general is what makes these games “multiplayer”. It’s all about competition and I want to underline for the billionth time that the proper etymology of “competition” is: “Going together toward something”. It’s not directly “me vs you”, it can be also a collaboration. Now all the non-single player games are about a competition and you cannot trivialize this concept. Foton was already over this point when he demanded his paycheck (follow the link because he goes straight to the point). The “equality”, the BASIC principle on which these games are *founded*, goes in the cesspit.

Let’s say that Mythic decides to sell directly the epic armors for an accessible price, like 10$ or so. What will happen? I don’t know how many guilds will accept to help a player with that horrible and upsetting line of quests. “Just pay the 10$ for god’s sake. No, we aren’t going to help you and loose all that time just for that.” If you directly plug in the game mechanics the real money you break the engine. Who will organize and join a raid on the bugged Molten Core to try desperately to kill and loot Onyxia when you can obtain the same result with a few bucks while sparing a lot of time? Once the money becomes gameplay it cannot exit again. How many players will be left to play the game “properly”? They will become quickly a minority, the gameplay not only will marginalize their presence, making them quit because they cannot find anymore peoples to group with, but it will also ruin directly the experience of those that gladly pay to not play. At the end they’ll cheat themselves out of the fun and the game will look just empty. Or, better, emptied.

About a year ago I was on the same position of Dave about this argument but Lum explained me (in a lost PM) that the “equality” *is* a basic element. Once you are in the game we are supposed to be all equal. WoW is largely successful (as already explained) because it is accessible. When you introduce pay-per-use gameplay elements (or when you tolerate them by not enforcing your policies) the players are not anymore equal, the difference becomes how rich you are in real life. You can afford to participate in the competition only if you have the money. The competition itself, the gameplay itself, become about who can afford to pay more. It’s not a case if already in the past another hot topic is about casual vs time intensive crowds. Because even the “time” is considered borderline as “interesting gameplay” (and, again, accessibility). And if we want to be completely honest about what Dave says:

We sell characters, we sell “special services” like character transfers that cost us nothing, we sell access to our betas, we would sell you the trash from our bathrooms if we thought anyone would buy it.

This is already true. “Expansions” for mmorpgs are already a line breaking the “equality”. If you want again to participate you have to shed out another 29$. Want this new shiney? 29$ or you’re out. Even the high system requirements for EQ2 are another line to cross that disrupts the accessibility and the “equality”. Even in the FPS genre the equality is broken when the gameplay relies too much on how many frames per second your hardware is able to grind. Again the direct reason why the first Counterstrike is still super-popular. If you play “chess” it doesn’t matter if the pieces are made of precious ivory or paper. The competition HAS a value. The competition is ALL. If we remove it we have nothing. Even a world like WoW that so much negates the importance of a strong community still relies completely on a competition and even Diablo was again about a competition.

It’s not a case if one of the examples brought by Dave *underlines* this point. The “bonus items” that are often tied to the collector editions of games are ALWAYS non-competitive tools. It’s graphic fluff exactly to avoid to affect and invade the other mechanic where the real money becomes a gameplay factor. This cannot happen. Going back to what Foton says, it’s obvious that another approach cannot work. What if I’m trying to organize a big raid with my guild so that I’m able to win that powerful item? Nothing? What if three days later my guildies find out that the powerful item is being sold for real money on eBay?

You CANNOT make peace with this secondary market because the playerbase is already borderline. The companies that are directly against this like Mythic, SOE, Blizzard and Squaresoft already have serious issues because the players demand a reaction, not just words. Again it’s not a case that reports of hacks produce loud fights in the message boards when the players don’t see STRONG reactions from the game companies to prevent them. Guess what? It’s again because there IS a competition. It’s someone running faster in a PvP environment as much as someone discovering a “god mode” switch in PvE (and it’s not a case if so many players legitimate attack Mythic because of their support to the buffbots). If one of those companies will now say “ok, we will stop taking actions against who uses exploits or hacks” or “ok, wo do not support the secondary market but we won’t pursue it” you’ll get a REVOLT.

