Why does EverQuest have levels?
EverQuest has levels because DikuMUD has levels. DikuMUD has levels because AberMUD has levels. AberMUD has levels because MUD1 has levels. MUD1 has levels because of the several advancement systems Roy Trubshaw and I considered, that one (from Dungeons & Dragons) was the one that most gave us what we wanted.
MUD1 gave us a paradigm, and EverQuest updated this to create a paradigm of its own. New virtual worlds are pushing at the paradigm in some areas (they may not have levels, for example), but reinforcing it in others (you can still communicate with anyone by name at any distance, irrespective of how fiction-breaking this may be).
Some features of the paradigm are defining, in that without them you don’t have a virtual world: the fact that a plurality of individuals can access the same shared space at the same time is an example of such a feature. Other features, while not strictly necessary, nevertheless seem to be perpetuated without much argument: distance communication is like this.
What non-defining features of today’s virtual worlds will still be present in them 20 years from now?
Richard
What are you driving at here? Twenty years is a looooooong time. Any attempt to answer the question will be redundant before it can become relevant, so I wonder where (whether?) you are leading. Perhaps a more useful question might have been "what are the necessary features of the paradigm?" or "what non-necessary features are untried but likely to emerge?".
That said, let me gaze into the crystal ball a moment....
I expect you'll see a gradual proliferation of paradigms. As the choice of virtual worlds expands, I expect those worlds will diversify so that most features we see today are retained in at least some of them. I'd argue we're seeing this effect already. Essentially what is happening parallels evolution by natural selection (except there is a 'Lamarckian' aspect introduced in that developers are designing their games to be successful). As the set of paradigms gradually expands and diversifies, at some point the outliers are considered different genres rather than different paradigms within the same genre. I'd argue we've already seen this happen with vanilla video games.
Your question implies a single accepted approach enshrined in EQ and only "pushed" or "reinforced" by later MMORPGs, yet you trace a lineage of successive approaches in the run-up to EQ through MUDs and paper RPGs. Dungeons and Dragons did not suddenly go away, nor did MUDs. The relics tend to die by way of a slow fade into obscurity. There has long been a variety of approaches to RPGs - granted some approaches are more popular than others, but the others are still there.
Some features are not to my mind essential but I don't think we will lose them in the foreseeable future: NPCs, non-permanent death, systems for combat, virtual money, virtual property and trading, the ability to influence character appearance on character generation. None of these seem strictly necessary for a working virtual world but all are popular enhancements found in most variations. They seem like very obvious answers though. I feel the edge of a 'neccessary/sufficient' digression approaching too so best to cut myself short.
I guess what is interesting about your question is that it forces you to think about what players want - the flesh on the MMORPG bones. Players are afterall the selective pressure that drives the evolution these games and if they don't like what is offered, they will look elsewhere.
Sorry if this isn't the sort of answer you were hoping for!
Posted by: Al | Jul 15, 2004 at 08:11
I think that the two competing paradigms that we will see fighting it out are:
Crafting vs Creation
Both have very long histories and produce experiences that feel very different. It seems that crafting is essential to a game where the creator wants to keep hold of the narrative / brand – as it is hard for things outside that to creep in (of course people can put together pre-existing objects to create all manor of artefact in world, but this is generally set specifically against the narrative). Whereas worlds that don’t rely on narrative, more socially targeted ones, actively encourage free expression.
While I see that these are competing, I guess that this is only conceptually, the two styles seem to produce very different experiences which appeal to a greater or lesser extent to different types of people.
Posted by: ren | Jul 15, 2004 at 10:41
ren>I think that the two competing paradigms
Ooops, I meant to say ‘two of the competing paradigms’, as I’m sure that there will be more.
Posted by: ren | Jul 15, 2004 at 10:46
While Al makes a good point about the timeframe, I think that looking back 20 years as you did, provides us with enough insight to guess productively.
Most strikingly I notice that very little has actually changed in game-like virtual worlds in the last ~20 years. Some designs have expanded the breadth of design in our niche, but what, if anything, has actually left?
When thinking about what will still be around, I'd have to say: pretty much everything.
I think our corner of gaming will certainly continue to expand, exploring new contextual-genres and trying new things here and there -- but I don't see the old standy-bys going anywhere.
For every game catering to a hardcore subset of players who don't want levels, at least a couple more will cater to those who do want levels. The status quo of game-like persistent worlds isn't going anywhere.
