Read about gold farming wage slaves in action, courtesy of James Lee of 1UP.com. We've been waiting for this for awhile. Thanks Brian Whitener of gameguidesonline for the tip.
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Jul 06, 2005
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Are they helping? or hindering? Ah the age old debate of have vs. have-nots. To compare, I would say this is somewhat like Bill Gates coming to me and saying he'll pay me $200K a year to manage a company as a CEO. My yearly salary is around $25K with all my benefits included. The yearly salary of a normal Microsoft CEO is at least 10x that.
Would I take the job? Damn straight.
In a place where $1 American dollar can buy a good night's sleep and 2 full meals a day isn't it almost the same thing? Are they being taken advantage of? Maybe a little bit. But just like in my job example, I'm pretty sure I'd be getting "screwed" too as Gates walked away with an extra $4 million in his pocket, but I wouldn't really care, would you?
Posted by: Lee Delarm | Jul 06, 2005 at 13:32
I think the difference here is that presumably in the Bill Gates example, Bill is not making his $4 mill by violating contracts and terms of service and participating in or profiting from clearly illegal exploits and hacking. So this is more in the ethical area of "does pirating help or hinder in poor countries?"
An age-old question, perhaps. But the term "exploit" rings with many connotations here.
Posted by: jj | Jul 06, 2005 at 14:07
In a non-zero-sum game, as long as many people can do much better it shouldn't matter that some do much, much better.
But that's not the problem here. The problem is that "doing better" in this case relies on breaking the contract term that says the player agrees not to sell or trade in-game items to anyone outside the game. (And that applies equally to farmers and exploiters/dupers.)
There's just one thing preventing these folks and the wholesalers from being prosecuted for fencing stolen goods: The goods are virtual.
And the law (so far) just doesn't know how to deal with this. (Is anyone aware of any statute saying that contract law applies to virtual items as well as real property?)
Given the amount of money involved, does anyone think that won't eventually be some WoW-playing legislative staffer who realizes that this is a no-lose opportunity for her boss? I count three wins (at least) for the legislator who jumps on this with some new bill:
1. gets his name on a bill
2. can claim to be "tough on crime"
3. looks knowledgeable about new technology
This could result in legislation that unnecessarily stifles internal innovation that could solve the problem.
Is anyone trying to forestall this possibility by providing relevant facts to lawmakers? Or do we feel secure in the knowledge, wisdom, and benevolence of all our public servants?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 06, 2005 at 14:28
Of course, if the entire gameplay did not revolve around exploitive social darwinism, there would hardly be a market for this kind of exploitive meta-activity, would there?
As designers, we can choose to enable and facilitate disfunctional human activity, or we can choose to encourage and empower cooperative, constructive activity.
One can hardly blame these harvesters of "gaming" the system--essentially, they are playing the games exactly right, which is to win at all costs--and, inherent in the game mechanics, at the expense of others.
You can't create virtual Iraqs and then expect people to play by Queensbury rules. People behave as the environment encourages them to behave--as *WE* design it. That includes any meta-play which provides in-game advantage. The answer is not to outlaw and police and repress it, the answer is to design out its advantages.
Games that center on killing others and looting the corpses, which reward individual accomplishment (granted almost exclusively at the expense of others, measured almost entirely in lucre), while providing no means to quantify, recognize or reward socially constructive behavior, will tend to attract and encourage certain kinds of play. Surprise, surprise.
Change the rules of the game, and you end the market for exploitation. (and end the culture of "gaming the system," too, which might just happen to have beneficial effects on the bottom line...)
Posted by: galiel | Jul 06, 2005 at 14:34
Slashdoted As Well
Posted by: Brian Whitener | Jul 06, 2005 at 16:03
Is anyone aware of any statute saying that contract law applies to virtual items as well as real property?
I think the answer to this continues to be a resounding "no" and there are no realistic signs that this is going to change any time soon. For all legal intents, game-objects are not merely "virtual" (itself a bastardized word that the hi-tech cognoscenti have appropriated), but are wholly imaginary -- despite the reality that others are able to make real money off of them (and surely, this strand of discussion has been beaten to death sufficiently on TN).
As for legislation on this, I'm completely unconcerned. This just isn't on the radar, nor would any legislation be practical. At most there are EULA violations here, even if some of the farmers spoil others' game experience with their aggressive tactics. But this aggression, we must remember, is entirely imaginary so long as it remains contained in the game's imaginary world.
As David Galiel rightly points out, all of this -- the 'shadow' or RMT economy and the sturm and drang it creates -- is entirely of our own making. In our imaginary worlds we make the laws of nature and economics; we just happen to have made them where rewards are narrow and measured almost entirely by what you can kill and loot. Change the imaginary rules -- that is, the gameplay -- and you'll change the outcomes and economic landscape as well.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 06, 2005 at 16:32
Galiel>One can hardly blame these harvesters of "gaming" the system--essentially, they are playing the games exactly right, which is to win at all costs--and, inherent in the game mechanics, at the expense of others.<
“Farming” is essentially a conscious choice by game designers. Its inherent in the decision to make the tenth kill of the boss dragon drop the same loot and experience as the first. And its trivially easy to remove. Just softcap the experience and loot a player can gather in a month to say three times that of the average player. Farming depends of being able to gather loot and experience orders of magnitude faster than an average player. Stop that, and you stop farming.
There isn’t any backstory reason why a magical dragon would drop the same loot the tenth time you kill it as the first. I’d say a lot of myths point to the opposite, pushing you luck like that is likely to attract the anger of the jealous gods. If you do want to give players who kill the dragon ten times in a week bragging rights, then make it a separate reputation statistic. Don’t tie that bragging right to in game money or power. Its just asking for your game to be farmed.
As with RMT servers, I’d add the caveat that people should be permitted to play on farmed servers with linear rewards if they want to. I just want to see some servers with this simple rule change for those of us that don’t.
Posted by: Hellinar | Jul 06, 2005 at 18:45
If the "journalist" that wrote this story bothered to look, he would find that the average annual wage in the Fujian province of China, the home of "Sack" the first sweatshop worker mentioned, is $1,278.77. According to the article, "Sack" makes $0.56 an hour and works 60 hours a week. That gives "Sack" $1,747.20 per year, 36% more than the average worker in Fujian. Not to mention, as the article points out "a lot of these young men and boys don't mind their jobs, and they aren't exactly working in sweatshop conditions." No wonder, again quoting the article, the "farm turns down 10 to 20 people a day."
These workers don't live in your "imaginary worlds" they live in the real world where a higher wage puts food on the table for themselves and their families. Players of MMOGs demand gold/credits and the items that gold/credits buys but would rather pay real world currency than spend the time collecting it themselves. Workers in China and elsewhere would gladly work supplying the gold/credits for a wage that is higher then their peers. What is wrong with this transaction? And, more to the point, who are you to tell either party, especially the workers in china, that they should not be allowed to make this transaction?
I would love to see everyone on earth become equally prosperous and happy, but unfortunately we don't currently live in such a utopia. Those who are wringing their hands over the fact that workers in China are given the opportunity to earn substantially more than their peers while working in good conditions should focus their anxieties elsewhere.
Posted by: Bergo | Jul 06, 2005 at 19:20
And, more to the point, who are you to tell either party, especially the workers in china, that they should not be allowed to make this transaction?
As the owner and operator of the game, the game company can deem selling of in-game currency or assets for real world money to be a bannable offense. If these sorts of trades are against the EULA, then no one, workers in China or otherwise, should be engaging in behaviors that lead to or support these trades. OTOH, if such buying and selling were not against the EULA (such as with Sony's new Station Exchange servers), the issue of who gets paid to farm currency becomes much less important.
