"Worst. Presentation. Ever."

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 99 Comments

Richard Bartle recently posted the presentation slides from his IMGDC keynote.

Note: bad presenters slam their entire presentation script into each Powerpoint slide, then read droningly from each slide, word for word, as if their audience were a crowd of illiterates waiting for the shaman to explain the pretty picture pages. Bartle is not a bad presenter. Thus the slides are more a hintbook into the presentation (and somewhat amusing that way) than an actual talk transcript. Still, it’s fairly good, and he makes some good points.

  • Cloning WoW is expensive, you will probably fail, and the result isn’t very good from a design standpoint anyway
  • There’s a vast difference between user-created content (such as City of Heroes’ architect system) and user-generated ‘content’ (such as the Eve Great War) – the latter is compelling and why people come back to MMOs
  • Elder games to date kind of suck thanks to the adherence to theme park-style game design as opposed to free-from social world design
  • This happened historically in the MUD development era, which no one knows about because for decades designers have ignored everything that happened in game development before the debut of their favorite MMO (note: Bartle was probably far too polite to actually say this)
  • The fairly obvious solution (which of course, no one has actually attempted) is a hybrid/balanced game akin to early MUDs where users begin on a theme park and graduate to an Eve-style freeform/social/user generated game
  • Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls” is pretty raunchy.

All seems very obvious (note: the best presentations point out obvious truths that everyone seems hellbent on ignoring for some reason in an amusing fashion). F13 didn’t get it.

Nothing in that presentation that hasn’t been stated by any armchair developer with more than 6 months gaming experience under their belt.

Physician, heal thyself.

This seemed like a thinly veiled attempt to make EVE/Shadowbane (that’s right, I said it) look good. Oh, and an excuse to use a lot of abstract terms in different combinations.

I think i’ve suddenly realized the attraction of being an academic. You can write “from on high” about the problems inherent in a topic without feeling obligated to present detailed solutions.

He’s spent thirty plus years saying the same crap and never putting his hat in the ring even though he could go to any publisher with a proposal, assemble a team and get funding. That’s the difference between us schlubs here and him: he could actually make the game he thinks is going to change the world and get all those subs but he refuses to do so.

Today class, we’re going to go to my ivory tower, built from MUD, and I’m going to show you my gold throne where I sit when I want to watch the peasants try to make something that I so obviously perfected 30 years ago. After that I’m going to snort blow off a co-eds thigh, give a speech somewhere I really shouldn’t be since my last real game came out before the NES was even an IDEA let alone a console that was ready for worldwide release that would change the world. Afterwhich I’m going to say a bunch of really profound, obvious shit and show you a square I came up with back when such a thing may have been relevant. After that? Yea, you guessed it. I’m going to ride naked on the back of my golden eagle that I have named Fame.

Wow. Whole lotta nerd raging going on. Almost as if someone threatened to take their candy!

So, to retort: almost everyone in that thread (including the moderator, and not including the post I’m about to cite below) is full of self-indulgent whiny bullshit. As someone who has built a career on self-indulgent whiny bullshit, I feel uniquely qualified to recognize this in the wild. Let me respond to the more obvious bullet points:

  • No, Bartle hasn’t worked on WoW. Amazingly, this does not disqualify you from commenting on MMO design (note: as far as I can guess, very few WoW game designers are posting in that thread. Ghostcrawler was probably busy.)
  • Yes, most of what he said was painfully obvious. Guess what: people are still funding WoW clones. Guess it wasn’t painfully obvious enough.
  • I find it deeply ironic that the sort of game Bartle advocated in the close of his presentation is actually fairly close to what the F13 hivemind would be quite excited over! (Hint: it was called Ultima Online)
  • No, Bartle can’t just walk into a game publisher, announce in a booming, stentorian voice “I WANT TO MAKE TEH GAME” and be given a $50 million budget. If you seriously believe that is how game development works, you are actually the target audience for those “tighten up the graphics on level six” game school ads.
  • The slams on his credibility are especially amusing. You do realize he worked on the first MUD, right. You know. The first one. PATIENT ZERO. This does give you a bit of credibility. At least for those people who don’t believe game development history began with the launch date of their current favorite MMO. It doesn’t mean that he is a Design Moses that comes from the mountaintop and shoots lasers from his eyes at gilded cow idols, but it does tend to get him invited to give presentations and it does mean he has things to say during them. Funny, that.

That being said – there was one valid point missed in the clouds of eloquent butthurtery.

So his proposal is to begin with a hand-crafted, polished, broad, directed experience (WoW) and then segue into an open-ended deep sandbox with nebulous emergent content (EVE). This is justified by his belief that content creation is, well, hard, and he dismisses user-created content as a potential solution pretty much out of hand. Well, I disagree. I don’t believe that “emergent” gameplay compares favorably to hand-crafted polished content.

You hear about these really cool world-changing political shifts in EVE online, and they sound really awesome, but the vast overwhelming majority aren’t playing at that level– they’re mining, or killing pirates, or PvPing, or trading resources. And that level isn’t really about the game anyway, it was “played” on bulletin boards and IRC chat channels. The game was incidental, a justification.

