[MUD-Dev] Birthday Cake (or Why Large Scale Sometimes Sucks) (long)

[Brian Green]

As I said last week, being without NDA is an incredibly liberating
experience.  Allow me to share other thoughts with my esteemed
colleagues on this list.  Well, I'm going to share if you want me to or
not. :)

As some of you know, I recently left my previous job and obtained a new
job at another company.  Leaving the main office of one company with
about 300-350 people to work at another company that employs a small
fraction of that is quite a shock.

One thing that really got me thinking about online RPGs recently was
something simple, birthday cake.  During a company meeting last month,
they brought out a cake to celebrate the birthdays of employees in that
month.  Now, I love sweets (as my frame amply shows), and was
delighted.  But, I took a moment to pause and consider why we didn't
have cake at my previous employer.

I realized it was an issue of scalability.  Going and grabbing a large
cake for a small company is something you can send an administrative
assistant out to do.  Going and grabbing five or ten such cakes is a
catering event.  The large company simply could not provide birthday
cake at a reasonable expense, especially on a monthly basis.

So, how does this relate to MUDs?  I think we're losing sight of
meaningful advancement in the field in the quest to just make bigger
games.  Just like the birthday cake in my story above, some important
elements in online games just can't be efficiently handled in large
scale situations.

(Now, Raph, I respect you as a comrade in arms and value your insight
into various topics; you are truly one of the brightest minds among us.=20
But, I'm going to use you as my pi=F1ata by referencing a recent Usenet
post you made that was also posted up on Lum the Mad's site
(http://www.lumthemad.net/).  I've been mulling this issue over for a
while, but your post helps support my arguments wonderfully.  I'm sure
you're used to such scrutiny by now.  Plus, what would a rant on
scalability be without me getting on your case? ;)

The biggest problem I have with current commercial development thinking
can be summed up in Raph's recent comment, "That niche products are all
well and good, but we already KNOW how to make those, and they aren't
going to teach us anything interesting about ourselves.  ...[T]here are
plenty of narrowly focused communities out there."  Raph said earlier in
the post that, "...The market, and more particularly the players, don't
reward experimentation very much. ...[A]s a comment on the audience in
general--most people want mere entertainment, stuff that is easy to cope
with. Stuff that doesn't make them ask questions of themselves."

I wholeheartedly disagree that we know how to make niche products.  No
niche product has completely solved even the most common problems we
have to grapple with.  Hell, if Raph's statement were true, the design
side of this list would not exist; MUD developers would just see how the
niche developers did it and copy them.  But everyone, from the humble
hobbyist reading this list to the experienced developer with years of
MUD and commercial graphical experience under his belt, struggles with
the same design issues.  We have struggled with many of the problems for
longer than a majority of the current online RPG players have even been
playing our games.

Raph's statement about the market is true, *if you are building a large
scale, mass-market product.*  When you water your content down to please
the masses, you should not expect soul-searching introspection aspects
of the content to remain intact.  At best, thinking you can is naive; at
worst, there is nothing more dangerous than a creative person with a
message and a medium that cannot sufficiently express the message.

To draw upon an offline example most of us are familiar with, allow me
to once again use Ultima 4.  The Quest of the Avatar speaks to me, as it
does many computer gamers.  Why is that?  It obviously won't speak to
everyone.  If I were to sit my mother down in front of a computer and
load up Ultima 4, she'd look at me funny.  It speaks to me because I am
the type of person who fantasizes about being the hero that saves the
land.

Think about it for a moment.  I could have gained levels easier if I
could have stolen treasure chests, attacked helpless villagers for easy
xp, or fled from battle when the situation was hopeless.  But, I did
not; not merely because the game penalized me, but because I wanted to
be the hero.  Seeing the ending this last time held no particular
significance for me, I had already won the game before.  I wanted the
chance to save the people and become the Avatar.

We need to customize the game to the players if we hope to touch them in
the way Raph wants.  This means we have to go back to that dirty word,
"niche".  Only when the message is customized to the individual will we
get people contemplating careful introspection.  Mass-consumption
one-size-fits-all content doesn't pose questions for us to ask
ourselves, it strokes our egos and tells us to spend more money.

It's a simple truth of art that every high school student taking a
literature class realizes: if you can't identify with the work, you will
learn little if anything from it.  Or, completely miss the point.=20
Reading Shakespeare is perhaps one of the most meaningless exercises
that young students endure.  They have little connection with the story
or even the language of works.  Yet, as their minds grow and they become
wiser, many return to the works and relish them.  Many of the works I
read when younger are much more potent to me now because I can identify
with the work better given my expanded experiences.

