It is well understood that the game structures and mechanics that undergird most commercial virtual worlds today draw their underlying DNA from Diku-style text-based MUDs, though many contemporary players have only experienced the latest iterations or forms of those game mechanics. Many of these features are now so familiar and expected, so much a part of the grammar of play activity, that developers seem to implement them without asking what purpose or role they will serve in a particular gameworld. Moreover, precisely because these features have become so foundational, it seems difficult to think of new approaches or game mechanics, even those that offer only a mild twist. But even a single such innovation can do a lot to spark new interest among players.
By way of illustration, a look at two such mechanics in two fairly new commercial virtual worlds, Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. (The latter is approaching open beta, with a release later in September 2008, but the NDA has been lifted .)
The Drop
The drop, objects or money taken from dead or defeated enemies (usually but not universally computer controlled), is the central economic engine of all Diku-descended virtual worlds. Even resource extraction from the topography of the gameworld itself (mining or picking herbs, for example) usually follows the structure of the drop, only without the preceding combat.
Value is contained within the corpse or object, revealed by player interaction. Most enemies (aka “mobs”) yield a direct currency payment that in theory should be appropriate to the challenge that the enemy represents.
In many Diku-styled games, relatively ordinary or simple opponents may randomly yield an occasional item of high value, where that value is either realized directly through personal use or indirectly through exchanging the item with another player. Some of these are items which can be directly used by players to improve their ability to battle computer-controlled enemies and other players. Some of these are components or parts of a useful item that can be assembled later by someone who has acquired all the ingredients or pieces. Some components require possession of a particular trade skill in order for the player to be eligible to acquire them. A World of Warcraft character with skinning can convert some corpses into pieces of leather, while a Warhammer character with scavenging can acquire additional items, some of them components needed in other trade skills.
Many quests also create special drops such as particular body parts or objects which the player can find for the duration of the quest, but once the quest is completed, such drops are no longer found.
More routinely, drops are items with no special additional value (often known as “grey” drops after the WoW convention) but can be sold to computer-controlled vendors for a currency payment (hence the term “vendor trash”). In more than a few Diku-styled games, such drops have been only marginally tied to the fictional context in which they were obtained. Early on in World of Warcraft, for example, many enemies dropped a startling array of objects and body parts, many of which had no plausible connection to the mob itself. Over time many of these games tend toward mild rationalization of such drops so that enemies drop currency-equivalent items that have some marginal connection to their nature.
Such rationalization also tends to reduce the variety of such drops so that they can be stacked within a single inventory slot. This opens up the key question around the routine currency-equivalent drop, namely, “Why have it at all?” High-value item or component drops drive the overall economy of these worlds, and provide a tremendous amount of the motivation for continued play over time. NCSoft’s City of Heroes/City of Villains notably lacked drops for much of its early existence, and many players complained about the absence. The routine drop, on the other hand, is really nothing more than currency in another form. Why not just give players the gold, silver, copper, etc. instead of grue spleens and ghoul toenails?
A limited argument could be made that the routine drop enhances the gameworld fiction by populating it with objects that are appropriate to the setting and mythology. But these are transient objects, not trophies. Most are visually represented only by a small icon that exists entirely within the player’s inventory and cannot be shown to other players or manipulated as visible objects in the world itself. A few such objects are witty or unusual enough that players may retain them for a while for amusement: vendor trash in World of Warcraft includes weapons like The Stoppable Force or novelty items like A Gnome Effigy.
The game-mechanical reason for the routine drop is essentially to put additional weight on the mini-game of inventory management that is a major part of day-to-day activity in most virtual worlds. Players have to decide how much vendor trash to pick up given limited space in their inventories, which vendor trash is worth picking up, and when they should return from adventuring to the location of a vendor in order to covert these items to currency.
