Broken Toys

To John Moore: I was aiming that one at just about everyone besides Mr. Bartle (I’m looking at you! *points to 10 million people*).

I stopped playing at 58 because I stopped having fun? Good point, Mr. Mind-reader. Actually I started the game not having fun. That time at least. The first time I played I was having fun. I bet I even had some fun the 2nd time too. I started playing that last time not because I stopped having fun, but because I got tired of not having fun.

The reason I tried for 70 is the same reason Mr. Bartle did it 3 times, so that we can not look like we don’t know wtf we are talking about. He did it for people whose opinions could matter when it comes to game design (and apparently a fuckton whose don’t) and I did it for my brother and his friends whose first MMOs were WoW (so the “crazies”).

If you haven’t thought, hey, I’ll try and play every MMO just to see what you can DO with them. It’s called educating yourself. I played so many bad crappy cloney asian MMOs a few years back, I tried the older MMOs that I had passed on before, I tried the crap that everyone talked crap about. Why? Not because I was having fun, but because I wanted to be able to try and prove that my opinion could possibly be worthwhile to someone like Bartle or the people he consults.

This is where you fail, I’m guessing. If you can’t understand what the man is saying, you probably shouldn’t be standing there flapping your arms huffing and puffing.

Is it that hard to understand that he can see games from two different perspectives? Maybe it is hard to understand an open mind when you don’t have one. I mean when I’m playing DAoC and I hit 1 to attack an enemy I can understand that an equation will decide if I hit, miss, am parried, blocked, or fumble. I can also see by hitting 1 that I hit that motherfucker with my axe. Is it really that hard?

John Moore> I’m a consumer.

You’re nobody, then.

I used to code and design text based MUD’s and MUSHES. I totally understand where Bartle is coming from. There are so many inventive systems and designed made back in the mud days that developers today have not even touched.

And may of the pitfalls and mistakes made by today’s developers echoed as well.

I find that just the text base medium was a lot faster in exploring what works and what doesn’t than these new graphical beast of games can. The MMORPG’s will eventually catch on.

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

“Design” by nature requires a market. You can’t design something for someone if there’s no ’someone’ to design it for. You can make something. You can have theories on what might make it enjoyable/useful. But you simply can’t actually specifically design a feature, and iterate on it based on feedback. Which is kind of what design is all about – making something useful/enjoyable.

In the Ferrari discourse from above:
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.

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.)

Everything I’ve ever read by Bartle since the A/E/S/K has been stuck in this perturbing time that no longer exists in today’s market. The market has broadened since the time of the MUD, and 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, nor do I feel the need to compare them with my own idyllic game. It’s simply not realistic, and is sadly mostly irrelevant to current online game discussions.

If I were to summarize what I think Bartle is saying — I feel like some sort of holy man, talking this way, so let’s go all out with that as a metaphor: “Let us all turn to Bartle Chapter Three, wherein he spake:”

It is not that the World of Warcraft is awful, or that it is boring, or that it is bad.

It is that the World of Warcraft IS.

And the Age of Conan is kin to the World of Warcraft with a different combat system and different PvP.

And the Warhammer is kin to the World of Warcraft with group battles and different PvP.

And the World of Warcraft is, and ever shall be, the child of DikuMud, whose children number as legion.

And the Prophet Bartle spake, saying: They Are All Good, But They Are All Diku. Let Them Not Falter, But Let There Be Something That Is Not Kin To World Of Warcraft. Let There Be Something That Cannot Be Described By Comparison To World Of Warcraft.

But what might such a thing be?, came the reply.

The Bartle replied: I Knowest Not. And That Is The Joy Of It.

–

Or to use the Ferrari metaphor:

The Ferrari exists. It’s already awesome. What Bartle is calling for is not the end of all Ferraris, but for Ferraris and jeeps and SUVs and VW bugs and vans and autogyros and aeroplanes and horses and cows and fish and boats and giant fish and flying birds and trees and houses and ladybugs and rocks and rainbows. Giving him an improved Ferrari misses the point entirely.

