Slow Food, Party Lines, Corpse Retrieval

Culture is inseperable from the technologies it employs. As everyone knows, more efficient technological systems don't always make for better societies -- the slow food movement provides one example of cultural retrenchment against encroaching efficiency. When I was a kid, I had the pleasure of living with a party line telephone, which as this article indicates, tied communities together in various subtle ways, sort of like proto-flashmobs.

In worlds constructed from code, inefficient technologies also give rise to social structures. These structures, of course, don't require fiber-optical cable investments to dismantle -- they can be nerfed overnight. One of JG's ongoing State of Play posts over at the Meme has produced this little gem of a comment post about how making EQ more n00b-friendly nerfed porters, tipping, and professional corpse-retrieval.

The influence of code changes on VW social structures is now an old story, I realize -- and things like this have been seen in countless MUDs and MMOGs. Julian's chapter on the Schmoo Wars in LambdaMOO was one of my favorite renditions. One thing I found interesting about this particular comment was the last line suggesting that "a lot of the older players have left" -- consistent with the concept that significant technological changes should signal the passing of a generation.

Comments

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

1.

I think this is an interesting, timely topic. There's a rather large thread on Waterthread.org's forums about corpse recovery, with Dave Rickey taking some lumps for plotting out a corpse recovery (CR) system in the upcoming game Wish people thought was a bit too much like EverQuest's old system. This lead to a long discussion of whether CR added anything to the game. On one side you had people that said CR added challenge to the game; on the other side you had people that hated the time sink that CR inflicted.

There seems to be an interesting backlash happening where players of online RPGs are demanding less penalties in games. I think some don't realize that some level of penalties are needed to provide challenge in the game game. Obviously there will be some debate about what level of penalties there should be for the optimal level of "fun".

Given this, It seems that there's some good parallels between how players think of online RPG administrators and how the general population thinks of government. Admins and politicians are a group of people that theoretically should be able to make your life easier. However, sometimes there are hard realities that the players or constituents are unwilling to accept gracefully. Therefore, you have eternal complaints against administrators and politicians. (Not that some of these complaints aren't justified, however!)

My thoughts,

[Edward Castronova]

2.

As I understand EQ's changes, based on some conversations, much of it has been driven by the maturation of the game. There were not enough new players entering the leveling treadmill, which meant that low-level players, who could not get around the world very easily, were getting stuck off by themselves in separate newbie zones. So, easy travel was introduced to help them get around and find one another.

I thnk there was a huge cost, however, in immersion. Easy travel reduces the vast EQ world to a sequence of best-leveling zones: Faydark, Crushbone, Paludal, etc. Go outside these zones and the world is empty. All of these newbie cities - Freeport, Erudin, Rivervale - ghost towns. And there was nothing like the feeling of riding a boat with someone for fifteen minutes to make the world seem vast.

So there's a trade-off here: if you want the world to feel big, you can't have easy travel. But if you don't have easy travel, people have to spend time just traveling instead of hacking and slashing.

Similar trade-offs are involved in corpse recovery. It was smart of EQ to create specilization in labor skills - only bards could find bodies, and only clerics could resurrect them. Specialization and gains from trade - that's what creates social interdependence. But it is also a hassle - you have to find these people and haggle with them.

Personally, I think the right choice is to have boat rides and haggling. If these things take time, then, for goodness sake, compensate by increasing the rate at which people advance. EQ actually could have done this *instead* of all these other time-saving innovations. Instead they pushed their game to become even more of a leveling treadmill than it was; the last few times I played intensely, it involved traveling easily to one zone and sitting there in groups endlessly pulling mobs. That's all the game was at that point. Not the game I played when I started.

(And by the way - would it be possible to have the rate of advance remain constant across the life of the character? If there's one thing I hate, it's leveling nicely to level 15 or Skill X and then, suddenly, all progress stops. Grrr. I quit at that point.)

[dan]

3.

Good comments, Edward. Your experience and reaction parallels mine pretty closely. I can tough it out to advance one character to the top level, usually, but the though of doing it with more than one... and I do think of it... tends to set me to looking for the next game.

I haven't been back to experience the EQ changes, but one of the things I LIKED was the vastness of the world and the real investment in travel time. It made decisions about places important. One didn't just hop from one continent to another to casually meet someone, one moved.

It's interesting the SWG sort of simulates the push/pull of distance in credits. Tickets to some places cost more than others. In the long run it's meaningless, but when starting out it does affect how much and how far newbs travel. On the other hand, if you want to bring someone to you, you can just pay for their ticket. EQ, in the original travel scheme, was better.

ATITD has real travel too. And (last I played) it was all running. Sometimes hours of running. A lot of people moaned, but it does create real separate communities and provides opportunities for real trade.