So another path isn’t possible? The answer is “yes”. For the same reason of what I wrote here above about the expansions. Why they are tolerated by the players if they effectively are bags of improvements with a real money labels? Because they aren’t just that. Those bag of improvements that you pay for aren’t just that. They are attached to the gameplay. They are creative systems, there’s a game that you play. There’s an experience. If we broaden this point of view we will be able to include realities like “Second Life”. This game works because the real money is always tied to an act of creativity. It’s not competition based on false laws, it’s creative competition before everything else.

Now I’m tired and I want to conclude. There’s a definite line between these games and real life elements. You cannot allow the secondary market to cross it, nor you can integrate that secondary market in your game without creating something *specifically* aimed to that, like Second Life. This is why Blizzard tried to address the problem in the best way that, for now, is a compromise. Trading is limited, not all is translated into a shareable value. Quest rewards cannot be traded and this allow the main structure of the game to remain unaffected. The accessibility of the game isn’t hindered even if the problem isn’t completely solved.

My point of view is still near of what I wrote in a comment to what Lum wrote (linked above):

I still believe that most of what is being sold (money, phat leet) isn’t fun to play. The game should focus to offer something more involving that leet power, greed and narcissism (as mechanics).

I believe there are better solution to solve gradually the problem strictly from the design point of view. For example you cannot buy the cooperation of peoples and you cannot buy reputation in a community. Again this should be the focus of these games in a similar way to what Ubiq always repeat. We play along with others, we need the world to gain new depths and better mechanics that aren’t again just a threadmill of power or personal achievement. These games need, again, *cooperation*. Healthy competition. Large scale PvP scenarios with more tactics and, maybe, more immediate and intuitive gameplay but not just time-intensive or money-intensive power-ups.

The solution is about thinking out of the box. Discover that these games can be much more without chasing desperately overused mistakes. Without seconding them. There’s a lot to do in the game design to minimize the relevance of the problem of the secondary market.

“They say that in a gold rush the only ones that really make the money are those that make shovels”

Yes, “they” made shovels exploiting holes and deficiencies in the design. The design shouldn’t now second that wrong tendence. It should learn about it and correct its behaviour. Addressing the problems and advancing.

Edit: Ubiq also commented and even shifted the focus to what really matters and is only drowned in the sea of words I wrote.

Recently on Corpnews I criticized the way Mythic was defining its latest expansion (Catacombs), not because they shouldn’t pimp their product in the best way, but because of the design approach behind it. This continued when Lum wrote on a comment on Sunsword’s blog that it is easy to build a new graphic engine for a game and deliver an up to date experience:

Lum:
It’s actually fairly easy, as such things go, to deliver a new client engine for an existing MMO. Here’s an example from a certain other game. After all, the server is pretty agnostic about who’s talking to it.

Well, this is exactly the point where I have a different opinion. This is again the point of the discussion between Lum and Haemish (on F13) where Hameish didn’t accept to put on the same level graphical and textual games. And it’s Haemish to be right again. This isn’t a matter of a simple preference, looking at the graphic as a simple form representing something that works below (the game systems, interactions etc..) is extremely superficial. Superficial is both comparing a graphical world to a textual world and superficial is again considering DAoC’s expansion able to mantain the game up to date with the competition (as they stated: a new graphics engine that puts the game right up there or ahead of anything else on the market). The point is that in the case of graphic versus text we deal with completely different mediums. I’m sure that if we shift this argument to something more near to the standard culture everyone will understand my point: are we able to compare directly a program on the radio to a program on TV or a movie in a cinema?

The relationship between the radio and the TV isn’t different from the one between text and graphical games. I’m not directly pointing to the structural differences but I’m pointing to how the products are conceived and developed. We deal with different mediums and each is a new space to discover with its own rules and possibilities. If we think to the text and graphic as “interfaces” we’ll see that their possibilities are completely different. So it’s not a discussion about the content, but how the content is built to take advantage of the medium that we are going to use. I’m sure that everyone is able to understand that the medium we choose will make the difference. How we tell the story, the feelings we want to trigger, the elements that we focus about… Everything changes in the plan and development of a product that is going to fit in a medium. Now the “story” we want to tell may be the same but how we tell the story is completely different. We cannot simply “translate”. Something working effectively on a medium may be completely wrong for another, and again even if the “message” may still be the same.