I don’t play games to chat with old friends, or collect cute pets, or decorate my in-game house with crazy furniture or play wacky dress-up. I don’t want to be a miner, or a crafter, or a cog in a wheel of a giant corporation. I don’t want to have to “find the fun”. I pay the devs for that, it should be handed to me on a silver platter. I want to be the hero that saves the day, exploring dangerous new continents, every day overcoming new challenges, progressing through a well-written story. That’s what I pay for.

Now, that’s just me. Some people dig all that crap, and I have no religious objection to that. But it’s not my bag. I want to be the hero.

And that is a coherent summary of why World of Warcraft is a raging success years later, and why many developers who presumably know better are afraid to veer from that paradigm. Many – probably most, in fact – players *want* to be content consumers, not content generators. They want to log in, be entertained, and log out.

The problem here is that this means they aren’t the target market for a virtual world. They want a game. So: how do you craft a virtual world that *also* is enough of a game to keep that person and his millions of cohorts entertained?

*That* is what we should be discussing. Not the length of Bartle’s neckbeard. (Note: most of the neckbeards come from forum posters, not game designers. Really. I checked and everything.)

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  • Saben

    I will have to disagree with the last statement on what should be discussed. I don’t see the need to marry the game concept to the virtual world one. I would like to see someone take another shot at a more pure virtual world, and worry less about incorporate game elements in it. It seems the focus most of the time is primary on developing games and maybe add some virtual world elemtents, time permitting. Let the content devourers play something else, chanses are alot of the milions of cohorts are just playing while waiting for something better, and a virtual world might be it.

  • tmp

    It’s interesting Bartle is so quick to write off user-created content basing it pretty much purely on Sturgeon’s Law, when the very same law applies to all; this including the content made by ‘traditional’ means.

    Lot of existing content is “inconsistent, derivative, unimaginative” shit. Being done by _DESIGNERS_ didn’t help it much.

  • Viz

    Er, yes, yes it did. That may not be a function of the designer’s skills, but it is a function of the designer’s desire to not TOTALLY BREAK THE GAME.

  • http://emergentfuture.com Arrakiv

    While, like Saben, I am interested in seeing some more pure virtual worlds out there, but when it comes down to it – more so on this particular topic – I have to agree with Scott. In fact, I pretty much agree with him on basically everything in this post, crazy as that is.

    Also just to pick out a quote:

    “The fairly obvious solution (which of course, no one has actually attempted) is a hybrid/balanced game akin to early MUDs where users begin on a theme park and graduate to an Eve-style freeform/social/user generated game”

    I would love to see something exactly like that. You enter into the game with the familiar theme-park style (and you can roll up new characters to experience it again – somewhat akin to what you’d do anyway in an MMO these days), but then you’re presented with the sandbox. Honestly, EVE itself would likely have benefited from something like this: you’d still have everything that EVE has to draw in its current crowd, but it’d be a heck of a lot less daunting for a lot of people. Plus, those who are less interested in the sandbox game could largely limit themselves to a theme-park experience (potentially). This would be more preferable if you could ‘escape’ the theme-park at any point.

  • Realist

    Given that there are millions of users, even if only a small percentage are “content generators” the amount of potential content is huge. Natural selection will provide quality control. If they content they create is good, players will select it, and the person who created the content is rewarded with recognition for their contributions. Creating content can be fun if you enjoy that type of thing.

  • tmp

    Viz :Er, yes, yes it did. That may not be a function of the designer’s skills, but it is a function of the designer’s desire to not TOTALLY BREAK THE GAME.

    Hence my “didn’t help it much” rather than “at all”. But if we’re now setting the bar merely at “should not break the game” then hey, i’m not sure whose side of the argument it supports.

  • mystery

    Natural selection will provide quality control

    That really hasn’t been the case in the past. Look at the module list for Neverwinter Nights/NWN2, as a good example. 9/10ths of those are absolute, game-breaking crap, and not worth the download. Does that cause them to be de-listed? No, it’s still a whorehouse of bad content, just looking for a John. You could say this about any user-content driven niche of the internet, not just virtual worlds. Look at Youtube, for example. No, wait, save yourself the trouble and go on believing that the human race is worth saving.

  • http://forge.ironrealms.com Matt Mihaly

    Mystery wrote:

    You could say this about any user-content driven niche of the internet, not just virtual worlds. Look at Youtube, for example.

    Yeah, look at Youtube. It’s entirely user created content and according to Alexa is the 3rd most trafficked site on the internet.

    Facebook (#5) is also completely user created content.
    As is Wikipedia (#7)
    And MySpace (#9)
    As is MySpace (#9)

    Clearly, user-created content is totally uninteresting to people.

    –matt

  • chabuhi

    I agree that natural selection does not do a very good job of weeding out the garbage. On the other hand, I do think it is pretty easy to find ways to filter out the crap and find the cream of the crop.

  • sidereal

    You know what I’m sick of hearing?

    Self-righteous ‘We solved this in MUD’.

    I played MUDs. I played MUSHes. I played f&%*ing MOOS. I know whereof I speak. The entire audience for MUD was a population of a few thousand self-selecting college student D&D players who had enough free time and body odor to play a shitty form of D&D purely in text over a 28k modem. The audience is absolutely and totally unlike the audience for modern high population MMOs. SOLVING GAMEPLAY PROBLEMS FOR THEM TAUGHT YOU NOTHING RELEVANT TO TODAY.

