[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle writes:

>>> The trick is to make people who leave your game go off to play
>>> another one of your games rather than someone else's.

>> the single game world that you have should be providing multiple
>> experiences.  This provides players with a very low
>> barrier-to-entry in changing the game that they play.

> I agree, but I don't see how this would prevent an guild leaving for
> a new game if they decided to go en masse.

I must have lost the point of the topic.  Instead of the guild leaving
for greener pastures, whether another publisher's pastures or your
own, provide those pastures in the current game environment.  The
guild gets a sense of change taking place, but you don't lose the
guild.  I guess it all depends on why the guild wants to leave.  They
may not like the administration, or the game interface or the game
systems.  In that case, my observation about multiple experiences is
moot.

>> If we rely on player skill in order to enjoy the game experience,
>> then why would I go to the game world?

> Because you can take far more risks in a game world than in the real
> world. Because you can't use your skills in the real world. Because
> you're trying your skills in a different environment in the game
> world.  Because you're using your skills in different ways in a game
> world.

As I attempt to draw in casual users, I assume that they aren't
interested in this serious a pursuit.  I certainly agree with your
observations that having the opportunity to use my skills in new and
interesting ways can provide entertainment.  I just don't see casual
users - who don't want to invest a lot of energy into the
entertainment that they get - going for it very much.  They might want
to crank up their investment from time to time, but if I put in
entertainment for the hardcore player - who want to really get into
the game experience in a big way - then I risk alienating the casual
players.

>> In my parlance, you are pursuing a more hardcore gamer and I am
>> pursuing a more casual one.

> In my parlance, I am pursuing a gamer (with this particular PD
> approach) and you are pursuing a non-gamer. The difference is, my
> approach also lets me pursue non-gamers, because they don't have to
> do the PD thing if they don't have to, whereas your approach
> doesn't.

Except that I worry about mixing gamers and non-gamers.  I use the
terms hardcore and casual player.  It has been pointed out to me time
and time again that hardcore gamers will track me down and play my
game no matter what I do.  I keep hoping that they won't bother if I
present the game in a certain light from the very outset - and follow
up by creating the game that I present.

> So you're saying you bought a game because you didn't want to tax
> yourself; I'm saying that if you play a game and don't want to tax
> yourself, don't do the things you find taxing. What's wrong with
> that?  Are you suggesting that there should be nothing in a game
> that's taxing, in case you want to do it?

To some players, yes.  I have no problem posulating a game world where
the activities in the game world do not tax the players' mental and
physical abilities.  I don't claim that it is the penultimate
experience for those who enjoy virtual worlds.  But I see it having
some interesting characteristics - such as that lighter tie between
players and the game world.  I'm not challenging the players, I'm just
entertaining them.  It's somewhere between a movie and the real world
in the investment that a player has to make in order to find
entertainment.

>> I don't think I get your point at all.  Having someone in a hurry
>> go rushing past me doesn't enhance my experience.

> And how does it degrade your experience?

Ever gone hiking in the back woods and had somebody break out a cell
phone and start talking business with somebody?  It detracts from the
experience of being in the back woods.  Similarly, if I'm patiently
trying to get something done, and somebody comes zipping along and
does it all in record time, I feel foolish.  Further, the effort I'm
putting into the task seems less worth it because others can do the
task so trivially.  Not unlike having a player buy an accomplished
character producing a trivializing sensation to the time that I put in
to manually construct that accomplished character.

>> In EverQuest, being killed and flung far from the point of combat
>> only means that I will run back to the point of combat before I do
>> pretty much anything.

> (Strictly speaking you could remove the words "killed and" from that
> sentence).

> Well yes, of course you will - that's EverQuest for you! I wasn't
> arguing for duplicating EQ's approach, though. If you die PD,
> there's only so long that you can rack up points while in a
> rage. Once you're over it, you can return to your normal pace.