While I'm a staunch supporter of EULAs (I won't even use thottbot.com because IGE owns it), I do support the idea of the secondary market, especially when it comes to developers harnessing it, like Sony has done. And I agree with Hellinar that we as developers enable this behavior in the first place. But I do find it ironic that the partner at one of the largest sellers of MMOG currency, quoted in the article, goes by the name "Smooth Criminal". As much distaste as I already have for anyone who makes $700,000 a year by duping, laundering, and selling MMOG currencies, a name like "Smooth Criminal" brings into sharp focus the criminal realities of the secondary market -- criminal in spirit, if not technically in law.
Posted by: Samantha LeCraft | Jul 06, 2005 at 21:24
This is purely unadulterated labor arbitrage. Different from outsourcing as there are no trade regulations. Different from manufacturing as the working conditions are so much better than Coal Mining or Shoe Making.
The fact that the product of trade is “virtual” objects that the game operators can create out of thin air only points to the fact that labor is the only input and the output are combination of bits and codes, like software.
So the shop might as will be a software development outsourcing firm. The staff are young and likely computer engineering students making extra money to pay for college. They sure hone in their programming skills creating bots. Some may even get involved with hacks.
This situation also applies to Eastern Europe. They have a large number of computer savvy people applying their skill to earn a living. One day the story of a “retired” Russian Nuclear Physicist making millions as an online entrepreneur in the shadowy world of virtual worlds will surface. That will make the headlines.
Oh the day an investigative journalist map out the murky connection with organize crime, more people may start to take notice.
These are the days,
Frank
Posted by: magicback | Jul 07, 2005 at 01:12
>>Is anyone aware of any statute saying that contract law applies to virtual items as well as real property?
There is plenty of precedent that has upheld EULAs, which is rather more to the point. However, it is probably moot in the case of overseas farmers, since you really have no way to haul them into a US court.
I really don't care if Player A wants to sell his Sword of Superior Belly-Button Lint to Player B. What irks me is how farmers shut out other players from whole areas of content to monopolize and control, causing me customer service issues I have to spend money on, rather than on new content and features.
It is easy for some to say "Well, just change the design!" but it strikes me a naive and inexperienced; you think we haven't? Part of the appeal of these games is the personal achievement; take that out and players wave as they find a game that offers it. In a sense, it is like baseball; players love to have their team (Guild, Fellowship, whatever) win, but they also want the opportunity for a more personal win. Most often, that means accumulation of wealth items.
So changing the design is an option that has had only marginal effect and that mostly bad. The only solution I can see for publishers/developers is to have plenty of data-mining capability with beaucoup cross-referencing and to look at the data for clues. That can still be manpower intensive, unfortunately, even if you have an auto-reports mechanism to spit out daily logs of, say, the top 1000 gold-earners and gold transferers, for example.
Posted by: Jessica Mulligan | Jul 07, 2005 at 01:42
Mike Sellers>Change the imaginary rules -- that is, the gameplay -- and you'll change the outcomes and economic landscape as well.
You'll also change the gameplay. This is a problem for people who like the gameplay.
It ought to be the case that if you don't like you gameplay, you don't play the game, not that you spoil the game for those who do like it until the developers change it to eliminate your tactic.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jul 07, 2005 at 07:05
It ought to be the case that if you don't like you gameplay, you don't play the game, not that you spoil the game for those who do like it until the developers change it to eliminate your tactic.
In some perfect world, I suppose that's true. In this world, it's the case that people will -- in and out of game -- do what you reward them for doing. Industrial-scale farmers are doing that in terms of real dollars, but they are still following the same pattern that every power-gamer who has ever played has used.
The rub is two-fold: first, game operators are making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars off the gameplay, and at some level don't want others making money off of it (by playing a different game -- the capitalist game) too. Second, the gameplay as designed rewards aggressive camping, taking over areas, etc., which ruins the games for others. Change the gameplay and maybe you get rid of the problem, but at the risk of also getting rid of the game operators' revenue.
I disagree with Jessica though that saying "change the design" is naive. For all their complexity, current MMOGs have an astonishingly narrow set of gameplay tropes and rewards. It's true that (especially for those of us steeped in current MMOG tradition) moving away from this is difficult and financially risky -- and thus unlikely to be attempted on a large scale.
But I have no doubt that various solutions to this current situation will be attempted. Some will be small, adjusting drop rates or locations in an attempt to lower the utility of uber-camping. Others will be more draconian, with Inquisitor-like CS personnel dedicated to chasing down and rooting out the cancerous cells of farmers infesting the game.
And others will try to re-think the issue from the ground up, providing new forms of highly enjoyable gameplay that are nevertheless resistant to this sort of large-scale griefing. Of these, most will be disastrously ineffective. But ours is a brutal Darwinian landscape: a solution will emerge (or the whole sector will collapse, or we'll just learn to live with this, but I don't see either of those happening). Industrial gold/item farmers may persist in a stable optimum point, cockroach-like, but in the face of new forms of gameplay that do not reward their behavior, they will not overrun the landscape from the players' POV.
What I don't see happening is that we stay with the MMOG gameplay forms we have now AND we somehow get the farmers to Go Away. Unless you can come up with a bigger reward than the one they're getting now, this behavior will increase, not decrease. A bigger (e.g. legal) stick is insufficient, given the international nature of the games and the farmers.
So the choices we have are pretty stark: we can't change human behavior. We can't change the economic realities that make sitting in front of a computer ten to twelve hours per day a winning proposition. We can change our game policies (e.g., RMT servers or the like) and we can change our game designs. Or we can just whine about it, but I don't see that as much of a choice.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 07, 2005 at 10:49
Personally, I think Smooth Criminal's boasts in the story are just that. Boasts. It almost reminds me of the things I would hear Lee Caldwell say. "I made 50 million dollars...blah blah blah blah...."
If you figure in time, effort, and what ever else it is no different than any other job someone might have. You have to deal with every aspect of running a business, and the profit becomes miniscule.
Anyway, anyone ever try buying a house with cash? I just dont buy what Smooth was selling.
Posted by: Rich Thurman | Jul 07, 2005 at 11:29
I think to improve our future we need to look at our past. MUDs have many features which still have yet to be utilized in game worlds that many overlook. One in particular deals with experience, mob types, and areas.
In each "zone" (a generalized area of a MUD, such as a dungeon) there are different mob types, all giving different amounts of experience. Once you begin to kill a certain type of mob in the area, your experience gain will slowly decrease. You would then switch to killing a different type of mob (in the same area) and even then, the amount of time you spent killing monsters in that area decreased your reward. This pressured players to learn many different areas of the game in order to gain maximum experience per hour. Botting was certainly much harder in many of these games, if not impossible, since eventually you'd reach the point of zero gain, or you'd have to craft a bot that could navigate more than 5 different areas all while keeping track of what areas in was in last and how long they've been in each area and the exp they've been getting.
This is just one of the methods MUDs had to prevent such activities, there are many others we could use (with some research :) that would certainly be helpful in identifying methods in preventing or discouraging botting, even while keeping eBaying to a healthy minimum but not discouraging what most people would consider "normal" gameplay.
Posted by: Lee Delarm | Jul 07, 2005 at 11:52
1. I mention the legal aspects precisely because while some lawmakers may be rational and well-informed Solons, others aren't. "Practical" doesn't enter into it. Some of these folks (at any level of government) are not above pushing legislation they don't understand to get a headline.
If you're lucky, people laugh and the bill goes away. If you're not lucky, it catches fire (with media help) and you get to spend lots of money fighting it, possibly without success, at which point you risk having lawyers tell you how to design your games.