    NOTHING.

  • mystery

    purely in text over a 28k modem

    Man, were you ever late to the game.

  • DrewC

    Yes, this is what the industry should be talking about. Content generation costs are the number one problem that forward looking game designers should be thinking about.

    While natural selection will “find the fun” in the process it will expose a whole lot of dedicated content consumers to a whole lot of bad game play. Which is exactly what they don’t want. So you need three elements: your content creators, some kind of content filtering or testing, and then your content consumers.

    The problem is that people, on a whole, are terrible at rating things in the abstract. If you ask people to rate anything on a scale of 1 to 10, you get huge clusters near 1 and 10, and a giant desert in the middle. The solution is to get people to rate things comparatively: which is better X or Y.

    You can see this in practice with Pirates user content system. We allow players to submit flag and sail patterns that their ships can display in game. Users can log into a web page and rate these patterns, and based on those ratings we move the patterns through the approval process. Pre-launch and at launch we used an abstract “rate the pattern 1 to 5″ process. The result was a cluster-fuck. Players traded ratings (vote for mine I’ll vote for yours), players voted based on what they thought of the person who submitted the pattern (that guy’s a douche on the forum, I’m rating his flag a 1), and even players not gaming the system tended to rate everything either a 1 or a 5.

    When we revised the system we turned it into a simple comparison. You’re presented with two images and you select the one you think is better. That’s it. The result was massively improved sorting. Quality images immediately bubble to the top (they’re better than 99.9% of everything else out there) and junk immediately sinks to the bottom.

    So how do you apply that to content? There isn’t an easy way to ask someone to quickly compare two pieces of content, especially when we’re talking about content that might take 30 or more minutes to consume.

    Even if you can solve that problem, you still have to go back to the original problem of setting up three distinct classes of player in your game: content creator, content tester, and content consumer. Plus all of the associated problems of putting content creation in the player’s hands. How do you balance population across all three? How do you encourage people to fill the needed class? How do you divide dev support across them? Do you monetize all three classes the same way? Who owns the IP of the content your content creators create? How do you filter it for obscenity/copy right?

    It’s a complex and interesting problem.

  • TPRJones

    That really hasn’t been the case in the past. Look at the module list for Neverwinter Nights/NWN2, as a good example. 9/10ths of those are absolute, game-breaking crap

    True, but there are ways to fix that. Off the top of my head, make it so that prize awards are not coded by the player-builders, but are either chosen from pre-made sets or are generated dynamically based on the difficulty of the content. Once you level the rewards-system playing field, then that leaves content quality as the defining element for player-rating systems to manage the content.

  • TPRJones

    SOLVING GAMEPLAY PROBLEMS FOR THEM TAUGHT YOU NOTHING RELEVANT TO TODAY.

    While I wouldn’t put it so strongly, I do admit there is some truth to this. If you were working on cell-phone design you wouldn’t turn to Alexander Graham Bell for advice.

    Has Bartle done any game design since the early 1980s?

  • Realist

    Shouldn’t it be relatively simple to write a fitness algorithm that filters out most of the crap and leaves the content that’s worth trying? Genetic algorithms have been around for a long time. Why not apply something like that here? If we can design AI to interpret ancient hieroglyphics, surely we can design a system for automatically filtering user generated content.

  • http://http//keithneilson.co.uk mandrill

    This is relevant to a recent post on my blog, but only in passing. I will link it here and allow you to judge for yourselves.

    You’re back from reading that? good… now

    Richard Bartle is just a man. A man we should be grateful to, yes, but still just a man who had an idea. The Nerds who are raging should get a little perspective and the Bartlites who are worshipping should get a life. Anyone can have an idea, and if they’re lucky, and talented, and determined, but more often than not all three are required. They can make that idea a reality. Bartle did this, and he now lives off the back of the fact that he did it in order to inspire others to do the same. Fair play to him I say. He also does it to promote discussion and debate, because these are the seeds that new ideas spring from, unless any real discussion is flooded by the QQ emo-tears of the weak, and burned by the flames of the unnecessarily angry. By all means argue about it but please be civilized about it.

    As to the whole “EVE itself would likely have benefited from something like this”. It now has it, in a package which is combined with the whole ‘user created content’ thing in the form of Epic Mission Arcs. There’s only one at the moment and it takes about a week to complete (for a new character, maybe a bit longer) and is a kind of bridge between the tutorials and the self directed gameplay that is empire mission running/mining/ratting. Even these three activities are only a step on the road towards low security PvP (either as a pirate or someone who fights pirates). Which again is only a step on the road to the grand strategy of the 0.0 wars and all the intrigue, politics and metagaming that they involve.

    With the addition of players being able to create their own Arcs (soon[tm]) I foresee that there will be a multitude of training programs, application processes and improved tutorial missions created by players, for other players to complete. EVE is like that. So the content creation will not be separate from the conten generation but becom a part of it and add to the depth and richness of the eve universe.

    EVE already has what Mr Bartle proposed, its just that its not obvious, and neither should it be. You should not notice the point at which the devs stop holding your hand and you begin to choose your own path and make your own way in the world. It should be a choice that you make naturally and almost unconsciously, if you ever make it at all. The option should always be there to remain holding hands with the devs and riding in their theme park if you want.

