A Road Paved with Good Intentions

So I started thinking about how an MMO could increase immersion by translating heroic game acts into real world Good.  The first thought that came to mind was allowing players to choose a charity, and the more they achieve each month in game, the larger the portion of their subscription fee that goes to that charity.  It would diminish the “evil Wall Street corporation” image of the game company, do some real good in the world, and encourage players to play more and do more because they were having a positive impact through their virtual heroics. Seemed alright on the surface, so I took the thought experiment a little further.

Imagine that the charity you are playing for is fighting child hunger and poverty, and for every dungeon boss you slay and level you gain and townsperson you save, enough money is donated from your subscription fee to feed and clothe one child for a day. A new expansion has just come out so you’re playing and slaying like mad, achieving so much that the majority of your subscription fee is going towards feeding starving children.

Then you run out of content.  You’ve maxed out your character, done everything in game you want to do, and are driven to keep playing by nothing more than guilt at the thought of taking your money away from the charity by freezing your subscription or underachieving. 

Troubling Question #1: Is it unethical of you to reduce your achievement level in the game (or cancel your subscription), knowing what that means for the children?

Interesting content wanes as the game company is unable to keep up with the players, and while total subscriptions dip, the overall level of achievement falls much further, so the level of donations drops and company revenue increases.  By making the game temporarily boring, the company has increased their share of subscription revenue and reduced the contribution to charity.

Troubling Question #2: Is it the game company’s ethical responsibility to maintain a flow of engaging content in order to maintain charity levels?

Troubling Question #3: If the company was donating at a certain level, and all that changes in the next month is how many imaginary dragons were slain in the game, is it unethical (or at least publicly frowned upon) to reduce the number of starving children that they feed and increase the amount of money they keep for themselves? Or is it simply good that they’re giving money at all?

I started this idea with good intentions, but quickly realized that it could get twisted in a bad direction and lead to a lot of bad feelings for all parties.  A shame, because at first I really thought I was on to something.

I want to get your answers to these questions and see what you think!

Pixelated Memories

Two games came out this month that are sequels (one direct and one “in spirit”) to two of my favorite games of all time.  Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Tactics Ogre (spiritual sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics) have both been getting great reviews, and making me languish the fact that I own neither a PSP nor a PS3.  But this entry isn’t actually about these new games, its about my original favorites, MvC2 and FFT.

Aside from the incredible gameplay, ridiculous replayability and visceral combat effects, these two games shared one thing in common: They were both crap graphics for their time.  FFT was a 2D isometric game that usually looked like it belonged on a SNES instead of a Playstation.  MvC2 was a Playstation 2 game that was composed almost entirely of 2D sprites.

As a result of these amazing games having crappy graphics, and other favorite games of the times having distinctly different graphics styles compared to now, I (along with many of you I’m sure) have a natural fondness for pixelated games and classic games with bad graphics. It takes me back to a time when games had to showcase good mechanics to make up for the lacking visuals, when limited audio capabilities tried their best to do justice to the beautiful scores of video game composers (ie: Nobuo Uematsu), and when game genres were still discovering their boundaries and potential.  Most of all it takes me back to simply being a kid and falling in love with video games.

What makes me sad is that the new generation of gamers doesn’t have that nostalgia and never will.  They didn’t watch game graphics improve from 8 bit to 16 to 32, they’ve seen life like 3D graphics fall into the uncanny valley and slowly climb out.  We watched graphics evolve styles, while they’ve simply seen improvement.  Thus they won’t connect graphics of the past to fond memories, and will simply continue to clamor for improved visuals.

I’m sounding like an old codger “when I was your age”-ing, so I’ll just say one more thing.  I think it was a smart move for Kongregate to start carrying Unity games, because the new generation isn’t going to have the tolerance for visually underwhelming indie games.

What were your favorite “outdated visuals” games?

Player Created Content: 1 Masterpiece > 99 Wieners

I tried the free version of Minecraft recently, and in the brief time I explored the world and mechanics I saw what everyone was talking about.  It really is an amazing sandbox game, which you don’t hear very often.  Merits of the game aside, what hit me more than the potential for creation was what players had already created.  It just reinforced for me a point I’d been thinking about lately.

Our gamer culture has produced a very wonderful situation, if you haven’t noticed.  We have created a huge pool of intelligent people who are in love with games and will do and learn and try almost anything to make a living off of video games.  That’s why sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds exist, why game development blogs are so popular, why colleges now offer game development programs, and why positions in established game studios are so competitive.  But the end result is a pool of talent much larger than the demand for that talent.  This means that there is a lot of eager talent being wasted.

Games like Minecraft allow this underappreciated talent to shine, showing the level of dedication that they have to quality content creation.  Its free content/publicity for the game and a great showcase for the player.

Now obviously the caveat here is that for every Wonder there are about 99 player created wiener jokes of content, and its unfortunate that that’s what we focus on in discussions of player created content.  But to be perfectly blunt, 99 out of 100 people in the real world create very little incredible content for the world (children aside), but that 100^th person can end up as a Leonardo Da Vinci or an Andrew Carnegie or a Mark Zuckerberg.  The point is that the world benefits more from the incredible 1% than it is hurt by the less-than-epic 99%.  

Net gain, but only if you give people the chance to try.

The End justifies the (e)Peens

If you asked a room of 50 people what the meaning or purpose of life is, the only answer you'd get more than once is "I don't know".   We didn't get a manual for our existence, we don’t definitively know what we’re supposed to do or if we’re doing the right things.  There is no clear definition of how to Win at life.  Most of us settle into what makes us happy and consider ourselves minor victors, but even still we’ll never reach that point where someone tells us: “You’ve won” (though we will all hear Game Over).

I believe this ambiguous purpose of existence –and I do mean ambiguous, not nonexistent- is one of the main drivers behind our attraction to games.  Games have clearly defined victory conditions, you know exactly what you have to do and how you can win.  They are –by mutual consent between developer and player- viewed as entire universes, separate realities, but the main difference isn’t the type of reality or its content.  The greatest difference is that you can achieve the ultimate victory within that reality, and you know how.  This is perhaps the true escapism we seek, not hacking trolls with a sword or shooting terrorists or racing our dream car, its being able to definitively achieve ultimate victory and completion of an entire existence.

And that is the exact problem with MMORPG’s.  Millions of people playing WoW for half a decade, and how many have Won? None.  The game doesn’t end.  Everything can be repeated, nothing changes as a result of your actions, and there is no end in sight. We opine that the problem with Endgame comes from the mathematical impossibility of Developers creating content as faster as players can consume it, but what if it’s the opposite?  What if the very promise of future content and further challenges is what cheapens the present content?  The excitement and accomplishment you felt when you killed the Lich King may have been 99% unencumbered, but at least a small part of you knew, this is not the end, I have not won forever, this is not how the world ends.

Howzabout: Voluntary Difficulty Tradeoffs

In the wake of an underwhelming Blizzcon, I wanted to throw out an idea for criticism and analysis.

One of the main sources of arguments in the MMO blogosphere seems to be the differences between traditional old-school MMO values and modern WoW-espoused MMO values.  MMO traditionalists put immersion before ease, and quality socialization before mass market appeal.  Modern MMOers prefer to optimize their enjoyment -which is derived primarily out of advancement- but also respect the fact that MMO's are a business first, and thus are more likely to make concessions to immersion to support a broader audience.  Neither the Traditionalists nor the Modernists are small enough to ignore -particularly because the blogosphere contains more vocal Traditionalists- so its a tough proposition for devs to fulfill the needs of both without failing on two fronts.

One form of compromise could be found in a system of Voluntary Difficulty Tradeoffs.  During character creation (or possibly in game) a player would be able to customize the gameplay experience to meet their needs for immersion and difficulty, and rewarding sacrifices appropriately.  The basic idea would be a two column menu, with sacrifices on the left side and benefits on the right.  Sacrifices would include things like:

-Semi Realistic Inventory: a sword doesn’t fill the same amount of space in a bag as a scroll does
-Realistic inventory: you can’t carry five swords, period.
-Movement affected by inventory: the more you carry, the slower you move
-Language differences (Dwarves can’t understand Humans, etc)
-No Insta-travel
-Vendors only buy items that they would realistically need or want
-Increased enemy AI (or at least randomly varied responses)
-Racial drawbacks:
 -Little types can’t carry much
 -Large types can’t move very fast
 -“Smart” types can’t learn physical skills as quickly
 -“Dumb” types can’t learn magic as quickly
-Generic “+Difficulty” for combat: Monsters have higher stats, know more skills, react smarter
 -And of course my favorite: Permadeath.

