The Theory Of
Here you'll find discussion of all manner of topics relating to the theory of multiplayer games. As I see it, anyway. A note to commentors: if you stray off-topic or if your reply contains ad hominem attacks, your comment will be deleted.

There are many crafting tasks that are not suitable to an Artisan.  When a large number of an item is required, and there is no significant decision-making involved in the construction of those items, that crafting should be implemented to appeal to a Manufacturer.  Those systems either involve push-button manufacturing as is found in World of Warcraft, or NPC factory manufacturing as is found in real-time simulation games.

An example of this is arrow crafting.  Arrows do not have 'big picture' skills.  All the skills used involve fine motor control, which is very much ill-suited to computer games.   Fitting vanes, attaching nock and head and so forth are simply not Artisan tasks.  A game that permits a character to make its own arrows need only use the standard push-button manufacturing model.

EVE Online involves the creation of many objects, and spaceships are certainly a mainstream element of the game.  They are an opportunity to occupy Artisans.  Indeed many Artisans could be involved in the crafting of a single ship.  That is an unexplored experience in games: group crafting.  Imagine players beginning with the crafting of each component that goes into a spaceship.  Each engine could be crafted individually by one player.  Or even a team of players.

I can imagine an assembly game that involves the same basic process as crafting a sword; the players assemble components for an engine one part at a time, aligning and calibrating each piece.  Once the entire engine is assembled, the computer examines everything to see what its performance should be.  Just a few numbers to reflect the operation of that engine are stored, a standard graphic is used, and the engine can then be moved into the drydock.  Other players will attach it to the drive system of the ship.

Naturally, that drive system had to be constructed in advance.  As were the other engines.  And all other major components of the ship.  Assembly tasks have great potential to occupy scores of players as they converge on accomplishing a single large task.

This sort of a system would completely change the game experience of EVE Online, so it's impractical for that game as it exists today.  Ship turnover in that game is very high, and new ships are manufactured at a furious rate.  If this were introduced there, it would have to be reserved for specific types of ships that are used for special purposes.

One of my favorite game design ideas is to have an entire game revolve around the construction of a massive device that is composed of assemblies of assemblies of assemblies.  Just a massive beast.  Fighters would find bits of the machine in the hands of enemies.  Explorers would find them lying about in obscure places.  Traders would negotiate for pieces in deals.  Crafters would assemble some components from scratch.  How they all fit together is to be figured out collectively by the players.  But when a piece fits, you know it fits.

When the machine is powered up and turned on, the game changes in some significant way.  This might be the means of opening the next section of content, or adding whole new systems to the game.  For example, the machine might transport characters to a new gaming environment (a la the movie Contact), or it might create spaceships for the players to now begin doing in space what they used to do on the surface of their planet.  It could even introduce a magic, psionic or superhero system to the game.  Anything is possible.

While making a sword blade is cliche, there are many other examples of crafting systems that appeal to enthusiasts of other types of activities.  A good contrasting example is salvaging in EVE Online.  After a battle is over, there are wrecked ships drifting about.  A character with the right combination of ship, equipment and skills can salvage items from those wrecks.

How does EVE Online implement that?  Point and shoot, unfortunately.  As with fantasy MMO crafting, EVE Online eliminates the actual process of salvaging.  The real fun of salvaging is left to targeting the many wrecks, tractoring them close, then firing up an automated salvager on the wreck.   There's a modest skill to it all, which is good, but enthusiasts who see Salvaging in the game are likely to want to actually do some salvaging. 

I made a proposal in the EVE Online forums to introduce a new item to the things returned by the automatic salvagers: Salvage Clusters.  These boil down to being puzzles that are of the kind where there are many individual pieces that move in limited ways and the goal is to tease the puzzle apart to get to the special pieces.  This is very much what a salvager does when he enters a wreck.  He cuts this, he opens that, he pushes there, he pulls here, and out comes the item he was after.  That is an example of using a puzzle to entertain a crafter.

This is far less involved than the near-simulator that would be required for the sword blade crafting example.  It's not necessary that all crafting systems designed for Artisans be complex or overwhelmingly sophisticated.  The goal is to entertain, and different people can be entertained by different things.  This is why a simple puzzle could suffice for a salvager while those interested in crafting their own sword would look to a more sophisticated form of entertainment.