Given this possibility, the choice is between scrambling to react to the headline after the fact (i.e., doing damage control), and trying to preempt the problem by working with legislators to explain these issues from the game developer's perspective before bad legislation is introduced. The latter approach seems wiser to me.
2. Can we separate the economic philosophy ("a rising tide lifts all boats") from the ethics ("knowingly breaking a contract provision is wrong")?
As I said, as long as it's a non-zero-sum game, I don't see a problem with a system that allows a few people to do very, very well as long as that system also enables many other people to do very well. To that extent, I agree with Bergo.
But I also agree with Samantha -- if that system relies on deliberately breaking a provision of a lawful contract, then it's not a lawful system and the fruits of the labor performed within that system are tainted. It's legally and ethically wrong to profit by such acts.
(I note here that Rich Thurman of UO farming fame has indicated that he farmed in UO because its EULA did not have an explicit "we own it so you can't sell it" provision. As he put it in the You mean, like, you can make money at this? thread: "... while I was a professional farmer, I stayed away from Sony games based solely on the conjecture that the activity was against the rules. ... I stayed within a realm where my activity was accepted by the publisher and had no clear ruling on the activity itself." This isn't something the other people in the Lee story can say.)
So it's possible to be pro-free enterprise but still disapprove of the particular enterprise of farming and exploiting in games whose EULAs clearly disallow that activity.
3. Is the answer, as David Galiel, Mike Sellers and Hellinar have suggested, to make games that don't define profit in terms of collectibles (money and objects)?
From a theoretical point of view, it's an interesting challenge -- is it possible to make a game that eschews the traditional rewards but is still popular? I'd like to see someone take a serious crack at such a game; the lessons learned could be helpful.
From a practical point of view, not only do the challenges seem severe, it's not clear that this would be desirable even if it were possible.
How do you reward players if you can't give them anything tangible (and which can therefore be farmed)? Would a game that didn't offer any rewards be playable?
Supposing such a thing could be created, what's wrong with "personal profit" as a motive for play? There's nothing wrong with altruism, either, but why should altruistic games be the only kind allowed?
So. If personal profit games are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, are there design or technical choices that could reduce farming by making it less profitable but that don't significantly injure the gameplay of people playing for entertainment?
I like Hellinar's idea: "pushing your luck like that [by repeating some profitable action] is likely to attract the anger of the jealous gods." As a design concept, that's a thing of beauty. It addresses the problem, does little collateral damage, and follows the suggestion made over in the Ce n'est pas un monde virtuel thread that designs should try to encourage desirable behavior rather than dictating it (possibly by letting players do what they want but assigning consequences to those actions).
Developers could also do what I suggested a while back (and for which I got my knuckles rapped slightly): do a better job of tracking item transfers by embedding unique identifiers in more items and improving the tools that watch transactions. While I recognize the potential for Big Brotherism in this approach, it's a practical alternative to trying to marginalize "personal profit" games.
I feel a lot better about this suggestion now that Jessica has proposed basically the same thing. *g*
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 07, 2005 at 12:24
Bart said: Given this possibility, the choice is between scrambling to react to the headline after the fact (i.e., doing damage control), and trying to preempt the problem by working with legislators to explain these issues from the game developer's perspective before bad legislation is introduced. The latter approach seems wiser to me.
This false dichotomy assumes that some legislation affecting EULAS and imaginary objects is being seriously considered somewhere. Does anyone know of any such legislation that is even being discussed or drawn up, much less being discussed in committee? Anyone?
I don't think there's any reason to assume that such legislation is around the corner. Maybe you know differently?
As for the ethics of farming, I agree that if it violates a game's EULA it's unethical. OTOH, so is ripping and uploading music from CDs, or using cracked software, or installing software on more than one machine. It's true that people don't typically make money with those activities, but the monetary aspect has nothing to do with the ethical aspect.
So, to loop this back to your legislative concerns, I suspect that all the p2p networks will be shut down before MMOG farmers and traders become a serious target.
As for assigning consequences to actions, I think this is (at a very high level) exactly right. We often tell our kids, "you can choose your actions, but you can't choose their consequences." Players will do what they are rewarded for, either in-game or out-of-game. And we cannot divorce those sources of reward.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 07, 2005 at 13:06
Bart said: Given this possibility, the choice is between scrambling to react to the headline after the fact (i.e., doing damage control), and trying to preempt the problem by working with legislators to explain these issues from the game developer's perspective before bad legislation is introduced. The latter approach seems wiser to me.
This false dichotomy assumes that some legislation affecting EULAS and imaginary objects is being seriously considered somewhere. Does anyone know of any such legislation that is even being discussed or drawn up, much less being discussed in committee? Anyone?
I don't think there's any reason to assume that such legislation is around the corner. Maybe you know differently?
As for the ethics of farming, I agree that if it violates a game's EULA it's unethical. OTOH, so is ripping and uploading music from CDs, or using cracked software, or installing software on more than one machine. It's true that people don't typically make money with those activities, but the monetary aspect has nothing to do with the ethical aspect.
So, to loop this back to your legislative concerns, I suspect that all the p2p networks will be shut down before MMOG farmers and traders become a serious target.
As for assigning consequences to actions, I think this is (at a very high level) exactly right. We often tell our kids, "you can choose your actions, but you can't choose their consequences." Players will do what they are rewarded for, either in-game or out-of-game. And we cannot divorce those to sources of reward.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 07, 2005 at 13:18
Bart said: Given this possibility, the choice is between scrambling to react to the headline after the fact (i.e., doing damage control), and trying to preempt the problem by working with legislators to explain these issues from the game developer's perspective before bad legislation is introduced. The latter approach seems wiser to me.
This false dichotomy assumes that some legislation affecting EULAS and imaginary objects is being seriously considered somewhere. Does anyone know of any such legislation that is even being discussed or drawn up, much less being discussed in committee? Anyone?
I don't think there's any reason to assume that such legislation is around the corner. Maybe you know differently?
As for the ethics of farming, I agree that if it violates a game's EULA it's unethical. OTOH, so is ripping and uploading music from CDs, or using cracked software, or installing software on more than one machine. It's true that people don't typically make money with those activities, but the monetary aspect has nothing to do with the ethical aspect.
So, to loop this back to your legislative concerns, I suspect that all the p2p networks will be shut down before MMOG farmers and traders become a serious target.
As for assigning consequences to actions, I think this is (at a very high level) exactly right. We often tell our kids, "you can choose your actions, but you can't choose their consequences." Players will do what they are rewarded for, either in-game or out-of-game. And we cannot divorce those sources of reward.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 07, 2005 at 13:18
Arrrrgh! Triple post!
Typepad apparently has it in for me. :-p
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 07, 2005 at 13:22
Mike>"So, to loop this back to your legislative concerns, I suspect that all the p2p networks will be shut down before MMOG farmers and traders become a serious target."
Which is never? :) There are networks of P2P out there that RIAA will never even know about much less be able to shut down :P Some of them have been around since before their sad little organization was even founded or in the process of being concieved.
Posted by: Lee Delarm | Jul 07, 2005 at 14:22
It is easy for some to say "Well, just change the design!" but it strikes me a naive and inexperienced; you think we haven't?
Actually, yes, I do think we haven't. The fact is that all commercial MMOGS operate within an extremely narrow set of assumptions and designs. They are no more differentiated than different brands of hard liquor. So I take the claims that "folks just wants their likker" with a grain of salt.
When all that is offered is a different flavor of virtual Iraq, it is disingenuous to say, "all people want to do is blow shit up, cheat, lie and steal".
