[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviorsspawnedfrom...]

[Sean Howard]

<EdNote: Minor editing done.  Brunt remains unchanged.>

"Michael Sellers" <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:

> Others would disagree - Caillois, Huizinga, LeBlanc, etc.

If you wanted to argue why they would disagree, well, that's a
discussion.  Name dropping is just an appeal to authority, and if
there was anyone who that didn't work on, it's me.

> Except, say, Barbie Fashion Designer or The Sims.  Both were the
> top selling games for their respective years, both have outsold
> almost all other games in years since -- and both were almost
> completely ignored by most gamers.

The Sims was played by quite a few gamers. "almost completely
ignored" is flat out wrong. And Barbie Fashion Designer was built on
top of a franchise that has literally has its own aisle at the toy
stores.

> Our industry isn't set up to design, develop, or distribute games
> that don't feature competition heavily.

Your industry isn't set up to design anything.

>> None of those Purple Moon-like studios which were created to
>> bring social gameplay and fashion to gaming to attract a female
>> audience succeeded.

> Purple Moon suffered from the same problem that many game studios
> hit -- their games just weren't all that good.  But the failure of
> one game or studio hardly disproves what user interviews,
> demographic, and psychographic studies have shown for at least the
> past ten years.

Not to be rude, but I did use the plural "Purple Moon-like
studios". I don't know the names of the others, but I know PM wasn't
alone.

> Single-point anecdote explains nothing.  Look at the population;
> look at what they buy.  You can't generalize from what one person
> likes.

To quote Rupert Murdoch, er... Citizen Kane, "People think what I
tell them to think". And likewise, people buy what you tell them to
buy. The only thing standing between you and a brand new home
version of Pong is one really good advertisement and an endorsement
by Adam Sessler. What people buy has very little to do with whether
or not they would benefit from it. Don't confusing marketing with
people.

> But even if you turned off all of these, you'd *still* have narrow
> games that value achievement over relationship, that present goals
> without any larger meaningful context, and that quickly devolve to
> how quickly you can eviscerate your opponent.

I'm not sure what games you've been playing, but just in the past
few days, I enjoyed Katamari Damacy, Star Wars Galaxies, Saga of
Ryzom, Dance Dance Revolution, and Cultures 2. My taste in gaming is
hardly mainstream (if tv is any indication), but I still end up
buying multiple games a month - which, at $50 a pop, is more than I
can afford.

And now... the Grand Unifying Theory of Games. We play games because
our brains need exercise. They need to make decisions, and games
provide controlled decisions in a safe environment. They are a part
of life, video or otherwise. People can have a preference for a
particular TYPE of decision (ie tactical vs logistic), but most
people tend to be fully capable of making all types of decisions to
some degree of success. Now, what those decisions are don't matter
to the brain. Whether you are moving chess pieces around or deciding
how to match Malibu Barbie's outfit to her pink car, you are making
a tactical decision. Very little of what you described has anything
to do with games other than being superficial window dressing on top
of the decisions. That superficial window dressing is an important
barrier of entry, but it's not the great uncrossable divide.

> It couldn't possibly be because our games are made by, for, and
> with a young white unmarried male world view, could it?

That's because the game industry can exploit these type of workers
by overworking them and they won't complain. You want to talk about
why the games don't have any discernable design in them, that's due
to the contempt with which the industry overwhelmingly treats game
design.

>> Other than the obvious (and, I dare say, arousing) physical
>> differences between males and females, they aren't mentally
>> different in ANY WAY.

> That's not the case.  There is abundant data that men and women
> vary...

Yes, yes, yes. Men are different from women. Blacks have bigger
penises.  Asians are smarter. Gay people have extra something or
others in their brain. Obese people have the fat gene. Midgets
aren't the same as dwarfs.  Andy Milonakis is 29 years old but looks
14. Some people are born with genius IQs and some are clinically
retarded. We are all different in ways that could be considered
significant, and yet somehow, we aren't THAT different. Black guys
may have larger penises, but they still have penises.

