[MUD-Dev2] Specialization

[Michael Hartman]

Sean Howard wrote:
> It's just a game. It's entertainment. Success is something you expect from
> all other types of entertainment (how many times have you failed to finish
> a movie?), 

You cannot compare passive and interactive entertainment in that manner. 
Challenge is an important and necessary part of a good game. There is no 
challenge in watching a movie, there never should be, and adding 
challenge would detract from, rather than enhance, the viewing 
experience. But a game with no challenge gets boring very fast. Part of 
a game having a challenge is the possibility of failure.

 > and in single player games, success is a requirement for most
> players. How many people have you met that have actively liked a game that
> they could not win of their own accord? Most players consider a failure of
> the designer, not themselves - and they are right.

Are you sure you are talking about _most_ players? In my entire history 
of playing games, I have finished/beaten far less games than I have 
finished/beaten. I still enjoyed them immensely. I never "won/finished" 
Bard's Tale, Ultima 6, Might and Magic 1-3 and 6-7 (I actually finished 
4 and 5!), Vampire: The Masquerade, and tons more. But I loved all of 
those games.

In my 16 years of making and running games, most of my customers have 
expressed a similar viewpoint. They win/beat/finish some games, and 
others they don't. But that is not the determining factor for whether or 
not they enjoyed it.

> Just because you introduce other players into the mix does not mean that
> competition and failure must also be included. I've never understood that.
> Why you can have a perfectly playable single player game, but the second
> you jump online, everything you do and can do is judged by some sort of
> competitive ranking.

Um..... Maybe because people like competitive rankings? That also 
happens to be one of the main reasons a lot of people "jump online" in 
the first place. Every time I have ever added a new way for people to 
compete with each other, it has been met with resounding joy. People 
love having all sorts of ways to compete with other people or to see how 
they stack up against others. That existed even before games went 
online. I remember tens of thousands of people snail mailing in 
photographs of their highest Astrosmash (a game for the Intellivision) 
score so they could see how they stacked up against other players around 
the world.


> It's the same thing with things like education. Nobody cares about how
> schools are enriching the lives of the children, how they are making them
> more creative, curious, or yes, even smarter. They don't care what the
> child's experience is in school, even if he is miserable or develops a
> life long hatred of learning, so long as he scores competitively with
> other schools in his district, state, country, and world.

This is another terrible analogy that does not hold. Interactive gaming 
entertainment and education are not at all similar in terms of goals, 
necessity, or importance to society.

It is irrelevant to our society if most people never learn how to circle 
strafe. But it is very important to society that everyone know how to 
read and do basic mathematics.

> For reasons completely beyond my understanding, the gamers who fail are
> somehow blamed for it. They are actively PUNISHED for it. In the eyes of
> the designer, it's not HIS fault that a solo player can't do raids. At the
> same time, the player who is cognitively pre-built for such things is
> rewarded for behavior which is as natural as breathing and, frankly,
> destructive to the community and usually to the game. You say to them,
> congrats for minmaxing the boss, but when they minmax environmental
> geometry, they are cheating. You say that grinding gold as a player is
> fine, but grinding gold as a bot is not? Why not? It's a simple and
> obvious extension of the way the designer wants them to play. You want
> them to succeed by grinding? What grinds better than a machine? But no,
> that's too far. Gotta bring the player back to this nonexistent ideal,
> through force if necessary.

Another comparison that really doesn't hold. I agree with a lot of the 
sentiment in the above paragraph, but it has nothing to do with the 
concepts of competition, letting players succeed at everything, or 
having the possibility of player failure in your game.

The obsession with "raiding" as a One-and-Only end game is a bad and 
myopic game decision, imho. Pushing people to spend hours and hours 
grinding gold is also a mistake in game design, imho. But these mistakes 
do not relate to the overall issues of competition, being good at 
everything, and failure.


> It's not the designer's fault. It's never the designer's fault. Always the
> player's. Well, I disagree. It's ALWAYS the designer's fault.

This is just as myopic as the raiding obsession. It is very often the 
designers fault, but some things are the players fault as well. I have 
watched players do things that are antithetical to their own enjoyment 
both as a developer and as a player. This always boggles me. The blame 
for such behavior goes on the player, not on the designer.

> If you only allow one class per character,
> you'll have players using a dozen alts instead of settling into a single
> person.

No you won't. Sure, some people will make a lot of alts, but if your 
game play is compelling and deep enough, a lot of people will focus 
almost exclusively on one, or maybe two, characters. Limiting the number 
of classes per character has little to do with whether or not people 
will make alts. I had alts when I played Final Fantasy even though you 
could level EVERY class on the same character. But when I played DAoC, 
where I was limited to one class, I pretty much played one character 
exclusively. I think on WoW, if it weren't for the raid-or-nothing 
gameplay, you would find more people sticking with their favorite 
character. But there comes a time in WoW where unless you are raiding, 
there is no point to even play a character. That is what turns people to 
alts more than the fact that they are only 1 class.

> So how about a new motto? All players, no matter what, can explore any
> game system they'd like, as often as they'd like to the extent that they'd
> like, with success guaranteed (if they want it). Let's shorten it a bit:

That doesn't sound like a game. That sounds like a movie. When I want to 
watch a movie, I will. When I want to play a game, I expect there to be 
challenges that will test my skill, my mind, and my reflexes. If I 
always succeed, there is no challenge, and the game is not even worth 
playing.

-- 
Michael Hartman, J.D. (http://www.frogdice.com)
President & CEO, Frogdice, Inc.
University of Georgia School of Law, 1995-1998
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, 1990-1994