Similarly, I don't think any particular part of the paradigm is necessarily immutable. Some game, some fanbase, is going to be happy to maintain their preference over tradition. A game without instant distance communication isn't implausible. IIRC UO initially launched (at least in beta) without /tells, in any event it certainly launched without many of the players knowing how /tells operated, and that worked out surprisingly well.
Granted EA would have limited their audience by not relenting in that aspect - but they found their audience without it, and a potentially profitable segment lamented the change. The same was true with its concessions to other design-regulars such as archetypes, static spawns, formal grouping, concensual PvP, etc. Original UO flouted much of the paradigm, but overall the genre has maintained the tried-and-true.
Posted by: weasel | Jul 15, 2004 at 11:15
I thought almost everything had already been tried at some point or another. It's likely that we'll see a revival of skill based games, where you no longer have to wait quite as long per "reward" in the game. Meaning when you kill a monster, you no longer have to kill 500 other monsters to gain some type of reward, you can directly (or indirectly) apply or automatically gain experience in the skills you were using.
I believe this system (basically the Asheron's Call system) will make a big comeback because now that most game companies have a good idea of what players want in a UI and options per game, they can effectively try this system again, which should've worked the first time but people got scared off it because everyone wanted to make EQ clones (leveling is the main point of the game and pretty much the only way to "win").
From what I've read some of the more recent games ready to emerge, especially World of Warcraft, have implemented a system like this is some fashion or other. WoW not only has an incentive for just gaining XP (apply directly to skills from what I've seen) it also has the leveling incentive (talents, wear better equipment, etc).
Leveling may or may not stick around dependant on how we view it after the next round of MMORPGs, which dabble in both worlds, ends up.
Posted by: Lee Delarm | Jul 15, 2004 at 11:29
One way to approach this problem is by thinking about scale. I expect that in a few years there will be virtual worlds with populations in the millions; maybe even in the tens of millions. What design changes follow from this fact alone?
Posted by: Fred Hapgood | Jul 15, 2004 at 12:04
"(you can still communicate with anyone by name at any distance, irrespective of how fiction-breaking this may be)"
How is this fiction breaking?
I will point to the old Arthur C Clark idea that "Any technology beyond our own would seem like magic to us."
Now I suggest that the reverse is true, "Any magic beyond our own would appear like technology" i.e. if we saw/heard a person having long distance conversations with multiple people, we would assume they were on a conference call via cell phone as the most plausable cause.
To say that magic could not mimic a tech advance like a cell phone and conference call regulates magic to the age of steam.
As for "level's" and other such paradigms, I am not sure how you are going to break that. Our society tends to break itself into such stratified levels when left to itself, so you are going to have to overcome a social "hardwiring" expectation.
Personally, I think most level systems and "skills" systems are used because a real world like system of visual cues cannot be reproduced in a game. Yet anyway.
I get all sorts of cues to tell me how dangerous/threatening/powerful/rich/intellegent a real life person is, as well as a gut reaction of charisma and "faction" of anyone I meet.
Such things are distilled down to a quantitative system in a game so that the game engine can aproximate those real life interactions.
A game engine might be able to hide some of this "level"ness, but on the backend it would have to track it to do the resolution of combat and/or social interactions.
I could see a engine that exagerates certian features of a toon to denote that information, such as bigger muscles or raggy/fine clothing, slightly out of sync movements, facial expressions or automated emotes, and even a slight "aura" about the toon to transmit this information.
Complicated to be sure, and the only thing you get is a "hiding" of the backend stats from the player.
Personally, I think we are going to have to jump the "so real it's creepy" gap to pull it off.
Posted by: Russell Conner | Jul 15, 2004 at 13:06
Twenty years is a long time in an industry built atop computing hardware and software.
In twenty years we'll probably see the MMORPG industry go through several Great Cycles of consolidation (due to only a few deep-pocketed businesses being able to affored to create the rich content gamers want) and diversification (due to cheap processing power, increased bandwidth, and cheap/simple/powerful content creation tools).
The consolidation phase focuses on minimization of resource usage, so it's a good time for critical analysis of what mass gameplay paradigms people really want (because the games that use them will survive in the marketplace). The diversification phase focuses on maximization of resource exploitation, so it's a period of experimentation with new and highly personalized gameplay paradigms in much smaller venues.
Who can say which existing gameplay paradigms will become obsolete and what new (and currently unimaginable) paradigms will become possible as we go through these radically different phases several times over the next twenty years?