And, when current players (a tiny subset of potential players) are rewarded exclusively for the accumulation of tangible things and for the exercise of power, it is disingenuous to say, "all people want is to accumulate things and to dominate and exploit others" - and even more disingenuous to scold them for doing it in clever ways, that just happen not to be the ways in which you wish to artificially constrain them.
Part of the appeal of these games is the personal achievement; take that out and players wave as they find a game that offers it.
Inherent in that comment is the assumption that "personal achievement" must take the form of accumulating tangible goods and "beating" others into submission. Assumptions are the enemy of better design.
I'm not blaming you personally here, in fact I have great personal respect for your work, Jessica. This is, however, a deep cultural bias in this industry, which prevents it from growing (in every sense of the term).
In human experience, most of which occured prior to the development of virtual world games, there are many other forms of personal reward and many other personal motivators--some of which help encourage socially-constructive behavior.
Which, touchy-feely social value aside, happens to be a smart business decision, because the more invested, welcomed and included people feel, the less they tend to litter, vandalize, hack and bypass the systems that serve them. And the less developers treat players as, at best, an unfortunate financial necessity, more commonly, as "data to mine", and, worst, as "the untrusted enemy", the less money and human resources must be expended on fighting them, protecting them from each other, and restraining their creativity.
Of course, we can continue instead to expend all our resources on more realistic viscera and marginally-less stupid AI, and pleasing our risk-averse, creatively-challenged publisher-masters, instead of designing environments conducive to the kind of play we claim we want to encourage and serving our audience well. And, we can always blame the players as a lazy way out.
If people are using your fountain as a urinal, the first place to look is at your fountain placement, environment and design--not to say, "everyone pees in fountains, people want to pee in fountains, if we tried to stop them they would do it somewhere else".
As a designer, the first lesson should be: if people are expending extraordinary efforts to defeat my design, my design is flawed.
Instead, the primary lesson seems to be: if people are expending extraordinary efforts to defeat my design, people suck, and I need to become more draconian and authoritarian in my efforts to force my design upon them (even as they pay me money for the privilege of being abused).
In a sense, it is like baseball; players love to have their team (Guild, Fellowship, whatever) win, but they also want the opportunity for a more personal win. Most often, that means accumulation of wealth items.
And if you think that professional baseball is better for having become a sport of pampered millionaires who often place their personal careers far ahead of their teams, and rich owners who shop around for the appropriately tax-break-offering city, then you aren't a real fan of baseball. Many people think that the replacement of value-driven sportsmanship, closely tied to the community it is played in, by money-driven enterprise in which players and teams hop around with no loyalty to anything but the almighty buck, is a bad thing for the sport, for the fans, and for the community.
Professional team sports in the US, in case you haven't checked lately, is suffering a severe fanbase contraction crisis. People are actually tuning *out* the higher the dollar rewards go and the more blatantly commercial the games are, and the leagues are contracting, while more people tune into (and participate in) amateur team sports, where the motivations are less purely personal.
So changing the design is an option that has had only marginal effect and that mostly bad.
An assertion made on faith without reliable empirical evidence. Again, not to blame you, this is an article of faith in the industry--things are the way they are because players (read: all other humans) suck, and not because our designs might suck--and, because everyone says it is so, it must be so. Of course, since no one will actually risk trying otherwise (despite several having written inspiring manifestos to the contrary), and since whatever tinkering with design has occured, has happened at the very margins, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it?
Are we sure we are learning the right lessons from the consequences of our designs?
Since the current gameplay dynamic is the only one offered in all commercial MMOGs with little more than different flavors, colors and brand names to differentiate the social-darwinist design, it is logical that the only players who play these games either A) only care about such things, or B) are willing to tolerate them because the virtual environment offers them an opportunity to engage in their own, preferred meta-games (which, if we really paid attention to, might give us clues as to what gameplay might appeal beyond the social-darwinist crowd. Hint: replacing repetitive rat-slaying with going to the toilet doesn't change the underlying gameplay dynamic).
To conclude from this that ALL potential players only care about accumulating "stuff" and dominating others, is a logical fallacy along the lines of "all men are humans, therefore all humans are men." (which, come to think of it, is another common assumption in our industry which keeps us from growing).
The only solution I can see for publishers/developers is to have plenty of data-mining capability with beaucoup cross-referencing and to look at the data for clues.
The problem is that you only have the data you have, which is the data from self-selecting players who put up with current designs. And what you will get from that self-selecting data will reinforce the existing biases and beliefs that keep things the way they are--and limit our growth.
The answer is not more data mining. You won't find human solutions there. The answer is fresh thinking, questioning old assumptions, and a willingness to learn from what has kept societies civil and sustained in the real world for centuries--not to throw out the non-binary, fuzzy living baby with the bathwater while focusing purely on reducing all human experience to a neatly quantifiable, amoral economic transaction. Because, if that is all we value in our game designs, that is how players will play.
Posted by: galiel | Jul 07, 2005 at 15:27
Supposing such a thing could be created, what's wrong with "personal profit" as a motive for play? There's nothing wrong with altruism, either, but why should altruistic games be the only kind allowed?
False dichotomy. Binary thinking.
No real society works if based exclusively and solely on one or the other. Civilization is a balance between the two.
Our games are not.
(Incidentally, the "only kind allowed" language falsely frames this discussion in a censorious frame, a frame used defensively to prevent any discussion about ethics and responsibility on the part of the designer, while keeping the focus on the ethics and responsibility of the player.
The actual discussion is not about what should be "allowed", the actual discussion is about what, as designers, we might *choose* to design, and which designs will serve our goals better than others?)
Posted by: galiel | Jul 07, 2005 at 15:34
David (Galiel), excellent manifesto-ish post above. Very well said.
One thing I can add, which I suspect you already know: you can design and develop a game that does not play to current hardcore gamer expectations, but the probability of being able to fund it (and thus bring it to fruition) in any traditional manner is close to zero. For example publishers, in my experience, will not touch a game that is not largely built around the "kill monster get gold" grindy gameplay we all know so well. Yes people complain about it and it sets up things like the woes of RMT, but it's also generally seen as a necessary and central component of any MMOG. Thus the assumptions that are now all but invisible to us hem us in and limit innovation.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 07, 2005 at 18:01
Wow. Two accusations in a row of being guilty of falsely dichotomizing -- a new personal best! (I'm only counting the triple post once, to be fair. *g*)
Nope, I have no information that someone's about to introduce legislation banning virtual trading or any such thing. What I do have is a decade living just outside Washington, D.C., getting a real education in how legislation is actually crafted... which left me with a fairly low opinion of the level of comprehension that most respresentatives have of any technical issue more complicated than operating a TV remote control. In short, if one of them can screw things up for the computer game industry, I expect it to happen.
But maybe I'm too cynical, and Congress is incapable of doing anything stupid....
As for posing altruistic games as the only alternative to "personal profit" games, I'll plead guilty to that one. Poor choice of words on my part. I know better than to suggest that those are the only options; developers are more creative than that.
Having expressed this mea culpa, however:
galiel> the "only kind allowed" language falsely frames this discussion in a censorious frame, a frame used defensively to prevent any discussion about ethics and responsibility on the part of the designer, while keeping the focus on the ethics and responsibility of the player.
That's not an accurate presentation of my objection. Mildly censorious? Yes. Altruism has its place, but so does the profit motive and games based on satisfying that motive.
But that is a criticism aimed only at the pooh-poohing of the profit motive as somehow ethically defective -- it is in no way a blanket dismissal of the ethical responsibilities of designers, and even less is it an attempt to "prevent any discussion" of those responsbilities on anyone's part.