I get the sense that Dr Bartle is too focused on the big picture of similarity between current gen MMOs to appreciate the nuance of flavor that separates them.

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 3×70s 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 3×60s (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

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

I’m afraid technology isn’t mature enough yet to achieve everything you want graphically what you did in text.

I’m still curious what others think is lacking in today’s MMO’s that was not present in MUDs.

To Bartle:

This has certainly gone on longer than I expected. I was started by making a observation that for someone so critical of a game, you spent a LOT of time playing it. More than you needed to simply understand the game.

Which lead to a comment( which I thought was a plainly absurb, but apparently not) that mmos are “less about enjoyment”.

Which then became a campaign to explain that people play games ( which seems it would imply a vehicle for enjoyment, but no) that they do not enjoy for “education” and “professional thoroughness”. Which sounds reasonable on the surface, until you consider the time invested (and thus not invested in other ventures). We are not talking about spending a free weekend learning about the current hot thing in online gaming. We are talking about hours and hours over months of doing repetitive actions( and then repeating the repetitive actions, and then repeating again the repetitive actions) for nothing else than a supposed credibility.

But, you sincerly seem to believe you made a great sacrifice for a greater good. The truth is, I am still skeptical . I would be lying if I didn’t say I still beleive humans act in there on self interest. I still believe, even if you do not want to admit to the world or yourself, you spent the time you could have used writing, teaching, being with family, supporting a game you do believe in, making the game you think should be made, etc. playing a game you do not like only to say “I did it” because WoW gave you something. Some reason to play. You got sucked in like so many others. Which , I still think, means on some level you enjoyed it. On some level, the game worked for you.

Wow, ok, that was a really badly written sentence in that paragraph. But I hope I made my point. That said, I give. If you say you did it just to look your sudents in the eye, then ok. I’ll accept that and I’ll shut up about it. I will not lie and say I am completly convinced, but I admit I can not know your mind, and you seem sincre in your assertion.

But, i have to make two more points.

As disrespectful it will seem for me to lecture the professor, I just have to say this.

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.

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.

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.

In short, when I read that you spent four hours swimming the island, I did not think “wow, this guys is really serious.” As rude as this will sound (and I do not mean to be), I thought ” wow, this guy is a loon.”

Second point. Art.

Yes, I agree that entertainment can be art. But I we are really getting on slippery rocks here. Is a soup can art? No, it’s a utilitarian item. But then again yes, it is. It can evoke an emotional response. Round and round.

But that is not the issue you are bringing up. You attacked WoW. And you say it lacks “soul”.

You are saying WoW is not art, but that I am saying music and books and such are not art. No, that is not what I am saying. I am saying entertainment does not have to be art. It can be simply entertainment. Sounds simplistic, I know. But the only validity entertainment needs is to be entertaining.

A book is art. Are all books art? Whats’s the standard? Finnegans Wake? or Cujo?
Are romance novels art, or just escapisim? Is Jane Austin an artist, or just a romance novelist?

Is Wow really worth killing because it lacks soul? Because it is not art? Can’t it just be a game.

So, I say again, No, not art. Entertainment.

RB did not have to level three toons to 60, then 70, because WoW at 70 is exactly the same as WoW pre-70, or at least it’s exactly the same as what the designers intended for WoW pre-70…with just one tiny difference. The pre-70 Instances have a greater Margin of Error than the lvl 70+ Instances.

If you have lvl 70 friends and Guildies run you through every Instance up to 70, you’ve missed what WoW pre-70 is all about. On the road to 70 you were meant to group with others of the same/similar levels and run Instances and learn to play your class and manage threat, learn to heal, learn to control your DPS, etc. In that vein, Kara is exactly the same as Wailing Caverns, just with a lot less margin of error, and each Instance is also exactly the same, just with less and less Margin of Error. If you did the solo-grind to 70 then complained the game changed you’re deluding yourself, WoW does not change at 70, it’s exactly the same as it’s always been.