To go back to the simplicity: the graphic part of a mmorpg isn’t an interface like any other that we can swap at any time with a better one or even transform it into a textual one. I know that this stuff is all “virtual” but it isn’t *that* virtual. There’s still a strong relevance between “content” and “container”. The container is built to be effective for that content and the content to fit the container. These relationships are strong and important, these relationships are the difference between something solid, with a value and something badly planned, out of place and not effective. The graphic is the game. I criticize how Mythic pimped Catacombs because it isn’t a graphic evolution, it is only a “lifting”. They stretched something with an identity (age) to make it seem up to date. But it is only if we really consider the graphic aspect as something superficial. And this is simply false.

In this case the face determines the identity. Because what’s on the face goes then below, it affects elements that aren’t just on the surface. “Graphic” isn’t just an image. It is a way to interact. It changes completely the perception of the world, even if the world is the same.

Now all this simply to express a desire of “what I’d like to see in the future”. My point is that till now the mmorpgs are really just a textual, virtual game plus a graphic interface. The strong potential that is in this medium is only partially tapped. We use the graphic to induce wonder and we are starting to use the graphic to create identity when we are able to build an avatar that looks really unique. Part of the success of games like SWG and CoH is exactly because of how much important is perceived the character creation. It is so important because it’s one rare occasion where we are tapping that potential exclusive of a graphical medium. We give some relevance to the body and its importance for us.

So how can we go deeper? How can we pull out the qualities specific of this medium and genre? From my point of view it’s about the interaction with the environment (linked here to another entry I wrote stating a similar point). Fun that I seem to agree with Richard Garriott (see when he talks about the use of physics). My idea is that here we have something in common that goes beyond a “genre”. What I’m saying is useful for different types of games where the focus is the immersion. It may work for Half-Life in the same way it may work for DAoC. The key is the interaction with the environment. The deeper the better (with an eye to the possible exploit in multiplayer games).

Without making things too complex, what I’d like to see can be applied even to the “simple” PvE. Till now we have seen monsters with linear behaviours. We see them changing shape and their statistics but they are all built generically, mostly because of the tight development time that this genres requires to deliver “too much content” (while the solution is to offer “better managed and planned content”. Read as: more efficient). On the other side we dream about artificial intelligence. I think that not only we don’t need to go there (because the AI adds zero to online games, but I won’t focus on this topic now), but there are better and more efficient compromises that I see as viable in the near future and that will also show a potential that is way greater than expected. And this is again about the interaction with the environment.

Recently, playing with Doom 3 I noticed how the monsters are able to path through a whole level to reach me and it seemed already a work well done. But I couldn’t avoid to notice how this “3D space” is still considered as complex as a “maze”. Rooms and corrodors. With the time we moved from the two dimensional maps rendered in 3D of Doom 1 and 2 to the real 3D engine of Quake and sequels but the logic of these spaces is still the same of a maze. So I was playing Doom 3 and an imp jumped at me from behind a dark corridor. I started to flee to gain some space till I was able to reach a “terrace”. There was another corridor below the one where I was and only a banister in between. So I jumped the banister and landed on the lower level. Here’s the key of what I’m saying: the imp could just start to pathfind me through the whole level because its logic based on the “maze” couldn’t conceive the “jump” I did between the two, supposedly unconnected, zones.

This is why I say we need more interaction with the space. The perception of the space is exactly one of those specific possibilities of a graphical medium that we are currently understimating/not considering enough. And this is one of the key to push the genre a bit forward on a real evolution. An evolution that isn’t just about “dressing” an avatar with a more detailed texture. It’s again about considering the graphic for what it is: an interface. And go to deliver the FULL POTENTIAL of that precise interface: something that a textual MUD will NEVER be able to do, and exactly the reason why Haemish doesn’t accept to “go back” at a MUD pretending to play the same type of thing and put it on the same level of a graphical game.

