Dude, play your own game.

Posted on December 14, 2005 by Scott Jennings| 6 Comments
Darniaq, whom I really should have added to my link list long ago, has a cry of pain up about developers not playing\’e2\’80\’a6 not only their own games, but any game.

Richard Bartle, in his book stated much the same thing, only in his own experience. Having spent most of his time working on MUDS, MMOs and their associated theory, he finds the joy of actually playing them to be jarred by a cognitive dissonance. It\’e2\’80\’99s too easy to take the game apart while playing it to enjoy it.

Meanwhile, I\’e2\’80\’99m not finding this to be true. I still enjoy MMOs. Heck, although I\’e2\’80\’99m taking a brief break from it right now (first for CoV, then to possibly get a WoW character to the point where my wife and I can be on the same continent), I\’e2\’80\’99ve played the one I work on since its beta. Even after working 8 hours or more that day on the game systems code, I\’e2\’80\’99m still as incompetent at playing it that night as anyone else!

I suspect the reason for this is illustrative. I play MMOs to be social, even in a solitary environment; although I prefer being in a guild and having witty banter (or the appearance thereof) scroll combat messages off screen, I can derive just as much enjoyment from throwing random interjections into general spam chat.

See, at their heart MMOs are really just large overgrown poker games. Sure, some people really know how to play poker and spend hours discussing arcane strategies on their blogs or whatever. But that\’e2\’80\’99s not why people play poker. People play poker because people enjoy social activities. And MMOs are currently the most social multiplayer games out there. It\’e2\’80\’99s what they do best.

The arcana that we get so worked up about? It\’e2\’80\’99s marginalia. We really do play these games to dance. Speaking as someone whose career now involves fixing the marginalia, actually following this line of logic to its conclusion is somewhat humbling. What I do isn\’e2\’80\’99t really that important, unless it somehow works to dissolve those social bonds. The first rule of MMO live teams should be that of medicine: First, do no harm.

And if you look at people who are furious at MMO Screwup X, I\’e2\’80\’99d wager a bet that it comes down to, when reduced to its components, \’e2\’80\’9cthe game is keeping me from being with my friends\’e2\’80\’9d. In most current combat-oriented games, this comes down to a reduction in effectiveness. I\’e2\’80\’99m less effective, so I\’e2\’80\’99m less likely to be asked along in raids, or I\’e2\’80\’99m an imposition on my friends when they do, or I\’e2\’80\’99m less likely to make new ones, or I contribute less to the group/tribe/whatever.

Ignore this lesson at your peril.

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  • http://ve3d.ign.com/ Apache

    Honestly, designers do need to play their own game in the live setting. If they don’t, then it’s hard to see what’s going right and wrong in their online worlds. Having cap level characters isn’t enough; you need to stay in the top 5% to have a clue of what’s going on.

    Plus, you need to play the games competing against you as well.

    It’s a tough job, but you need to do it.

  • http://www.livejournal.com/users/carolinapinoy/ Dan Irving

    QUOTE:”…if you look at people who are furious at MMO Screwup X, I\’e2\’80\’99d wager a bet that it comes down to, when reduced to its components, \’e2\’80\’9cthe game is keeping me from being with my friends\’e2\’80\’9d. In most current combat-oriented games, this comes down to a reduction in effectiveness. I\’e2\’80\’99m less effective, so I\’e2\’80\’99m less likely to be asked along in raids, or I\’e2\’80\’99m an imposition on my friends when they do, or I\’e2\’80\’99m less likely to make new ones, or I contribute less to the group/tribe/whatever.”

    Illustration:

    My guild, Deus Vincit, is basically a friends and family type guild (as opposed to heavy PvP, Raid, etc). Most of us are social creatures and we have chapters in at least three MMORPGS (DAoC, WoW and EQ2).