RB didn’t need to level three toons to 60, then 70, to understand WoW, because after you’ve killed the first 10 Rats and run your first Instance, properly, with a group in the correct level range for that Instance, you’ve pretty much done everything WoW has to offer. It might get harder the higher you go, but theoretically it’s still the exact same game.

Kill 10 Rats.
Collect 10 Rat Skulls.
Escort NPC Smith passed the Rats.
Deliver NPC Smith’s letter to his wife/sister/son/lover.
Gather a party together, enter the Rat Cave, defeat the Rat King and retrieve the Golden Rat for NPC Smith.

That’s it. That’s what it all boils down to. So why am I still playing this game after 3 years, with two lvl 70 toons, two 60+ toons, and a multitude of 40+ Alts?

I guess because I’m enjoying it

So what if RB swam around the northern kingdoms? At some point during my first 6 months in WoW I did the same thing. Although I didn’t swim the entire way, I kept getting out and trying to climb the cliffs. And so it was that in the far north-eastern peninsula I found a section where I was able to wall climb all the way up to a barren, featureless wasteland that would later come to be known as the Ghostlands. I can’t say I did it because I thought it would be fun, I probably did it for the same reason Sir Hillary climbed Everest, because it was there.

Unlike RB I didn’t notice the fish, or lack thereof, but that’s the difference between RB and me; he’s a designer, he sees the game from a designer’s PoV. As a player I see WoW in a different light. I’m blown away by the coral reef, RB notices the absence of fish.

I suppose if I’m quote-spammed, I’d ’bout as well return the favor!

>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.

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 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. I’m not sure how that’s productive in the slightest.

>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.

No, you certainly don’t have to be a member of an audience to design for it. But you should probably take notes as to what that audience actually enjoys, and design for _that_. However, most things that you write seem contrary to that basic premise. Namely, your writings indicate that you would like to design -around- the audience, rather than -for- the audience. There’s a rather large gap here. I’ve been as guilty as anyone in the past about not seeing certain trends developing, but you’ve continued on as if nothing has changed. And it has.

>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.

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), but rather, the road (market) needs to allow for viable cars (games) to suit each driver’s (player’s) needs (wants). So you can have a WoW, a game that meets many consumer demands alongside a game like EVE, which meets a different consumer’s demands. As time goes on, the market will clearly continue to broaden as companies search for new, untapped customers.

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

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

>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.

But people don’t necessarily read books for the same reasons that they used to. Books at one point were only used by academics and religions. Now we use them for entertainment. Your writings seem to indicate that you believe people should continue to only use MMOs as academic tools rather than games. And that’s going to be a problem for a lot of people who actually want to play games, not take part in a social experiment.

>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.

Sadly, that’s what I’m saying – that was the last really good thing I’ve read that you’ve written. But even that’s just loosely based off of Hippocrates Four Humors theory, bent towards describing those personality types in terms of a game world. It is still a derivative work, and the one that likely without which, you would be condemned to the realm of obscurity.

>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?

Quite the contrary. The past is there to be learned from, but not to be adhered to. Learn from the past, but don’t try and superimpose the past over the future.

>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.

People absolutely do play for the same reasons – provided that they’re the same people. But they’re not the same people, are they? If they were, you could, of course, point me to the MUD in the late 80’s that had ten million users. I could be mistaken. But I think you’ll find that the average MUD user had more patience, time, and tech savvy than your average MMO player now. It really was a different market, and to design for future MMOs based on a playerbase which existed in the past is not only commercial failure, but also a critical error.

Just as the modern movie-goer probably wouldn’t find much enjoyment in most silent films, the modern MMO player wouldn’t find much enjoyment with MUDs. Some of the principles can (and should) carry over, but no one should be holding the entire industry’s feet to the fire to return to the ‘glory days’.

