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.

Synopsis: Player interaction is the source of the best multiplayer entertainment.  Any merits that grinding might seem to possess are actually a result of forcing players to interact.  Recent games have removed that forced interaction, which contributes to their bland, empty feeling.

The Grind is the phenomenon of players having to repeatedly perform actions over a long period of time in order to reach some goal.  It is like running a marathon.  Or climbing a mountain.  You just keep slogging away at it until you reach your goal.  And in an MMO, the grind is shared.  You're all trudging along, side by side, picking other people up when they fall, commiserating about the sores on your feet, the callouses on your hands and the tendency of your eyes to spontaneously cross and uncross.

That sounds like a pretty good recipe for some real worthwhile memories, doesn't it?  You've got people helping you up, maybe a few putting you down, you've got trials and tribulations to share, and a community of players who are actually interacting in a personal way.  That's the sort of environment that EverQuest produced.  I have my memories of that game.  I have war stories and some really enjoyable moments.  And I sincerely hope that I never play a game like that again.

What I do hope for is a game that can get the players interacting.  In EverQuest, the grind contributed to an overall environment that accomplished that.  But it wasn't just the grind.  There was also mandatory grouping, a nasty death system and most of all, it was a crowded world.

There were people everywhere you turned.  We were constantly in each other's way.  We had to interact.  Not only because we were too many people for such a small world, but because the game systems forced us to.  We were dependent on each other to play the game.

That is why EverQuest is remembered.  Because of the fact that we all had to do things together.  The grind just happened to be the shared experience.  The corpse runs just happened to be the point where the most hung in the balance, and the kindness of friends (and strangers) could be demonstrated.

But we also came together when there were bugs, when we needed items made and all other manner of activity.  EverQuest forced us to interact.  After a fashion, the bugs in EverQuest really were features.

Compare that with World of Warcraft.  Players hardly need to interact.  They can email each other.  They can buy and sell through the auction houses.  Anyone can become a crafter of any type of item.  Players can solo all the way up to the highest levels.  When EverQuest players wanted to buy or sell an item, they had to turn into barkers on street corners, trying to hawk their wares.  Finding an item relied on word of mouth or visiting a certain zone that the players had turned into their marketplace.

Yet given the choice of the two games, I'd immediately pick World of Warcraft.  While EverQuest succeeded in bringing players together, it was done in forced, draconian and otherwise unpleasant ways.

It is not the grind that makes games enjoyable or memorable.  It is the process of keeping players interacting with each other.  World of Warcraft succeeded in eliminating the pain of EverQuest, but that included the elimination of all the forced grouping effects.  That is why World of Warcraft is so practical as a soloer's game until the highest levels.  What the next generation of games will have to discover is how to formulate a game experience that naturally causes players to interact.  Not because they artificially must, but because for one reason or another, they want to.

It'll be a real trick to pull off, but I'm certain that somebody will find the magic.  Without the grind.

Back before the world wide web became a reality, there were things like America Online (AOL).  You dialed into AOL by phone and once in, you were in a simple form of virtual environment with all sorts of things that you could do.  It was a kind of private world wide web.

When I joined Microsoft in 1995, the world wide web was turning into a reality.  It hadn't exploded yet, and the folks at Microsoft had a vision of where the money was.  They saw it in building another AOL.  It was going to be the Microsoft Network, or MSN.  I had been hired to help build the tools that would let people author content for that product.  As everyone knows know, MSN became something rather different and my job changed as well.  That happened because Bill Gates eventually realized that the world wide web was a phenomenon, not a product.

Come forward 12 years.  World of Warcraft is a spectacular success.  Everyone and his cousin wants to duplicate that success in some way.  People can see how they can make money by building a monolithic product that people go to in order to get a certain experience.  Just like people went to AOL when it was a monolithic product.

Interestingly, there is a kid in town that may do to World of Warcraft what the Tim Berners-Lee did to AOL.  The Metaplace project, which I have mentioned in past blog articles, is Raph Koster's Warcraft killer.  He's not positioning it like that, of course.  He'd be a fool if he did.  The world wide web is the success that it is not because it tried to kill AOL, but because it was a good idea.