It's a not a false dichotomy to make such an accusation. It's just unwarranted.
So: As I said, I'd sincerely like to see altruistic games made. I think that would be helpful. What I would not like to see is such games being described as some kind of antidote to profit-based games as though the latter were a form of disease of which humanity must be cured.
If people think there's room for both kinds of games (and others as well), then good -- I feel that way, too. So is there really anything to argue about on that score?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 07, 2005 at 20:39
Bart -
You missed the central point. The false dichotomy you presented is "altruistic games" vs. "profit-based games".
As I stated, sustained, healthy, free societies rely on a complex mix of both. Our games do *not*.
They seek to reduce all designed affordances for human interaction to numerically measured, amoral market transactions. To use your imprecise and value-laden shorthand, they eschew "altruism" in favor of pure "profit-based" motivations. And they have run into some problems as a result.
Since the sustainability and profitability of an MMOG depends on the health of the player society, it makes sense to look at how different motivations and norms positively or negatively effect that health.
The reasonable alternative to the current crop of MMOGs which discount, fail to design for--and often penalize--non-digital, non-economic aspects of the social fabric is *not* MMOGs that have *no* economic models, *no* competition, *no* goals, just a lot of hand-holding and hugging.
*That* is the false dichotomy. No one that I know is proposing purely "altruistic games" as an alternative to purely "competitive games" - that is a simplistic (yet almost universal) distortion of the reasonable critique.
Rather, the argument is that, by deliberately designing in affordances for--and by skewing design to encourage--certain kinds of socially-constructive non-binary, non-tangible, non-economically-modeled human interactions which are essential to the health of a society, we might just end up with less disfunctional, less expensive, more widely appealing, but still fun-as-hell MMOGs. The fact that we might actually do some social good in the process is icing on the cake.
This is not an either-or, ban-all-guns and replace them with fuzzy-bunnies discussion; it is an attempt, futile within the industry as Mike points out it is, to open thinking about what is missing in current game design that might be added to it and add value to it, and what is present in current game design that might detract from its ability to realize its potential.
The fact is that by remaining oblivious to and largely refusing to consider non-economic social transactions, our designs tend to actively thwart them. There is no such thing as neutral game design; even our non-decisions come back to haunt us.
Isn't it rational to seek to understand and then design affordances to encourage and support behavior that we wish to see in our players?
Seems obvious and common-sensical to me--which is why, as Mike points out, it won't happen from within this industry...
Posted by: galiel | Jul 07, 2005 at 21:25
One thing I can add, which I suspect you already know: you can design and develop a game that does not play to current hardcore gamer expectations, but the probability of being able to fund it (and thus bring it to fruition) in any traditional manner is close to zero. For example publishers, in my experience, will not touch a game that is not largely built around the "kill monster get gold" grindy gameplay we all know so well.
Yeah, Mike, which is why both of us, taking different paths, are doing it outside the "traditional manner".
At this point, I'm treating the game industry as damage and routing around it. I suspect you are doing much of the same.
Posted by: galiel | Jul 07, 2005 at 21:37
Well, there are many different paths, some more traditional than others.
Regarding your post above, I'm reminded of the statement by Jung: "One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games -- and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive values."
Of course, making games that are enjoyable, allow for personal achievement, and aren't built on social dysfunction at the core... well, that's the (first) difficult part.
But yes, I believe it can be done.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 07, 2005 at 23:48
galiel> No one that I know is proposing purely "altruistic games" as an alternative to purely "competitive games" - that is a simplistic (yet almost universal) distortion of the reasonable critique.
Let's back up to the first occurrence in this thread of an assertion that an alternative to gameplay based on "exploitive social darwinism" (to use your terminology since mine is merely an imprecise and value-laden shorthand) is desirable:
"As designers, we can choose to enable and facilitate disfunctional human activity, or we can choose to encourage and empower cooperative, constructive activity. "
Please note that I'm not the person who posed this "or" proposition.
I'll take my lumps when I deserve them, but if I'm guilty of discussing these design choices as an either/or proposition, I'm not the only person here to do so, and I wasn't the first.
The only reason I spoke to those alternate views was because it can be useful in discussing issues to try to describe the positions at the extents -- sometimes that helps to define the problem space. But there's not much point in that approach if it's going to be labeled as simplistic thinking in "false dichotomies."
Again: I'm not looking for an either/or world; I don't believe such a limitation on design would be fruitful or interesting even if it were possible. I actually support designs that try to encourage a more sustainable social ecology in games. I'm at least as turned off by the Hobbesian nature of many of today's MMOGs as anyone. (Possibly more so than most -- did anyone else here on TN pose a critique of RMT based on its possible contribution to a coarsening of our society?)
I not only don't disagree with you, I got the point a while back. If you're not convinced of that by now, I won't waste your time on further attempts at clarification.
Mike> making games that are enjoyable, allow for personal achievement, and aren't built on social dysfunction at the core... well, that's the (first) difficult part.
Who gets to define "social dysfunction"? *g*
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 08, 2005 at 01:34
Bart: Who gets to define "social dysfunction"? *g*
A difficult question in our culture and times. But there are a number of things that stand out in non-game world contexts as dysfunctional in almost any time or culture, including:
- using violence as the primary method of resolving conflict and disagreement
- a singular or hyper-competitive (to the exclusion of all else) focus on personal wealth or power
- treating other people as if they were mindless automata, not requiring or being worthy of any degree of empathy
- not caring about (or having) consequences for actions
- exerting complete mind control over others' actions
Now, I'm not sure anyone would want to argue in favor of any of these in a non-game world. And yet each is a long-standing hallmark of MMOG gameplay.
The last two are important because they are the basis for most non-PvP games. Yes, such games generally have fewer interplayer problems than do PvP games, but it's my belief that the unnatural constraints (the lack of any real consequences and especially the mind control "you just can't do that" aspect that insures PvE-only) cause psychosocial stress in the players that creates pathologies in other areas. In some ways, games like DAoC or WoW with RvR or factional combat opportunities -- especially if these are not meaningless and Sisyphean, but have some real consequences -- are amongst the most psychologically resonant and least dysfunctional of current games. OTOH these games also inculcate a local culture of aggression, violence, hoarding, and disregard for others that, were it to take place in the physical world, would be distressingly dysfunctional to many people.
Now, I'm not arguing that such games will turn players into aggressive, violent, hoarding, sociopathic individuals. But I am saying that, in a world containing other real people, people often act and react within the game-world context in such psychosocially pathological ways.
This is why, IMO, there seem to be so many more flaming jerks in games than are encountered in daily life. It's not that MMOGs attract a disproportionate number of jerks, emotional mutants, and sociopaths, but instead that the physical, psychological, social, and cultural landscapes created by these games reward primarily what would be called dysfunctional behavior anywhere else.
It is worth noting of course that many people develop strong, edifying, long-lasting social bonds in games. To me the development of community in MMOGs is the most remarkable thing about them. But consider: what might develop if such games were attractive and enjoyable, but weren't built on the foundation of aggression, violence, acquisitiveness, and a disregard for the consequences of actions (or, as in the case of a putatively non-violent game like TSO, a foundation of the worst of junior high school social maneuvering)? Put another way, how would WoW be different if you could be a crafter, guild leader, or similar (and even these roles are narrow), without first having to kill a mountain of creatures to get to the neighborhood of level 60?
FWIW, I think that worlds like SL provide a partial example here, but in a sense have swung too far the other way: by eliminating all threats, life becomees an eternal party. That's cool for a while, but ultimately becomes unsatisfying (it would be interesting to find how many SL playes struggle with a sense of ennui after a while, as has happened in other primarily social worlds).