It’s not like I’m under the impression that I’ll change your views, or even that I should, but I don’t feel you’re doing a service to anyone by repeating yourself ad nauseum. Also, there seems to be a lot of rose coloring in your glasses, sir. =)

Mr. Bartle, thank you for being so generous. You remind me of some of my favorite teachers. I wish I could audit some of your courses.

Hrm… once again late for the party.

I’m actually rather surprised to see this discussion taking place, not because the fanbase, once again, fails to see the point behind any argument other than pro their game, but much more because Richard has actually spent hours rewording the very same statements he made in the very beginning. Given the poor quality of interpretation shown by quite a few participants, I would have certainly left after the second post, but then again, I’m not Richard.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the argument on Richard’s side was a plain and simple: “The virtual worlds do not progress to their full potential”. I might be well missing something, but to what extent are his characters in WoW relevant, or the way he plays and/or enjoys WoW for that matter? Richard could have all classes maxed out with best equip and PvP rampage the Tarren Mill every evening, for all I care, but it doesn’t change the validity of his argument in the least. Half of this comment section is filled with precisely this sort of pseudo-retorts.

As for the argument itself, I somewhat disagree. While a little more originality might be welcomed, there’s absolutely no need to run ahead of progress. The industry seems to be adding “new” features in baby steps, which is not necessarily a bad idea. Seeing an outrageously innovating world would definitely be interesting from the designer’s point of view, yet there’s a good chance that it would simply alienate the community.

World of Warcraft’s success lies in it’s almost tiring familiarity to what the consumers expect to see. On a large scale, it’s a set of old games polished up. As an example, imagine me taking 10 Pacman players and letting them play Pacman with 16-bit graphics and a jump ability. There’s a good chance that I’d be able to migrate at least 9 players to my Pacman 2.0, thus keeping the critical mass of player’s required to call the game a success (and selling some copies along with it).

Now if I made a revolutionary virtual world, which would be like nothing the players have seen before, it might be somewhat confusing to them. Once again, imagine the 10 Pacman players from the early 80’s and letting them play something like Call of Duty 4. I would throw in those millions you’re talking about and be left with neither profits nor satisfaction from my primary group.

To keep it KISS, a certain amount of innovation is certainly good, but there’s no need to overdo it just yet or we’ll inevitably end up preaching quantum mechanics to medieval clergy. Even the success of the relatively original Age of Conan was in question, due to the features the average MMO player doesn’t expect. Without a player-base the virtual world is dead and what good is a dead virtual world?

You know, I do not think the poor quaility of interpretation can be laid at the feet of at just a ” few participants.”

Bartle may have been generous in his typing, but I can’t see that he defined his position well, made his points clearly, or gave any real insight on how things can be better.

No one here attacked him for not have played WoW. Yet, I was grouped into a group of “mouthbreathers” who apparently want to prove he is enitrely irrelavent because he only played WoW to level 70, and think that makes him unfit to breed or something. And Bartle seems to have believed them.

But my point is Nicholas’s point, his characters in WoW are NOT relevant. Playing three characters to 70 has not given him the credibilty he seems to think. And yes, a LOT of time was spent on people telling me he HAD to play WoW so much because of pseudo-retorts others in the past have made, and that I would have, if only I had been given the chance.

Other than that, if his point was simply “virtual worlds do not progress to thier full potential”, where exactly was that discussion? In the interview? In his posts here?

Where does he define “full potenial”? Where does he give a positive, honest look at what the real failings of mmos are today , rather than just saying in MUDs they could do more,that in MUDs there were less preconceptions? Where does he give a postive, honest look in the successes of mmos today?Where is the discussion on marketplace forces? On consumer desires? On technological differences? On the effect of going mainstream? Rather than having that discussion, I got , over and over, that people in the past attacked him for not playing the game, and he sure will not let that happen again.

The response to my obeservation that for somone who is so critical of a game, he sure plays it a lot, was not that playing so much gave him insights that he could share. It was not that I was wrong in my assumptions about how much time he spent on WoW. It was not that wheter he played three charcters to 70, or one to 40, or a thousand to 10 , point X and Y stayed the same.