It's interesting that EVE nerfed travel a bit with the addition of "superhighways" among the most popular areas. Still, when you wander out to the edges you're looking at a serious investment in travel time (and, in many cases, risk). I like it that they keep some (large) areas pretty safe for travel though. This way the risk-averse can play happily in safe-ish zones, while the bloodthirsty and combative go at it tooth and nail a few sectors over.

[Nick Yee]

4.

I think the mechanics of death and travel have a huge impact on the degree to which relationships form.

The safer a world is and the more independent the game mechanics allow you to be, the less you need to trust and depend on other people and the weaker the social fabric becomes.

Whereas the more dangerous a world is and the more you need to depend on other people, the more you become willing to place your trust in another person and the stronger the social fabric becomes.

Thoughts?

And Re: Brian's point - I agree that players don't know what's good or fun for them.

[B Smith]

5.

"And Re: Brian's point - I agree that players don't know what's good or fun for them."

'Scuse me?

And on this previous comment:

"There seems to be an interesting backlash happening where players of online RPGs are demanding less penalties in games. I think some don't realize that some level of penalties are needed to provide challenge in the game game. Obviously there will be some debate about what level of penalties there should be for the optimal level of "fun"."

If it were fun, people would not be complaining about it.

Corpse runs serve one purpose, forcing the players to give up their free time to carry out drudgery. In other words, a time sink

Time sinks are not fun. Time sinks drove me away from online gaming, among other reasons.

And there is a real and significant differencs between "challange" and "penalties" (i.e. punishments).

[Dan]

6.

Corpse runs do another thing besides sink time: they add a cost element to taking high risks. If there is no penalty for dying, we begin to see kamikaze type attacks which, well, a lot of us find unacceptable.

Sure, some don't. And they should have their own, god mode, games.

And, yes, speaking as a player, we don't always know what's best for our "fun." But then neither do game designers.

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

7.

Nick Yee wrote:
"And Re: Brian's point - I agree that players don't know what's good or fun for them."

Woah! I never said that! That kind of talk gets a developer crucified. ;)

I will admit, however, that players tend not to take a long-term view of "fun". A player can tell if they're having fun right now or not; that's not exactly a hidden art. What differentiates a player from a developer is that the developer is able to take a long-term view of the situation.

Focusing on CR once again. B Smith wrote above, "Corpse runs serve one purpose, forcing the players to give up their free time to carry out drudgery. In other words, a time sink". Surely we can include having to regain lost power resulting from death as a time sink. Plus the time running back to the place where you died in order to rejoin your friends. And, let's not forget the time lost from having to restore your stats to maximum after taking a mortal blow. So, in the name of eliminating time sinks we should allow players to pop right back up where they died at full health to continue the battle.

Really, where's the fun in that? If there's no way to "lose" the encounter, then what's the point? Part of the challenge is avoiding the consequences for losing ("dying"). The player hates losing and hates the penalties inflicted as a result. Most will advocate the removal of the penalties as a way to soften the blow of losing. The game designer knows that CR is part of what maintains the fun and excitement and adjusts as necessary.

Hey, I'll admit, I hate losing as much as the next guy when I'm playing a game. In a single-player game I use the save and load features extensively to avoid any sort of penalties. Unfortunately, in online multiplayer games you don't have the luxury of a global save/reload function. It's one of the drawbacks of actually being able to interact with other people in meaningful ways.

Some more thoughts,

[B. Smith]

8.

OK, let me clarify what I said. I did not mean to advocate removing death penalties. Although, instead of saying "penalties" as if the player were being punished for doing something bad, I would suggest a different term. Like "cost" or perhaps "consequences". I just suggest that anything which feels like drudgery is not the optimum approach to having fun. Like the level treadmill. It was intended to provide an added dimension to games and ended up making it feel like a job instead of recreation.

I don't mind losing something by being killed. In fact, I would personally prefer to lose my character completely when it gets killed, but I guess I am weird. Certainly I would have no objection to losing items, or being forced to undergo some kind of trial in the afterlife to prove that I am worthy of reincarnation, or something of the sort. In fact, to me in my weirdness that would offer up all kinds of possibilities. Force a newly dad character to go face his/her in-game diety for judgement. If you are judged as having been faithful you could be reincarnated at a levle equivalent to your old one. If you are judged by your in-game diety as being a slacker or an apostate, you might end up reincarnated as a puny weakling, or perhaps even a mob like a snake or rat. If you got stuck with beign reincarnated as a rat, you might be given the task of carrying out some difficult rat-quest in order to regain your humanity. Somethign like that would be a serious "penalty" but woudl also provide something interesting to do, rather than mind numbing drudgery and frustration.

I just despise being forced to give up what sometimes amounts to several hours of my scarce free time in order to jump through someone else's hoops.