The sweet spot, it seems to me, is to create a world (as with current MMOGs) that presents an explorative, potentially dangerous environment, and thus one that rewards social bonding as many do now -- but without requiring the additional pathologies that we've come to implicitly assume are a necessary part of MMOG gameplay. Can a functional (and commerically viable!) MMOG be built without requiring a foundation of violence, aggression, hoarding, a growing disregard for consequences of actions, a lack of empathy, and/or other socially dysfunctional behavior patterns?
I believe so. But in a lot of ways it won't and can't rely on the common MMOG foundations and devices we otherwise take for granted.
(Apologies: this became longer in the writing.)
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 08, 2005 at 10:11
No apologies necessary, Mike -- it's the well-informed and thoughtful commentary like yours that gives TN its unique value. I appreciate your taking the time to consider my question.
I agree personally with your suggested list of dysfunctional game behaviors. What's interesting is that while we might agree that those kinds of behaviors are dysfunctional and even sociopathic, to many of the people playing these games there's nothing wrong with those behaviors -- in fact, if you tried to tell them that these things were wrong, they'd argue with you that you were wrong and just didn't understand.
Violent action as the primary in-game activity? "That's what makes these games exciting and fun."
Hypercompetition? "Arguing against that is just an excuse for being incompetent and a carebear."
Treating other people as fools who deserve no respect? "How will people learn to keep up if you coddle them?"
Has "computer game" already become synonymous with worlds where this kind of thinking is the norm?
(A lack of consequences for actions is also an important issue, I agree.)
> It's not that MMOGs attract a disproportionate number of jerks, emotional mutants, and sociopaths, but instead that the physical, psychological, social, and cultural landscapes created by these games reward primarily what would be called dysfunctional behavior anywhere else.
Can I suggest that the jury might still be out on this one?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there's a dynamic effect at work here:
1. A game offers intense combat and loot/money rewards.
2. People show up.
3. Those who don't like that sort of thing leave, while those who are naturally drawn to it stay.
4. To retain the remaining player base, now consisting mostly of those who like hypercompetitive and acquisitive virtual violence, the developers intensify those elements.
5. Return to step 2.
Isn't this as plausible as the idea that games, through their dysfunctionalist design, turn otherwise rational people into sociopaths? These "normal" players may be performing sociopathic actions in the game (because that's what the game rewards), but they don't seem to be the same people as the apparently multitudinous gamers who actively and loudly endorse the rightness of violent/acquisitive/hypercompetitive designs, and who criticize any game without those features as "boring." (And who are catered to in this belief by the gaming magazines and Web sites.)
How do we explain the prominence of these gamers? Are they numerous in online games because the current games create them? Or do we see them because the standard game model attracts them disproportionately?
Like you, I'd like to see a game world design that doesn't have to answer that question because it doesn't let Darwinism run amok. I'd like to see a game that launches with a balance among the prominent playstyles (including controlled violence and acquisition among other rewarded behaviors) and that is explicitly designed to maintain that balance over time. In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I started developing just such a design a few months ago... and I'm not even in the industry! (I'm serious about it, but I have no biz connections so no one need worry that I'm "competition." *g* It's a useful learning exercise for me.)
Is a truly balanced game technically achievable? I think so. I can't see any architectural or run-time impediment to a design that deliberately tries to balance playstyles with and against each other.
Is it conceptually feasible? Again, I think so. I haven't seen anything that makes me think it's impossible to formulate a functional design that establishes and maintains a diverse playstyle ecology. But maybe someone with professional experience has found otherwise.
Is it socially viable? (In other words, will people play it?) Once again, I think so. If it's truly balanced, there'll be enough of the old ultraviolence for those who like that sort of thing, but it won't dominate the game because increasing power will be designed to be both self-limiting and limited by required interactions with other playstyles. (I'm assuming that this could actually be made to feel like fun, but I could be wrong about that.)
Is it commercially viable? That is, would enough people actually pay to play something like this to pay back the development and operational costs?
I don't think I'm qualified to even guess at that one.
(Incidentally, I'm not laboring under any belief that I'd be breaking new ground if I completed such a design. I expect this sort of thing has been conceived and described by veteran designers already. I just don't know a better way to learn than to talk with professionals and try building things myself.)
Anybody think a game with a sustainable balance of playstyles is impossible to create or maintain? Or that only about three people would want to play it? Or that such a thing is unnecessary in the first place?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 08, 2005 at 12:53
Can a functional (and commerically viable!) MMOG be built without requiring a foundation of violence, aggression, hoarding, a growing disregard for consequences of actions, a lack of empathy, and/or other socially dysfunctional behavior patterns?
Can a functional and economically viable society be built without going through a required stage of violence, aggression, hoarding, cronyism, disregard for non-elite members, lack of empathy for lower status members, and other socially dysfunctional behavior patterns? Historically, the answer would seem to be no. :(
This is a point I've made before--when you look at the stages of development of a human society as it scales with size (Jared Diamond's chart in Guns, Germs and Steel) you see something that looks terribly familiar, really. I seriously wonder whether we in our virtual spaces get to skip past the intermediate stages of society building.
Posted by: Raph | Jul 08, 2005 at 13:41
On the positive side, human society does seem to have a kind of "racheting" mechanism -- we make social progress slowly, in fits and starts, but we do make progress. And when we do have problems, we aren't required to go all the way back to the first forms of society before returning to making progress.
If virtual societies have more problems because they're products of small-scale intentional design (rather than large-scale self-correcting systems), we can at least hope that as a kind of human society they'll be subject to a similar racheting mechanism over time.
We may not get to skip painful intermediate stages, but maybe going through those stages is a necessary feature of sustainable growth.
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 08, 2005 at 14:25
I seriously wonder whether we in our virtual spaces get to skip past the intermediate stages of society building.
Almost certainly not. But neither do we need to become stuck in the earlier stages, reveling in them to the point we come to believe this is all there is. And as Bart points out, there is a central difference here in that virtual worlds are products of intentional design, and may be missing crucial self-correcting and self-regulating systems we find in the physical world.
MMOGs are no more and no less than what we make them to be, as I expect everyone here knows. They have no physics, ecology, psychology, sociology, or politics that we do not explicitly give them (even if by seeding emergent effects). We could make a game where access to water and trade were paramount, but so far as I know no one has done so. Given the differences between societal evolution in the physical vs. the virtual world, there's no reason to believe that our games will parallel the development of societies (as envisioned by Diamond, Tuchman, Jacobs, and others).
That said, our understanding of how to create such societies -- or to enable them by providing the building blocks for them -- probably does follow the same path, more or less, that we have followed through history. The issue here is about how much we as developers know, what we're willing and able to risk and try, and not so much about what the players know. If we are willing and able to conceive of broadly interesting gameplay that is not built on (what would be in the physical world) dysfunctional behaviors, then we'll move along some societal scale, eventually. If not, we'll be stuck with more and more games where what's rewarded is killing, hoarding, and treating others (PC and NPC alike) as if they were made of cardboard.
But yes, probably we'll continue to build worlds that enable more meaningful societies... but slowly. And, from both commercial and craft POVs, I'm impatient.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 08, 2005 at 15:30
I expect (hope?) that Raph's comment was meant to be provocative rather than serious.
Surely, when forming social organizations today, the typical executive committee does not hand founding members swords and bags of money and tell them to fight it out and move through all the evolutionary stages of social evolution.
Nor are all new independent states formed through blood and violent revolution, nor are all new societies authoritarian at first.