Each of these drawbacks would have an associated point value, so whichever combination you selected would allot you a total amount of points which you could then spend on Benefits such as:
 -Better loot drop %
 -Faster rate of advancement
 -Extra tradeskill slot
 -Access to Epic events, quest chains and locations
 -Faster movement
 -“Elite Flag” that serves no purpose other than to advertise that you’re a masochist

This allows players who still crave traditional “immersive” limitations on gameplay to scratch that itch and be rewarded for doing it old-school, while allowing modernists to play exactly as streamlined as they want.
This also plays into the idea of a difficulty slider, where a player can make combat more or less difficult at any time (outside of combat and dungeons), with an accompanying increase or decrease in rewards and experience.  Group difficulty would simply be the average difficulty rating of the entire party.

Disclaimer:  The bare bones outline for this idea has been sitting in my inbox since December 15, 2009, which means I don’t remember 100% if this is entirely my idea or is based on something someone else wrote.  If this looks familiar to you, please let me know so I can give credit where its due.

A Riddle

Using the clues in this description try to figure out which game my friend is playing:

My friend Harvey is the type that only plays one game at a time, and the one he's playing now he plays almost as much as he can every day. Most people consider this game too easy, but others would argue that the very ease and simplicity of gameplay is why its so popular and has millions of players worldwide.  When he receives instructions for a task in the game, any superfluous details or context either confuses him or is ignored completely, thus he prefers only the most basic instructions so he doesn't waste time and can get on with the game.  These tasks usually involve doing a very basic action again and again, and even when he completes a task he is willing to take up the same type of task again and again and again just so he can maximize his rewards and minimize downtime.

Harvey doesn't mind PUGs, but he prefers to group with those he's more familiar with.  He judges people by oversimplified factors and doesn't even consider their intrinsic skill or experience.  He enjoys grouping but in the end he isn't doing it for anyone but himself, and is only willing to cooperate when its in his best interest.  If it comes down to it he will shout at even his best friend over a contested reward.


Harvey enjoys the simple combat of the game even if he isn't particularly good at it, primarily because the punishment for losing a battle is minimal.  He isn't interested in any tradeskills, and when he does make something it usually ends up being a worthless piece of crap that he has no personal use for and couldn't sell for much if anything.  Since he is reward driven he focuses primarily on the task that yields the fastest rate of reward.



Despite usually being happy with the state of his game, if he believes that there isn't enough new gameplay being introduced or he isn't being entertained enough, he feels entitled to whine about it to everyone and anyone willing (or unwilling) to listen. 

Think you know which game it is?  Here are some curveballs before the answer:

He pays nothing to play this game, and still expects constant entertainment.

There are no levels, but he does gain experience.

He hasn't killed a single thing in the game.

So what is the game?  Do you know?


It's Fetch.  Harvey is my one year old puppy.

The only thing I cheated on was the capitalization of Pugs.

Our games are really that basic, and our game habits are really that simple.  Why hasn't our genre evolved yet?

Permadeath: The Answer to Our Prayers

I’ve figured it out! I’ve solved all of our problems! I have singlehandedly saved the MMORPG genre! The answer we were looking for the entire time was the one thing we didn’t want to address! The solution to our problem is PERMADEATH!

Deep breath, hooooooo… whewwwwwww. Okay.