  • sidereal

    @mystery

    purely in text over a 28k modem
    Man, were you ever late to the game.

    Actually I played hardwired to a VAX. The populations at that time were not in the thousands. But thanks for the peen-waving! Brings me back.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

    The way I look at it is more of a question of finding a compelling purpose behind the game, but the way Bartle puts it is nicely framed in a more productive direction.

    Personally, my feebly empowered dabblings in BYOND have mostly been experimenting with this very desperado: dynamic, implicitly user-generated content, because it’s both something oldbies can appreciate more.

    One model I think is really interesting along these lines is what the roguelikes have been up to.

    How many times can you get the Amulet Of Yendor in Nethack befire you find the quest boring and derivative? Therein lay an answer of excellent content generation and player significance, if you can harness it right.

    Then we look at something like Dwarf Fortress which pretty much endeavors to create a massive world with a real history that players are empowered to build onto.

    Next generation MMORPGs, with real compelling purposes behind them, here we come.

    EVE Online still sucks eggs to play, however. Freedom-imbued outside layer, crappy barely interactive inside layer.

    (P.S. There’s a lot F13 doesn’t get.

    How to treat eccentricity that may well be emerging from underlying genius without demonizing and rejecting it like a paranoid medieval villager, for example. There’s an important difference between “usefully cynical commentary” and “this thing that does not conform to us – bring fire!” A difference that they’ve yet to grasp, partly out of addiction to the enjoyment the spectacle of burning strange things brings.

    You can call my history with them bias, I call it informed opinion. They stopped being a place developers should pay attention to ever since they decided the hate needed to be put on a pedestal.)

  • Guy

    Was the reason MUDs had the transition from theme park to sandbox because the design/code/designers were more flexible and responsive to the needs of the few gamers that played them? After all, changing modern MMOs is a huge deal, a multi-million dollar affair that can still only manage incremental changes, not just because of restricted budget and not enough time to deal with the huge code-base, but also because managers and executives don’t want risks taken in a multi-million dollar venture. Whereas with a MUD, as the soon as a critical mass of players got bored, the designers could start adapting the game to interest them again.

  • TPRJones

    Was the reason MUDs had the transition from theme park to sandbox because the design/code/designers were more flexible and responsive to the needs of the few gamers that played them?

    Sort of. It would be more accurate to say that as the players got bored with the game, they would start to join the developers and become one of them. Or go start their own MUD themselves.

  • Blackblade

    TPRJones :
    SOLVING GAMEPLAY PROBLEMS FOR THEM TAUGHT YOU NOTHING RELEVANT TO TODAY.
    While I wouldn’t put it so strongly, I do admit there is some truth to this. If you were working on cell-phone design you wouldn’t turn to Alexander Graham Bell for advice.

    While I understand your point, I personally don’t view this as a good analogy for two reasons:

    1) As for the guy who works on cell phones, what precisely is he doing? Is he writing firmware for the machine? Did he develop the transmitters and receivers? (Sorry, I know nothing about how a cell phone works specifically, but hopefully you get the gist of it.) What role he plays in the creation of cell phones matters. The guy working on the cell phone might not have the faintest clue about how the fundamentals of a simple phone might work because technology and it’s advancement has allowed for him to be completely removed from that knowledge, hence, he might benefit from asking old Bell a question or two.

    2) In such a hypothetical scenario, who’s to say that Bell didn’t have other ideas, but not the technology to make them happen? How many fundamentally good ideas did Da Vinci have, but didn’t have the means to see them realized?

    Richard Bartle may be a man,who only did something important once way back when, and is resting on those laurels (If someone holds that viewpoint) but that fact alone doesn’t dilute his credentials. Great Thinkers aren’t always Great Do-ers: Application and Theory are worlds apart. Who knows? Maybe his ideas and theories are right on the mark (And I agree with a lot of them), but it’s how they are IMPLEMENTED that matters.

  • Vetarnias

    Interesting discussion here, and I would like to know whether there is any significance to the font used by Dr. Bartle on his slides. Maybe he’s considering turning this into a webcomic or something.

    A few points:

    User-created content: I understand it’s quite fun for a player to feel he/she can contribute something to a game, but I never quite see the point to it. For instance, if I create content, my reasoning goes something like this: First, it must be for a charitable cause for me to volunteer my time. Second, if the cause isn’t charitable, I must get paid for it. Third, if it isn’t charitable and if I don’t get paid for what I make, I should have the possibility of putting a big Circle-C on whatever I make. And player-created MMO content meets neither criterion. The cause isn’t charitable, I don’t get paid, and it’s your intellectual property. So I tend to view a game relying too much on player content in a very bad light — unless I benefit directly. That’s why, in the case of Pirates of the Burning Sea, I submitted my own flag and sails, but I would never design a ship to be added into the game (if I knew how, that is), as other players have done.