We can, and have, learned from the past. To seek to excuse deliberate design choices as the inevitable stages of social evolution is a designer cop-out. It is blaming players for our design choices--and those design choices, do date, are strongly and quite deliberately skewed toward Mad Max vs. the Constitutional Convention.
It is a design choice which some may choose to defend, but it is a design choice, not a product of natural selection.
Posted by: galiel | Jul 08, 2005 at 16:20
It's a point I have raised before, actually. And yes, it's provocative, but it is also serious. The central thesis of Diamond's book is that social development is about greater efficiency in caloric extraction from the soil. That's what sustains higher population densities and larger societies.
I've suggested in the past that the equivalent to caloric extraction for our worlds right now is usually XP extraction from the soil--hence why we call it "farming." Seen in that light, farmers are the natural societal evolution.
Diamond's chart gives a series of common societal characteristics for different sizes of interdependent populations (not newness, Galiel). Right now, we not only do not create interdependent populations of any significant size, we don't even have any worlds of a size large enough to hold what seems to be the minimum "civilized" population size.
Posted by: Raph | Jul 08, 2005 at 17:13
I have to admit I had some trouble slogging through Guns, Germs and Steel -- it's still not clear to me why Diamond needed to spend so much time discussing details of life in Borneo.
That said, I think his notion of social development being based on the level of caloric extraction is effective... but only up to a point. After absorbing Carrol Quigley's The Evolution of Civilizations for about a decade, it seems to me that Diamond focuses too closely on energy as correlating with social development.
Quigley suggested that societies become civilizations when they obtain an "instrument of expansion," that is, some organizational form that allows a few people to collect a surplus and productively reinvest that surplus back into the society. For Mesopotamian civilization it was theocracy (the priests knew when the Tigris delta would flood -- improving the caloric extraction rate, in Diamond's terms); for Egypt it was a sort of bureaucratic socialism; for Classical (Greco-Roman) civilization it was slavery.
Western civilization (per Quigley) has actually gone through several instruments of expansion, starting with feudalism and switching to commercial capitalism and then to industrial capitalism. In this time, the West has advanced (per Diamond) beyond other civilizations of the past because it replaced inefficient production systems (human- and animal-powered agriculture) with mechanical and chemical energy production systems that have vastly higher outputs (despite also having higher costs).
So there's agreement so far... but I think it ends there. Our technology has reached the point that agriculture is no longer the limiting factor in our growth. As an example, the U.S. alone has gone in just one century from something like 75% of its population engaged in food production to barely 2%, and yet still generates enough food to get obese, export tons of the stuff, and still waste untold more tons.
To me, this suggests that caloric output is no longer a good indicator (if it ever really was) of social progress. A civilization's "social level," it seems to me, is really more a reflection of how well the emotional needs and desires of individuals in that civilization are being met. For most of human history those needs have taken a back seat to survival, which is why agriculture has been so important. But now that so much of humanity (especially the West) is no longer in survival mode, our social systems are able to concentrate more on direct satisfaction of emotional wants.
Basically, it's no longer about survival -- it's about happiness. Which means the crucial technologies are no longer agricultural or even industrial... but what they are now is up for debate.
Personally I'm inclined to go with the "information revolution" as the key production system for the near-term future. As our primary needs have become more abstract (because our more concrete needs like food and shelter are in large part no longer going unsatisfied), the means to satisfy these new primary needs must also become more abstract -- basically, happiness requires information.
Knowledge is the new food.
So if there's a parallel to games here, happiness in MMOGs is only about digging up XP because the social and economic and physical systems possible in them are still stuck at a near-prehistoric stage. When the players in these worlds are able to use (or create) systems that, like the West's, easily satisfy "physical" needs (in the game world), then they can begin to look for ways to satisfy their more abstract needs for happiness and pleasure as we're starting to do out here in the Real World.
And the social systems in these worlds will progress to serve those needs accordingly. But they'll probably have to endure the same kinds of social disruptions we've experienced, as well.
Social ethnography of these virtual worlds should be a growth industry. *g*
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 08, 2005 at 18:19
Not to make too much light of an interesting thread but...
By definition then government is dysfunctional?
Posted by: Thabor | Jul 08, 2005 at 18:40
Jessica>It is easy for some to say "Well, just change the design!" but it strikes me a naive and inexperienced; you think we haven't? Part of the appeal of these games is the personal achievement; take that out and players wave as they find a game that offers it. <
Can you point to any major game with a server that has soft-capped experience and loot gain? Would soft-capping one server really drive the players on all the other severs away? My understanding is an efficient WoW farmer can earn more gold several hundred times faster than my casually played characters make. It seems to me its this enormous average to max earning ratio that makes farming viable. I can’t be the only one who would forgo the theoretical chance to earn gold at such a rate to avoid the disruption farmers cause.
For me, the level up and get stuff game is just a nice background to stuff I want to do in VWs. I’d like to see a server that reflected that. Building your characters career in WoW around gathering loot at the maximum possible rate is about as enticing to me as building your everyday life around making money at the maximum possible rate. I can understand the fun in that game, and even play it now and then, but I would like a server that provided an alternative.
Posted by: Hellinar | Jul 08, 2005 at 23:27
Galiel>It is a design choice which some may choose to defend, but it is a design choice, not a product of natural selection.
Raph>I've suggested in the past that the equivalent to caloric extraction for our worlds right now is usually XP extraction from the soil--hence why we call it "farming." Seen in that light, farmers are the natural societal evolution.
On the one hand, I agree with Galiel. The development of ingame cultures has little to do with natural selection. For one thing, participation in game worlds is voluntary. And until you designers start building worlds where characters have heredity, mutation, and natural selection, you're not going to have anything for ingame cultural evolution to interact with.
On the other hand, there are two levels of organization to consider with respect to the cultural development of ingame 'societies':
The first and foremost level of organization is that of the gameworld population as a whole. At this level, the determining factor in the continued success of a population is very simple: fun. Populations die because players leave. Players leave because they are not having 'fun' relative to the costs of investing in playing the game.
From this perspective it's entirely possible (though I doubt it's exclusively the case, cf. ATITD), for example, that what people want when they choose to join a virtual world is the opportunity to try out precisely the kinds of strategies that are prohibitive for them to engage in contemporary 'real' society--viz., clubbing others into submission and amassing as much wealth as possible without regard to costs like censure, imprisonment, death, etc. That is, in the mien, they may far prefer to experiment along the axis of "Mad Max" rather than spend their leisure time developing the "Constitutional Convention."
The second level of organization is that of subpopulations within the game world. This is the level of organization I think Raph is referring to when he suggests that XP is the 'food' of the virtual world. Guilds and clans survive by aquiring benefits that their members cannot efficiently provide on their own: social status, individual wealth, power over the environment, protection from outsiders, etc.
To the extent that the above are achieved through XP, XP becomes the primary cultural currency. To the extent that PvP (cf. WoW) provides these benefits, it becomes a cultural currency. Since, currently, 'get in a group and beat the crap out of each other and the environment' is the most effective strategy for success, it becomes the dominant strategy.
The bottom line is that you're never going to get the kind of sophisticated 'civilizations' that many of you value as long as there is such a glaring poverty of successful strategies.
Here are just a very few examples of how the biggest virtual worlds are impoverished with respect to promoting interesting cultural evolution:
--Geography is trivial. There are no real but potentially permeable geographical barriers among populations. Remember that this is the key lesson of Diamond's book: The impact of geography and, a fortiori, the circumstances of ecology on cultural success.