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jul 15, 2004 at 13:40
One reason the persistance of levels may seem odd is the eroneous belief that MUD1 or D&D invented levels. Those trailblazers may have made it explicit, and doubtlessly have greatly shaped the thinking of modern gamers, but as alluded in an above post, wanting to represent (often explicitly) what level you have achieved in a given undertaking is nothing new for humans.
Being a level 50 Runemaster really isn't all that different conceptually from being a Lt Col today, a vice president 100 years ago, or a primus pilus in Rome 2000 years ago.
Games that try to not include levels tend to have this effort defeated by their players, at least in MMO's where representing yourself (i.e. your skills and abilities) to others quickly and clearly is an essential skill. UO didn't have levels, so people invented them (e.g. I'm only 3xGM but I'm working on meditation). Similarly with SWG (e.g. 3444 Bounty Hounter lfg).
Take this along with the fact that all information has to be turned into numbers for a computer to understand it and levels, or at least some numerical representation of effectiveness are here to stay. (A computer doesn't understand "highly skilled" or "great effort" or "cold", etc., as memorably described by Roger Zelazny's For a Breath I Tarry, if you'll allow a rather obscure reference.)
However, emergent bahavior tends to mitigate this, such as with effective raid leaders or guildmasters and the like. Hopefully as games evolve to allow more and more meaningful interaction and content of this high-level (ack, need a new word) nature we will drift away from the slavish devotion level as seen in EQ. But the achievers out there will still find a way to quantify and compare accomplishment (much like middle management).
Posted by: Staarkhand | Jul 15, 2004 at 19:32
Levels - You could ask how levels (or any architecture design decision) fundamentally affect game play, and are used by the designer...
Levels, for example, perform a few functions:
1) Slow down consumption of interesting (and expensive) content by making the user (re-)consume boring (and cheap) content... You can't visit the wonderful Island of Umarium (expensive content) unless you're strong enough to fight off the nasy beasties that reside there. Therefore, stay here and kill several thousand rats (cheap content since it's re-used) until you're a high enough level.
2) Provide an in-story mechanism for intorudcing new game physics so players don't get bored... You reached level 10 so now you get to use Fire Balls, which are an area-affect spell. Forget the wimpier magic missle, which only affected a single enemy.
3) Allow people with higher levels to grief low-level players. (Not really a design decision, but a result of levelling.)
4) Allow players to measure progress: relatively, and absolutely against other players.
5) Others... I can't think of them now, but there probably are more.
Levels aren't necessary. You just need to find way to either produce equivalent effects, or design a world that doesn't require such effects: Adventure games use difficult puzzles to take care of item 1, and new objects or new locations for item 2. They're single player so item 3 is a non-issue, and not really desirable anyway. Item 4 is solved by opening up new areas of the world as players succede.
Chat to anywhere in the world...
1) It's handy for groups to organize themselves.
2) If you didn't have it, players would use out-of-game communciation systems to get around the ingame limitations. Why fight it?
But, there are quite a few reasons why chatting anywhere in the world is bad for the user experience.
Here's a biological analogy to answer the question: "What non-defining features will still be present in 20 years?"
Kanagroos are ecologically the same as deer. Both are medium-sized grazers that consume grasses and tree leaves. Both are large prey for medium-to-large-sized predators, like dingos or wolves.
Kanagaroos look very different than deer:
- They have two eyes, fur, head, feet, etc. After all, there's only 20M-40M(?) years of evolution between them.
- Kanagroos run by hopping on two legs, and walk using two legs and a tail. Deer locomote with 4 legs.
- Kangaroos have arms and hands with 5 fingers, and feet with 3-4 toes, one toe being major. Deer have four feet, two hoofed toes each.
- Kanagroos have a pouch. Deer are placental.
- Etc.
Kanagroos survive in the wild in Europe (some park France I believe), and could certainly survive almost anyplace (except the arctic) that deer do. Likewise, deer have been introduced into Australia and survive almost anyplace (except the desert) that Kanagroos do.
They're just different approaches to the same problem. Likewise, many givens in virtual worlds have dissimilar equivalents.
Some automatic assumptions that virtual worlds have which may not hold true:
- Virtual world physics based on real-world physics
- The player controls only one avatar
- Player controls the avatar through micro-commands ("go north", "pick up axe") and not larger commands ("pick up all the axes in the area")
- Amount of control the player has over his/her avatar.
- How automated the world is, vs. how much live-time input into what happens
- Races
- Classes
- Skills
- Magic
- Levels
- Humanoid avatars
- Posession of objects
- Reliance on combat
- Money
- Guilds
- Economy
- Communication methods
- And there's more... Just look at any MMORPG/MUD web site and you'll see a list of "features" that are common to virtually every MMORPG/MUD.