    Then there is the question of reconciling “sandbox” with “linear” games. The train analogy, while clear enough, is confusing in other respects. I know I’m just a player and everything, and only playing MMO’s since 2007, but it does seem to me that EVE is just another stagnant world (a la Shadowbane) just waiting to happen. Though I don’t play it, I was very concerned over that little cloak-and-dagger thing back in February. What if the Goons had won the game? Sure, yeah, freedom. If you’re a Goon leader, it’s as good as it could get, but for the rest of players, what does that mean? Would EVE still be alive then?

    Complete freedom is what Darkfall advertised. What happens when that big alliance with powerful guilds started years ago wins over that other big alliance with powerful guilds started years ago? Sure, fredom is fun. But look who is really taking advantage of it: the same usual suspects who apparently take pride in having their guild grow its e-peen from game to game. It’s like the free market: You want to just open that little store to sell candles and party supplies, and here comes Wal-Mart right on the outskirts of town. Complete freedom isn’t so great anymore when you know that it will always be the same people benefiting from it.

    No wonder ordinary folks stick to WoW, and why some of its most rabid fanboys take pride in their casual victory over the hardcore, usually by hiding behind numbers.

  • http://yfernbottom.blogspot.com/ Yeebo

    He really missed the boat on “user generated content.” One of the reasons that MUDs worked so well was that users that were interested in becoming admins could crank out new content fairly quickly. He must be aware of this, I wonder why he so opposed to user generated content now?

    In addition, the first example of this sort of design paradigm being applied to an MMO, the architect system in CoH, has been a raging success. I’ve been playing through nothing but user generated story arcs since they opened our accounts for free earlier in the week. Some of the best storytelling in MMOs is available for free in cohesive bite sized chunks in CoH. I do not exaggerate when I say that the user generated story arcs I have played through make the bulk of quests in MMOs like WoW (or even the developer generated content in CoH for that matter) look absolutely amateurish.

    A player can spend weeks tweaking a single story arc until they have created a compelling piece of fiction. No developer has that kind of luxury with a particular quest chain. And it really shows.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

    I suspect a lit of the impetus behind the rejection of user created content was the recent release of Issue 14 on City of Heroes.

    The users were provided all the tools they needed to create user created content and, just as Bartle outlines in his slides, easily 99% of that content was self-serving crap that only the creator cared about.

    It wasn’t so much a raging success. I think that the user populations have, any anything, slightly decreased during prime time. Raging successes should increase the number of players, you’d think. Right now, most people have moved back to doing mission chains because they’re more accessible, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, affairs. Even Alice hates to be cheated by fickle fate.

    Bartle’s completely right that there’s a big difference between letting people add whatever versus having changes come about as the result of their actions as a meaningful consequence.

    This is why City of Heroes would have been a lot better off with what I recommended, a change in the opposite direction, instead of letting people wander off into their own Architect Entertainment pocket dimensions they would be introduced into a mechanic that makes meaningful changes to the actual city.

    It’ probably too late for City of Heroes. The AE buildings aren’t going away, the instancing damage is done for good.

  • Informis

    “[....] a hybrid/balanced game akin to early MUDs where users begin on a theme park and graduate to an Eve-style freeform/social/user generated game”

    One might argue this is exactly what DAOC was. Level up, gear up, and it’s off to the frontiers with you, where you consume user generated content (AKA other players) before they consume you. Of course, the frontiers could be considered another ride in the theme park, but you could conceivably do it forever without running out of “content.”

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless_

    Meh, Bartle is right. I thought and tried to prove he was wrong, but man do I feel stupid after watching WAR flounder post-launch. Ah well.

  • Stormwaltz

    The fairly obvious solution (which of course, no one has actually attempted)…”

    Ninth Domain, 2003. Unfortunately, we were de-funded after six months.

  • michael, St E

    Yeebo: “In addition, the first example of this sort of design paradigm being applied to an MMO”

    Second? Ryzom Ring.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

    Informis :
    One might argue this is exactly what DAOC was. Level up, gear up, and it’s off to the frontiers with you, where you consume user generated content (AKA other players) before they consume you.

    If you’re counting other players as being user generated content, you’d hardly need to go off to realm PvP land to do it, you’re getting ample amounts of that in Barrens chat.

    “Content” is a difficult label to adequately encapsulate sometimes, but player characters wear that label poorly for some reason. Perhaps because it seems redundant for player characters to be content consumed by player characters. Perhaps because players seek something outside of eachother, or else they might as well just be in a chat room.

    DAOC did have some dynamic content in the swapping of keeps and relics. It wasn’t quit enough

  • http://yfernbottom.blogspot.com/ Yeebo

    @Michel SE: ahh you got me there. I never played Ryzom.

    @Geldoney: Different strokes for different folks I guess. I really have thoroughly enjoyed the player written story arcs I’ve played in the last few days. I’ll admit that I haven’t strayed past the first two pages of five star rated arcs, but I really have been genuinely impressed with the ones I’ve gone through. The number of story arcs users have generated is staggering. Even if we assume that 95% of them are crap (probabaly a fair estimate), that’s still a hell of a lot of new good content.

  • tmp

    Vetarnias :User-created content: I understand it’s quite fun for a player to feel he/she can contribute something to a game, but I never quite see the point to it.

    It seems you’ve answered your own question — “it is quite fun for a player to feel they can contribute something to a game”. Fun is pretty good reason/point to it, especially considering that’s why people play games in the first place.