--There are very few tools and mechanisms for subpopulations to aggregate and differentiate themselves in culturally meaningful ways. It's pretty much just the individual and the guild. Further, since most games hard cap the size of a guild, even absorption soon becomes worthless as a strategy. Sure, in many games player-built alliances arise, but because game mechanics seldom support these, they become far more costly than any returns they tend to offer. This is especially true when the possible encounters in a game world are also hard capped.
--The game worlds themselves do not represent very dynamic ecologies. The most interesting period of any game world's history is generally the very brief period after launch when access to new regions of the world, new powers, new forms of wealth, etc. are still possible. Very soon, however, these cease to be function as barriers. Since the environment doesn't change much, there's very little adapting after that point that populations have to contend with. Success becomes more a matter of fighting attrition than anything else. As a result, the 'societies' fall into equilibrium and stay there.
--The contexts in which characters find themselves in a game world is typically designed around a binary, light-versus-dark military conflict. This severely prejudices the kinds of strategies that are effective.
Bottom line: Cultural heredity (the formation of traditions and values and taboos), cultural mutation (changes due to environment and other contingent factors), and cultural variation (the size of the 'strategy space' and the subset of that space that represents effective strategies) are so limited in virtual worlds presently that there is really no engine to drive cultural evolution at all.
It really has nothing to do with the kind of Hegelian, phenomonology of the spirit of history that many seem to be suggesting is at work.
--Aaron
Posted by: Aaron | Jul 08, 2005 at 23:34
I would use the term "journalist" loosely. He quotes me twice in his article yet I have no recollection of ever speaking to him at all.
Posted by: Bob Kiblinger | Jul 09, 2005 at 00:03
Bart>So if there's a parallel to games here, happiness in MMOGs is only about digging up XP because the social and economic and physical systems possible in them are still stuck at a near-prehistoric stage. When the players in these worlds are able to use (or create) systems that, like the West's, easily satisfy "physical" needs (in the game world), then they can begin to look for ways to satisfy their more abstract needs for happiness and pleasure as we're starting to do out here in the Real World.
I totally agree with this, and this is what Josh and I have started doing with tools we originally crafted for farming. http://www.macrohmasheen.com With Macroh Masheen, we are basically creating a better wheel to take away the grind that so many players despise. Have your toon do the grind while you sleep, and when you wake, you can actually have fun in the game.
Posted by: Rich Thurman | Jul 09, 2005 at 00:17
I wonder whether anyone here has ever spent any time in Eve Online. It's not the highest-population MMOG out there, but it has many of the characteristics being mentioned in this thread:
--No level grind. This has been replaced by a system featuring hundreds of skills that only take time to learn. Your character build is a function largely of what order you choose to learn them in.
--PvP with real and immediate consequences in high-security space (i.e., destruction of your ship by the CONCORD police force), and with only Darwinian consequences in other regions (i.e., the strongest, smartest force wins).
--Farmable regions of both combat and non-combat nature (i.e., NPC pirate and drone bases, and asteroid belts, respectively), and regions that are a combination of the two.
--Combat and non-combat missions, all of which are elective and not required for advancement.
--A robust economy that's partially market-driven, featuring many items that the game does not build but can only be built by players, and partially static, featuring items released in measured portion by the game.
--Significant geographic variations in the economy.
--No "class" constraints (i.e., warrior, thief, priest, mage, etc.). Players can build their ships to fit something much like any of these, or can build hybrids, or can maintain several different ships to fulfill several different functions.
--A long list of ships, ship modules and star systems that players know will become available, but don't know just when or at what rate.
...and several more things I'm probably leaving out.
What's interesting about the game in the context of this thread is that it affords the opportunity to create your own role within the game-world, rather than being confined to one of the pre-determined roles you have to choose at character creation in most MMOGs. You never have to fire a shot in Eve if you don't want to. On the other hand, your corporation (Eve's version of the guild) can go to war with another corp, if you both so choose. You can also vie for soveriegnty over some star systems by populating them with more player-built starbases than the next guy. The game is also built with farming in mind in that "choke-points" are designed into the geography. A corp that controls a choke-point controls the commodity (usually rare asteroid ores) that lie on the other side of it, and there are enough choke-points so that rare ores are never prohibitively expensive.
Through design points like those above, some of the Darwinian element is removed. You still have to earn money to buy ships, but if you're content to poke around in high-security space, you can very quickly earn enough to make the game interesting. If you want to see what's happening in low-security space, you need a bigger ship and have to put in more effort. If you want to go to 0.0 space, you better have a good corp on your side.
There are definitely griefers in Eve, ore-stealers, dishonest brokers and the like, and good drop locations do get farmed out in high-security space pretty regularly. It's also, as I mentioned, not as densely populated as some other MMOGs (but it's not sharded, either, so it looks fairly infinitely scalable to me). What Eve does seem to provide is a lot of the things people have mentioned above as desirable, which I'll sum up as the opportunity to opt out of the survival-of-the-fittest race, and the chance to measure one's accomplishment however one pleases, not by some completely arbitrary system of "levels."
Eve hasn't avoided the RMT problem entirely, but I imagine it contains important lessons for designers looking to break out of the lather-rinse-repeat cycle that prevails in most MMOGs, lessons that could perhaps move a game away from whatever dangers RMT holds (if any).
Posted by: Mark Wallace | Jul 09, 2005 at 04:55
To append to what I wrote earlier, I neglected possibly the most important obstacle to cultural evolution in virtual world games--namely, that the population is aware that they are 'gaming' and so many traditional assumptions about cultural evolution, etc. may just not hold at all.
Anyway, I didn't intend my post to be accusatory and certainly not normative. Just descriptive.
--Aaron
Posted by: Aaron | Jul 09, 2005 at 14:09
On the other hand, imagine if player guilds could form nations. If you offered every member of any member guild an entire level, any level, one time, upon approval of a GM witnessed constitution, you can bet people would do it at least for the XP. You could even have players input values for parameters that characterize their constitution. These 'modelled' constitutional values could then be used to affect members gameplay with different bonus to stats, uniforms, etc.
Point is, I doubt there's much you guys can't (and won't, ultimately) get your players to play along with.
--Aaron
Posted by: Aaron | Jul 09, 2005 at 19:11
As usual, this thread started off interesting and has become even more so.
It sounds like we've reached a point in the discussion where it's generally felt that farming is really not so much a disease as it is a symptom. Namely, a symptom of the fact that MMOGs, as complex as their code may be, still have designs so simple that they engage only the most primitive human capabilities.
(Raph mentioned something very much like this in his A Theory of Fun, which I'm finally reading along with Richard's Designing Virtual Worlds. Fascinating, both of these books... and why again is Raph's not listed in the Author Publications section on each of TN's pages?)
Several of us have now suggested some of the ways in which the current state of the art in MMOG design creates Hobbesian worlds by enabling the satisfaction of only the more obvious human desires (primarily survival and acquisition). Does anyone want to take a crack at the more positive side of the ledger?
What are today's MMOG designs getting right? What concepts in some of today's games ought to be used as foundations for future designs, and what new concepts need to be part of future designs so that other important aspects of being human are rewarded?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jul 10, 2005 at 01:57
Mike Wallace wrote:
"I wonder whether anyone here has ever spent any time in Eve Online. It's not the highest-population MMOG out there, but it has many of the characteristics being mentioned in this thread:"
Most of us have, only we called it Ultima Online, post-March 1999, :D. Pretty much all of the characteristics you mention are present in UO, after some changes were made to reduce griefing and rampant PK (the survival of the fittest syndrome you mention), just in a men-in-tights situation.
As it comes up on it's eighth anniversary and still going strong, maybe it is time to go back and relook at what other MMOs gained from it.
Posted by: Jessica Mulligan | Jul 10, 2005 at 03:24