You can go through all of these and ask how they fundamentally affect the virtual world experience. A bit of thinking usually results in an alternative.
Posted by: Mike Rozak | Jul 15, 2004 at 22:40
There seems to be some sort of debate on if levels are the breakpoint or a necessary component or whatever.
From what I see of what Richard said, and what I've heard him say on the subject before, that is merely a comment on how features are included blindly.
Something is fiction-breaking if it's added in without a fiction in place to explain it. A sword is fiction-breaking if there is reason for it not to exist and there is no countering explanation. Mithril is fiction-breaking if mithril does not exist; simple as that. The fact that no one has the same name is also fiction-breaking, nevermind that it's seemingly necessary. (It's not; among my myriads of projects, designing a Recognition system is one. I've mostly folded it into my larger designs, though.)
Levels have their ills primarily because they ARE fiction-breaking, but few dare say so. There is no explanation for the little number that denotes progress in your Profession or Class or Guild. Secondarily, their ills derive from a misguided focus on them. While I make no claim to knowing what was in the minds of the creators of D&D, I can suggest that levels were developed there as a simple method of keeping track of the various ways in which your character grows. Few designers appear to understand that levels are an abstraction of progressive addition of skills, lore, experience, just as hit points are an abstraction of your character's capacity to stay alive, including things such as defensive measures as well as how much you're bleeding.
One non-defining feature of virtual worlds that will be present in twenty years, probably more, is the human factor. Currently, nearly all virtual worlds have humans as some part of their population. More utilize human knowledge as skills; you speak in English, you make bows and bandage wounds, you fight toe-to-toe. This humanness will stay for a very long time, indeed, I would not mind if it stayed as permanent as anything will. Nevertheless, it is not a defining feature. With that in mind, it might be worthwhile to consider strictly elven MMORPGs, or perhaps a MMORPG based on the Hive Queens' Galactic Empires (well, you'd have to ask Orson Scott Card for rights, I suppose. He seems to be good at making reasonably alien species.)
Posted by: Michael Chui | Jul 15, 2004 at 23:11
Hi everyone,
Carrying forward Michael Chui's ideas, I predict that in 20 years, someone will successfully create a world inspired by D&D's Manual of the Planes and hang every MUD and MMORPG, old and new, off this virtual world "lobby" with an adaptation of an universal Avatar system or GURPS.
There's a lot of RPG innovation beyond D&D, so we'll sure to see some of it online soon or later.
Gotta go...
Posted by: magicback | Jul 16, 2004 at 02:26
I don't see MMORPG features like levels as perpetuated paradigms, but more like genes, leading to a Darwinian survival of the fittest.
Game developers are quite willing to try different things. We have games without levels, games without combat, and a lot of other possible combination of features. And then the game hits the market, and you can determine its success in dollars and cents. Of course it is difficult to determine which feature or gene is responsible for the success or lack of it, but some kind of picture always emerges. Compare the average number of players of all virtual worlds with levels with the average number of players in all virtual worlds without levels, and it certainly seems that levels are more popular.
Virtual worlds are commercial ventures. Some guy in a suit, who couldn't care less about any artistic or social approach to the theory of virtual worlds, will have a say in the creation of new worlds. And he'll point out obvious features that seem to cause the financial success of competing games, and insist that the new game include those "genes of success".
Posted by: Tobold | Jul 16, 2004 at 03:31
Al>What are you driving at here? Twenty years is a looooooong time.
And yet some of the things that were developed 20 years ago are still important features of the paradigm.
>Perhaps a more useful question might have been "what are the necessary features of the paradigm?" or "what non-necessary features are untried but likely to emerge?".
Those might be more useful, sure, but not for my purposes.
I wasn't so much trying to find what are the necessary features of the paradigm as to find out what the unnecessary ones are. Unnecessary ones that are faithfully implemented in VW after VW do no-one any favours. I want to free designers from those constraining legacies of the past that they don't need; I want them to know what they can change; even if they don't want to change it, I want them to understand why they don't want to change it, rather than simply take it as part of the basic "what VWs are" forumla.
My question was therefore intended to stimulate debate to identify what aspects of a VW's design its designers can and should think about. Not "how many levels should we have?" but "should we have levels at all?".