But as such, the routine drop needs the same kind of calibrated attention to balancing cost and benefit that goes into every other aspect of a Diku-style game, and here is where problems sometimes arise. When something like the routine drop becomes, well, routine, something which is a part of gameplay simply because it’s expected that it should be, it paradoxically becomes a game-mechanic which disrupts the activity of gameplay because it is so nonsensical. Funcom’s Age of Conan provides a good example of this problem. Even in the more tightly-designed initial experience of the game, virtually every enemy drops a great deal of vendor trash. There is little differential in value between routine trash drops and so very little reason to make careful discretionary decisions about which to pick up and which not to pick up. (As opposed to World of Warcraft, for example, where grey weapons often have a much higher currency value and some grey items stack within a single inventory slot, making it possible to pick up many of them without crowding out other items.) Moreover, early player inventory in Age of Conan is relatively small, meaning that a player who picks up all routine drops will quickly fill the inventory within the time it takes to complete a single quest. An Age of Conan player who returned to a vendor every time their inventory was full would spend much of their time simply going back and forth from vendor to quest and back again. As a result, the landscape of Age of Conan is often densely cluttered with routine drops abandoned by players. The collective cost/benefit judgment of players renders the entire game-mechanic of the routine drop a pointless nuisance, which in turn suggests in one fashion just how much the whole design reproduces an industrial standard without really thinking about its purpose.
The Public Quest
Thinking carefully about the purpose of a Diku-style feature obviously helps a virtual world to function better, but it doesn’t guarantee an escape from some of the contradictions and tensions inherent in the genre as a whole. A good example of this is the mechanism of the public quest in the forthcoming Warhammer Online.
Warhammer’s public quests remind me a bit of the grouping mechanism used in the game Toontown. In Toontown, in part to make social collaboration easier for the target audience of children, joining a group is simple and automatic. A character merely walks up to players who are engaged with enemies and is added to the group up to a limit of four characters, for as long as a particular battle or instanced series of battles lasts.
In Warhammer, many locations within the gameworld contain public quests. Any player entering these areas is automatically counted as a participant in the quest. Such quests are typically divided into three stages, each progressively more difficult and usually requiring larger numbers or more coordinated effort as it progresses, though many work perfectly well when players carry out independent actions towards the declared objective or goal.
If the third stage of the public quest is completed, the relative contribution of individual players is calculated, and this value then is added as a weighting onto a roll for loot. The weight of contribution is relatively small, however, in order to give all players a reason to participate. If contribution were much more highly weighted, most players would likely refuse to participate unless they believed they were near the top of the scale as the quest progressed.
The design goals for the public quest as a mechanism are fairly clear. First, to create a relatively spontaneous, enjoyable pretext for social collaboration that requires very little prior arrangement or negotiation, and to do so in the visible and public spaces of the virtual world. Second, to provide a novel incentive for repeating the same content multiple times which carries less risk than the conventional “pick-up group” (pug) in a game like World of Warcraft. A typical pug may take several hours to complete, if it is completed at all, and leaves players vulnerable to misconduct or incompetence on the part of other players. A public quest in Warhammer, on the other hand, takes less time, requires no negotiation, carries little risk, and a player can participate in a relatively diffident manner while still having some hope of reward. Repetition of content is important from a designer’s standpoint simply because there is no hope of providing inexhaustible amounts of novel content within the current design paradigm.
Still, the architecture of the public quest does produce some strange anomalies that are likely to be an ongoing source of sharp disagreement between Warhammer players. In my own experience, I have twice won loot from a public quest merely by traversing the area in which the public quest was transpiring, without making any actual contribution. It’s pretty easy to guess what might follow if that was a common enough outcome and the loot were sufficiently attractive: some players might well “park” an idle character at the outskirts of a public quest, or otherwise exploit the mechanism to the frustration of those players who really are throwing a lot of effort into the adventure. If the loot is trivialized to discourage exploiters, then this also discourages legitimate contributions. If more weight is given to contribution, then spontaneous participation by lower-level players is punished, which takes away a good deal of the fun and very public character of the system.
Nevertheless, I was really struck by the public quest system, and the extent to which it demonstrated that it is readily possible even within the highly defined structure of a Diku-style world to come up with lively twists to the established game mechanics which can then have a larger impact on the social experience of the players as a whole. That requires thoughtfulness about the purpose, character and consequences of the underlying genetics that come with the Diku blueprint.
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