[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Rewards

[John Buehler]

cruise writes:

> A lot of the current discussions have involved, obliquely, how players
> are rewarded for what they do.
>
> In current MMOG's, rewards are used as a "carrot" to encourage player's
> jump through a game designer's hoops.
>
> The whole point of these is that players want them. However, therein
> lies the problem - gameplay becomes fixated on the reward, to the
> detriment of whichever activity is necessary to achieve it. Especially
> in a multiplayer environment players become competitive between
> themselves, even when this is not desirable in the game's universe.
>
> Between achievement-seeking and player-competition, players will quickly
> determine the most efficient method of achieving the reward. Often, this
> will bare little resemblance to the activity the reward is supposedly
> for...the virtue quests in UO, for example.
>
> Equally, players will often participate in activities that provide no
> reward, simply because the activity is enjoyable - re: the anecdote
> about chicken dancing in UO.
>
> Thus:
>
> a) Players don't need rewards if the activity is enjoyable.
> b) Rewards for activities often reward the wrong behaviour.

I'm a strong advocate of activites that are inherently enjoyable.

> As a generalisation, the available enjoyable activities increase with
> more players, since we are at heart social creatures (yes Sean, I know,
> you hate people ;)
>
> As per Caliban's recent posts, the more players, the more opportunity
> for b) to become disruptive and spoil your game.

I'm an advocate of the disruption theory.  The theory that "available
enjoyable activities" increases with more players would only make sense to a
socializer.  If a virtual setting only permits walking, then that's what
players can do as an actual activity.  Whatever walking can be used for can
be done by one player.  As a tool for socialization, yes, the dynamics
change as the group size changes.

> Which leads me to the conclusion that in a multiplayer game, rewards
> should be minimal, if existant. They certainly should not involve an
> increase in power, since that will only worsen the competetive streak.
> The exception to this, obviously, is if you can make your rewards immune
> to b) above /and/ can evenly distribute them amongst all the play styles
> you wish to encourage.

Right now, games seem to focus on one type of "reward": recognizeable
personal achievement.  That is a viable "inherently enjoyable" form of
entertainment for a lot of people.  The population of current games
demonstrates that.  So people ARE involved in an inherently enjoyable
experience right now.  Unfortunately, what designers have done is to make
every variation of gameplay the same thing; they're all focused on
recognizeable personal achievement.

Much of the griping about the treadmill and so on is that players who are
hoping for other "inherently enjoyable" activities are finding the trappings
of what they are hoping for (crafting, questing, exploring), only to find
that the activities themselves are rooted in "recognizeable personal
achievement".  The challenge to the gaming industry is to figure out what is
"inherently enjoyable" about stamp collecting and work that into the game.
Or juggling, or making beer - or even engaging in medieval combat.

Ultimately, rewards of the form we see today are just fine as a means of
entertaining players.  But they are not the only rewards that players could
be getting from multiplayer online entertainment.

JB