>Your question implies a single accepted approach enshrined in EQ and only "pushed" or "reinforced" by later MMORPGs
Many of the people who are designing virtual worlds today cut their teeth playing EQ. Their VW design is informed by that of EQ, much as the EQ design is informed by DikuMUD's. Now this kind of evolutionary approach is good, but only if the designers of the new games understand what they're designing. If they have a feature from EQ, they should know why it was in EQ and why they want it in their VW; they shouldn't take the basic EQ paradigm and tweak it because unless they understand how the whole design hangs together they may discover that their tweaks undermine some other part of the design they'd just taken aboard without thinking.
I want people to understand the paradigms not so they can be perpetuated, but so they can be redefined.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jul 16, 2004 at 03:38
Russell Conner>How is this fiction breaking?
>...
>To say that magic could not mimic a tech advance like a cell phone and conference call regulates magic to the age of steam.
OK, so you're saying that in EQ some character classes can use magic to communicate but they can't use magic to do any of the other things that magic-users can do? And this is explained how?
Some VWs do have a fiction for this kind of communication. Federation II, an early era SF textual world, had your communicator crackle when you got an incoming distant message. Most VWs don't have a fiction for it, though, it just "happens".
There are worse things they don't have a fiction for, of course; this was just an example. My point was that the concept of distant communication is sufficiently embedded in the paradigm that people put it in even when it doesn't make sense for their VW's scenario for it to be there. What other concepts are embedded but might benefit from being reconsidered?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jul 16, 2004 at 03:48
Michael Chui>From what I see of what Richard said, and what I've heard him say on the subject before, that is merely a comment on how features are included blindly.
That's correct. I wasn't trying to stimulate a debate about levels, I was trying to stimulate a debate about hand-me-down design.
Mike Rozak>You can go through all of these and ask how they fundamentally affect the virtual world experience. A bit of thinking usually results in an alternative.
This is the kind of thing I was looking for. I'm not so bothered if people think about a concept and decide that they prefer it to the alternatives; my main concern is getting them to think at all - to realise that these are not sacred cows, and they can be be slain if the designer wishes.
Tobold>Virtual worlds are commercial ventures. Some guy in a suit, who couldn't care less about any artistic or social approach to the theory of virtual worlds, will have a say in the creation of new worlds.
In that case, the suit should hire a designer who will design that kind of VW (either that or the suit should design it). If the suit hires a designer who doesn't design that kind of VW, it's the suit's fault. If I wanted my portrait painted, I'd hire an artist who specialised in portraiture, not an artist who specialised in landscapes.
One day, publishers will realise this. One day, they'll do like the construction industry does when it puts prestige projects up for tender and architects bid for a project. Architects submit proposals and whoever is funding it chooses which one they like the best. They may ask for a few modifications, and the architect may go along with them. However, once they've chosen the plans, they're in the architect's hands. This is the only way it can be if a project is creatively driven.
Next time a publisher wants to break into the VW industry, they might consider asking for design documents to be submitted for appraisal. If they want a VW that has levels and non-PD and talking fish, well OK, they'll choose a design that has that. Once they've chosen it, though, they have to sit on their hands and let the developers do their jobs. Suits telling designers how to design is like designers telling programmers how to program: specify the problem, and answer questions from them, but otherwise stay out of it. They're the experts, not you.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jul 16, 2004 at 04:07
Richard,
I like that you have brought up one of the basic motivators for playing MMOs. Level advanement serves the very real purpose of establishing achievement at regular intervals. Thus I would point out the other system that does this, and one which has been extent in games since their inception, the random drop.
Beginging perhaps with dice and the concept that one might get a roll that one wanted on any given toss, randomness and expectation of good events has served as a powerful motivator. The popularity and longevity of gambling can attest to this. Therefore I would say that the random drop will be used as a key motivating tool even 20 years from today.
I recently had an e-mail discussion with one of the developers of World of Warcraft and was given a bit of inside info on loot drops. I was disapointed to learn that they were simple percentage chances for each MOB killed. I would have been much happier if I'd found out that a more sophisticated schedual of reinforcement governed drops.
Perhaps inclusion of other scheduals will be used in future games.
Ian Danforth
------------
ePsychology at Iandanforth.net
Exploring Online Game Addiction
Posted by: Ian Danforth | Jul 16, 2004 at 13:11
I haven't seen any fundamental *paradigm* changes in the last twenty years, so I don't really expect any in the next twenty years. Hardware gets faster/cheaper, people get wrinkled and die. Virtual worlds, as in the MMORPG variety discussed here, reflect the desires (and sometimes necessities) of human play. Those will be exactly the same twenty years hence.
