Multiplayer Interactive-Fiction Game-Design Blog

A rose-filled world

1 May 2008

by Mike Rozak

Discuss on www.mXac.net/forums

When I first started thinking about writing a game, I considered the following “game” design:

Imagine wandering around a world and just watching – “smelling the roses”, so to speak. A player could wander around, watch what the inhabitants were doing, and be entertained by just viewing, just as a story entertains readers, who are merely watchers (not doers).

Theoretically, players wouldn’t be able to affect the world at all.

Except, of course, the design wouldn’t let players miss the important action. Scenes would be frozen until the player was there to observe them.

And players would be able to talk to NPCs, and maybe even interact by playing cards with them, or partake in other sub-games that wouldn’t interfere with the world/story.

So, the player would affect the world somewhat, but only on the margins, like deciding which shade of black to paint their Model-T Ford. (Henry Ford is attributed with the quote, “The customer can have any colour he wants so long as it’s black.”)

As I said, I was originally going to write such a “game”, but decided not to. I didn’t have any firm, logical reasoning for not wanting to; it just didn’t feel right. For years now, I’ve been wondering if the idea would “work”.

It won’t work.

The reasons are:

1. 
   Games are about choice. Without choice, players might as well read a book or watch a movie.
   
2. 
   Choices without consequence (change/agency) aren’t valid choices. If you’re given a choice of what’s behind door A or what’s behind door B, and later discover that the exact same thing was behind both, you’ll be miffed. (See Choices III.)
   
3. 
   Without choice, players would feel like ghosts, unable to actually do anything. Most would realize this and leave unsatisfied. Those that remained would be tormented souls, spending eternity wandering the world, rattling their virtual chains.
   

It still won’t work. (And typical MMORPGs don’t work either; I’ll explain later.)

I’ll expand my “smell-the-roses” world to include typical MMORPG features, though still without world-changing agency:

1. 
   Players can walk around and smell the roses.
   
2. 
   The roses make sure not to actually bloom until players are around to see and smell them.
   
3. 
   Players aren’t limited to smelling the roses; they can also touch them.
   
4. 
   Players can partake in rose-like activities, such as flower arranging, playing poker with rose-themed cards, and/or killing rose-monsters.
   
5. 
   Players can smell the roses together.
   
6. 
   Players can collect roses of different varieties and colours. These collections allow players to ultimately collect bigger and better roses from more dangerous parts of the world.
   
7. 
   Roses can be used to affect (prick?) other player characters, and indirectly affect other players.
   

• 
  If a game-world has nothing that players can or want to change, then many players will be miffed and leave. (Don’t forget, if a player’s choices can’t be used to change something the player wants to change, those choices aren’t valid.)
  
• 
  Some players will put all their effort (choices) into changing their character (Aka: grinding/treadmill).
  
• 
  Others will work on changing relationships with other players (socializing or player-killing).
  
• 
  A small percentage will smell the roses (explore). Contemporary MMORPGs tend to have very few roses though.
  

MMORPG fundamental problem #1: MMORPGs are fundamentally broken because players can’t change the world.

Even though gameplay involves millions of choices, players eventually realize that all those choices have only two effects: (a) advancing their characters, and/or (b) affecting their relationships with other players.

Thus, the types of players attracted to MMORPGs are (a) people whole like advancing their characters (achievers), and (b) people who like hanging around people who like advancing their characters (socialisers). A few killers come along for the ride, because they like having people around that they can dominate. And a few explorers find the paucity of roses (explorable bits) present in a MMORPG enough to keep them interested.

I’ve been lying (somewhat). Some MMORPGs have limited world-affecting agency:

• 
  Players can own things in the world:
  
  • 
    Players can own houses (inns, guild halls, etc.) and affect those houses.
    
  • 
    Players can own ships (or other vehicles) and affect (aka: improve) those ships.
    
  • 
    Players can “own” personal NPCs and affect them. In turn, personal NPCs can own houses and vehicles.
    
• 
  Players can pretend to change things:
  
  • 
    Players can temporarily change the world, such as killing an orc (only to have it reappear a few minutes later), or perhaps temporarily making a NPC happy, or even temporarily taking control of a castle or city.
    
  • 
    Players are fooled into thinking they have world-affecting agency by being rushed out of one section of the world after they have “freed it” from the evil overlord... rushed being the operative word, because if players return they’ll still find the overlord in control. (This is an important trick though, one that must be used, as I’ll describe later.)
    
  • 
    Instances (and other world-fracturing techniques) let players defeat the evil overlord in a temporary incarnation of part of the world, formalizing the “rush them out the door” approach.
    
• 
  Meta-gaming
  
  • 
    Players can actually change the world by whinging on the forums.
    