Raph Koster and company also have a good idea.  I know precious little about the details of their project, but I know the basic idea: create standards for virtual environments to operate on the internet so that they can be streamed around like web sites.  They have some serious technical challenges before them, so something as verbose as HTML or XML isn't going to do the job.  But that's the basic plan - streaming standards.

This will ruin the World of Warcraft model of creating one massive monolithic structure to entertain players.  Instead of "Warcraft or the Highway", you will be able to get dribs and drabs of entertainment from many different virtual settings.  Collectively, they will offer far more than World of Warcraft ever could have hoped to provide.  The challenge may be in making avatars portable.

An avatar is the virtual you.  Today, when you visit a web site - such as MMORPG.COM - you find that in order to interact with anyone here you have to create a new avatar.  Web sites call them profiles.  I don't know about you, but I've had to create a pile of profiles out there on the web.  If the Metaplace project is to succeed, it will be important to eliminate that mess.  We will create a single avatar and then use that avatar wherever we go in the Metaplace.  That single avatar will gain and shed various attributes according to the environment that it enters, but it will remain the same avatar.  It will be your floating profile as you hop from world to world in Metaplace, just like a single profile on the web would permit you to visit web site after web site without constantly logging into each site (or forgetting what you called yourself at a given site).

Once Metaplace is available, MMOs would never be the same again.  Anyone who can build a web site can build a virtual entertainment venue.  Given that you and I can build a web site, we could build an MMO.  It wouldn't be very good, just as our web site wouldn't be very good.  But there are talented people out there.  As a group, we can start to create artwork, systems, quests, equipment, costumes and all manner of content that people can use, switch around, modify, nudge or just throw together to create something interesting.  Just like the web.

The business people will love it.  If Metaplace catches on, there will be just as many types of MMO authoring services as there are web authoring services.  The people who run FaceBook and MySpace and other social sites can upgrade their experience to include avatars that own homes and apartments instead of simple web pages.  They would become very much like Second Life, except that everything would happen through browsers instead of monolithic custom software.  We would move from buying a service to simply having the service around.

How does anyone make money from this?  Sadly, it will mean a continuation of the advertising model, though I can imagine Metaplace worlds being pay by subscription just as there are still sites such as newspapers and magazines that charge to read them.  The AOL experience was pretty mild compared to that found in MMOs, so if an experience is sufficiently in demand, the owners of the world site may well still be able to charge a fee for entry.  In the very least, we will have our pick.

If you buy my When Flocks Collide argument, you may see the benefits of creating private worlds that permit only those who know the password into the world.  Do you really want to open your virtual world to everyone and anyone who cares to visit?  It's one thing to create a FaceBook profile and let the world see you.  Do you want to be able to see them looking at you?  What if they use their avatar to point at your posted content and laugh?  What if you forgot to disallow visitors from writing on the walls?  And you thought securing your computer's ports was fun.

However it works out, it really does seem to me that World of Warcraft may be the culmination of a breed; monolithic virtual worlds that stand apart from the rest of the internet.  Like America Online, it may be swallowed up and integrated into the standard experience of the world wide web.  It might be kinda nice to be able to visit Orgrimmar by clicking a link in Wikipedia.

[edit: Metaverse references changed to Metaplace]

Synopsis: Player entertainment preferences often conflict in MMOs, which is a source of problems for the players.  Various means of addressing the conflict are described.

I've been meaning to write this article for a while now.  I wrote something related to it almost 7 years ago.  The basic notion is that players each have a preferred way of playing a game.  They want a particular experience from it.  For some, that experience is very specific and they might only want to go fishing.  For others, it is very broad, where they might go adventuring and hope to find some treasure, some fights and perhaps even have some other players to tangle with.

Multiplayer games work best when all the players in the game are looking for the same kind of experience.  This is the old "birds of a feather flock together" ethic.  People want to interact with other people who enjoy what they enjoy.