So I’m now wondering: when we will be able to see games offering some consistency to the graphical bodies? When I’ll see a monster pushing me back (so an *action* affecting me, not just swinging an immaterial sword) so that I go knock on a rock that was behind me and get hurt in the impact? When we’ll see monsters aware of the structure of the space, about the objects, about the z-dimension? When we’ll see a monster jumping in a room, clutching something on the ceiling and then rise itself to go inside an air duct that couldn’t be entered in another way? When we’ll see the monsters starting to cooperate, taking cover behind objects, hiding themselves to stalk players (as opposed to “fade in/out” in the middle of a desert) or blocking a player from behind while another monsters stabs it from the front?

Those are examples to give some “solidity” to the space. Both the personal space (the body) and what’s around you (the environment). I think it’s time to move further and forget players and mosters casting/shoting freely through the terrain or trees or other objects. I want the space to have a consistency, to become a gameplay element. I want the games to develop more the verticality and move away from the “maze” model that in mmorpgs is often translated as a “pretty” open space with no real (specific to space) quality.

Again as applied to the graphic/text paradigm: the “space” isn’t just a “void”. The space is a perception. It’s one of our strongest needs and if games want to be successful they need to give it some depth and relevance instead of making it more and more virtual and inconsistent. We need consistency. We need the perception of the touch. As opposed to games that continue to be immaterial, blurring the space, making avatars sit outside chairs, walking through tables and crates, walking at the same speed on a road and while climbing a mountain, shoothing through bulidings, trees and hills, jumping off mountains, sitting happily on a fireplace without getting hurt, keeping jumping in circles for hours without feeling dizzy and so on…

(about the last example: if i’ll even work for a mmorpg -in this or another life- that’s the first thing I’ll implement, I swear)

Both Jeff Freeman and Damion Schubert are discussing death penalties in massive online games. Observing the trend and commenting. The focus is about these penalities becoming less relevant, becoming lightened-up.

Jeff’s conclusion is:

Note that these are very different things than “Make death something players want to avoid”. Players don’t want to die anyway. In considering what should happen when a player dies, that is not a consideration in my mind. Or at least not a top one. We already want to avoid death, just eliminate any benefit that would result in us suiciding in spite of the fact that we don’t want to die.

That is enough for the game to work, but not so much that only the hard-core will play it.

Damion’s conclusion is:

We need to figure out how to get players to be willing and happy to take more risks, because risky play is what gets the adrenaline going, and is by extension more interesting and engaging gameplay. This means that designers will continue to monkey with death mechanisms far in the future.

In particular I agree with everything Damion wrote before this ending line. Because instead I strongly disagree with his conclusion.

I explained all this in an analysis I wrote in April.

I follow exactly the same line of thoughts but my conclusion is different. Right now Warcraft does exactly what Damion wants (go check my analysis): take risks, push the experience further, try new things, explore etc… Exactly because the game doesn’t try to punish you constantly as you *dare*. What is obsolete is the risk/reward mechanic used as the ONLY core of a mmorpg. Everything in this genre is designed after this model and I’m NOT saying that the balance isn’t optimized, I’m saying that the model itself is obsolete.

I proposed months ago a way to tweak the death penalty in WoW, trying to incentivate the group survival. Instead of adding an XP loss I proposed to build a bonus. The more you kill monsters without dying, the more you accumulate a % bonus on the exp you gain. Till a max of 20%. If you die the bonus goes to 0. In a group this mechanic is based on the survival. If 51% of the group survives the encounter the bonus goes up. It goes to zero if 50% of more of the group is killed.