    Having played both WoW and DAoC I’ve have discovered that WoW does *not* seem to engender our guild’s more laid back style of play whereas DAoC seems to encourage friend/family play. Let me explain.

    WoW seems to be geared towards Raid/PvP guilds where gear/spec reigns supreme. Sure, you can play your own game and not kow tow to the powers that be but this avenue makes it less likely you or your guild will be included or effective in Instance Raids (read Molten Core). Our guild has even sustained some remarkable drama both ingame and on our boards. Our only rule is: “Respect each other”, but this was constantly being broken ingame and on the boards. I’ve even seen other guilds blow up over something as simple as loot rules.

    DAoC, on the other hand, seems to encourage group play. Our guild recently reformed the DAoC chapter after Mytic introduced *Classic* servers. Like Coke, I guess they figured screwing with the formula was a bad idea. In any event, I was a latecommer to Gareth and most of my fellow guildies had leveled pretty high. The game has mechanics that allowed me to level quite rapidly and I even capped out experience when grouped with our higher levels. Four months into play and most of us are at or near 50 with some having only been playing one month. This allowed us to play together (heck we went on an instance raid with one of our members at Lvl 8 – yeah he got one shotted a lot but he had fun being with the group) since no one had to have an alt at the groups level to be included.

    While I enjoyed playing both games I believe DAoC is the better model since both endgame (RvR) and content (PvE) are balanced.

    I’m sure my arguments could be picked apart but I wanted to keep this comment brief. Believe me – this was brief for me, I can be pretty verbose.

  • imweasel

    “While I enjoyed playing both games I believe DAoC is the better model since both endgame (RvR) and content (PvE) are balanced.”

    While this may be true, unfortunately for daoc, class balance was never and will never be achieved.

    Now onto the subject.

    Every developer should play the game they are…well…developing.

    Every person that has any ties to the game should play the game they have…well…ties to.

    How in the world are folks that design and work on games supposed to get any perspective on how the ‘real world’ player base has impact/interaction on their game?

    The truth is, they don’t. They prefer the ‘stick head into sand’ (or up someplace else) method. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, which means the game is going just fine until the subscription base erodes. Then it’s ‘go into milking as much money from the cash cow as possible’ mode.

  • http://www.flyinglab.com isildur

    “And if you look at people who are furious at MMO Screwup X, I\’e2\’80\’99d wager a bet that it comes down to, when reduced to its components, \’e2\’80\’9cthe game is keeping me from being with my friends\’e2\’80\’9d.”

    Absolutely. This has, over the past year, become my new mantra. It’s the key to good MMO design: ‘Let me have fun with my friends.’ Everything else is secondary to that goal.

    I don’t play MMOs for the community; it’s almost always wretched. I don’t play them for the gameplay; it’s almost always repetitive and dull. I don’t play them for the content; it’s usually derivative, bland, or a cliche in its genre. I play them so that I can play multiplayer cooperative games with my wife and my friends.

    Game design that enables that is good game design. Game design that impedes that is bad game design.

    Which is why I, as a game designer, walked away from WoW. It wasn’t any more or less dull than any other MMO. It was just difficult to play it with my wife. We were punished for being different levels; we were punished for our choice of classes; we were punished for only being a duo.

    If you, as a designer, want to punish me for playing with my friends, I’ll leave your game in a second.

  • http://cities.totl.net Elseware

    I’ve been making a free multi-player online game for about 6 months. I play it regularly (without cheating) and have frequently found things which just ain’t fun. So I change them.

    That said, there are some tedious quests which I created to make sure people always have something to be getting on with if I am busy (I am only writing it for fun). Many of the players seem to have great fun trying to solve them.

    I have found that players prefer to know what’s required up-front. ie. “Collect these 40 rare objects” seems to be more fun than “collect object a, bring it to someplace, then get told what object b is. repeat.” – people appear to like planning their approach rather than just running a treadmill.

  • http://heavygames.com Chance

    I want my game to be about naruto.