After thinking about MMOs as well as Greek Mythology over the weekend (kept seeing commercials for Clash of the Titans) I remembered a quote from the 2004 movie Troy,

“Let me tell you a secret, something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be more lovely than you are now. We will never be here again” –Achilles

How excited were you the first time you faced down a dungeon boss? You had (relatively) no idea what was coming, you only knew that this intimidating monster was probably going to hand you your ass. Remember the exhilaration? Remember the fear and adrenaline pumping through your veins? What about when you first ran from a mob, realizing you were in over your head and couldn’t win the fight? Or when you peered over a hill to find an elite mob, knew you had little chance of beating it, and decided to charge it anyway? The thrill existed only because fear accompanied it. But without consequence or risk, the thrill diminishes when you realize you can die again and again and it doesn't change anything, you can always try again.


Imagine an MMO that is a bit easier than WoW, but if you die you have to start over. How much more fun would it be to do a dungeon raid or run through a higher level zone if you knew that your character really was risking his life? More importantly, how much more rewarding would it be when you succeeded? Victories would be sweeter, rewards would be even more valuable, groups would be closer, and playtime would be much more memorable.


Naturally we have to take into account that humans are terribly risk averse and might be scared to venture out if they're faced with permadeath. An inheritance system might help cushion the blow, where you can roll a new character that is the son or daughter of your freshly-killed warrior, and while they do start at beginning level, they progress faster based on how high their parent's level was. Eventually characters would be able to track their lineage back several generations and be able to level extra fast. As for gear, a "Vengeance System" could be implemented to retrieve lost gear, where a descendant could defeat the faction/boss/mob type that felled their parent and reclaim the gear they were wearing.


There are ways to slightly cushion the blow of permadeath, but its major impact is exactly what we need in games to bring back the fear and excitement


Disclaimer: I am not egotistical enough to actually think I have solved the problems of MMOs, its obviously a (bad) joke.

Statistics Galore(y)!

Ravious is talking about leaderboards, data collection and elitism today, so I thought I’d throw my two cents in. I think data collection is a key to long term survival for an MMO, and its fortunate byproduct should be player accessible stats, both about themselves and the community at large. Its been argued before that players don’t care about the MMO’s fictional story as much as they care about their own stories and memories from the game. Player stat devices like the Tome of Knowledge and even WoW Achievements reinforce the players’ own history, reminding them of what they have achieved.

Unfortunately even a system as mindless as WoW Achievements can be perverted by players’ darker sides, as seen in the current trend of only allowing players to join a PUG for a dungeon if they can show the achievement for the dungeon.

As long as stats have been recorded, they’ve been used for comparison, its just natural human behavior. Its also human nature to pursue what’s best for yourself, and when these two instincts are combined its only natural for people to exclude based on statistical thresholds. It becomes a problem when there is no way for people to improve their important statistics. In this case it means that players who are just reaching level cap cannot improve their gearscore or complete dungeon achievements since no one will group with them. Ravious (and Sanya) mention a solution to the problem, tracking everything. I agree, and offer two more solutions.

First, don’t just report all stats, reward all stats! Johnny Newbie may not be able to kill the UberDragon within his first week of play, but if he manages to fall off cliffs and get himself killed more than any other player, he deserves some recognition. Give him the weekly title of “Johnny the Fragile, Chief Inspector of Gravity” and watch him be proud to show off his title. Even if he’s showing his title off to other new players with equally lame titles, they’ll be happy because they are unique, for that week they are the absolute best (or worst) at something. With any statistic there can be only one leader, so if no other statistics are shown (or are shown but without possibility of recognition or incentive) they are naturally going to gravitate towards the one or two stats they are told matter.

Second, don’t show statistics that can be easily improved simply by playing the game a long time. Total number of times a player has killed a dungeon boss is a number that should really be more depressing the higher it is, because its just a neon sign screaming LACK OF CONTENT, but instead it would be (and is) used to gauge how worthy a player is. Why not instead track a players success rate at a dungeon, or fastest time to clear a boss, or largest damage healed/dealt/tanked in a single boss fight? These still measure the success and relative skill of a player, but do it in a way that at least limits the impact of longer time /played. And if you absolutely must show quantity stats, show them over a standardized period, like the week or month. That way players who suffer from EPeen Redundant Incessant Comparison Ketosis (EPRICK) will still have something to show for it.

I’ll throw in a third solution just for good measure. Role Proficiency Ratings! See my previous post for details, but it addresses these same types of problems of socialization gated by arbitrary statistics.