Or, to give another example, you could consider the painting "IKB" by
Yves Klein.  The painting is a large canvas covered with a uniform coat
of blue.  It's one of those paintings that people like to point and
laugh at, saying it's not "real art".  Yet, when you learn that the
artist developed and perfected (and even patented) the process to make
the pigment capturing the exact shade of blue that makes up that
painting, you get a bit more respect for the work and the artist.  Many
of the most wonderful paintings I've ever seen require a bit of
knowledge in order to fully appreciate.

To his credit, Raph says, "I still believe we need to get all kinds of
people into one game."  While I think this is an admirable goal, I think
this something we need to tackle in the future, not the present.  We
face too many problems in developing our games that I think it is as
foolish as tilting at windmills to try to add more complications to our
tasks.  I argue that we're still trying to understand our players, even
in the context of something as simple as Bartle's groups.  Throwing the
complexity of how they interact is definitely a challenge I look forward
to, but is something that must be built on more stable foundations than
we currently have.

Am I arguing that we should abandon all large scale games?  Absolutely
not!  Just as there are many things you cannot do in a large scale game,
there are many things you cannot do in a small scale game.  Raph is very
interested in the social interactions of large scale games.  I just do
not think we should expect more from the large scale games than we can
reasonably expect.  We should also not ignore small scale solutions and
situations merely because they do not scale; these solutions and
situations are just as viable and interesting as the large scale
situations that major commercial interests have to face.  I think that
enough attention has been paid to the large scale games in recent times.

I think that the current crop of games are in a sorry state of affairs
because of the focus on large scale.  This focus on scale is
particularly harmful because it is merely used for bragging rights, not
for meaningful development of games.  Game X is better than Game Y
because more people play.  Game Z will blow them all away because it
will have a million subscribers!  Never mind the fact that the typical
player will hardly meet, let alone meaningfully interact with even a
tiny percentage of such a huge population.

The observation that communities rarely form of greater than roughly 250
members combined with the focus on advancement which harms socialization
and interaction (as argued in last week's post) make the truly large
scale meaningless in terms of posing situations that force players to
learn about themselves.  If anything, it has shown us the ugly side of
the human nature, the side that rises up from the teeming crowds to
commit a wrong, only to slip back into the world as an anonymous face in
the crowd.  It is no surprise that grief playing seems to get handled
better in smaller scale games than in larger ones.

So, what can we as game developers do?  If we want to create meaningful
works that speak to people, we have to focus on niche products.  If we
want to teach people that being selfish is wrong, that killing people
just to loot their bodies is wrong, then creating a high fantasy game
with easy resurrection is probably not the vehicle we should choose.=20
One not only has to fight against the pre-conceived notions brought into
the game from single-player high fantasy RPG fans, we also have to find
a way to reach the "it's just a game" crowd that points to easy
resurrection as an excuse to kill another player.

I am sure people will shake their head and cluck their tongues and tell
me it's easy to say such things since I am not a business person that
has to worry about making ends meet.  I would argue that such people
have not evaluated business models very well.  Smaller games were able
to make quite handsome profits before the arrival of any of the "big
three" large scale graphical commercial games.  Most niche suppliers
will tell you that although you may not find large numbers of people
willing to participate in the niche, often people will be happy to pay
more for content that interests them; more than they will pay for lowest
common denominator content provided at a cheap price for the great
unwashed masses.  Some people are willing to spend more than McDonald's
prices if they want to eat a good hamburger.

And, that's the problem.  We've focused on becoming the McDonald's of
the online gaming world.  We've traded our willingness to make
interesting content for producing bland, generic, non-threatening "fun"
for the masses.  Where's the focus on becoming the corner bistro that
connoisseurs  love?  Where's the businesses making the game that can
touch people in deep and meaningful ways?  Why weren't they actively
hiring MUD developers with professional experience? :)  (I can think of
two serious companies trying to make smaller-scale products on this
group.)

In the long run, I personally think it will be niche products that grow
the market more than any of the numerous massively multiplayer
(especially the dreaded "million subscriber") worlds I've heard about in
the last few months.  The power of the internet allows us to bring
specialized content to niche audiences at a reasonable price; the
problem is that large companies have gotten into the "McDonald's" mode
of content production that they don't realize that there are meaningful
small scale games that could be made.  I think these smaller, focused
worlds will interest the non-hardcore crowd and bring them to our fold. =20

After all, if they wanted mass-market content, there is always prime
time TV....

Comments welcomed and encouraged.

--=20
"And I now wait / to shake the hand of fate...."  -"Defender", Manowar
     Brian Green, brian at psychochild.org  aka  Psychochild
       |\      _,,,---,,_      *=3D* Morpheus, my kitten, says "Hi!" *=3D=
*
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_ =20
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'  "Ritalin Cures Next Picasso"=20
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)               -The_Onion_, August 4th, 1999



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