[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN} Who to design for?

[Sean Howard]

"Caliban Darklock" <cdarklock at gmail.com> wrote:
> Many Star Trek viewers are effectively translating the conversation into
> Pakled. They see Geordi come out and say something like this:
>
> "Captain, the dilithium matrix is destabilised, and we can't use warp
> drive for several hours. We're limited to impulse engines while I
> climb through the jeffreys tube and reinitialise the system."
>
> And the filters kick in:
>
> "Captain, IT IS BROKEN, and we can't GO FAST for several hours. We're
> limited to GOING SLOW while I climb through THAT and FIX IT."

Your geek is showing :)

That's exactly my point. Context clues allow people to understand dialogue
which contain vocabulary they don't understand. Something like an Aaron
Sorkin show tends to use a really large vocabulary, but fails to put it in
a manner in which intent is obvious. That's why Studio 60 will never find
a large fanbase. But Star Trek is something which places ideals ahead of
vocabulary. Everything that Star Trek is and means is obvious, even if
things like phasers and warp drives seem like gibberish to you.

> But in a game context, you can't make that translation, because you're
> expected to give the command to fix it. So when someone in the game
> says "the dilithium matrix is destabilised" you're sitting there lost
> in this quagmire of jargon and unable to make a rational decision.

Hmm... I think that if your intent were to design a game which closely
modeled the Star Trek gibberish, then yeah, you'd be very much confined by
it - as are most hardcore Western fantasy games, which take their lore far
too seriously. However, compare that to World of Warcraft. Each quest has
about a page of text, almost always optional, and yields a concise summary
at the end. You know you need to kill 4 wolves, then talk to a guy in town
X. That's all you need to know for pretty much the entirety of WoW. And
that's why WoW works. Because the gibberish isn't functional. That's why
every MMORPG has a quest tracker now.

A good example of this is the Super Robot Taisen series. It is a very
popular tactical game series in Japan which uses licensed robots from
stuff like Mazinger Z, Macross, Evangelion, Dangaioh, Full Metal Panic,
and so on. These games are completely playable to someone who does not
read Japanese and does not know the difference between Getter Robo and
Gundam (now my geek is showing :). The real test is when they released a
game without any of the licensed robots and it was still playable.

You don't need all that flash. In fact, I think if you got rid of the
flash, you'd be able to deliver MORE complex gameplay mechanics to a wider
range of players.  For instance, in my current project, I've created a
theoretical gameplay mechanic for managing complex point and click
movement for a platforming game
(http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=6). The idea itself is fairly
complex, both visually and conceptually - and yet by illustrating it with
silhouettes, it seems simple and obvious.

You are talking about dilithium crystals, when I think the worst offender
has been graphics. I think extremely complicated gameplay can be presented
in an obvious and clean way and even the most casual observer will be able
to understand it. Gameplay is absolutely universal. The thing which
separates the casuals from the hardcores is the wrappings.

> I think there's a big fat part of a game's life cycle where you've
> already locked in your core player base, and until they move far
> enough along that they're a fringe element, the mainstream won't touch
> the game. The game has three important stages - one at the beginning
> where everyone who joins will be a "playa" simply because competition
> is minimal, one in the middle where only the elite get to succeed
> because competition is massive, and then one at the end where
> competition is reasonable because the elite have either moved on or
> are now playing a whole different type of game. Only "regular folk"
> are signing on and playing the main game, and most of them are
> comparable. That's where the game needs to be sustainable, in the end.

I think you are close, but I think games become more hardcore over time.
WoW is a good example of it. The casual players have long since left that
game, and the hardcore gamers have been begging for more hardcore cookies,
so WoW has slowly over time become a hardcore game. The newbie areas are
empty. You can't find groups in most areas. What few other people you do
see are usually alts, twinked to perfection and intolerant of players
unfamiliar with the minutae of the game. In my experience, the only time
you can truly start a MMORPG as a casual gamer is on day one.

> But the learning curve - while admittedly long - is shallow. Starcraft
> builds, mission after mission, so that you initially work with limited
> units and limited ideas. Over time, you become accustomed to the
> gameplay. Diablo has early levels where stats are largely irrelevant,
> and it's only as you get much deeper into the game that you need to
> track stats.

I don't think the learning curve is nearly as important as people think it
is. I think by the time a casual player sees the number of units in
StarCraft or the stat system in Diablo, they've already decided whether or
not it is something they feel comfortable tackling. Obviously, you can
have a learning curve that is too steep and frustrating, but that's the
only time the curve matters - making it long, shallow, short, quick, tall,
whatever isn't going to make or break the game.

> Agreed. There is something fundamentally different in the mindset; I'm
> playing Dead Rising over and over this week, not because I'm having so
> much fun with it, but because I'm convinced that I can accomplish a
> particular goal within 24 hours of game time. Every time I hit that 24
> hour mark and haven't accomplished it, no matter how close I am, I
> start over. That's hardcore gaming behavior.

More like obessive compulsive disorder :)

I think all players get that kind of thing, depending on their goals and
situation. I don't think having goals is what makes you a hardcore gamer.
I think it's an edge of competitiveness, a bit of perfectionism, mixed
with detailed knowledge of a game's minutae as if it mattered, and of
course, min maxing everything from your character's name to how many steps
they walk.

I think your goal qualifies you as hardcore because it seems to
incorporate all those things. But without knowing the goal, I'm just
assuming.

-- 
Sean Howard