This makes the death less trivial. Originally I imagined the system to encourage the PvP. Based on DAoC’s realm points. The problem was the continue run of players in a battle, over and over, giving zero importance to a possible death (well explained by Jeff as the “death penalty objective one”, go read). What Mythic did? They added two stacking res sickness, preventing this dumb combat style by adding a timesink. So you cannot play anymore if you died. The result is that the death has now a meaning and the survival is encouraged because you don’t want to sit down and wait. But this is stupid, because to give a meaning to a part of the game they made it extremely unfun and annoying. It’s obviously not smooth design already in the premise and, as a side effect, it’s extremely hard to understand. Penalties and sub-penalties. With exceptions and different timers with each a different mechanic. A design mess.

There are better ways to give a meaning to a system without punishing the player? Yes. My solution is simple even for a child: instead of punishing you can work on “positive bonuses”. Someone a bit more clever will say that the gap between a bonus and the absence of a bonus is exactly the same concept of “penalty” but I do not agree. The core system where is the reason why WoW is “different” is that the penalty isn’t “faked” directly as a bonus. Instead the penalty is never *negative*. That’s the point. In a progess-driven game you aren’t loosing that progress in ANY way. You CANNOT loose experience, you CANNOT loose your items. What you can do is advance more or less slowly. This is the real difference between a “positive penalty” and one that is negative.

DAoC’s RvR is another system that I can define successful. I hope we can agree here. Why? Because it’s again a progress-driven game where the penalty is ONLY positive. You CANNOT loose your realm points. But you can loose a battle, you can loose a keep, you can loose a relic and so on. You can see the point? The “winning” direction is about shifting the focus from the mechanic itself to THE GAME. The penalty should be about A PURPOSE. Instead of punishing the players because they try, the game should offer them reasons to fight, goal to accomplish. OUTSIDE the limit of their single characters.

The point is that in a mmorpg a death already doesn’t exist. Giving a meaning to it is just another way to break the game itself. The market already demonstrated that positive penalties are way more successful than risk/reward mechanics. Risk/reward pivots around frustration. A game based on the frustration isn’t a good game. It isn’t fun, it isn’t compelling and it isn’t deep. It’s a game with a workaround for an unsolved problem. So we need to solve the problem and make the game pivot on stronger and more valid elements.

There’s also another side of the truth. What’s the gameplay offered? Games like Everquest or DAoC (pertinent to PvE) simply offer a repetitive gameplay often seen as “work”. It’s not interesting, it’s not compelling. But it does the trick because the focus is the advancement and the work is the gap which separates the different goals. The death penalty here is a tool to regulate and control the “pace”. Again following the risk/reward mechanic. In WoW there’s finally some more. There’s an experience that is more near to a single player game. We follow a story and that’s the focus. The death penalty is something completely “outside” the gameplay. What we do is already fun and involving and doesn’t need a side-system to become “excused” or valuable. This is why we can finally play and only as a consequence we also advance. The game has something to offer. The death penalty isn’t anymore an obstacle and a system clashing with another. It is coordinated with the rest of the game. The game simply wipes even the effort at reproducing a win/lose mechanic. There’s an experience and all the mechanics of the game are focused to make this experience possible and fun. It isn’t anymore a Pindaric flight about messy game mechanics desperately trying to reproduce and balance various consequences. Blizzard here simply focuses on what is meaningful and designs the game so that it goes straight toward that precise goal. Simple, logic and completely self consistent design that makes sense and doesn’t need any form of workarounds and bandaids.

My conclusion is very simple: World of Warcraft is more self-conscious of what it is. It knows (and it chose) its limits and then it focuses on what it can do right within those limits.

At this point I wrote other considerations, in particular about the PvP. This because I identify two different phases that offer something to consider and learn. There’s a third phase I won’t directly explain here but which simply follows Blizzard’s model: try to understand where the genre holds its potential and try to deliver it aiming at its heart, without fiddling around it. What’s the content of this phase? Trying to focus the attention of the players outside their character. In the PvP this means involving them in a story which is based on concrete purposes and goals. I completely agree (and disagreeing with Damion) as I explained above that we cannot use the death system to make the PvP meaningful. But we can still offer something deep. For example building up a conquest system. Where players don’t gain anymore just “realm points” to boost their skills, instead they take part into a story with concrete elements. Where they CAN win and loose. But within a concrete structure offering a hook for groups of players playing together to reach a communal goal. Finally we remove the OOC (Out Of Character) completely and we are able to involve the player through the character. Inside the game-layer. This is an healthy process that will open positive side-effects. New potential to discover and to expand and not a closure or a sperimental attitude losing pieces everywhere and in the constant need of workarounds and bandaids.