A problem arises when birds from one group try to fly in the same space as birds from another group.  They slam into each other at odd intervals.  We see the clashes of philosophy all the time on internet forums, and it's also pretty clear when it happens in the games themselves.  Players tell each other what to do, how to play the game 'properly'.  It becomes more pronounced when whole chunks of the player population are in conflict.  Instead of individuals colliding, there are whole flocks colliding.  It makes for an unpleasant time for at least one of the groups.

The cliche example is PvP mixed with PvE.  Take a bunch of players who want to kill monsters.  Mix them with a bunch of players who want to kill other player characters.  Whamo.  The monster killers are getting killed by other player characters, which wasn't what they were looking for.  They accuse the PvP crowd of playing the game wrong, while the PvP guys tell the PvE crowd to stop being such whiners.

Neither side is right or wrong.  The only important point to it is that the two crowds don't play the game the same way.

A perhaps less contentious example is the case of role players and people who want to talk about things outside of the game.  They are in fundamental conflict about how they enjoy the game.  The role players try to get the guys talking about sports to shut up while the sports guys are telling the role players that "Thee" and "Thou" doesn't make for role playing.  Again, a cliche encounter.

What can be done about these sorts of clashes?  Fundamentally, the groups need separate play spaces so that their experiences don't clash.  The means of doing this boils down to players being able to find the entertainment that they want - and nothing else.  Players do this today with single player games by simply buying the game that they want to play.  If they want sports, they play a sports game.  If they want a shooter, they buy a shooter.  And so on.  With multiplayer games, there is a need for players to be able to say what it is that they want to be doing - and to somehow find it.

1. Choice by game.  This is the single player approach.  Consider Multiverse, which is Raph Koster's attempt to make multiplayer virtual environments as common as web sites.  If he succeeds, then there will be so many MMOs that any entertainment that you care to pursue will have been implemented by somebody.  Then it's just a matter of seeing how many other people are interested in the same activity.  The ability to transport characters between these games would become an issue, and a number of folks are working on how to best handle that.  So you can take your character to Fishing World one day, and then off to Leveling Tank-Mage World another.

2. Choice by geography.  Once in a given game, there can be changes of entertainment according to changes in where your character is located.  Ultima Online and Eve Online both partition the geography of their worlds by PvP safety.  Other games have had PvP arenas.  Instances are also a way to geographically partition players.  Or just arbitrarily change the game experience as the characters move around, like a theme park.  At the race track, you get a Need for Speed experience.  On that murky island in the bay you get a Deus Ex experience, and so on.

3. Choice by mutual consent.  A given game may provide players with the opportunity to interact in ways that are departures from the normal gameplay experience.  In a PvE game, it may be possible for two players or two groups of players to enter into PvP only amongst themselves.

Once players who agree that they like to play the same way are able to come together without disruption, the potential for drastic rule changes by mutual consent becomes possible.  Today, rules are static.  What if they were dynamic?  Given that instances of portions of games and even instances of whole games can be created, consider having an instance set aside for you and your friends.  Whenever you want to, you can change the rules that operate in the instance.  Perhaps gravity is reversed if physics are implemented.  Perhaps theft is permitted where it normally wouldn't be.  Perhaps stealth is disabled.  No matter how crazy the change, all the players will be operating under the same rules.

Players have conflicting agendas when it comes to entertainment.  Tossing everyone into the same space and having them operate under the same rules means that any large commercial game must have very generic rules.  Only those rules that most everyone can agree to at a very basic level will be implemented.  World of Warcraft succeeds because the majority of players can pursue something innocuous to do without being bothered by the things that other players are doing.  But it's a rather bland experience.

Games that attempt to let everyone do everything frees players to constantly bump into each other.  the experience might be more intense, but only for a certain small set of play styles.

By partitioning players according to the experience that they want, players can share their experience with like-minded players, and those experiences can be as deep as the developers can possibly make them.  The key for game companies is figuring out how to create a single property that will draw huge numbers of players while still keeping the various flocks away from each other.