    There’s other benefits for some too, like using this kind of creation as portfolio or way to gain recognition… but fun itself is fine, too.

  • Vetarnias

    tmp :

    Vetarnias :User-created content: I understand it’s quite fun for a player to feel he/she can contribute something to a game, but I never quite see the point to it.

    It seems you’ve answered your own question — “it is quite fun for a player to feel they can contribute something to a game”. Fun is pretty good reason/point to it, especially considering that’s why people play games in the first place.

    Well, it’s a bit hard to explain, but I know that contributing content to someone else’s intellectual property, without financial compensation, is something I would never do.

    To an average player who likes the game, I can see why it’s appealing to see your own stuff in the game. Not to say I’m above average or anything, but I don’t see why *I* should bother when I could just churn out cheap fantasy novels based on my ideas. (Maybe if there were a thin chance I could put creating user content for other people’s MMO’s on my resume without being laughed at, just maybe, I’d do it, or if it opened doors in the gaming industry. Even then, what the hell could I do if I can’t code my way out of a paper bag?)

  • TPRJones

    Vetarnias: I can see your point, but think of it more as being a DM for a D&D group. A DM creates a world that the group plays in, even if it’s based on prior art in the form of a module. In much the same way making a good user-generated event/dungeon/whatever in an MMO that you enjoy would let you give pleasure to the friends you have in the game.

    Plus if you are particularly good at it, it can buy you recognition and renown among the playerbase. Not all payments come in the form of cash.

  • http://www.unwesen.de/articles/a_hybrid_elder_game unwesen

    I actually think a hybrid approach to an elder game should work, in which players are eased into content creation right from the start, and can pretty much decide how much they want to create and consume at any level.

    Examples of such systems are found all over the web — many websites offer the ability to first vote on content, then submit new content, and finally sort through the submissions and put a selection of them up for vote.

    I’m thinking a similar approach could well work for game-themed virtual worlds.

  • DoubleD

    I used to create text based muds in my college youth using PennMush as a code base. I’ve read Bartle’s book on designing virtual worlds and agree with pretty much a large chunk of it. Developers do not learn from the past mistakes. I’ve pretty much seen all the drama in text based worlds evolve into the graphical realm, and watch current companies re-do the same mistakes we done 10 years ago.

    In any case, His slides were entertaining and I do believe a hybrid approach is the way to go. I like the idea of having the complexity shielded at first. Like layers of an onion the user can peel away at and get deeper into the game.

  • Vetarnias

    @TPRJones
    I also see your point, but I’m not sure it’s similar to being a DM in a D&D game. The worst that could happen with a D&D game is that one of your friends steals your story and does something with it. Wizards of the Coast cannot suddenly show up on your doorstep and claim copyright to your entire D&D campaign plot because it was first “exhibited” using their game system.

    I understand that there might be some recognition from the playerbase, but then what? You can brag about it, I guess, which risks alienating some of your supporters. But still, because you’re an amateur modder, your fame is pretty much linked to the fortunes of the game you’ve modded, unless you can build a following for when you’ll strike out on your own. But you will have to strike out on your own sooner or later, and I don’t see many of those people showing much interest in that.

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  • Freakazoid

    So if you haven’t worked on an MMO, what other qualifiers allow you to give presentations at game conferences? I think my armchair development ranting is as good as his. I think I deserve a shot at giving presentations in a room full of people who probably aren’t really listening.

  • BridgetAG

    “After that I’m going to snort blow off a co-eds thigh,”

    Having spent a few interesting evenings with sober and fascinating RB amidst drunken colleages, this line just completely cracks me up!

  • http://crymore.de EpicSquirt

    Traditional, subscription based MMOGs are dead to me, people who say WoW or nowadays EVE too much are the dinosaurs of the future.

    The whole presentation was a waste, well not all of it, “make something new” is actually a good advice.

    To those who said that DAoC and user generated content in one sentence. that is just cynical, please make a reality check, DAoC is a very static game. EVE had its potential for a pure world, affected by actions with a possible extinction etc., but that chance is gone now, dying and then buying billions of ISK or exploiting moon mining isn’t content.

    Today 6 of my players died (perma death) in a Blood Bowl (beta, upcoming video game) match. Imagine that happens to your star players on whose you’ve been working for 3 years. Blood Bowl is round based, and this needed when dealing with perma death, so how about an MMORPG where the world is very dynamic, where the market simulation is in real time but the actual combat takes in (dynamic and big) instances (size depending on game) and is round based (like all the pen & paper RPGs were)? There would be a reconnection-mechanism needed, so if your link drops in fight, you’d have 45 seconds or something to reconnect.

    The power pyramid in this game would be very nice, since there is potential death, players would play differently, the more powerful a character becomes, the less risk the player would take in order to avoid to trash something that he has spent years on. A dealer like class would actually have a higher life expectation than a front-line samurai/mage/decker/whatever.

    The only real value would be life and not some meaningless grind to level 80 and then some random 4394535 vs 5 fights (common fantasy MMOG) or 5 Titans on a gate and 11 additional ones cloaked ready to gank a Shuttle (EVE).

    I am too old today for a lot of that stuff which I’ve played in the last decade, I don’t understand why not more players don’t get more ambitious. Way better games are possible, but hey, billions of flies eat shit so they can’t be mistaken.