Here below I describe the first two phases. They were the beginning of this article but then I noticed that I was triggering something too complex, loosing completely the focus. So I desperately tried to reorganize everything hoping that it makes a bit more sense.

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I think we had two different phases till now. The first phase is the loved and hated Ultima Online old-style. The PvP with substantial consequences. Many think about it as a “golden age”, an experience that cannot be replicated in any other game. But what happened? Trammel/Fellucca. The designers decided to draw a line between PvP and PvE and this destroyed the “paradise”. Many at this point consider UO loosing its soul and becoming just a shade of itself. The (partial) truth is that many, many players decided to took advantage of the new mechanic and flee away from open PvP whenever possible. The truth is partial because often the possibilities that a game offers can go against the fun and the depth and still be followed by the players. Trammel is a shield, a safe-land, and everyone obviously took advantage of this new “advantage”. But the advantage also disrupted the depth that made the whole world. So the players were offered more “guarantees” and control over their own experience, but this dumbed down the experience itself. The system was based on the “unexpected”, about being at risk always, without safety nets. When they made this risk as a possibility they made it a “choice”. And the choice of a risk is something different than *being at risk*. This is obviously a strong Out Of Character (OOC) mechanic that in the first UO was present and was wiped from the second. There’s also the other half of the truth, though. It’s a fact that the players ask for those safety nets. The success of the game is strongly dependent on those nets. This is why I consider the first phase as a niche market. It involves OOC mechanics with a strong impact but it’s a reality that involves and is fun for a minority of the players. I’d say more: the strong impact is the consequence of this unbalance. The world has a majority of victims and a minority of hunters. This makes the hunters have a lot of fun, the world is their playground. Since it’s an OOC mechanic this also brings directly to griefing. The system is “broken” because the “fun” is for a “few”, at the expense of many.

Then there’s a second phase that I identify with Dark Age of Camelot. This game demontrated that PvP not only can be fun without exploiting the winners/losers dichotomy, but it can also be commercially doable and possible for *all* the players and not just by a few hardcore. This game definitely did a step in the right direction, opening a new stack of possibilities. But then it stopped. I think that if we look at the panorama from a general point of view we *cannot* say that PvP is niche and PvE is mass market. In DAoC there’s only one PvE server against 18 where there is PvP. In EverQuest is the opposite. Now In World of Warcraft the two “factions” are even, with a slight prevalence of the PvP crowd. I think it’s obvious that the debate PvP vs PvE has no sense on its own. What matters is the implementation. None is “better”, not from the quality point of view nor from the commercial possibilities. It’s the offer that shapes the market and only as a consequence it happens the opposite. So what’s the core difference between the first phase I descibed above and this one? What is different is that the PvP is available to everyone. It is fun for everyone and doesn’t pivot on the frustration of a group to reward and make happy the other. It’s less OOC. The loss is always trivial and just an incentive to retry, as fast as possible. The actual gameplay becomes the center, the consequences of a fight become a side-effect as minimal as possible.

We move from a first phase where the penalties are everything to a phase where the penalties don’t exist anymore. We lose the depth, the meaning, the purpose. The goal now isn’t about going back. But it’s about how we can mantain everything we have gained and *add* the depth we missed.

This article didn’t come out easily. Now I’m happy that it’s done, good or bad. More then once I was on the point to delete everything.
Since it’s long enough you’ll have to follow the link on the right and “read more” ->

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I have a few points to underline. It all started with the article that Richard Bartle wrote to explain why the mmorpg genre doesn’t seem to improve over its (self-imposed) limits. The fact that there’s a dissatisfaction seems widely accepted, both between the players and the intellectual elitists. Instead there’s some controversy about what this dissatisfaction is about. The players find MMOGs, for various reasons, not appealing, not involving, not fun. The developers, from the other side, are splitted between those trying to figure out how to reach the mass market and exploit it (and why it didn’t happen already) and those, like Big Bartle in this case, arguing about the quality standards.