I haven't player M59 for a while, but I liked hte way it handled death. Much better than EQ anyway. Or Underlight, where you are reduced to a kind of ghost and have be re-corporealized, or anything at all besides forcing me to sit there for several minutes holding the arrow key down to cover the same ground, just to finally end up sneaking into a battlefield and colecting my dropped possessions. WIth a good chance fo getting killed again and needign to do it all over.

To me, that ain't fun. Maybe I am strange. But it feels like work.

[DuckiLama]

9.

Mr. Castranova said:
"it involved traveling easily to one zone and sitting there in groups endlessly pulling mobs. That's all the game was at that point. Not the game I played when I started."

and Mr. Yee's points:
"The safer a world is and the more independent the game mechanics allow you to be, the less you need to trust and depend on other people and the weaker the social fabric becomes."

If this is frowned upon, admins please just delete this, but I think at a meta-level, this thread is related to the one on "The Absence of History in Synthetic Worlds" and particularly my comment about a delineation between simulation-like MMOWs and (arcade)game-like MMOGs found at http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/10/the_absence_of_.html#c237550 .

The degree of death-penalty, or lack thereof, is, to me, a measure of how simulation/world-like or how arcade/game-like a MMO is. It's fuzzy, but when the changes go too far (as your players communally measure them) it's pretty obvious, as seen on MMO message board "You nerfed my *" posts/movements.

Striking a good enough balance to satisfy and retain the "serious" gamers in your community while still being able to attract, retain, and sometimes convert to "serious" the elusive Casual Gamer appears to be the single toughest balancing act an MMO builder/maintainer does, but tending towards Casual and Arcade-like seems to be a trendline to success, assuming you don't go far enough to destroy any sense of community and reality in your Game/World.

Did I just wake up with a single track mind today, or does anyone else see the similarity of these two game-vs-world issues? Is it agreed that game-like attracts casual gamers in greater numbers at the cost of community and retention?

[Dave Rickey]

10.

"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all."
--James Graham

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, if you have nothing at risk the reward seems hollow. And no matter what we do, risk ultimately comes down to time, time to regain whatever it was you have lost. Brian's extreme case of just reincarnating the avatar on the spot is right on target, ultimately the less the penalty, the less significant avoiding it is.

But this all does go to the same question: What are the opportunity costs of making decisions? Do I travel to this place or that, do I group with these players or those, if I make this skill-advancement decision what future choices does that exclude? Decisions that lack opportunity costs are ultimately pointless, if your choice has no significance in the long term, ultimately it didn't matter that you made it.

Players may resent the game "punishing" them for bad decisions, but to paraphase Jim Carrey; "If you don't kill them, they won't learn nothin'."

--Dave

[Greg Lastowka]

11.

I'm agnostic on the "punishment" issue -- like Dave says, some adverse consequences are needed to make games interesting. That's why we keep score in the professional competitive games.

I guess I was more thinking along the lines of what Nick said, that there are social consequences to easy travel, easy trade, etc. And I generally agree with Nick that impediments to travel efficiency and solo play should create stronger social structures in games.

The centrality of the SWG entertainer is a good example of forced interdependence. I think designing players to be socially interdependent is one reason why EQ got to be EQ. If I read Ted's article right, he probably would have never been as 1337 as quickly as he is/was in EQ, if he hadn't filled a healer niche.

[DivineShadow]

12.

"Brian's extreme case of just reincarnating the avatar on the spot is right on target, ultimately the less the penalty, the less significant avoiding it is."

The ultimate 'playmode' in this line of thinking is playing an immortal character.
I understand people want the thrill of victory which only comes with the possibility of defeat, but what about those who just want the hanck-n-slash relaxation? Am I alone in this regard? I'd like to see a game where the only penalty for being unskilled is that you advance slower, or get a lower score, instead of being diverted to a time-sink.

I bumped into this mismatch between what I wanted and what games delivered a little over ten years ago. I wanted a game, similar to the arcade games at the time, but that would actually let me "win" instead of sending out wave after wave of faster baddies only to always tell me "you lost"...
So I wrote my own. It was a space shoot-em-up. Instead of dying and having to repeat lower levels for a time-sink, you would loose shield points. And instead of scoring against how many baddies you killed you scored against how fast you blew them up (it was actually how far you strayed from home base, but it amounted to the same). The game was great fun, there were around 200 flying bullets at any one time on the screen, my little ship would fire a streaming barrage of around 50 spinning energy pellets that would branch out to zap everything in it's path and it's deflector shielding would curve the path of the closest incoming bullets away so that if you moved slowly your deflector would actually have time to deflect everything. And while the ship was 99% invulnerable it could be destroyed if you were too kamikaze (moving too fast) or decided to turn the deflector off, in the latter case your game lasted about 45 seconds.

Can we have similar entertainment from a hack-n-slash VW?? Can't we detach ourselves from the line of "now you're alive / now you're dead" and move upwards into the range of "now you're winning / now you're winning even more"?