[MUD-Dev2] Player Choice - How Much is Too Much?

[Lachek Butalek]

On Nov 20, 2007 7:52 AM, cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
> Now, I'm big on player choice - to me it's one of the fundamentals that
> makes a game not a movie. Saying that, I'm not sure I can truly agree
> that a game designer can't tell players how to play the game.

Johnicholas Hines wrote:
> There is something called "The Magician's Choice".
> This is when the magician seems to offer an audience member a choice,
> but phrases the offer in such a way that the magician actually forces
> the choice in a certain direction.
...
> Games can be linear, while still offering pleasure in a different way
> than a movie.

In the tabletop RPG world, what is referred to here is a firmly
established mode of game moderation called "illusionism". If
railroading is the act of forcing players into specific situations,
illusionism is the act of doing so while attempting to avoid player
knowledge of their predicament. It is used for two possible reasons:

1. The game moderator is lazy and/or unable to think on hir feet in
response to player actions, or
2. The game moderator believes that the story zie has written will be
more entertaining to the players than anything the players can come up
with on their own.

If "found out", an illusionist mode of play usually result in far more
player resentment than an openly railroading mode of play - players
feel cheated when they realize the choice they perceived they had was
not real. Even if players never catch on explicitly, such games rarely
entertain unless the players have a large amount of buy-in into the
game moderator's marvelously crafted storyline.

For MMORPGs, the reasons such a technique may be used translate to:

1. The game is technically unable to adjust to player actions, or
2. The developers believe that the story they have written will be
more entertaining to the players than anything the players can come up
with on their own (identical to the tabletop variety).

For #2, I think I can safely claim that no MMORPG has actually
achieved this, although nearly all of them believe they have. Sure,
there are (some) people who read the quest flavour text in WoW before
venturing forth to bravely kill ten ocelots, but outside of easily
amused fiction-starved early teen kids I can't imagine anyone
excitedly recount their adventures slaying the giant fire demon of
Oxz-Gagon from point of view of the game lore, as opposed to in
meta-game terms. On the other side, many people have awesome stories
to tell about how they once had a guild Moot in the middle of hostile
territory, or how they entered the Wetlands by jumping down a series
of hazardous cliff-side precipices. Simply, the stories players make
on their own are far more entertaining and sticky than the storyline
built into the game mythos.

#1 is far more forgivable. A game that attempts to offer a lot of
player activities and freedom often find themselves in situations
where the game engine cannot adjust to unpredictable circumstances. As
an example, look at the economy in EVE Online. In wild 0.0 space, you
will find all manner of odd market situations, like ridiculously high
prices on simple shuttlecraft or an complete absence of a particular
type of common ammunition. Within Empire space, however, the markets
are tightly regulated. Supply and demand resets each day and
stockpiles refill regardless of player intervention. This is most
certainly an invisible wall in the supposedly player-driven EVE
economy.

But if Empire economy didn't reset, the repercussions would ripple
throughout the EVE universe. The immediate effect would be that
newbies would be unable to engage in standard EVE activities of
manufacturing and trading. The long-term effect would be that certain
major alliances would start to dominate completely, with little to no
chance of retaliation. The gameplay of EVE would suffer - and worse,
it would suffer in a thoroughly unpredictable manner, in uncertain
ways at an uncertain timeline.

I think that designers can and must inform their players of the game
modes their game is built to deliver. It doesn't have to be by
explicit statement - in fact, the best games are those where the
"correct" mode of play naturally emerges from engaging with it. The
Alterac Valley is a good example of an incorrect way to inform -
Blizzard presents it overtly as a new mode of WoW gameplay focusing on
tactical combat and teamwork, but attaches a reward system which
informs the players that it is actually just a new currency to grind.
The gameplay which emerges is one of super-efficient farming rather
than tense tactical teamwork - objectively less entertaining than the
mode of play presented overtly. What would happen if Blizzard simply
removed the Honor reward entirely from the Alterac Valley
battleground? I imagine that those who chose to engage in that mode of
play would now be there voluntarily to engage in the form of play
initially presented by Blizzard - which, obviously, is entirely
possible to engage in within that space.

But linearity in an MMORPG, I believe, is missing the point entirely.
The advantage of an MMORPG over a single-player RPG (other than a
$15/month/subscriber cheque </sarcasm>) is that with other players
present, one can more easily forge personal stories within the game
environment due to the infinite number of variables a human element
offers. Elder Scrolls can only give you so much randomness within the
scope of its game code, but the presence of other players interacting
with the environment in dynamic, sticky ways provide a potentially
endless source of entertainment. When designers figure this out,
instead of offering fake choices and (warning: convergent analogies
ahead) herding players through their rollercoaster museum, maybe we
can get *real* entertainment from mainstream MMORPGs.