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.

Author: JB47394

Not many of you will understand this, but I offer it for the ones who will.

Whenever something is created for consumption by other people, the author of that creation is obligated to anticipate how people will react to it.  A novel is only successful if the people reading it are somehow intrigued by the writing, the characters, the events, the story and so on.  A successful movie must have a compelling script, story, editing, photography, acting, etc.  The success might be niche, appealing only to those who seek sex and violence, romance, science fiction or other escapism - or the success might be universal because the content of the book or movie might strike a chord at some fundamental level with the population.

The level grind is niche.  It is a kind of escapism that feeds on our desire to achieve something.  To feel a sense of clear progress when all the world around us is unfocused and scrambled, going nowhere and everwhere in a non-stop marketing frenzy.  We will enjoy it as we enjoy an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie.  It's something to tickle our desire for escapism, but a diet of action movies tends to dull the senses, just as the level grind does.

The connection with other people is fundamental.  This is why MMOs exist at all.  We want to interact with each other.  More correctly, we want to exist in relation to others.  The fact that MMOs are multiplayer is the first bit of fundamental insight that makes MMOs as popular as they are.  There are many single player role-playing games out there, but it is the interaction with other people that makes MMOs such a success.

How do we know when something is niche or fundamental to the entertainment that we're trying to present?  That is determined by the people that will be enjoying the entertainment.  Because MMOs are all about lots of people interacting, creating entertainment for that genre requires understanding not only people, but how people interact.

If you want to become a good systems designer for MMOs, you must understand how people interact.  The more broadly you understand that, the greater chance you have at creating a successful MMO system.

For example, if you create a system where killing a monster causes the player character that gets the killing shot to die in an explosion, you have to anticipate how people will react to that.  Their reactions won't be uniform.  You will get a bell-curve kind of distribution of reactions.  There will be people who have extreme reactions to it, but the bulk of people will react in a certain basic way.  You need to know how the bulk will react and how the extremists will react as well.  Then you need to figure out what's going to happen to the rest of your systems as a result of their reactions.

Players might never attack that particular monster.  Why?  At that point, it becomes a question of your understanding of people.  Will they not attack it because they don't want to get the killing blow?  What about groups that like risk and find it funny to see who will get blown up by the kill?  If your systems have a significant penalty for death, will that deter their enthusiasm for the 'fun' of that interaction?  Do players have pets?  Can they send the pet in for the killing blow?  Will they do that if their pet is an animal that they have to train from birth?  Will they do it when they can summon one up for 10% of their mana?  Is their mana easily restored or does it take a long time to generate?  What is inspiring players to get into combat in the first place?  How does that alter the balance of the system?

This sort of thinking goes on forever.  Can the system do this versus that?  How will people react if a certain condition is true?  More importantly, how will people react if what they expect and hope to happen doesn't happen?  That's important because there are things that you can do as a designer that will undermine any ability to offer entertainment to your customers.  Betraying the trust of customers can be lethal for an entertainment venue.  MMOs have done it, and they have paid dearly for it.  Ultima Online might have been as big as World of Warcraft ten years ago if they hadn't had free-for-all PvP.  The authors of Ultima Online missed some fundamental issues about how people behave in a virtual environment.

At the beginning of the article I made a snide comment about people not understanding this article.  That was a bit of psychology.  How many people do you think chose to read through more of the article than they normaly might just because that first line was there?  That's the sort of thing that goes into system design.  The snide comment is, however, fundamentally manipulative and is not good design practice.  Some who are reading this paragraph of the article will feel betrayed and may not read any farther in this article, let alone any other articles of mine.  To them, I apologize for the subterfuge.

[I should probably also add that some readers will read that first line, take affront and write something unpleasant in the comments.  Let's see how I do on that prediction.]

When all is said and done, system designers don't need to focus on graphics, sounds and numbers.  They need to focus on psychology, sociology, history and philosophy.  You can be sure that Will Wright is a student of those areas of knowledge.  It is why he comes up with games like The Sims and Spore.  He is addressing fundamental motivations that we all have, and he is addressing them through entertainment.

So look hard at your system designs.  Think about why they will fail.  To do that, you need to run as many different types of people through your system, and you need to do it in your head while the system is still on paper.  If you understand the basic motivations of men and women, adults and children, conservatives and liberals, religious and atheists, tall and short, black and white, and myriad more dichotomies beyond that, then you are well on your way to becoming a fine systems designer.

Disney calls them Imagineers.