The technology, however, will not.
In the future, everyone will have their own virtual world, just like everyone currently has their own imagination. Some people will borrow from other people's worlds/imaginations, just like they do now. The current implementation of personal and instanced missions/dungeons will expand as memory/bandwidth/and such expand.
In the future, you will be able to choose exactly to what degree real-life others interfere/interact/inter-whatever with your virtual world. If you want to interact with griefers, you can -- for thirty minutes or so -- then you can turn that part off. If you want to do the hero's quest, you can, for days or weeks or months, or you can just fast-forward through the whole thing. If you want the x-rated content, almost certainly you'll be able to get that -- for a price; almost certainly for a price, but there you go.
Connections will be cheap, memory will be cheap, relationships will be cheap, everything will be cheap but the profits and the code, which (unless the revolution comes or the meteor hits) will remain as proprietary as all hell, and an extraordinary daily churn will not cost anyone anything -- if indeed churn even still exists after the great vw consolidation into something that looks like ma bell.
Well, maybe not in twenty years. Twenty-one, twenty-two, maybe, something like that.
Posted by: dmyers | Jul 16, 2004 at 15:29
"OK, so you're saying that in EQ some character classes can use magic to communicate but they can't use magic to do any of the other things that magic-users can do? And this is explained how?"
Well, a magical sword/armor is not only usable by magic users now is it? Yet it is a product of that magic. Some systems allow the use of scrolls or wands that make a non-magic user into a magic user.
I introduced it into ROE mythology (as a player) as a small brooch of a magic stone tuned to various channels. Such stones were ubiquitous, being a very good practice item for starting Summoners and artificers to make.
Now, that was retroactive to an existing system, to explain a feasable reason that feature could be implimented. But, as you point out, it is in the game for no particular reason, other than it is useful.
Personally, if a gaming system has a strong impulse to exist, every feature put into the system must have a reason to be there.
For example, if system is designed to be primary combat system level grind (and I could name a few), to attract that crowed, then social interaction features like an economy don't have a reason to exist.
Adding a crafting/consignment system or resource gathering would just be distracting.
If you are looking at a game that promotes community, you need to look at how each feature fits into promoting that community idea.
Posted by: Russell Conner | Jul 16, 2004 at 18:22
Richard Bartle posted: One day, publishers will realise this. One day, they'll do like the construction industry does when it puts prestige projects up for tender and architects bid for a project. Architects submit proposals and whoever is funding it chooses which one they like the best. They may ask for a few modifications, and the architect may go along with them. However, once they've chosen the plans, they're in the architect's hands. This is the only way it can be if a project is creatively driven.
Having worked with architects to design my house, and having talked to architects that were touring my house, I suspect that most architects would find this statement to be a bit idealistic.
99% of all architecture is very copy-cat... the client comes in and says, "I want a building that looks like that other building there, but with more stories and tinted windows.". Of course, most architects realize this, so they propose plans that are likely to get accepted...
1% of clients do meet the ideal; Such as Bilbao's art gallery or the Syndey Opera House. The project usually runs over budget, is decried as being a failure/eyesore, and only 20+ years later do people appreciate it (or tear it down).
Of course, in either case the architect does become the decision maker. They still must listen to their clients, though, or they get fired. There's still a lot of give and take, even once the plans have been settled on.
While I'm talking about architecture, here's a mind-exercise to do: Walk around your house, look at every feature of construction, and ask what problem it's trying to solve. You'll notice that many features are there for historical reasons (such as shutters, cladboard, or divided windows), or because your house's design was translplanted from a different climate. (In the US and Australia, builders build the same house in both warm and cold climates; this is silly since the design doesn't take advantage of the environment.) If you want to see what a good architect and this sort of thinking does to house design, take a look at my website: http://www.mxac.com.au/eagleeye. Now, do the same exercise for the virtual world you're designing/playing.
Posted by: Mike Rozak | Jul 16, 2004 at 18:30
Some guesses for design changes: 1) more twitch emphasis, 2) more content licensing, 3) more pay for power-ups, 4) less fantasy/sci-fi "worldness" and more shallow, casual, mainstream appeal (CoH?), 5) simpler user interfaces, 6) more attempts to find tie-in revenue streams (more branded worlds).
But looking forward 20 years, I wonder if the question should be whether MMORPG will be more or less important, relative to other online games and leisure activities. I can't see it being a less important genre, but to make VWs more popular, they'll need to change.