More or less Big Bartle starts from this perspective to analyze the negative reaction that is being produced. The mix of the players as a “blind” group, with needs but without ways to express clearly these needs, and the developers that have to try hard to figure out “how to please” and satisfy two unrelated layers: the economic needs and the artistic “quality”. Knowing that the first definitely owns the second. This rationally and logically. We know we live in this situation. But we can also add to this logic possibility, because we have also the diachronic dimension. The time. Or the actual shape of time in this context: the wisdom.

The logic tells us that we need money and that the artistic quality we want to address is still a subordinate. But the Bartle-wisdom and our experience also tell us that, in the long term, the king is naked. Naked because the money isn’t there on its own. The money, even in its super virtuality, still depends on something concrete. And this is our quality. Without quality, in the long term (again), we won’t even have the money. Because we can fool ourselves all we want but we still need to accept that, at the end, a mmorpg will sell only if it has a value to offer. An artistic, emotional or social value. Somewhere. Somehow. The type doesn’t matter, same for the genre, but there must be definitely something “solid” in there so that we can hope to tansform into “money”.

Bartle’s theory is that MMOGs are being designed by the players. This because the devs, in the desperate attempt to please their customers, are forced to second all they ask. But the customers don’t know what they are really looking for, their “needs” aren’t that obvious and easy to get. So what they search for? According to Big Bartle they search for what they know already because their previous experiences are the frame to measure and judge all they’ll encounter as they go on. In order to fulfill their desires the developers need to shape their world after models that are broken but that are able at least to quickly put the experienced players “at ease” with groups of features that they feel “theirs”. Like a way to reassure the players, to make them comfy. Now I believe that Big Bartle doesn’t like this because he feels the process as a menace. If the developers second every request of the players they’ll mostly provide solutions that are qualitatively mediocre. And not just for an abstract quality standard, but both for the developers and the players themselves. Why? Because, again, the players don’t know exactly what they like, in particular they don’t know what they could like, and their only resort is to ask what they know already. But what they know already is nowhere near an “improvement”. This like a recursive circle with no exit.

I don’t share this point of view. I believe that the real problem Big Bartle is observing here has nothing to share with design. This is exquisitely a problem about the communication level. Something that I discussed a lot. The developers aren’t captured in the process he described but I agree that they easily fall there. This because what is really in a very bad shape is the relationship between the developers (system) and the community (ambient). A sociologic problem that generates, as a consequence, all the “symptoms” that Bartle sees and points out. But even if I believe that this is the key to solve the whole issue, I also want to discuss the design directly. So…

One of the biggest errors, I think, is about considering this genre “new”. This is why there are peoples like Raph Koster feeling like pioneers. This is why there is a place like MUD-dev shaped into a brainstorming group about a new media and all its implications. A new horizon, a “far west”. But the truth is that there’s nothing new. This genre is everything but a “discovery”. It’s its opposite. A melting-pot. This genre is the result of an hibridization. It’s derivative, syncretic. It’s an amass of junk collected from everywhere, in particular the very essence of the culture: the myth. This is the reason why fantasy themed games are so common: they are a common and shared form of modern myth. What are designers here? Not gods. They are storytellers. “Nothing else”. They do not create. They shape. They observe and fix (focus) things into a point of view, then they offer this elaboration to others. It’s “art” in its purest form. Yes, the art has the originality as one of its basic traits, but the art is simply defined as: “discovering an hidden aspect of the world”. A discovery that starts from an observation and this observation produces a stimulation and the stimulation is then elaborated into art. And offered. But at the beginning there isn’t a blank page or a space to define and discover from zero. At the beginning there’s what I define “a symbolic shared system“.