A game that entertained an Artisan swordsmith would do something like the following:

The player first gathers the raw materials needed for the blade.  That would be a block of metal.  That metal could be any kind of metal.  Tin, lead, gold, silver, iron, steel, and so forth.  Don't assume that all swords should be steel.  Suppose a magic spell needed a sword made of silver?  A deception of a well-armed military involved tin swords?

The block might not be pure.  It could be an alloy or have inclusions.  It could be in the wrong shape for the Artisan to begin working.  Not all raw materials are created equally and there may be some preparation time involved before the main task can begin.

How can a game do all that?  Procedural content.  Generate a random number for a block of metal, and all of the necessary information is derived from that.  Where the inclusions are, what types they are, whether the metal is alloyed, etc.  It's all a question of how well you can construct the procedural generator.  It is only when the Artisan begins fiddling with the block of metal that the game has to turn the procedural content into detailed information.  Until then, blocks can be bought, sold, traded, juggled and otherwise manipulated without ever deriving any of the available information.

How is metal worked?  By heating and hammering.  So an Artisan would have access to a heat source of some kind as well as a hammering mechanism.  This is the fun part for the Artisan.  He drags the lump of metal into the fire, watches it as it heats up, and notices the color of the metal, not a scale or timer countdown.  The point is to appeal to enthusiasts of metalworking, and that's how metal crafters did things.

The metal reaches the desired temperature and the player moves the metal to an anvil.  He holds down the mouse on the spot where he wants his assistants to strike.  Again, this is how it was traditionally done.  The assistants are an NPC fiction.  They're just unskilled muscle labor.   They strike at the places that the Artisan indicates with the mouse until the Artisan stops the process.  All the while, the metal is cooling, making the hammer blows less and less effective.

Each strike will reshape the metal block.  That's key to the Artisan.  The Artisan is using his skill in working with the game systems to get that block shaped the way he wants.

For reasons of practicality, the artisan cannot make an arbitrary item.  The goal is to make a particular item.  He's making a specific pattern of sword blade, and how well he matches the ideal blade will determine the properties of the item that he is crafting when it is finished.

This is how A Tale in the Desert tackled its own blacksmithing.  Its system was primitive and could be done far more intricately, but the essentials are there.

The metal block might start as an amorphous blob of metal, as a purpose-built rod of metal or just a cube of the stuff.  Any way it arrives, the Artisan has to work it into the proper shape.  Note that the form of the raw materials will influence the desirability of those materials to various artisans, affecting the game's commerce system.

Now the Artisan has hammered out the blade and declares it complete.  The sword is rated by the computer (a simple calculation) and assigned certain numbers for durability and so forth.  At that point, the blade is ready to be incorporated into a sword or whatever other engine of destruction it was originally built for.

Note that I have glossed over the meat of the Artisan's activities, which is the shaping of the metal.  The fun of the crafting is in landing blows where the player wants them, and seeing the shape of the blade take form.  The blade should be straight or curved, of a certain length, perhaps tapered, perhaps with a specific type of edge, perhaps even the metal needed to be folded at the beginning.  The blade would have to retain the best properties of the metal it is fashioned from, and too much heating or the wrong cooling could damage those properties.  The game would lay all this out for the player, but the player would have to use their skills to ensure that the blade was properly crafted.

In order for a player to be entertained by all this, the player has to be an enthusiast of blade crafting.  While blade crafting is similar to any other blacksmithing task, it's different from whitesmithing.  Working with silver and tin to make jewelry and decorative pieces is a different game system.  So you might imagine that different players will spend their time in different systems.  Further, there is real player skill in mastering one of the systems.  Just as there is skill in mastering the level/loot system in most fantasy MMOs.

If you want a sense of having to master many individual systems, try playing EVE Online.  They implemented multiple systems that operate on different principles.  Manufacturing, trading, PvE, PvP, corporate operation and so forth.  Fantasy MMOs just don't do that.  All systems are about levels, classes and character skills.  So if you are having a hard time understanding what I'm talking about, or don't believe it's practical, try the free trial of EVE Online and get a sense of being overwhelmed by your gameplay choices.

There are several perspectives on crafting systems.

1. Consumer.  This is the player who spends his time using a crafted item.  His greatest concerns are on the capabilities and appearance of the item, as well as what he has to do to get it.  The skills of a Consumer revolve around how the crafted item is used.

2. Merchant.  This is the player who spends his time buying and selling crafted items.  His greatest concerns are those of supply and demand, market pricing and profit margins.  The skills of a Merchant revolve around money and inventory management.