  • 
    Players can actually change the world by harassing other players so much that they leave.
    

MMORPG fundamental problem #2: MMORPGs are fundamentally broken because MMORPGs where players can change the world (often by owning something) all tend provide the same “you can change the world in such-and-such a way” feature.

Face it, almost every MMORPG has housing. It’s nearly as cliché as orc whacking. Players have already owned MMORPG houses before, so being able to own more housing isn’t seen as terribly desirable. Vehicle ownership is the new housing (housing was new for MMORPGs circa 2000). Personal NPCs will be next.

What players can change about the world needs to be a unique selling point!

The other fundamental problem is much scarier for MMORPGs:

MMORPG fundamental problem #3: MMORPGs are fundamentally broken because when players do change the world, it will eventually revert back.

It must; letting a sieged castle stay occupied by a guild forever, for example, means that new players will never get to siege that castle, instantly “wasting” all the time and effort that went into the castle’s design. Even worse, if a group of players were to actually defeat the evil overlord, a whole new one would have to be invented, including all the quests that lead to the final defeat.

The only solution to this problem is to “rush the players out the door” soon after they’ve changed the world in the largest and most meaningful way. Failure to do so shatters the illusion of change, and quickly negates any solutions to problems #1 and #2.

MMORPGs don’t rush the player out the door because their business model relies on keeping players around so they keep paying. Consequently, players eventually learn that all changes are ephemeral, except (you guessed it) changes to their character or their relationships with other players. (...as well as whinging on the forums and harassing other players off the game.)

So what does a virtual world that allows change look like?

• 
  However the world lets itself be changed, the change must be a unique selling point.

  Letting players change the world by building houses has gotten a tad cliché. Vehicles will soon fall into that category. And so too will personal NPCs (once MMORPG designers understand personal NPCs).

  
  
• 
  The world must be created in such a way that players want to change it. (If not, why even bother with world-changing agency?)

  The world must be “good enough” that players like it and decide that it’s worth their effort to improve, but the world must still have things that need changing: wrongs that need righting, diseases to cure, etc.

  
  
  There’s no point writing the code that allows players to change Morder by kicking the orcs out because Mordor is such a desolate and dislikeable place that no one will want to change it. Hobbitton, all lush and friendly, is worth saving from the invading orcs, so players will rally around the cause.
  
• 
  The world must provide tools that are appropriate to the change. If the world is about finding the cure for cancer, then it must provide players the virtual laboratories needed to do their research. Killing orcs to cure cancer stretches imagination a bit too much.
  
• 
  Because challenges and emotions encourage immersion (see Making players forget that they’re playing a game), the act of changing the world must be challenging and emotional. This is where games (challenges) come in, as well as likeable NPCs dying of cancer.
  
• 
  Fracturing reality is a must: Letting more than one player cure cancer is financially desirable for the game company – the cancer-curing content being very expensive to write. While the world can contain thousands of houses, ultimately, only one person/team cures cancer... which means that reality must be fractured so that several people/teams can cure cancer without feeling like they’re being cheated.
  
• 
  And when players have made THE big change to the world (or at least the big changes they want to make), they should then be encouraged to leave so they don’t overly notice that the world hasn’t really changed, and all their work has been for naught. In other words, no matter how good a world’s fracturing techniques are, players still have to be rushed out the door when they’re done.
  

• 
  MMORPGs make their money by keeping people playing for a huge length of time, 500+ hours.
  
• 
  A game that’s that long cannot allow the world to change, for all the reasons I listed.
  
• 
  Consequently, MMORPGs offer character advancement and social relationships as two things that can be changed.
  
• 
  Those players that want to change the world but realize they cannot do so, leave.
  
• 
  Those players that don’t wish to commit 500+ hours to the game, leave. (Especially if the game doesn’t get fun until hour 250.)
  
• 
  Those players who realize that most MMORPG players are obsessed with character advancement (to the point of spending 20 hours a week doing so), decide that they’d rather not hang out with advancement-obsessed MMORPG players, and they leave too.
  
• 
  Some players leave when they don’t find enough roses to smell (exploration), or discover that the roses have been sparsely distributed over 500+ hours of gameplay.
  
• 
  And finally, players who don’t want to spend $15/month to play a few hours a week also leave. (Yes, there are “free” MMORPGs, but they are even less fun than for-pay MMORPGs unless players buy $15 worth of stuff per month.)
  
• 
  To sum it up, most people that have tried MMORPGs have left, and they won’t return until these problems are fixed. According to MMOGChart.com, MMORPGs retain approximately 20 million paying players. How many players have tried a MMORPG and left? 50 million? 100 million? How many players have never tried a MMORPG because they’ve heard bad things about their grind and communities?