[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle writes:

> On 19 March 2007, John Buehler wrote:
> >Is that a sign of an interest in emotes for reasons of
> socialization or for
> >reasons of seeing something fun for themselves?
> 	It doesn't matter. You said "I simply don't believe that the vast
> majority of graphical combat game players have any interest in emote
> systems.".
> You didn't specify WHY they had to be interested in them.

:) Okay, fair enough.  The english language stinks.

When I say "an interest in emote systems", I'm talking about the use of
emotes to build up a character's role or to augment the game context in some
way.  I'm keying off your original example of a weak /bow treatment.  Taken
literally, "an interest in emote systems" would include their design and
development.  Happily, that interpretation hasn't been brought into this.

> >These are not the sort of players who are looking to get to know other
> >people or are interested in presenting a sophisticated facade of a role -
> >which is what subtleties such as emoting are most closely aligned with.
> 	Nevertheless, if those tools are available then they'll notice
> them and use a few. If a virtual world appears that doesn't have them,
> they'll want to know why they're not there.

You may get a grass roots thing going or you may not.  I'm skeptical.  My
nieces are not going to play first person shooters any more than my nephews
are going to play Barbie games.  It's just of no interest.  I assume that
emoting systems are one of those things that people either enjoy using or
not - at a fundamental level.  Build the right game and you attract people
who would really glom onto emoting and chatting.  My example is, as always,
Second Life.

> >My experience has been that players
> >communicate data about the game far more than spending any time
> at all with
> >communicating anything about themselves as players or as characters.
> 	This may well be the case. The point is that they don't spend 100%
> of their communication time on game-related data. Furthermore, tiny though
> that percentage may be in terms of time spent doing it, it punches above
> its weight. If people want to express something subtly, even if it's
> only once a week, they'll know when they can't do it and notice when they
> can.

Okay.  I can see people dipping a toe into this area once every so often.
Is that going to serve as an argument to a product team for expending more
resources on it?

Mind you, I'm not averse to emoting and chatting.  I like doing both.

> >> 	Well, we do have actual girls playing these games.
> >I didn't mean to be taken quite so literally.
> 	Me neither.
> 	What I was trying to say is that we do have people playing
> these games
> who aren't there entirely for relentless raiding, and there's no good
> reason not to cater to them.

Catering to a secondary demographic is a hard sell to a venture capitalist.

> >I think it could be quite fun as well, but the devil is in the
> details.  If
> >the entirety of the game is about getting to level N as fast as possible,
> >then smiling at vendors is going to be a macro on the keyboard
> and nothing
> >more.
> 	And if the vendor is in a bad mood and you auto-smile at them, then
> it'll count against you. It's pointless to give NPCs emotions if those
> emotions never change in reaction to events and if your actions aren't
> among those emotional events.

My point is that if the majority of players are auto-smiling merchants, then
the game is flawed.  Putting in a penalty for players not playing the game
the way you want them to is fundamentally a bad idea, in my opinion.  This
goes back to the issue of the sort of players that a game attracts.  A game
cannot say "Kill everything in town, then go and have a little chat with the
hermit outside of town."  The sort of player that wants to kill everything
in town isn't the sort that is likely to go talk to a hermit about the
weather.  If the chat is about where the next town to wipe out is, they'll
be more inclined to go, but you can be sure they'll try to get through it
quickly.  They want to wipe out a town.

My rule of thumb is that if players are macroing a game system, then there
is a mismatch between the player base and the game systems.

> >A game like Second Life is far more social.  Emoting and
> chatting there can
> >be very sophisticated, and it makes sense there.  The players
> are of a mind
> >to use it.
> 	Certainly there's more of it going on in SL, but then there's not a
> lot else to do there (unless the spending-time-making-things
> dynamic really is a big as the media would have us believe).
> 	That doesn't mean players of game-like worlds wouldn't be up for it,
> if it were available. After all, SL still has walking even though you can
> teleport everywhere.

Regardless of WHY players are socializing in Second Life, they are.

> >The need for subtlety in a
> >chat system (including emotes) is what I'm focusing on.  Unless
> the virtual
> >world's entertainment is structured appropriately, a subtle chat
> system is
> a
> >pointless expenditure of development effort.
> 	I disagree. It doesn't take a great deal of effort to implement a
> chat system with emotes at all - one programmer for one day, if you don't
> care about having accompanying animations or sounds.

Multimedia games demand multimedia treatment.

> 	Also, I disagree about its being pointless. Some people really like
> that method of communicating and will use it a lot - if they have the
> chance. WoW players don't use it because they don't have it; if they did
> have it, they'd use it (and rave at how good this "new" feature is). It
> would take a very sour individual to complain that Blizzard had
> wasted time enhancing the communications feature when they should be
> re-rebalancing the first boss in Arcatraz.

This is what it boils down to:

You say that a rich emoting system would be used if it were made available.

I say that a rich emoting system will be used if it were made available and
part of the "right" kind of game.

We just disagree.

> >> >Chatting and emoting in Second Life? Definitely.  In World of
> Warcraft?
> >> >Does it get me my tier 3 gear?
> >> 	It does if you do it to the right person.
> >"The right person" is the key.  The "right people" aren't
> playing World of
> >Warcraft.  They're all over in Second Life, chatting and emoting.
> 	No, they're playing World of Warcraft. You need a group for
> your tier 3 gear, that means you need to communicate with potential group
> members. You
> may have to persuade them, if they'd rather be doing other things. If you
> have more expressive power at your disposal, you can better persuade them.
> Once the group is put together, hey, who cares whether you can ";falls on
> his knees and begs." or not, but if you used that to get someone to group
> with you, it's contributing to your getting your tier 3 gear.

I guess we need to convince Blizzard to up the ante on their emote system so
we can have another data point on what it takes for people to use emote
systems.

JB