I'm assuming that you want significant power advancement for
characters, as with EverQuest.  I'm mentioned before that this
produces social stratification in the online community.  If my
powerful character is killed off permanently, I'm certainly going to
have a big ol' fat carrot waiting for me when I get back to my
powerful state again - rejoining the people I was playing with.  And
they are going to help me powergame my way back up again.

The only way I can see breaking this chain is to make powergaming
advancement take so long that the powerful characters will refuse to
invest that much time.  A close-knit group is then faced with the
prospect of everyone restarting characters so that their social group
can remain intact.  Or, we'd get the goal you're after, which is the
player get a new character, finds a new social group and starts
playing the game again, being rather wiser than his fellow
first-timers.  I don't care much for that effect either, because we're
back to the hiking in the woods experience.  I'm working up my first
time character, experiencing the world.  But if I'm travelling with
this second time guy, he already knows all the answers and knows
what's around the next corner.  We'll be more efficient in what we do,
but I'll feel the same way that I did in EverQuest: that I was being
dragged along instead of being given the opportunity to enjoy the game
itself.  I stuck to my social group in EverQuest and got dragged along
because the social group was the prime motivator for me.  I'd hate to
assume that that was the preferred model for a game experience.

>> Not by nature, but by circumstance they can become powergamers

> I agree, but the question is whether PD turns people into
> powergamers or not. You seem to think it does almost by definition,
> but I don't. Normal people don't powergame for more than an hour or
> so at most after being PDed.

My above comments are the best way that I can think of to present my
opinion on this.

>> The 'chore' that I'm refering to is recovery of gains that have
>> been taken away.

> Taken away? Only with PvP PKing. With PD from other sources, the
> gains have almost invariably been lost, not taken away.

Semantics.  To me, they are taken away regardless of whether the
software does it or another player does it.  To you, it's different.

> If you walked from one building in the middle of town to another
> building some distance away, then the next time you tried it you
> wouldn't have the same journey. You'd see different things, your
> feet would touch different parts of the pavement, you'd encounter
> different people. You might take a short cut you've worked out since
> your previous walk, or you could even decide to go to a different
> building altogether. Sure, you can make the end result pretty exact,
> but when it comes to characters in games, how you got there is just
> as important as where "there" is.

In an environment where there are significant power ramps, the carrot
often outweighs the process of getting to it.  If you can come up with
a gaming experience that is so engaging that players focus on the game
experience and not on the accumulation of power, I'd be quite
impressed.  I'm not saying it can't be done, only that I don't think I
could do it.

>> Player response to such things seems to be to just work through to
>> get them back again.  And you suggested earlier that players should
>> be able to recover such gains in less time than their first time
>> around.

> Yes, they should. But they don't have to do it the same way.

It depends on whether they're interested in experiencing the game with
a new social group or not.

>> I want to develop a mechanism where the player's view of the game
>> world depends on the development of the character's skills.  As a
>> quick, rough example, consider the character who acquires the
>> 'thief' skill.  The player who is running that character will be
>> able to more easily detect 'wealth' on other characters.  That is
>> the thief's perception of the world.

> That makes sense to me. If your character is blind, you (as a
> player) don't receive any messages from the game conveying visual
> information. If your character is a herbalist, that smell will be
> reported as being "thyme" rather than "pungent".

> Is this kind of thing contentious or something?

I don't think so.  I think I was bringing it up as a means of
enhancing the player's experience.  I'm too tired to dig up the full
thread.  I may have gratuitously brought it up because I'm on a
'perceptions' kick right now.  I think it has *tremendous* potential
for making a very different game depending on the skills that you
build up.

>> 'Power up'?  You don't.  This is something that I'm almost
>> unthinkingly in opposition to now.  I don't want one character
>> having personal power in the sense that they can control other
>> characters

> No, but you do want characters having abilities that other
> characters don't have. If these abilities are abundant or superior,
> that would be a way for the player to feel higher in the pecking
> order than a player who had fewer of them at inferior levels.