  • Gx1080

    Well, i liked that presentation (at least the PDF of it). And, yes everything that he said is obvious but theres a universal truth:
    “Some People need you to state the obvious”. You know, i believe that a world with less WoW clones would be better (Unlike Tobold).

    Second, despite the fact that EVE is already all of that, first that was integrated way too late in the game design aka it already have a fame of NOT being user friendly. Second, the players of EVE shoot CCPGames in the foot for saying: “this game is for teh hardcore, noob”. People like that hurt the game just for e-peen stroking.

    Third, i always will believe that WoW has that many success because they were in a moment of the MMO history when nobody else knew how to make a game appeal to the masses, aka the gived EQ without most of the soul-consuming gring (the little few is in the endgame).

    Now, in a few years games like Wizard 101 and Free Realms will be treated like royalty because a)They will be the firsts MMO that many people have played by then, and b) they will be massive behemoths because they were the first in a market.

    About the user created content, the hate that many designers have to it (besides the ego of said designers) is that a)Its a variantion of the HOLY AND SACRED DikuMud style. b)Said content in the majority of the cases (but more that the <1% that Bartley said)will lack certain standards, like proper gramar, coherency and not being fan-made pr0n.

    Asking the players to create the chunk of your game will piss off most of them, and its lazy. As someone wise once said “you cant copy a feature in the game without understanding the problem that said feature solved” or something like that. Making players action have a meaning in the game IMHO should be hold until at least the middle game, aka when players are confortable with their class/stuff and it should be gradual, not just being thrown in the abyss (Hint: EVE didnt do the second one).

    But well, most people like games that are just like single-player games, just with other people. The problem is that people play those games and then stash them for eternity, and a MMO its a constant world. So, basically: An MMO cannot be like a single player game, despite the fact that most people would like that.

    So, what you do then, its fairly simple: you choose a market and start from there, and for for the love of god, dont insult the guys in other markets (Unfortunately, in the PVP based games, your own community will do just that. You need to resign that a PVP based game will be a niche game)

    And a hint: a good market is one that nobody else had seen, aka DONT CLONE WOW OR ANY OTHER GAME. Free to play MMOS fail for that and for being korean grindfests.

  • http://www.psychochild.org/ Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green

    First of all, context is important. This was a keynote at the Indie MMO Conference. This wasn’t a keynote pitched to a bunch of people with $50M budgets, it was for people actually going out there and doing their own games on small budgets. Richard intended the talk to be inspirational, showing people actually doing something that their options aren’t just sandbox or theme park, but that they could do both and the reasons why the two rarely meet is because of some obscure schism back in the days of text games. For indie developers, this type of information can be enlightening. For bitter board warriors, maybe this isn’t such a surprise.

    tmp :
    Lot of existing content is “inconsistent, derivative, unimaginative” shit. Being done by _DESIGNERS_ didn’t help it much.

    Yeah, but most professional designers live under the ultimate content-moderating system known to man: the paycheck. If a designer truly does not pull their weight, then they run the risk of being fired. Yeah, maybe not every nugget they produce is gold, but despite what you think there aren’t necessarily a large group of people ready to take their place.

    TPRJones :
    While I wouldn’t put it so strongly, I do admit there is some truth to this. If you were working on cell-phone design you wouldn’t turn to Alexander Graham Bell for advice.

    That would be a great analogy if we were talking about tech. We’re not: we’re talking about design. A better analogy would be phone color and material.

    DIKU phone: We like black, too! Hooray black!
    EQ1 phone: The phone I used was black, so I’ll make my phone black, too.
    DAoC phone: It’s a black phone made of plastic. It’s the EQ phone, but without all the metal suckiness!
    WoW phone: Our black wireless phone is made of precision, shatter-proof plastic that could never hurt you. Ooh, shiny!

    On the other side of the divide you have:

    MUD1 phone: metal painted black, because that’s what we had and it looked acceptable.
    MUSH phone: Black sucks! We’re using unpainted metal!
    SL phone: Brushed metal phone with the option to have furry art laser-engraved on the side. So nice!

    So, along comes Dr. Bartle saying, “You don’t have to have a black phone! And if you use metal, you can still have color on your phone. Don’t just blindly copy what people have done before!”

    Has Bartle done any game design since the early 1980s?

    Yes. Just because he doesn’t brag about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. As Stormwaltz points out, a lot of games don’t see the light of day. I also did half a year of lead design on a project that got canceled when the company I was working for sold itself but forgot to keep a license to work on the game I was designing!

    Vetarnias :
    I also see your point, but I’m not sure it’s similar to being a DM in a D&D game. The worst that could happen with a D&D game is that one of your friends steals your story and does something with it. Wizards of the Coast cannot suddenly show up on your doorstep and claim copyright to your entire D&D campaign plot because it was first “exhibited” using their game system.

    The issue here is one of publishing. If you published work that was derived from D&D, they most certainly can come along and claim authority over it. There were quite a few “net books” back in the early 90′s that TSR tried to get taken down for various reasons, primarily because they felt it hurt their bottom line to have competing products. No, your house rules were safe if you just shared it with your friends, but once you put them out in the open things changed. (TSR was going through a lot of financial problems during this time, before being acquired by WotC.)