3. Manufacturer.  This is the player who spends his time cranking out copies of a crafted item.  His greatest concerns are similar to the Merchant, except that his needs are for raw materials, and he may be able to work with a Merchant to get the products out the door.  The skills of a manufacturer revolve around factory efficiency and materials management.

4. Artisan.  This is the player who spends his time making individual items.  In contrast with the Manufacturer, his goal is to work on a single crafted item.  The skills of an Artisan revolve around the crafting task, whatever that might be.

Players carry one or more of these perspectives with them when they consider crafting systems.  The perspective that is rarely accommodated by MMOs is that of the Artisan.  Because that is one of my primary areas of interest in gaming, I'd like to offer a few basic ideas to sate the desires of my fellow Artisans.

The Artisan is interested in sitting down to make something.  It may be used by someone, it may be sold, it may be powerful, it may simply be nice to look at.  However, the perspective of the Artisan is to focus on its crafting.  We all like to see something happen with our creations, but that motivation is apart from that of the Artisan.  The Artisan wants to be occupied with fashioning stuff from other stuff.

In concrete terms, that means that the Artisan wants to be using the controls of the game to manipulate raw materials into a finished product.  The Artisan wants that process to occupy him for hours.  This is the same attitude that any other player has; a player wants to do something that is fun for hours at a time.  Monster bashing, perusing markets, exploring; whatever the interest of the player might be.

What can Artisans be doing for hours on end that could be any fun?

The activity will vary, depending on the type of crafting being performed.  As with all activities, they should be implemented into a game in ways that appeal to enthusiasts of that activity.  Swordfighting systems focus on factors that appeal to swordfighting enthusiasts, while gunfighting systems focus on factors that appeal to gunfighting enthusiasts.  It makes no sense to make swordfighting like gunfighting or vice versa.  In the same way, each form of crafting must be designed to appeal to enthusiasts of that activity.

The classic crafting example is blacksmithing or swordsmithing.  In standard fantasy MMOs, players fill a recipe with raw materials (which can be an arduous process), then press a button to make the item.  That moment when the player presses the button is the moment that an Artisan is disappointed.  That is the very moment when the Artisan's game would normally begin.

One of my starting assumptions about MMO design is that the player is looking at a screen that shows his character in a 3D virtual environment.  The player uses that character to seamlessly visit each experience in the game.  To craft, the player uses their character at a forge.  To fight, the player uses their character near monsters.  And so on.  I recently decided to start exploring the what if exercise of departing from that assumption.

The prevailing mechanism has the problem of guiding all activities into the same mold.  I see a character in a 3D environment, and I think a certain way.  Characters in 3D environments do certain things, and those are the things I expect.

But what if you didn't see a 3D environment?   What if you saw a web-based 2D flash application for crafting?  What if there was an FPS game for one type of combat, a class/level system for another type of combat and a turn-based email game for yet a third type?  All affecting in the same world.

Chaos, you say.  Variety, I say.  The FPS game happens in space.  The class combat happens on the ground.  The turn-based combat influences the political game that spans whole planets.  The crafting game affects only individual items used by any of those other systems.  The systems don't necessarily interact directly, which dovetails with what I was talking about in Designing Roles for MMO Characters.

Why do all this?  Because different players enjoy different things, and what they enjoy can interrelate in ways that provide greater entertainment for everyone concerned if they aren't forced to use the exact same user experience.

I'm back to playing EVE Online, which is a game that caters to different types of players intent on different activities.  Yet there is constant leak-through where one system impacts another even though the players of the respective systems aren't interested in those interactions.  It makes no sense to create a single user experience that is a vast compromise across the spectrum of player agendas when an isolated treatment of each is what players would really like to have.  When systems are most entertaining while intertwined, intertwine them.  When most entertaining while separate, separate them.

Note that switching between games doesn't require character travel, which is a long-time gripe of mine.  If I'm in the middle of combat and decided to do some crafting, I can just close down the combat side and switch over to the crafting side.  Or do both at the same time, for that matter.  I switch from a FPS experience to a 2D flash experience - or however the crafting game wants to be structured.

Different people have different temperaments, different schedules and even different game devices.  Is there any reason why players of a game shouldn't be able to play through their cell phone and affect the exact same game world that others are playing through their virtual reality rooms?  The cell phone guy may only be able to place a sell order on something that he owns, while the guy with the virtual reality room can get an adrenaline rush from combat or do complex design tasks, but they'd be affecting the same virtual environment.