If they change, I'm not sure they'll be identifiable as the same activity as Everquest. My guess is that EQ will be here in 20 years, with cycles and bandwidth will being spent on making it more and more pretty. And I think we're kind of locked in, as you note, to a MUD1 genre just like there is a Space Invaders/FPS genre and a Advent/Myst genre.
Wifi and PDAs, however, might lead to changes in game structures and some of those games could be massively social and persistent. I could see augmented reality mobile gaming, e.g., becoming more widespread. And the Xbox Live just hit 1 million -- but they just haven't tied that network into something spatial -- maybe they will some day.
But I think the real shift will be an echo of the MUD1/TinyMUD shift from game to social worlds like SL, There, Habbo, and even this new Yahoo Avatar thingee. The questions are:
1) What's the best paradigm set for a social virtual world--do you really need a 3D spatial geography, for instance? Is the Web a social virtual world? (Eventually, as the tech increases, maybe this won't be such a huge investment consideration but more a design consideration.)
2) Can you replace game content with anything equally compelling for the average subscriber? Which is another way of saying: how can the platform owner make enough money to make new designs a viable proposition? I've had plenty of people say to me that they understand why people would play the games, but they don't get the motivation for participating in social worlds. But that's Cory's latest post.
Posted by: greglas | Jul 17, 2004 at 08:07
greglas>to make VWs more popular, they'll need to change
There's a tension between popular meaning "well-liked" and meaning "common". If VWs became common, they may have to change so much that they're not liked to the same degree by those who play them as they are at the moment. Fortunately, there's not a problem in having a range of virtual worlds, some of which are resolutely unchanged and some of which would be barely-recognisable as virtual worlds to today's players.
>I think the real shift will be an echo of the MUD1/TinyMUD shift from game to social worlds like SL, There, Habbo, and even this new Yahoo Avatar thingee
I wouldn't call the adventure/social thing a shift so much as a branching. It wasn't that people stopped creating game-like worlds and started creating social worlds; rather, both paradigms continued semi-independently. Even if SL went mainstream and topped 100 million subscribers, EQ would still be around - we just wouldn't talk about it much any more.
Besides, these days computer games are themselves fairly mainstream. Most people in their 30s (in developed countries, this is) grew up with them just as their parents grew up with TV. The older the population gets, the less computer games are the province of geeks and the more they are the province of everyone. Geeks just write 'em (heh heh).
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jul 18, 2004 at 16:37
Richard> I wouldn't call the adventure/social thing a shift so much as a branching
Yes, that's right. Shift had the wrong implications.
Richard> Fortunately, there's not a problem in having a range of virtual worlds, some of which are resolutely unchanged and some of which would be barely-recognisable as virtual worlds to today's players.
Right -- I'm just not sure what people will be using persistent (virtual) social spaces for in the future, if they're not just for playing games that require persistent spaces. The key feature of the Net so far has been the benefit of a n information realm where the constraints of geography are irrelevant, where you don't need to even walk to a shelf in a library to find a book.
Soon, maybe it will be feasible to build a VW front end to something like AOL or eBay or Amazon (see Adobe Atmosphere), but what kind of value will that add?
I can come up with some arguments, but I think the stronger case could be made that if the VWs are just extensions of real space, they may add more value. E.g. being able to "see" information within a 10 mile radius of my laptop would be really neat.
Posted by: greglas | Jul 18, 2004 at 17:12
Virtual spaces provide for more possibilities than web pages. The value added from a virtal ebay would be the increased flexibility of your marketing space and the added customer draw. If nothing else, you'll attract all the VW people to come look at your shop. And I don't think anyone would say that increasing your foot traffic is bad for business.
While I am sure that web-based shopping as we currently know it has a place, virtual worlds give us the ability to interact with the worlds, and I have no doubt it would be successful.
Posted by: MM | Jul 18, 2004 at 21:04
greglas>Soon, maybe it will be feasible to build a VW front end to something like AOL or eBay or Amazon (see Adobe Atmosphere), but what kind of value will that add?
None. It only adds value as an interface to other people.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jul 19, 2004 at 03:16
greglas>Soon, maybe it will be feasible to build a VW front end to something like AOL or eBay or Amazon (see Adobe Atmosphere), but what kind of value will that add?
Richard>None. It only adds value as an interface to other people.
I argue that it adds more than a mere interface, but a familiar spatial and social reference/experience to web destinations. It's virtually standing next to someone along the book asile and starting a conversation. It's vritually standing next to a bidder about the product up for bid.
The experience enhances web data with social interaction, the "human touch" factor.