    This is one reason why the d20 Open Gaming License was a profound change: it gave people permission to make and publish derivative works, but not to include the core or setting-specific rules. The goal was that more content would get more people involved and sell more core books and perhaps more D&D materials. (Of course, 4th edition and the scouring of 3.X edition stuff shows how much they thought of that effort.)

    Freakazoid :
    So if you haven’t worked on an MMO, what other qualifiers allow you to give presentations at game conferences? I think my armchair development ranting is as good as his. I think I deserve a shot at giving presentations in a room full of people who probably aren’t really listening.

    I was the speaker organizer for the conference. I handled the speaker proposals and sent out information to the people accepted to speak. Perhaps you should have visited the IMGDC site and submitted a proposal? Just understand that a bearded guy named “Psychochild” is going to visit you after-hours of the conference with a bat if your talk sucks. ;)

  • Keybounce

    geldonyetich :
    How many times can you get the Amulet Of Yendor in Nethack befire you find the quest boring and derivative?

    Wait … you’ve done it more than once? Yeish, how much time do you spend on NH?

    ===
    Blood Bowl? Where! How do I get in! Which version? (Admitedly, rules version 3 was very, very long ago, but I did keep up back in … I think open rules version 5, with the pre-game balance system).

    Oh — for those of you who don’t know, the “perma-death” of blood bowl was the whole point for us. How many kills per game can we get? Can we hurt teams so much that they cannot continue to play, at which point we just restart the league again.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

    Keybounce :

    geldonyetich :
    How many times can you get the Amulet Of Yendor in Nethack befire you find the quest boring and derivative?

    Wait … you’ve done it more than once? Yeish, how much time do you spend on NH?

    Honestly? I never survived doing it even once. Stockpiling wands and engraving elbereth can only get you so far in the game.

    However, the thing about Nethack is that every time you dive for the amulet, you’re going to have a significantly different experience.

    It’s the same reason Blizzard is still selling new Diablo Battlechests – well, no, not because it’s cheap, but because people still aren’t bored of plumbing the depths of Tristram.

    If you don’t think there’s a lesson to be found there, you’re giving up too easily.

  • GregC

    While everyone should have some respect for Richard, I kind of wish he had the same respect for people who actually make games these days. To say all the problems were solved back in the “good ol’ days” of MUD is wrong.
    MMO games today are becoming more and more mainstream. Anyone who reads this blog – or knows it exists for that matter – are not part of the emerging MMO market. These are the people who play a game like WoW and never bother to worry about the latest patch made their DPS drop by 0.01. They login – play – have a good time – log out. It is just a game. These same people back in the days would never have played a MUD, or even played UO or Everquest 10 years ago.

    From my arm-chair it easy to say “doing this or that would be the way to go!” but from my office chair – where reality lives – there are things like time, budget, and actual reality. You make decisions that best fit in the time, budget and reality – not always the decisions you want make. I am sure many designers – including guys working on WoW and the numerous other MMO games in development would love to do some of things Bartle talks about being the “right” thing.

    Bartle gets paid to speak, those of us who make these games get paid to do. We live in different worlds. Until Richard gets back in my world for a while or at least offers some solutions – I don’t really pay much attention to what he he has to say

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

    That might be a misconception about Bartle. I don’t think it’s that he’s trying to say the problems were solved in the good old days. I think he’s actually trying to say that problems could be solved if we reexamine our fundamentals.

    He brings up examples from the good old days because these are examples he’s witnessed first hand, and he’s trying to support his premise. You’ll note that he brings up examples in modern games as well.

  • http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com Melf_Himself

    Seriously, who played MUDs? I just went on a mini-rant, felt good:

    http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com/2009/05/stay-awhile-and-listen.html

  • Mark Asher

    I agree with Bartle that it’s hard to compete with WoW. I also think that looking at new ways of creating content is something to consider, given the reality that most MMOs won’t have the budget to create enough developer content to hold players more than a few months.

    I think, however, that most players want the polished content that the developers can create. We’ve had games with user generated content — A Tale in the Desert and Shadowbane come to mind. Players end up competing and the losers end up unsubscribing. Bartle needs to tell us how to come up with user generated content that doesn’t turn on players being competitive with one another.

    It may just be that when it comes to mass market MMOs, WoW does most things right. That might be hard for some people to accept.

  • UnSub

    Matt Mihaly :
    Yeah, look at Youtube. It’s entirely user created content and according to Alexa is the 3rd most trafficked site on the internet.
    Facebook (#5) is also completely user created content.
    As is Wikipedia (#7)
    And MySpace (#9)
    Clearly, user-created content is totally uninteresting to people.
    –matt

    All those sources you mentioned are free and I can check them out in 30 seconds or less, as well as end up spending hours on them. User-created content for MMOs usually isn’t 1) free or 2) that quick.

  • Experiment 626

    geldonyetich :

    (P.S. There’s a lot F13 doesn’t get. ….. They stopped being a place developers should pay attention to ever since they decided the hate needed to be put on a pedestal.)

    If that asshole Schild wasn’t around, F13 would be 100% better off. Why the community over there tolerates his shit as much as they do is truly a great mystery.

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