It was that I would have attacked him if he hadn’t done it.

The comment that mmos are less about entertainment, and more about status and obligation didn’t even raise an eyebrow with the professor. His response was to ask me if I swam the entire way around the Eastern Kingdoms. And why did he? He wanted to see how dedicated blizzard was to explorers? So is that one of the failings of mmos, of WoW? That the world is not infinite?

This is the clear discussion so many of the weak minded blog readers are unable to interpret properly?

I have to agree with Brandon Reinharts post at this point. I found his points vague, and offer little substance. More broad ideas, with little disscussion of why things are how they are, and what can be done to change things.

The broad ideas are interesting. They are worth discussing and thinking about. It’s too bad that discussion isn’t happening beyond “wouldn’t it be cool if…”

And a minor thing. Mutantmagnet, that’s not my qoute. I swear, I have never seen so many people trying to explain what someone else said, rather than just stating there own thoughts.

Honestly, I just came here to gather a little data on the bloggery and wolfpackishery methods of stoning those smelly ones who will not take their seats and stfu (the Mar08 Prokofy thread), and I see this Bartle thing and didnt the professor say exactly pretty much more or less the same exact thing about closing WOW and watnot almost exactly a year ago?

I mean is this like an internetz echo?

Dejadooville.

I must remind all that we the fans prefer novelty — or, at bare minimum, a serious and vastly increased spawn rate plz.

Ugh, why’d you have to link the Gamasutra article? It’s a morass of poor assumption and unsupported opinion.

Richard, you can’t change the meaning of some one’s metaphor and then use that same metaphor to try to illustrate your point. What’s the point of using a common metaphor if it’s going to mean something else for each person in the discussion?

Worlds of Monopoly might actually make for a good metaphor. There are thousands of “Monopoly”s out there, and they’re pretty much the same except things are named differently. Giving improved or updated versions of Monopoly will never give you Scrabble, Risk, or Settlers of Catan. — and if you’ve played Monopoly for ten years, then playing Edna Krabopoly will not give you a new, fresh experience. You’ll enjoy it, but mostly on a “What have they changed?” level instead of a “Hey! A fun new game!”

This isn’t a perfect metaphor, of course. For one, Monopoly sucks. For two, the changes between different Dikus are far more significant than the changes between different versions of Monopoly. They’ve rewritten the Chance cards and renamed the Community Chest and added a THIRD set of cards and there’s a SECOND track you can use to go around the board, and if you roll an odd number on a wednesday you can go backwards …. but you’ll still never get Chess or Go or Backgammon or Axis and Allies or Snakes and Ladders by making changes to Monopoly.

And someone who REALLY loves Monopoly will (once he gets out of the asylum by convincing them he doesn’t actually love Monopoly and that the scene in Toys R Us will NEVER happen again) will make a rockin’ awesome version of Monopoly. (Blogopoly! Free Parking is replaced by Free Snarking and the Community Chest has become the Blogosphere Bag)

And in this fictitious universe, where Monopoly is popular, Bichard Rartle and Mohn Joore will have an argument on tokenbroys over the precise amount of Monopoly Bichard should have played before he was allowed to claim that Ministropoly is essentially the same as Lasagnopoly.

Some people need to get a Cluedo.

Trevel would win the thread, except he’s too stupid to see the many obvious innovations opened up by Mythicwaropoly’s third pile of cards.

And you wouldn’t be able to use it to play Volkswagen Golfopoly.

Sorry about that Anticorium, seems like I missed the sarcasm. In retrospective though, given the depth of arguments presented till this point by the anti-Bartle team, I can’t say that the previous stupor will break my heart.

Nicholas Chambers wrote:

“I think the big issue with this whole discussion is that one (bigger) half is talking about -games- the other is talking about -worlds-. In this regard Richard’s point is perfectly valid: WoW = Dikumud with light-greenish orcs, WAR = Dikumud with grey-greenish orcs, Vanguard SoH = Dikumud with dark-greenish orcs. In the end, it’s the same game in 3 different implementations.”