Abilities are abilities.  You can do things that those who do not have
those skills cannot.  They have abilities that you cannot accomplish.
No character can master all skills, and the goal is to have many
skills.  I'm also trying to inhibit the comparison game by not giving
all players apples.  Some have oranges, mangos, etc.

If you're not for power, then I think I need a design document for
your game world :)

>> I'm not going for *some* reminder.  I'm after a specific kind of
>> reminder that registers on the player in a specific way.

> The mechanism you propose doesn't sound like a reminder to me, it
> sounds like a punishment. Was that the point?

Absolutely not.  Remember that the player model I'm pursuing is one of
casual gameplay.  Players regularly stay away from the game for a day
or two because they don't feel all that compelled to keep going back.
Just enough to keep playing over time.  In that model, the loss of
ability to play the game is a reminder.  We might just be down to
semantics again.

>> As I attempted to point out, even destruction of a character isn't
>> permanent death.

> It is for that character.

But is that significant to anybody?  It permits in-game scenarios to
play out in a consistent way, and that's about it.  Then the downside
is all the stuff that I keep claiming will happen whenever the player
loses an in-game construction.

>> Only complete game ejection is permanent death.

> That would be death (in game terms) for the player, but in game
> terms the player doesn't exist, only the character. It goes
> completely against the fiction of most games to have a non-closed
> world. Now you could have a game where it made sense in the game
> fiction for a player to be chucked off if their character died, but
> you'd have to set it up like that from the start.

> In terms of a game world populated by characters, permanent death
> means character death, not player blocking.

Yeah, but in a game world populated by characters, characters
shouldn't know things that they weren't exposed to.  Why is it that
the newbie warrior knows all about the most advanced weaponry in the
game world?  It's not consistent.  I understand the attitude behind
permanent character death, but I think that the gains are dubious.

Oh, by inspection, you may have discovered that I dislike the idea of
a player having multiple characters.  I struggle with justifying that
to players who want to roleplay multiple characters.  But it does
eliminate muling in all its myriad forms.

>> Your comment about elimination of a given name from the game world
>> is a barrier, but not a complete one.  I use the character name
>> Tormanth in games (that I like), and if killed off, I'd then use
>> Tormantth, Tormmanth, etc.

> And you'd still say that you were playing the same character as
> before?  But you're not!

It doesn't matter whether the game is permitting me to create the
exact character.  The point is that the player's intent is to
reconstruct the original character.  You're assuming that players will
generally pursue a new route through the game.  I'm assuming
otherwise.  I hope that you're right.

>> the player can reconstruct the essence of the character - its
>> personality, which always survives because it lies with the player.

> The player can attempt to, yes, but it won't be the same character.
> It would be like an identical twin, kept in cryogenic suspension and
> brought out when the other twin died. You could try to bring up the
> identical twin the same way, but the environment has changed and you
> have changed since the previous twin was brought up. They could be
> similar, but similar enough to have the same essence?

Same comments as above.  The player's intent is the essential point.

>> Achievement is the only viable form of entertainment?

> No, but it delivers or enables other forms of entertainment to
> non-achievers, which is why it's important in multiplayer games.

I was really harping more on achievement of power than achievement in
general.  'Achievement' in its most general application just means
'change'.  It all depends on what a player considers an achievement.

> What if the player already has a mental map from having played the
> game before? Would you insist on the character learning everything
> as if it knew nothing (which is the purer solution) or allow the
> player to use their mental map (which isn't so pure).

Insist?  Players will play the game as they see fit.  I can only
design the game to encourage it to be played in a way that I think
works out the best for the game audience I'm seeking to entertain.  In
the case of the map, I want the character's mental map to be more
reliable and capable than the player's mental map.

> It's OK saying that you want a game where characters have knowledge,
> but how (or should?) you remove the knowledge that the players have?