Recognizing Us for What We Are

I love the mind of a typical programmer/designer/engineer. They are so used to dealing with logical programs and mechanical systems that they are deluded into believing that any problem can be fixed, patched, or worked around. This usually works for most things, but when it comes to human nature, these are temporary measures at best.

Too often in game design discussions (particularly MMO discussions) people reach the conclusion that the main "problem" is some trait or another that people exhibit in game, whether its greed, sadism, selfishness or just the mindless pursuit of awards and power. The designers view these traits as problems to be solved or worked around using game features that simply preclude the players from indulging in this behavior. The perfect example is friendly fire in your own faction. In WoW a Horde player can't walk up to a Horde NPC or another Horde player and attack them. If this were allowed it would obviously give rise to massive player killing and an irritating plague of griefers in starting areas and cities, so immersion be damned, we're changing the rules of reality.


The same goes for Gold Farmers, Twinks, Loot Ninjas, Channel Spammers, and every other type of MMO degenerate. They are the result of a genuine human need for money, attention, and power. On the other hand, so are Hardcore Raiders, Powerlevelers, Arena Champs, Guildmasters, and basically anyone at level cap. The very needs that lead a minority to become MMO scum are the same needs that drive the majority of players to play and stay in the game. Therefore, any limitations to the pursuit of those needs will affect all players negatively. But that is the method of choice it seems.

Instead of viewing these flaws in Human Nature as obstacles to be avoided or overcome, why not face the fact that these unflattering characteristics are a part of every person's being, and since its been that way for thousands of years, we are not going to miraculously cure it with the next weekly patch. Why not embrace these traits and allow them to drive additional hours of entertainment for players?

Tired of player killers? Set them loose on each other with something like a Bounty Hunter job system. Kill a player? Their faction automatically puts a bounty on your head, which players with the Bounty Hunter profession can pursue by either offing you or capturing you for more money. Kill a lower level character and your bounty goes up exponentially. Player Killers would flock to this profession and regulate each other. Oh, and if you're captured instead of killed? Time in a public prison where you must spend a set amount of time (logged on) in the stocks, where free players can taunt you. You'll think twice about camping the new player villages. Oh and players and guilds with money can set their own bounties on other players, so if someone ninjas one of your guildmates, you better believe they need to watch their backs for that bounty hunter you sic on them.

Don't like Twinks? Well thats your fault for having levels in your game, but thats a discussion for another day. If a guy wants to dominate in low level PvP and uses ridiculously OP'ed gear to do so, he should have the right, but with great power comes yada yada yada. Assign the highest gearscored 15% of players on each side of a PvP instance/zone the rank of Leader, General, Commander, Squad Leader, Chief Corpse Teabagger, whatever you want to call it, and give them special group abilities like setting visual waypoints, drawing on the map, and chatting specific groups on the fly. Also give them the opportunity to earn more honor/reknown/points. The tradeoff? They're flagged as leaders to your opponents, and are worth super duper extra points for killing. Hope your gear is good enough now!

Gold Farmers are not a problem in and of themselves, but they do encourage two different bad meta-behaviors: Account Theft and Gold Buying. Both of these can be easily addressed by having the company that runs the game offer to sell gold to players. I can hear the wail of the Anti-RMT Police sirens coming to get me, but before they do, think about two guys standing in a capital city decked out in identical epic gear. If one knew that the other had bought his gear with RMT gold instead of grinding countless hours and dungeons to collect the set piece by piece, he would feel discouraged, outraged, and cheated. But who is going to admit that their gear is bought? Gold buying would still be the dirty little secret of MMOs, it would just be legal now. No matter how much you argue that gold buying is a heinous crime fitting for only the lowest and least skilled of noobs, some people are always going to want to take a shortcut, even if its illegal and indirectly results in another player being victimized. Just roll with it and mitigate damage to other players.

I hate that we humans are plagued with deep seeded greed, laziness, selfishness and power cravings. I wish we could somehow help everyone overcome these defects and form a more perfect society. But we can't, not even in an MMO. What we can do is harness the motivational force of these desires and use it to provide even more entertainment and balance for our players.