What should be done, after these considerations and after accepting this level, is about observing and recognize what is new from what is coming from the past, inherited. This is where I think Big Bartle “falls”, like his love for for ideas that are still surely valid but also tied to a precise context. And with a value directly consequent to that context. A value that derivates and depends on that context. Here starts the old debate between a textual and a visual space. On one of the spawned threads on a message board, Raph says that MUDs definitely share aspects with MMORPG. Just to give an idea he says that they are 80% the same. I agree, they are both about the same stuff but the *form* completely changes and we are in a (virtual) genre where the form is basically everything. It is not “fluff”. These theories are new? No. This is the same when we moved from the press to the photography and cinema. Then we moved from the mute movie to the sound. Then the color. Then the TV. Each of these “jumps” produced both “losses” and new possibilities. There are a good numbers of high profile intellectuals theorizing that these jumps actually modified the structures of our brain. Something relevant enough, I guess. Marshall McLuhan rings a bell? One of his most famous quotes is:

In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Moving from a textual interface to a graphical one isn’t fluff. It isn’t a new “dress” for the same model. It’s a whole new level of the expression. The graphic isn’t just graphic but it is a COMPLETE revolution of the approach. Exactly mimicking what happened when we moved from the press to the movies and the TV. A strictly logic approach is being replaced by an emotional-driven one. This is completely different and if we fail to perceive this big change we also fail to focus what is the real potential of the medium we are going to use. We diminish the real essence of the change and all the consequent results.

This is why it’s surely indispensable to observe what the MUDs did and are doing. But we still need to observe the medium that we are going to use or we do the same mistake of directors making a movie for the TV like a movie for the cinema. They will fail because the medium they use is relevant and each has different possibilities and rules to understand. It is AFTER we are conscious of this that we can toy with hybridizations, perhaps bringing the style of the TV into the cinema (someone has seen “Bambaloozed” of Spike Lee?).

Now lets go back in topic. I said that the genre is nothing new, that what we need to do is to observe more than “design” because there’s the need to re-read more than create. This is an important point. There are two layers: the perceptive structure and the symbolic-social space. The first depends a lot on the medium we use. A different medium is a whole new dimension with new rules to consider. It’s a level about the form and, again, I have to underline how the form is important when we are dealing with something already “virtual”. Then we have the symbolyc-social space. I defined this above as a “modern myth”. This concept is easy to understand if we take an example like Star Wars and its “translation” as a mmorpg. One of the things I criticized about it is the approach. It’s not possible to build a generic mmorpg infrastructure coming from well thought but high-level theories and *then* paste the game, the setting elements specific of Star Wars. Like a plug & play content. We cannot pretend to codify something, because “Star Wars” even if a movie, a book or a game, is already strongly codified. This is why I wrote that this genre need way more to be (re-)read and experienced instead of invented. I don’t agree when Raph Koster says that the genre is new and we are only starting to build and understand the theories on which it can and will be built. I do not accept that the design can be detached so easily from the object of what we are creating (and here I’m doing a crossover to what Jeff Freeman wrote).

I believe that what needs to be done is to rethink the approach. Look back and focus again to what is really relevant:

1- The medium, or the shape of what we doing. In this case the visual approach, the image, the interface, the sound. The cinema here is able to teach a lot. Bring in directors of photography and let them work with the artists on the game. Or at least remember to study attentively these perspectives.
2- The myth, or the symbolic shared system(s). If we are working on a fantasy setting we should go back, read a book. Trying to capture what is the *real* essence of that myth. Capture *why* it became so relevant in our imaginary.

If we do that, everything will change. The design of the interface, the sound and the overall visual experience will transform completely. And I’m sure that also the design will completely change direction (and the mass of players with it), focusing on the “adventure” as a feeling, discovering again how to produce content to offer *emotions* and system to let the players themselves recreate those emotions. Going back at the *roots* of a myth, trying to discover where its real value lies.

I’m absolutely certain that the symbolic shared system that we call “fantasy” is way more than a grind of monsters to gain more experience.
The mission of a new game and a new genre is an “exploration” of what made this myth so important. And capture its essence.

Looking backwards more than looking ahead.