What I'm saying is that the differences mean little, and that the
differences between two random people on the street would be
overwhelmingly larger than the two sexes collectively. I should
point out that the human body changes to meet life. The brain is a
muscle, what you don't use atrophies away, and what you do use grows
ever larger. There've been studies that showed that the parts of the
brain used for maps and directions was much larger in life long New
York cab drivers.

The only things that do matter, as far as games are concerned, is
their preference on the types of decisions they make and perhaps
their IQ.  Everything else is just marketing.

> And then of course there are the cultural differences between men
> and women.

I'd argue that there are plenty of cultural differences between men
alone to justify an article. I mean, some guy in a stained wife
beater from Georgia may not play videogames while a Beverly Hills
plastic surgeon might. Women are different than men, but men are
different than men.

> I wasn't aware we were in the business of creating gamers.

That's exactly what you are in. Industry needs repeat consumers. My
sister goes to the movies like seven or eight times a month. She
sees all the new movies that come out. I haven't been to a movie
theater since "Land of the Dead". We are still both "moviers". We
keep track of what movies come out, get excited and follow certain
releases (man, did I follow "Land of the Dead"), and have more than
a passing knowledge of movies in general.  Judging by the volume of
people who were buying "Kung-Fu Hustle" at the Best Buy the other
day, I think there are plenty of "moviers" out there.  The game
industry wants to create that same dependence in the form of new
types of gamers. They want to reach out and addict someone.

>> The reason the Sims did well was the relationship it had with
>> SimCity, a game which has had a long standing positive
>> relationship with non-gamers.

> SimCity 3000 didn't give The Sims much of a bounce.  No doubt the
> 'Sim' name counted for something, but that could have explained
> maybe 500K units sold or so at the outside.

That's because it wasn't that different from SimCity 2000. People
get tired when you continually sell them the same games with a
different coat of paint. Tomb Raider 4 didn't do nearly as well as
Tomb Raider, despite being the same game.

> This went beyond the "Tamagotchi" effect on which the game was
> first pitched to distributors; for many players,
> disproportionately women, the difference between caring for a
> single interactive 'creature' and several with family and friends
> was profound.

Why didn't "Creatures" do better then? The Sims did well because it
had a name, a huge marketing budget that got that name out to
non-traditional sources like Time magazine, easy comparisons to
Little Computer People, and cute little ancedotes that work in bite
sized new clippings. You can't tell just anybody about that time you
were playing Everquest II and a Gnoll killed you and caused you to
rerez outside the city gates, but you can tell anybody that the mom
set herself on fire while cooking and the dad got locked out of the
bathroom and started to pee on the floor.

The Sims is a good game, but not an exceptional game. The reason it
did so well is simply because it was market friendly.

>> Let's not forget the near infinite number of expansion packs that
>> guarranteed shelf space for The Sims long after it should've been
>> forgotten (can anyone remember teh American Idol or Harry Potter
>> expansions?)

> Yes, expansions which were initially a risk for EA; many inside EA
> weren't convinced the market would support them.  But the game
> just kept selling!  Again, the expansion packs didn't make for the
> word-of-mouth or the shelf-space; the continuously strong sales
> made retailers willing to give shelf space, and made EA willing to
> make expansions again and again.

Ah, but you forgot Sean's Third Rule of Gaming, don't sell the
consumers the same game in a different box too often. The reason the
Sims 2 didn't do as well is because the market was literally
saturated with Sims expansions, and whatever integrity that the
series had once held with its fans pretty much died between Hot Date
and the one with the dogs.

It's the risk all game companies seem actually willing to take - do
I release seven Tony Hawk games in seven years, even creating an O2
line specifically for Tony Hawk clones, thereby losing the trust and
long term fanbase of the consumers in favor of immediate
gratification. Napalm the market with as much same old crap and get
the money while there is still money to be made. There's a reason
that games like Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Ratchet and
Clank, and Jak and Daxter don't quite have the lasting franchises
that something like Mario or Zelda does.

- Sean Howard
http://gamebastard.blogspot.com
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