As you advance your own designs, think about how your game can have many faces for many different people.  Don't assume that all your players have to be interested in killing monsters and gaining levels.  Make that only one bit of the entertainment juggernaut that you can assemble.  Look at an activity that you're going to put into your game and then figure out the ideal interface for the people who enjoy doing that thing.  Take everything into account, including how long they'd want to be actively involved in the game per session (10 seconds?  10 hours?), where they are likely to play it, whether they're likely to play by themselves or with friends present (thank you, Jimmy_Scythe), whether they want mental or physical exercise (q.v. the Wii) and many more factors.  Let the consequences of their games affect each other without the way they play the games affect each other.

Synopsis: An MMO design can be thought of as being a set of character roles that relate to one another.  Each role is supported by a complete entertainment system, and the interactions of those systems establishes the way the roles relate to one another.

This article is about examining MMO system designs by considering character roles and the way that they relate to each other.  The purpose of looking at system designs in that light is that it underscores the multiplayer aspect of the game genre; if players are not interacting, then the value of having the players in the same virtual environment is squandered.

The examination begins by considering a supposed role for a character.  As an example, the Crafter.  If you want a design to contain a role for Crafters, then you must have a complete entertainment system devoted to crafting.  Crafters must be able to be using that system every moment that they are in the game.  They should not be obligated to do things unrelated to crafting.

But what does related to crafting mean?  Part of the challenge of design lies in finding the set of activities that someone enthusiastic about crafting wants to experience.  Critically, the designer of the game is focused on ensuring that crafters have a game experience of their own.  That experience is not polluted with warrior tasks or political tasks or animal husbandry tasks.  It's about crafting.  A player who enjoys crafting can enter the game and do nothing but the activities of crafting and be happy.

That's the key to creating a role: that there are players who enjoy doing a specific set of activities.

Now comes the second part of our examination, which is the way roles relate to each other.  It's great to have a crafting role, a political role, a fighting role, a shipping role and many more roles besides, but unless they are related to one another then the multiplayer element of gameplay is not fostered.

To relate roles is again an exercise in design.  No magic recipe exists that I know of to ensure that any two characters with different roles will interact.  However, there are some natural ways in which character interact.  There is the producer-consumer interaction.  There is the cooperative interaction.  There is the competitive interaction.  Undoubtedly there are others, but use those three as a starting point.

Returning to the example of crafting, we'd pretty quickly look to a producer-consumer interaction.  A crafter creates things that characters of other roles consume.  At that point, we have to do something very important: we have to make sure that the producer wants to produce for the consumer and that the consumer wants to consume what is being produced.  If bakers are making bread for warriors and warriors don't want to be bothered with the maintenance task of eating bread, then the relationship between the two roles is not a sustainable one.  Players with warrior characters will attempt to minimize or eliminate that relationship every way that they possibly can.

If two roles are going to relate, we want them relating in mutually enjoyable ways.  Crafters who make warrior tools are liked by the warriors.  This is the case in Eve Online where the people piling all those goods into the economy in support of the corporate wars are appreciated by those fighting the corporate wars.  Both sides are entertained by the interaction.

The last part of the examination is making an interaction sustainable.  If a certain character role involved providing a one-time service to another character role, we don't end up with a sustainable interaction.  We want an interaction that players will continue to use time and time again.  Eve Online implements a marvelous structure where corporations chew through equipment in their bid to play the corporate war game, causing a constant demand for harvested goods as well as crafted goods.  That is a system that has all three elements of a good role

1. An entertaining system for the role
2. Mutually-entertaining interactions with other roles
3. Sustained interactions with those roles

I should note that interactions between characters do not need to be live.  Being able to drop off an item with an offline crafter so that he can repair it later may be perfectly acceptable.  Selling crafted items on an automated market does not involve live interactions, but the interactions between the members of the different roles are certainly present.

If you are hoping to create a distinct role for a certain activity in your game, be sure to devote a full entertainment experience to that role.  Players who enjoy that activity will spend time there, and you will have created that role in your player population.  By relating their activities to other players' activities in a sustainable way, you will find that your player community will strengthen.  This is true whether the interaction is designed to be cooperative, competitive or some other variation.  So long as both groups enjoy the interaction, you're golden.