I don't remove it.  I'll tend to make the character's knowledge
useful.  In a dynamic world, this will be more viable than in a static
one.  In a dynamic world, the character's perception skills and
knowledge will permit the player to more readily interact with the
world.  In a static world, once something is known, everyone knows it
and there's little value to having the character know it.

Note also that I'm trying to avoid all game mechanisms that encourage
or require players to create new characters.  That includes the death
model.  The issue of player knowledge is one reason, and I leverage
character knowledge to make existing characters more attractive.

Consider that if I can retain my thief and turn it into a wizard in
about the same amount of time that I could take a newbie and turn it
into a wizard, then I have not only gained the ability to do wizardy
things, but I have also retained all the character knowledge that I
have built up, along with whatever other skills the character might be
trying to maintain.  If character knowledge implies character
capabilities, then retention of that character knowledge has value.

Consider the case of the mental map.  If I can tell my character to go
to a certain location on the character's mental map while I am
offline, then I have an ability due to character knowledge that
another character would not have.  If teleportation was available
(blech), then character mental maps might be essential in arriving
safely at a desired destination.

>>> No, but the destruction of OTHER people's characters can be. It's
>>> just not a great deal of fun when it's you it happens to.

>> Um, that strikes me as a little bit nutty.  It's no fun for me to
>> get whacked, but it's fun to do it to other people, who probably
>> feel the same way that I do?

> I didn't say youhad to do it to other people, just that they had it
> done to them. I wouldn't necessarily get fun from pushing someone
> into a pond, but I might get fun if I watched them bend down and a
> goat ran up and butted them in. No-one would watch any of those home
> video shows on TV if they didn't like laughing at the misfortune of
> others.

Being pushed into a pond isn't getting whacked.  Regardless, I don't
enjoy it when other people get whacked because I don't enjoy it when I
get whacked.  Identifying with other people, be it through their
success or their misfortune, seems to be a trait that distinguishes
between those who enjoy PvP and those who do not.

>> In my world, I want to permit characters to morph over time to fit
>> the exact spot that the player wanted.  So there are no mistakes of
>> choosing the wrong class or the wrong race.

> I just wrote a section of a proposal for a new game that says almost
> exactly that (only using about 20 times the words!). I'm in
> wholehearted agreement with you there.

Oh nuts.  I'm starting to repeat myself.  Sorry about the dupe earlier
in this thread.  But I'm glad to see that the idea of flexible
characters is considered a good thing by somebody other than myself.

>> You are playing the game as you intended to.  If you wanted to
>> change your mind, you change your mind and you change your
>> character.

> But it's not that easy. The longer a character "lives", the harder
> it becomes to change it (emotionally). You keep the character for
> sentimental reasons, you may want to change it but you can't bring
> yourself to do it.  You can end up in a rut, wanting to get out but
> unable to do so. In that kind of situation, PD is a form of release.

I can see the rut phenomenon developing, but I wouldn't go so far as
to say that permanent character death is a good thing because it ends
that growingly intolerable experience.  Voluntarily creating a new
character accomplishes the same end - with the exception that I can
still be drawn back to the 'rut' character.

> Of course, if you're not in that situation then you won't
> necessarily thank the designer if you die <grin> .

Perfect timing.  That's pretty much my point.  I want it to be a
voluntary process.

>> Discarding the exact character that you were after makes no sense
>> to me.

> It's what you wanted, but is it what you want now?

The flexible character thing is supposed to let you change your
character if change is in the wind.  If a fresh start is desired,
creating a new character is an option.  Note that if I were to pursue
the single character per player route, I would be implementing
voluntary character recycling.

And there are other ways of getting a fresh start.  Travelling to a
distant place and finding new people to interact with and new things
to do would be one example.  New digs can be a way to change the game
experience.  But to get THAT, we have to figure out how to keep a
large world large.  That is, no teleportation, etc, to shrink it back
down again.

JB


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