Frank
Posted by: magicback | Jul 20, 2004 at 05:19
Levels aren't essential.
But in a game designed for achievers, there needs to be some discernable measure of skill capability.
In EQ, perhaps....
Competition skill => Level
Co-operation skill => Guild
It may be a fault in EQ that even a poorly skilled player with enough play time can reach the highest levels. So the guild tag can often be a better indicator of player quality (*).
If levels fail to record player skill faithfully then what does? In a game with a finely tuned (twitch?) interface and no level progression, the historical skill of the player could be recorded by some kind of killing efficiency measure (average kill-time for rat = 2.4 seconds).
But perhaps that just forces the achievement metric onto the wealth/equipment "level". It would be straightforward to have a MMORPG with equipment progression instead of level progression. (Several level based MMORPGs end up like this once the character reach the max level.)
But if there is no equipment progression either, then what is left to achieve. Once the skill metric has been raised to its personal achievable limit once, the game is done with.
However, if your business model is monthly subscription, then the acheivement model needs to be cyclical and not one-time-only. The game needs to give you something to allow you to achieve the next harder piece of content. Could be additional in-game capability (~level). Could be better equipment. Could be just a piece of information (~a flag/key)
Maybe there are 2 paradigms here:
- One which enhances the avatar in game when the player achieves something (level/equipment)
- One which does not enhance the avatar, but merely records the achievement and leaves the original player skills unchanged.
However, if success in game is too tightly tied to real life skills, then the game may lose its appeal for players escaping their real world ordinariness, by their VW achievements.
(*) Interesting that guilds were not in the original EQ design, but got added later to enable what the players were already doing. So looks like guild/clan may be an essential MMORPG feature, at least for achiever style games.
Posted by: Estariel | Jul 21, 2004 at 14:08
To expand somewhat on Estariel's suggestion:
"Maybe there are 2 paradigms here:
- One which enhances the avatar in game when the player achieves something (level/equipment)
- One which does not enhance the avatar, but merely records the achievement and leaves the original player skills unchanged."
I'd describe these as "actual power" and "markers of accomplishment," respectively. More interestingly, perhaps, I also think they key nicely (and not coincidentally) to two of the Bartle types.
Power can be defined as the freedom to do what you want right now, while markers of accomplishment are possessions denoting past accomplishments. If so, then games offering public indicators of a player's Power will tend to appeal to the Killers, while games publicizing a player's earned markers of Accomplishment will tend to appeal to Achievers. And of course games that capably publicize the indicators of success of both playstyles should appeal to both types of player.
A slightly extended list of such public indicators might include:
POWER
- abilities (personal control, internal)
- equipment (personal control, external)
- rank (interpersonal control)
ACCOMPLISHMENT
- badges (medals, decorations)
- achievements (lists of things seen and done)
- rank (visual indicator of advancement)
If "rank" corresponds to "level," then the value of this indicator to both denote power and connote accomplishment probably explains the appeal of levels to designers of online games.
Note that rank is also the most prominent indicator in RL military organizations....
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jul 21, 2004 at 16:38
I think there is more to the success of the levelling system than the fact that it has been copied from game world to game world during twenty years. That said it is striking that the levelling systems are copied in so similar forms, and just like Richard writes, becoming a paradigm by copy. The advancement and levelling is something that can be a very strong driving force for activity - the joyful flow experience that so often turn into blind achievment. The numerical expression of levelling makes the blind achievment behaviour very obvious, but its all around us in most hierarchical social structures we are part of, such as work environments, sport clubs, hobbies etc. We levell in many environments. I think that is one reason for the levelling system being this successful. What i personally find a bit sad with it is that vw:s are created spaces, and as such possible to create other paradigms within. The drive for flow is in us all, and a good thing to build game mechanics to support, so i think that varieties of levelling systems always will be successful. But i would like to see something new, something less instrumental. Im aware of that the whole setup of game mechanics, relations and architecture of a vw always is instrumental in the parts, in the setup, -> but when played it, at its best, can become a synthesis and someting more than instrumentality.
I look forward to a possible paradigm shift. Or at least variations. I find Richards writings on this subject of the fixed paradigms many gamedesigns follow very useful. Also the fact that players often _demand_ these paradigms.
If to think of examples of games - what games could be considered to break the most common paradigms in some senses? Would you, for example, consider SL as a paradigm breaker. If so - how? And ATITD. Or any other VW?
Posted by: Mirjam Eladhari | Jul 27, 2004 at 08:07