[MUD-Dev] Kaczynski's Law

[Freeman]

Everyone is familiar with Bartle's Essay

  http://www.brandeis.edu/pubs/jove/HTML/v1/bartle.html

so I won't go there. Basically the theory is that some people are
more socializers and less achievers, other people are more killers
and less explorers.

Somewhat less well known is Nick Yee's Player Motivations study

  http://www.nickyee.com/facets/home.html

which failed to find any reliable method of putting players in
boxes, defining them as 'player-types'. Rather, he found five
distinct motivations for playing games that people possessed to
lesser or greater degree. Furthermore, that people who strongly
identified with 'achiever'-motivations weren't really less likely
(nor more likely) to identify strongly with the
'socializer'-motivations, etc.

Lately there's been also some discussion regarding type-A players
and type-B players: The idea being that type-A players (whom are in
the minority) desire a "sandbox"-style game where they're given lots
of toys and tools and allowed to do whatever they want. Type-B
players, conversely, desire clear, specific goals outlined for
them. The idea here is that you should have 70% to 80% of your
content geared for one type of player, and 20% to 30% geared for the
other.

Here's someone taking a slightly different approach. It is closer to
Nick Yee's study, in that it doesn't assign people to
mutually-exclusive 'types', but still quite different in which
motivations are deemed important. This begins with what I like to
call Kaczynski's Law:

  "a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and
  he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals."

Now that statement, alone, satisfies the type-B player
description. But there's more to it than that. This hypothesis is
contrary to the argument that some people need A, whereas other
people need B. Rather, it is to say, all people have a need for one,
and most people have a need for both.

Quoting once more:

  "The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of
  these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs
  to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to
  succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth
  element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for
  everyone. We call it autonomy..."

While the concept of 'autonomy' addresses the type-A playstyle, this
hypothesis doesn't state that some people need A and other people
need B, but rather it states that all people need B and most people
need A, too.

Personally, I disagree with that, in that I think it more likely all
people need both A (autonomy) and B (goal, effort and attainment).
Ultimately, that disagreement is a mere quibble: If you're designing
a game for a large group of people, then if "most people" need
autonomy, then it's a must-have for your game, even if some minority
of players don't need it.

He writes better than I do:

  "But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in
  working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on
  their own initiative and must be under their own direction and
  control. Yet most people do not have to exert this initiative,
  direction and control as single individuals. It is usually enough
  to act as a member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen people
  discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort
  to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be
  served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above
  that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative,
  then their need for the power process will not be served. The same
  is true when decisions are made on a collective bases if the group
  making the collective decision is so large that the role of each
  individual is insignificant."

So, the danger in 'typing people' is that you wind-up implementing,
for example, entire professions or classes that do not satisfy all
of the elements of the power process. For example, you might
implement a combat professions on the one hand, and a social
profession on the other.  'Thinking that some players want the
directed-experience of your combat profession whereas others want
the sandbox-expierience of your social profession.

But there are elements of the social profession (autonomy!) that
more combat-oriented players, playing combat-only professions, would
enjoy, and need. And conversely there are elements of the combat
professions (goal, effort, attainment) that are desirable and
necessary for all players. A player focusing on your social
(autonomous, sandboxy) profession would miss-out on the
directed-experience, that sort of gameplay, and would not be as
satisfied with their experience as they would have been otherwise.

So, what games need are both, for all players, all the time: The
player must always have goals, which require effort to obtain, and
which they do obtain with a reasonable degree of success. And the
player must have autonomy.=20

Fortunately these aren't opposing play-styles: You needn't choose
which to provide to which player. Rather, the player needs to be
given choices in how, when and which goals to satisfy, but not the
option to opt-out of satisfying any goals at all. The player has to
be forced to do something, but just exactly what that something is
and how to go about doing it, should be a choice left up to the
player.

To use EQ as an example, you must level-up. If you aren't, then you
aren't really playing the game. You can take a break from grinding
xps to go pursue some short-term temporary goal, such as twinking a
pal, or to just goof off for a while, but ultimately you come back
to the goal that you can't get away from. So you cannot opt-out of
it (apart from just quitting the game altogether). But you do get a
lot of choices as to how pursue that goal. Starting with
class-selection, which dictates a lot about what sorts of things
you're going to be doing in order to level-up, and then also with
the choices you make about where to go, what to kill, which items to
camp (because they will assist you in pursuing the goal of leveling
up) and so on.

Therefore, EQ serves the need for the power process for a lot of
people.

But what about 'fun'? Surely people don't really play games to
satisfy the need for goal-effort-attainment and autonomy. They play
to have fun!

Well, okay. The reason we're playing games to begin with is to have
fun, and be entertained.

But the purpose of both Bartle's Essay and Nick Yee's Study is to
address retention, not fun - and a fun game is not necessarily a
sticky one.

This is not to say that people will play an un-fun game so long as
it satisfies the power-process. Rather, it does suggest that if a
game fails to satisfy the power-process, it probably won't be fun,
either.  More likely, it will be boring, tedious, repetitive or
frustrating: Because it fails to provide goals, the goals are too
easily attained. Or the goals are too difficult to attain. Or
because the game doesn't offer the player any freedom or choices to
make.
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev