Richard Bartle Is A Hardcore Killer

>Richard Bartle Is A Hardcore Killer

No, see, when I play an MMO I don’t play as a player, I play as a designer. Killers are a player type, not a designer type. You have a category error here.

Yeah, I know, you were going for the headline…

My remark about WAR and WoW, which seems to have got a lot of attention, isn’t being understood quite how I meant it. I was suggesting that the Warcraft universe is, er, let’s say “coincidentally similar” to the Warhammer universe, not that WAR was a WoW rip-off. However, it would appear that in terms of design WAR does indeed seem to be only an incremental advance on WoW when you look underneath its skin. The atmosphere is different, in a gritty, AoC kind of way, but the gameplay has changed only in evolutionary ways, not revolutionary ones.

My comments on PvP in Aoc don’t look on the page quite as tongue-in-cheek as I meant them to sound. That said, the basic point is still in there: people need to get a sense of perspective here. I was asked the question as to whether I’d play new games like AoC, OK, so why would I play AoC? Its USP is its PvP, which by WoW standards is hardcore but by the standards of 20 years ago is hug-me-in-a-warm-blanket soft. So the main reason people would play AoC, ie. combat and PvP, isn’t as big a deal for me as it may be for WoW players… AoC ‘s differences from WoW are in terms of small increments, not large steps, although if all you know is AoC, WoW and perhaps EQ, you might think it was actually a big step. It isn’t. Designers have more possibilities at their fingertips than they seem to realise.

>assuming that designers have any knowledge of games that came before their current favorite is not a safe assumption

Yes, sadly I agree. Too many of today’s designers want to create the MMO they grew up playing, only better. This basically makes them players who want to create games that are better for them, as players, to play. Now although this is a reasonable approach for single-player games, it’s bad for MMOs: there are many different types of player, and they play for different reasons, but they’re inter-dependent. If you build an MMO that’s a honeypot for achievers, but that drives explorers and socialisers nuts, you’re making long-term problems for yourself. However, if you’re a designer who loves grinding for gear, why would you – and how could you – create a game that appealed to the other types? You can check the checkboxes for “something to explore” and “some reason to socialise”, but you’re not putting any of your soul into that; your soul is all going into the achiever mentality. This is why you need designers who can’t play as players, only as designers (or if they can somehow switch off their play-as-a-player emotions, that would work too, I guess).

Moorgard>I honestly don’t get why someone would want to talk about or consult for a type of game that he doesn’t enjoy playing.

Because I enjoy designing. Also, if I enjoyed playing, I would enjoy only one style of playing, not all of the types that you need for a healthy MMO.

>Sure, you see things differently once you step over to the professional side of the fence, but designing games should be about love and fun and magic.

It is – oh, it is! But for me, the love and fun and magic are in the design, not in the play. I want to imbue love and fun and magic in the MMO so the players experience love and fun and magic when they play, but my love and fun and magic is of a different kind to theirs. I’ve done my job if they players see the magic; I have to know how the magic works to create it, though, so I can’t see the magic; I can, however, see the magic of someone else’s design. This is where my fun comes from.

>If you lose that, why do it? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Steven Spielberg actually enjoys watching movies that other people make.

Well yes, but does he enjoy them in the same way that you do?

>Personally, I’m much more interested in hearing from people who are actually working on MMOs and trying to make the genre better rather than listening to consultants on the sidelines, no matter how influential they’ve been in the past.

My experience is that few people working on MMOs want to make the genre better, because they don’t see the genre as a whole: they only see the MMO they’re working on and the ones they played. Yes, consultants may not be at the coal face of design, wrestling with issues of network code or whatever, but we do see multiple designs and are therefore in a better position to see the wood for the trees. I do want to make the genre better – much, much better! My frustration is at the slow pace of progress, caused in part because people think they’re making radical design changes that are only minor alterations to the paradigm. Back in the text MUD days, making genuinely imaginative changes that took the genre in a whole new direction was not only possible but likely (at least until stock MUDs appeared). Where’s that kind of revolutionary change happening now? We’re having to look to indies and Metaplace to show the big developers what’s possible – they just don’t seem to realise the full extent of their creative possibilities.

J>Bartle keeps talking as though he expects MMO designers to actually want to justify their decisions to a world audience.

No, I don’t at all. I don’t even expect them to be able to articulate their decisions other than through their design. However, when I read a design and don’t understand a decision, then naturally I’d want to ask the designer what they were thinking of in case they can express its logical underpinnings. Sometimes, though, the best they can say is “this is just how it has to be”, which is the backstop you always get with an art form.

Sinnach>Thats like making fun of your friends for not learning to play a real instrument when they’re enjoying a game of guitar hero.

No, it’s like making fun of your friends for not enjoying a game of Guitar Hero when they’re learning to play a real instrument.

Darm>Spielberg has had enormous critical and finacial success.
>Bartle? Any MMORPG history should include his name, but the level of >accomplishment is not remotely in the same ballpark.

If Spielberg had got into movies in the 1890s and then given away his work for free, he wouldn’t have had a great deal of critical and financial success, either.

>His point is valid, but he flatters himself to mention Spielberg in the same breath.

I mentioned Spielberg because I was trying to give an analogy that was easy to understand. Film directors have a similar role to lead MMO designers – they’re the keeper of the vision for a vast project involving many skilled people all working within their own artistic parameters. If I’d said “a famous film director”, that would have been less impactful than naming a famous one (and you’s still have criticised me for suggesting I was famous). I wasn’t saying that Stephen Spielberg and I are peers, I was saying that someone who creates a work of art looks on other works of similar art in a different way to the people for whom that work of art was created. I’m sorry that you think my ego is sufficiently large that I regard myself as the Stephen Spielberg of MMOs. I’m more like Louis Lumiere.

DaveN>Someone who has made great contributions lashing out because they see their chosen field moving in a direction they did not set? I am shocked. SHOCKED!

Ho boy, did you ever get me wrong! I WANT the field to move in directions I didn’t set! I want it to move in directions I couldn’t even CONCEIVE of! I WANT to become obsolete, wheeled out at confereces for the sole reason that I haven’t died yet! The reason I want this is because it will mean that virtual worlds have begun to reach their full potential, to become what they truly can be – awesome, glorious, wonderful places where people can be and become themselves: freedom incarnate. What I’m raging against is the fact that we’re running on rails, following existing tracks to destinations we already know, seeing the same scenery and never wondering what’s beyond that hill over there.

Moving in a direction I didn’t set, jeez…

Richard

Ghiest>I actually prefer the comments you left here, rather than the entire interview you gave at massively

That’s because I have a backspace when I type, but not when I speak.

pufbox>When you want to say a game is only making incremental advances you should probably say it’s making incremental advances instead of making yourself sound like an asshat.

You’re not looking at the bigger picture here. Yes, there are differences between WoW and WAR, but there are many, many more similarities. When you consider the great range of possibilities that virtual worlds have to offer, it’s as if WoW is one racehorse, DAoC is another racehorse, and WAR is a third racehorse that may or may not be faster than its parents. Where are the cheetahs going to come from?

>I still cannot see how you can say you are “a designer” and not want to actually play the games.

Because if I wanted to play them, that would make me a player. I want to (and do) design them, therefore I’m a designer. Playing and designing are two different things. Composers don’t have to know how to play every instrument in the orchestra; what they need to know is what sound each instrument can be made to produce, and how those sounds fit together.

>Know why Ferrari’s are such awesome sports cars? Yea, the man had passion for driving. I seriously doubt your ability to design when you make comments like this.

Ferraris are great on the racetrack, but useless at moving refrigerators from factories to stores. If all you want to do is drive fast, then you’re going to create a fast car, but you’re going to ignore all the other road users. Virtual worlds have different types of players, and those players have different needs. Some do indeed want to drive fast, but others want a more comfortable, leisurely drive, and others prefer to drive monster trucks. If you are a person whose only interest is in driving awesome sports cars, you’re not going to address the needs of those other people. If, on the other hand, you are interested in vehicle design, then you’re going to look at the bigger picture and design for everyone.

>And then there’s the part where you claim that unless there is “perma-death” like back in the old days you couldn’t get very excited about PVP.

I wasn’t all that excited about permadeath either; as I say, I’m a designer, not a player. Look, the point I was making is that sure, to today’s players there looks to be a wide gap between the PvP in WoW and AoC, but when you look at how wide the gap could be, they’re actually so close that you can barely get a piece of paper between them. Progression in MMO design is progressing at a snail’s pace – mere nuances of difference appear to be major changes. How are we ever going to get the virtual worlds we deserve if designers don’t see (or do see, but aren’t allowed to design) what they COULD be? I’m not saying we should have permadeath, I’m just using permadeath to show how big the canvas is.

>Please, please, stop while you’re ahead. You’re embarrassing yourself by actually continuing to comment on here.

Yes, well, when you remember this conversation having played MMOs for another 20 years and you come back to look at it, then you’ll be in a position to judge who was embarrassing themself.

John Moore>How does someone play 3 characters to level 70, and then claim they can’t enjoy mmos?

I do enjoy MMOs – I enjoy seeing the design and watching it unfold. It’s a case of diminishing returns, though. I had 90% of what I ever got from WoW by level 10. Yes, if I’d stopped playing at that point I’d have missed the piquancy that is STV and the sweetness of ZF, but the time taken to get there is linear and the returns are an inverse square.

I worked up to level 70 for the reasons I said: credentials. My daughter just took her A-level (ie. pre-university) exams: she spent 12 hours a day revising for 2 months, and didn’t enjoy any of it. She did it because she wanted to get to a good university. I didn’t enjoy playing WoW much beyond the early designer fun stage, but I stuck at it just to stop people from criticising me for “pontificating” about virtual worlds without playing them. OK, so I played them, and I have the credentials, but really I didn’t learn much more than I knew anyway – which is exactly how I knew it would be. And of course, I knew that when I stopped at 70 I’d get slated because “that’s when the game really begins”. Yes, I KNOW it really begins there, and I KNOW what it’s like, but I’m NOT going to play all the way through every last instance just to validate the metrics used by raiders to measure their worth.

>Isn’t the act of maxing out three characters an admission of enjoyment?

Did you ever swim the entire way round the Eastern Kingdoms? Was it fun? I did. I even learned something from it: there are no fish on the northeastern shores, which means that every fish school is placed by hand, and that’s interesting (to me) to know. It was mindlessly boring to swim for 4 hours, sure, but no more so than if I’d been doing anything else.

It’s not an admission of enjoyment, it’s an admission of will power driven by the desire to look my students in the eye.

Richard

ubvman>You put yourself through “hell” just so that you can berate game devs for being lazy and unimaginative?

No, I put myself through hell so that I can talk about MMOs without having to deflect criticisms about “you never play them, so how does that give you a right to comment on them?”. I didn’t expect that I would in the process open myself up to accusations of being hooked on them. I can’t win…

>Question: At any point, did you have to slap yourself to remind yourself NOT to have fun while playing all 3 chars to Level 70 – just so you can say it was shit and not up to your standards?

What? When did I say that WoW was shit and not up to my standards? Would that be just now, when you put the words in my mouth?

>Did you go out of your way to find the most tedious way to level just so you can say you found the gameplay as bad as swotting for an exam?

I didn’t find the gameplay bad, I quite liked it in fact. I found playing through the gameplay bad, for me personally. Other people clearly love it, because they still see the magic. I don’t see the magic, I just get to respect the magician.

>What sort of quest required you to swim all round the entire Western Kingdom just so you can say its boring?

See, I kinda knew it would be boring when I did it, just as I knew that killing voidcallers (362 of them) to get the pattern for Robes of Arcana would be boring. I didn’t do it just for the right to say it was boring. I did it in the hope that I’d find something interesting there to relieve the boredom. I did see a little tower with a landing dock up on the east coast, too. Oh, and the main map was wrong, it showed me swimming through land at one point.

>Come now – are you seriously telling us, there was ZERO enjoyment throughout your entire WoW experience?

No, but since you don’t appear to have paid attention when I said it last time, I guess I’ll say it again. I did have designer fun, in that I enjoyed seeing aspects of the design that hung together well or that I hadn’t seen used that way before. I also made friends in the game, which made it easier (especially when they realised I’d repeatedly go on repetitive instance runs with them to get some tier 0.5 drop or whatever because I didn’t actually care about not being somewhere else doing something else at the time).

>I find that very hard to believe

Well, I can see why. No need to be quite as sarcastic about it, though.

It hasn’t helped me, by the way: now I get accused of not being in on the WAR beta, and therefore unqualified to make any statements about it at all.

John Moore>But it does not mean you have to max out three chracters just to earn the right to say the game sucks.

It’s not the right to say it sucks, it’s the right to say anything about it at all, at least in the eyes of people who think you have to play before you get to speak. As I said in the interview, this is actually a reasonable point of view – there are many people out there (eg. politicians) willing to spout opinions on games without ever having played them. However, when it comes to designers (and very experienced players), this is not the case: they can fill in the gaps a lot of the time, without having to play through right to the end.

However, because people don’t believe me when I say that, I worked up some level 70s in WoW. Now, they still don’t believe me, and say I must have done it for fun. I end up getting shot either way.

Anticorium>If Bartle leveled a holy priest to 70

Actually, I do have a holy priest at, er, 44 I think.

>If Bartle leveled an affliction lock to 70

I went with destruction, as it happens, because I wanted to try more with my pet.

>they could ignore him because he didn’t even try arena PvP.

I didn’t try arena PvP. If I’m going to suffer, I don’t want other people enjoying my suffering, particularly twinked out RMTers.

It’s as you say: people move the goalposts. However, the number of people moving the goalposts is much smaller than the number of people who criticised me for not playing, so overall I’m better off than if I hadn’t done it.

pufbox>The fact that you totally missed the point here tells me everything I need to know.

Ditto.

John Moore>He did not have to level 3 characters to max level to understand, critque, and discuss WoWs design and impact on mmos.

You say that now I’ve done it; if I hadn’t done it, you’d be criticising me for not having done it.

>There is no magical world where he can post, and not have people challenge his words and ideas.

Why would I want to say something and not have people challenge what I say? Whence progress?

My aim is for people to think about MMORPGs. If arguing with me makes you think about them, great! Even if you disagree with me, great! That way, we may finally get something different instead of retreads.

Not challenging what I say, but challenging my right to say it: not great. Insults are easy, discussion is hard.

>You do not have to spend 4 hours swimming through empty, virtual waters to get credibility.
>Because it does not give it to you.

I know that. You know that. But I can tell you that the number of people who do think I need to play in order to comment is orders of magnitude greater than those who don’t think I do.

>But knowing there are no fish on the northeastern shores does not let you look your students in the eye. It was simply a waste of time, from the perspective of learning WoWs mechanics, and being able to discuss game design.

Mechanics? Ha! Not mechanics, art!

Richard

Me>You say that now that I’ve done it.
John Moore>No, I would not have criticized you for not leveling 3 characters to 70. But I take your point. You are saying people critized you for not playing the game, so you are saying you did it to silence the ctitics.

Yes, that’s pretty much it.

>But I’m not sure why you think that would work. It does not give you anymore credibilty. And in my reading, it gives you less.

Yes, but it did work. Now, I only get flamed by players who’ve put a lot of thought into this, not by newbies, not by academics and not by journalists.

>You make some good points in the article. Take Kharazan, for instance. It is a valid point. But you did not have to level 3 characters 70 to make it.

Of course I didn’t. One look at the basic characteristics of Kharazan was enough to reveal it to be a potentially epic guild-breaker. However, having levelled 3x70s meant that when I did mention this, no-one got to throw rocks at me for having been there, done that.

Lest you think this doesn’t happen, check out some of the other blog threads following up this interview, you’ll see examples of people saying things like “It seems Mr Bartle does not realize leveling to 70 is the tip of the iceberg in the wow experience”. Great, like I didn’t know that before I even started to play, and now I have to raid all the way through to Mount Hyjal? And then, oh, “that’s where the game really starts”, because I don’t have all my tier N gear, and I don’t have every single enchantment formula, and I never play on Thursday evenings because I watch House on TV…

I had to draw the line somewhere, and I drew it at 3 level 70s. Whether I can face taking 3 up to 80 remains to be seen…

>I agree with you that Blizzard is wrong. But I do not have to run it 3 times to know why I think it’s wrong.

Yes, but you aren’t going to be asked by a journalist for your opinion about WoW and, having given it, subsequently asked whether you actually play it. That’s not what happened in this interview, but it’s happened in others.

>If you are accepting the idea that you are not allowed to talk about game design because someone else claims you must have played every little part of the game, that you must play every character at every level at every build, then you arer lost to the discussion.

Not at all. I accept that some people (designers, very experienced players, perhaps some academics) have no need to play every part of a game in order to comment on it. I also accept that there are other people who should have to play a game substantially before their opinions are given much weight. However, I further accept that there are some people who can’t tell the difference between these two types of commentator, and it’s for these people that I worked up my 70s in WoW. I don’t think that by doing so I somehow disqualify myself for commenting on those MMOs I haven’t spent a hundred days playing.

>The time to play the characters (especially if you were raiding) is just too great to say ” I was just doing homework”.

Not really, I’ve done more onerous things before. The amount of time I spent working on my PhD was enormous compared to the fun I got out of it. The write-up alone took month after month after month, none of which was remotely exciting because I’d done all the funky stuff by then. It was a long, long slog. For some people, the prospect of typing for 8 hours a day is too much, and they never submit; however, I did submit. I figured that the time involved would be worth the pay-off, so I just knuckled down and did it.

It was the same with WoW. I set out to get 3x60s (but had to take them to 70 as it happened), and grim though the experience was, I have to say that I don’t regret it.

>The analogy is that you sat through a shitty movie. You spent 2 hours of your life watching a really bad movie. And then, you decided to spend 2 hours watching it again the next night.

Not quite. It’s more like spending your evenings watching all 350+ episodes of Scooby Doo over the course of several months. You’ve grokked the formula after the first week, and the rest of the time it’s just looking for individual flashes of insights (and bitching about the “Scrappy Doo” patch).

>I just can not accept that. It makes no sense. It did not give you credibility.

No, but it gave me credentials, and took away ammunition that people had been using against me. Now, I’m attacked for what I say, not for my right to say it, which is a much better state of affairs from my perspective.

>A fine line. But , I disagree. This is not art. This is entertainment.

Art has many facets to it. For this particular art, entertainment is one of the parameters that frames the medium. If you think that something’s being entertaining means it can’t be art, you’ve at a stroke decreed that most music, film, theatre and dance isn’t art. There is nothing incompatible between the two statements “This MMO is art” and “this MMO is entertainment”.

>You suggestion about WoWs auction house was a good one, imo. But it was not a artistic suggestion. It was about game mechanics.

Sure, but for that particular example I was asked what Blizzard was doing wrong. If I were talking about the art (of MMO design), the first things I would have said would have been all about what they did right. The way the different classes play is particularly impressive, for example (although they compromised this somewhat when they gave Alliance shammies and Horde pallies). My main gripes about WoW’s design are to do with all the hand-holding that goes on, but that’s hardly an issue that’s exclusive to WoW…

>There is no simple right or wrong answer. Some like it, some hate it. But it is still basically a mechanics arguement.

No, because those mechanics are there for a reason. Identify that reason, and you get a sense of what the alternatives were, and then you can consider why the designer chose that particular way of doing things rather than these alternatives, which, coupled with other views formed from other aspects of the game, allows you to build up a picture of what the designer is saying.

Sometimes, the designer doesn’t have a coherent idea of what they’re saying, and will cobble together pieces of cool mechanics or structures that grate against one another. For example, I was looking at a student design for an MMO recently, and they highlighted the go anywhere, do anything, open-ended nature of their world. So, that says “this is a place where you’re free to find your own path”. However, that same game design had a highly rigid character class structure. That in turn says “this is a place where we’ll lead you along your chosen path”. Those two concepts don’t sit easily together, and to an experienced designer they clash loudly.

This isn’t just an aesthetic issue – the aesthetic is just how a designer will pick up on it quicker than a non-designer. Class structures address issues of player roles in groups and player expectations of future experience, but there are other ways of doing that which don’t involve specifying from the beginning what you believe is the experience you’re looking for. Now for some people, knowing in advance what (gameplay) experiences they’re going to have is important, and for these people a class system is just what they want. However, if you put those people into an open-ended, do-as-you-please world, they’re going to feel lost and directionless. Where are the quests? What am I supposed to do? Why would I want to do that? Conversely, if you took someone who relishes the freedom afforded by an open-ended world and put them into one where much of the experience is prescribed and optimised for specific modes of play, they’re going to feel stifled and constrained. Why can’t I use magic one day and a sword the next? Why do none of the things I do have any long-term effects? Why can’t I chop down that tree?

When a designer designs an MMO, all these choices that they can make coalesce into an artistic statement. As to what that statement is, well, the designer can’t explain in words; if they could, they wouldn’t have to design the MMO to say it. If what they say makes sense, the MMO will make sense; if there are conflicts and contradictions, then the MMO will be flawed (and there always are conflicts and contradictions, by the way; the only question is the degree of flawedness an MMO has). Sometimes, though, design is by committee, or over-imposed by marketing types, or tied to an unsuitable licence, or created by someone who doesn’t (yet) know what they’re doing. In this event, you get an MMO with no soul.

In my experience, lots of players – even relatively inexperienced ones – can pick up on whether an MMO has a soul or not. Just think of it as: has a soul=art, has no soul=craft. That’s a good place to start.

Richard

Noel>I’m curious why someone would make so many comments about games which s/he did not enjoy.

Yes, it beats me why anyone would do that, too. Luckily, as I’ve pointed out several times already in this thread, I did actually enjoy some of it, just not the entire 113 days 19 hours 54 minutes 35 seconds of it.

>At a certain point, it seems counter-productive, because the audience that you would have to design for is clearly not the one you’re thinking about designing for anymore.

What? This doesn’t follow. I enjoy designing – I love it! – but not playing. Hiowever, you don’t have to be a member of an audience to create for that audience, which is probably just as well with MMOs because there is no single “audience” – there are different groups of people who play for different reasons, all interwoven in an overall dynamic. If you can only identify with one of them (say, socialisers) then you’re either going to neglect or misunderstand others (say, achievers). To design for all player types, you have to be able to put yourself into the heads of players, but still to make decisions objectively. If you’re a player yourself, you’re going to struggle to do both of these.

>A Ferrari is designed to go fast and uphold a certain amount of luxury. Thus, its features and performance need to be measured against those goals. Bartle, however, has managed to completely miss the mark, and is measuring the goals of the product against a completely dissimilar product.

Different people have different goals but they all have to share the same roads. When you create an MMO, you have to create for all road users, not just the ones who happen to like fast, red cars. That’s because if we only had fast, red cars there would be immense difficulties with the movement of goods and with public transport. MMOs, built only for people who like one particular style of play will rapidly suffer because they don’t have the other styles of play that are required to give that style meaning. Put bluntly, your Ferrari is only fast if there are other cars around that are slow. If everyone had a Ferrari, Ferraris wouldn’t be special. You need some people not to have a Ferrari just so you can feel good about having a Ferrari.

>It seems to be that every MMO Bartle comments on are to be compared to his mythical ideal online experience, when they are clearly being made to appeal to a more modern -game- consumer. (As opposed to, say, a late-80’s MUD.)

Er, that would be why I’m trying to encourage diversity here?

>The market has broadened since the time of the MUD

Well gee, the market for books has broadened over the centuries, too, but that doesn’t mean people can’t read them for the same reasons people in the past read them. A broader market just means that more people from more demographics participate in it than before; it doesn’t mean that people are doing it for different reasons.

If you have a better way of modelling why people play MMOs in today’s modern world, please, let’s hear it. I long for the day that my player types model is superseded, because that means we’ll have a better understanding of why people play MMOs, which in turn will mean we’ll get better MMOs.

>despite the fact that I played many in college, I don’t specifically feel the need to compare everything that comes to retail with them

Why’s that, then? Is the past irrelevant? If so, what makes it irrelevant? Or, conversely, is too well understood now to yield any more meaningful information?

Things have changed, yes – there have been many innovations. Nevertheless, people play for basically the same reasons they always did. If film schools can still talk about cuts and montages and mise en scene – the principles for all of which were laid down in the days of silent, black and white movies – then why can’t a medium that’s a quarter the age of film still make useful comparisons between modern and earlier examples? If you don’t know how you got where you are, that makes it harder to figure out where you’re going.

>It’s simply not realistic, and is sadly mostly irrelevant to current online game discussions.

[Warning: pro-history rant follows]

Here’s a list of text MUDs present at a conference in 1989, in terms of genre and (in the case of Fantasy) differences in mechanics:
Non-Fantasy:
Federation II – space opera
The Zone – adult (score to score)
Dark City – cyberpunk
Strat – holiday on the moon
Trash – “fire-breathing cabbages and inflatable hover-cars”
Void – magical adult
Prodigy – ancient Britain
Empyrion – underwater city
Spacers – generation spaceship
Fantasy:
Gods – end game players can create objects using points given by worshippers
Mirrorworld – rolling resets
Avalon – integrates grid-based and node-based geographies
Bloodstone – object decomposition (humans made of 260 parts)
Amp – objects with shape
Strata – internal currency
Warlord – highly combat-intensive

None of these MUDs were at all close to one another, whether judged in terms of atmosphere, mechanics or gameplay. They all felt – and were – very different. Gods was further from Mirrorworld than Anarchy Online is from Asheron’s Call. Yet where’s this variety today? The only current major MMO that stands out is EVE – the rest are all huddled in the same corner compared to what we had in the past. If people are unaware of what went before – of what glorious possibilities there are – they’re going to have to rediscover it all over again. I don’t have time for that!

MUDs aren’t relevant to all MMO discussions, but they’re relevant to most, and they’re even relevant to this one. I want a wider variety of MMO, because only through experimentation will we truly break new ground. I know that we can have a wider variety, because we saw such a flowering 20 years ago in MUDs. Minor incremental changes to the EQ/Diku paradigm may look big if all you know is the EQ/Diku paradigm, but if you’ve seen what other things are possible then they don’t look all that big at all. Knowing what happened in the past tells you that.

I’m not, despite what you might think, overly-invested in text MUDs. 20 years from now, today’s MMOs will look antiquated and irrelevant, too, but you’ll still refer to them in discussions that aren’t invalidated by interface differences or whatever. Likewise, if something we learned from MUDs applies to today’s MMOs, it would be foolish to dismiss it out of hand. Only when all the lessons of the past have been learned and absorbed and the arguments moved on is it safe to let them drift into obscurity.

If you want MUDs to be irrelevant, make them irrelevant. Please.

Richard

John Moore>This has certainly gone on longer than I expected.

Yes, me too, I’ll try to keep this brief!

>I would be lying if I didn’t say I still beleive humans act in there on self interest.

I was acting indeed in my own self-interest. I wanted those credentials, and I was determined to get them. I don’t want people shouting “shame!” at me for commenting on MMOs without having been through the machine, and now they can’t. Besides, it’s not as if I can’t think of other things while mindlessly mashing buttons, in the same way that I don’t have to think about driving the whole time I’m driving my car.

>Mmos are going mainstream. It has happened. This means a wider audience. What may have been “apparently true”for the niche mmo audiende ( and still may be true in the developer community, I don’t know) will not nessecarly be true for the new, less orthodox community.

I know, and this is one of my fears. 20 years from now, MMOs could be so watered-down and anodyne that people can’t seriously believe they were ever as awesome as old-timers say they were.

>So, when you say you spent four hours swimming a virtual island, and that you know it was a waste of time, but you did it because you wanted to counter critics, you sound weak.

Actually, the swimming-round-the-island thing wasn’t to counter critics, I just wanted to know how much WoW’s designers wanted to reward explorers, and spending 4 hours swimming round an island to find out was no more irksome than blasting turtles with shadowbolts for the same period.

>It makes you sound like you are allowing others to define your message. That you are accpeting their intellectual constraints rather than accepting the strenght of your own convictions.

It’s not an either/or thing – I can do both. I can give them the message they want AND maintain the strength of my convictions. It wasn’t as if I was being asked to do something that was incompatible with my beliefs, it was just a trial.

>You attacked WoW. And you say it lacks “soul”.

No, at no point did I say WoW lacked soul. WoW does have soul. If I gave that impression, I apologise. I could point at some MMOs that don’t have soul, but then I’d have to spend 3 days explaining myself to players of those MMOs who would be baying for my blood as a consequence.

>I am saying entertainment does not have to be art. It can be simply entertainment.

I agree, but I’d add that it can be both.

Richard

Noel >I’m not referring to WoW specifically, but rather the genre as a whole. What I’m saying is that you don’t enjoy these games

And what I’m saying is that I do enjoy them, just not in the same way as regular players do, and not for the same length of time.

>and when you speak about designing them, you don’t speak as if you’re designing them for the people who are going to play them.

But of course I’m designing them for the players! Not to do so would be merely an intellectual exercise, like designing an interstellar spaceship – it’s not going to be made, but it could help your own understanding of the subject.

One of the reasons I wrote my player types paper was because in the past too many people used to create games for an audience of one (themself). The assumption seemed to be that if they liked it, then other people would like it, too. The problem with MMOs (and the MUDs that preceded them) is that there isn’t just one kind of fun going on in them. Yes, you can create one that YOU would find fun, and that all the people who share your playing style find fun, but for an MMO to be healthy you have to support the other player types, too. You have to design for all players.

Why would I even write that paper if I didn’t believe in designing for the people who are going to play?

>your writings indicate that you would like to design -around- the audience, rather than -for- the audience.

What? Where on earth did you get that idea?!

>That’s an interesting theory. I’d put it to you another way though – The Ferrari does not need to meet every consumer’s demands (just as every MMO does not need to do so)

OK, let’s back up and see how we got to this analogy.

The Ferrari example was presented to illustrate something that was created by someone with a passion for driving; the suggestion was that if you want to create an MMO, you’d get a better one if you have a passion for playing.

I countered that there are other people with a passion for driving who wouldn’t want to drive a Ferrari. They may prefer leisurely drives through the countryside, or being at the wheel of a thundering 18-wheeler, or driving a 4×4 over rough terrain. There isn’t just one way to enjoy driving. Now with MMOs, there’s plenty of evidence to show that people play them for different reasons, and that you have to address all of these if you don’t want your MMO to suffer. Thus, if you design for just one style you’ll lose out.

You seem to want “Ferrari” to apply to an MMO as a whole, rather than to the players. Now although you can create MMOs with different appeal (Fantasy, SF, Horror, World War 2, Wild West, whatever), the players are still going to break down into a number of inter-related, self-supporting player types. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that someone with a passion for, say, Ancient Rome should try to create an MMO expressly for other people who like Ancient Rome; I do think it’s unwise for someone with a passion for achievement-style play to create an MMO expressly for other achievers. The reason for this is that MMOs need a mix of player types, not just one type. Player types are influenced by (but not defined by) the genre, so it’s fairly safe from a player balance point of view to create a game “for fans of ancient Rome, by fans of Ancient Rome”. However, creating a game “for killers by killers” (or any of the other types) is asking for trouble.

>But you’re not actually trying to encourage diversity. At least, not according to what you write.

I don’t know how you got this impression. This whole thread blew up because I was moaning that MMOs are too similar to each other; that’s not the action of someone who wants them to be similar..!

>Your writings seem to indicate that you believe people should continue to only use MMOs as academic tools rather than games.

What?! Oh the irony…

Here in the UK, if I want to get research funds to study MMOs then I have to come at them from some other academic discipline. I have to propose a project that would involve education, or AI, or psychology, or sociology, or economics, or law, or geography, or pretty well anything except MMOs in their own right.

Well, I haven’t made any such proposals for funding. The reason I haven’t is because these all denigrate the concept of games as being worthwhile objects of study. It’s as if the funding bodies regard games as grubby, populist nonsense of no intrinsic interest but perhaps of use as vehicles through which to study something worth studying. Well, I have only contempt for such attitudes, so I refuse to pander to them. As a result, my academic career is never going to go anywhere.

I want better MMOs. I believe they offer humanity the promise of freedoms undreamt of previously, and I want to see them deliver on that promise. Yet you somehow seem to have interpreted my “writings” to suggest that I merely see MMOs as some kind of academic tool. This utterly confounds me.

>It is still a derivative work

It’s not derivative, because I didn’t derive it from other work. I fully accept that plenty of other people have come across similar relationships in the past, but that puts it in the category of ignorantly reinventing the wheel, not derivation.

>and the one that likely without which, you would be condemned to the realm of obscurity.

No, see, I already live in the realm of obscurity. Few players of MMOs have heard of me, and I don’t even register as a tiny blip on the radar beyond MMOs. I don’t regard this in any way as “condemnation”, because this isn’t about me, it’s about MMOs. I just want to see them flourish and succeed, because I believe they’re a powerful force for good.

>People absolutely do play for the same reasons – provided that they’re the same people. But they’re not the same people, are they?

No, they are the same people. At the level of abstraction my player types theory talks, people are people are people.

>I think you’ll find that the average MUD user had more patience, time, and tech savvy than your average MMO player now.

And this invalidates what I was saying how?

>Just as the modern movie-goer probably wouldn’t find much enjoyment in most silent films

The modern movie-goer wouldn’t find much enjoyment in most modern films, either. There are plenty of silent films that are still entertaining and meaningful even today, though, if people care to watch them.

>no one should be holding the entire industry’s feet to the fire to return to the ‘glory days’.

I don’t see how you come to believe I’m arguing for that. Unless you think that having a wide variety of innovative and inventive virtual worlds is some kind of misguided hankering after some long-gone, never-to-return past, I don’t believe I’ve said anything here to support a return to the “glory days”. Of course, if you do think that asking for imaginative departures from the paradigm is an unrealistic, sentimental view from a bygone era, OK, well I guess I’m guilty as charged.

Richard