The Beatles = Rock n Roll. Smashing Pumpkins = Rock n Roll. Therefore, I don’t need to listen to Smashing Pumpkins, because I already listened to them. They were called The Beatles. Citizen Kane is shot from a third person perspective in black and white. Schindler’s List is shot from a third person perspective in black and white, therefore I have no reason to see Schindler’s List, because I already saw it, and it was called Citizen Kane.

See where this goes off of the tracks? Just because there are strong similarities between two things doesn’t mean they’re the same. To dismiss them as the same thing is the sign of a very unsophisticated or uninformed viewpoint. Dr. Bartle, as a foremost “expert” on MMOs, should be both sophisticated and informed, so this simplistic viewpoint does not make any sense.

More to the point: Even if you can make the argument that in all of the fundamentally important design decisions, the games are identical, this only goes to demonstrate that changes in the fundamental design concepts, while a “big deal” do not represent progress in any way to the consumer. Maybe the problem is that these “hidden gems” that Richard is talking about are just not very polished. I’ve played some of the games he’s talking about, and frankly while the CONCEPTS are in some cases very cool, the actual execution of those concepts is very ameteurish. The tolerance for unfinished/buggy/unpolished games is very low among MMO players because they’ve been bitten repeatedly in the past. Developers have a hard time with the execution of ambitious, revolutionary design because these efforts tend to go unfinished.

So when you’re creating the next game are you going to use the formula that you know, and iterate that to the next level of sophistication and balance, or are you going to go exploring and end up with an expensive mess? Choice C, where you go exploring AND end up with an engrossing, balanced, long last game, will cost you half a billion dollars. Choice A and B will cost you 100 million. Choice A will result in a million subscribers and, choice B will result in one hundred thousand, and choice C could result in anywhere from a few hundred thousand to many millions. Does any one with half a billion dollars want to take the gamble? I’d rather buy a sports franchise.

Iconic > Still not getting it, are we? This is just getting tiring after a while. Beatles = Rock’n'Roll, Smashing Pumpkins = Rock’n'Roll, ergo by your definition the entire media of music has to consist of Rock’n'Roll. Where do Mozart and Stevie Wonder jump in? It’s been stressed over and over again, yet you (not Iconic specifically) are still missing the big picture. Read what has been written, then think about it from a global point of view.

And no, as a good designer, you do not build your creations by a known formula. You can learn from the previous designs, but in order to create something revolutionary successful, you have to start building from ground up.

What you, Iconic, are talking about, in your last paragraph, is overall correct and is precisely the way the management thinks the way virtual worlds should be like. What you fail to understand is that it’s NOT A GOOD THING. It’s neither a good thing for designers, nor is it good for the consumers, nor for the virtual worlds as a medium on its own. It is good for the guys, who own the company’s shares, but believe me, as long as you pay, they don’t care about you anyway. This is the sad reality of virtual worlds today.

Either way, this is turning into babble as all interesting points have been highlighted already. Thanks to Richard and the contributors for the interesting posts.

There are so many metaphors and analogies in this thread that my ears are bleeding.

ok…..

this old guy made a game….

and then a bunch’o folks made some other games…

but all the new games where the same as the old game…..

this pissed him off, and he said “MAKE A NEW GAME”

this pissed off the new folks……and they said”ZOMG..IT IZZ A KNEW GAME, DWARVES ARE CALLED @#5#!@, and we have elves called ^%$@$, and we TOTTALY made up “lore” for them….”

but in the end, it was just WOW, and their “lore” was written by bloggers.. “yay bloggers”……..a great collective “yawn” was uttered, and, in the end, no one cared…..

magical medieval kingdoms ftw….really……
don’t bother with creativity…

regurgitation is AWESOME!!!

roger zelazny would so piss on modern “MMO” story telling…..

(and tolkien’s characters where one dimensional, to put it nicely….)

my point…TRY HARDER