Hay Day vs SimCity BuildIt – Why the mobile freemium model encourages bad games

City builders have been a game type that has intrigued me for decades. I’ve been playing Hay Day for a long time now, and if anybody wonders. Yes, Hay Day is just a city builder in farm disguise. So when SimCity BuildIt was recently released, I was intrigued. How does the classic hold up on mobile devices. I did enjoy the 2014 PC release of SimCity, despite the launch hiccups.

The big surprise about SimCity BuildIt is just how much it literally copies from Hay Day, perhaps the most successful builder on iOS. Storage expansion, land expansions, boat orders, trading with others are virtually identical. It’s not wheat and fish that is being traded, but chairs and nails, but really the ultimate difference here is window dressing. It’s probably not a bad guess that developers of SimCity BuildIt wanted to capture what works in Hay Day and transplant it into the SimCity model of straight up city building.

But it fails.

And why it fails is very instructive not about city builders, but the trickeries of the excessively popular (with game developers one might add) monetization model. If the model succeeds, it’s big bucks as is evident by the multi-game success of Supercell, who not only produced Hay Day out of the core of a Farmville clone. But also produced Clash of Clans, a kind of variation on the tower defense model.

The freemium model is typically implemented like this (with some notable exceptions). Players are time and/or resource limited. Real money helps unlock the time and resource barriers to allow progressing in the game or simply continue playing. In builder games this is quite an intriguing place to add monetization, because placing is such an important aspect of making the experience good. As a player you want to build expand, evolve. Some waiting is OK, but not excessive amounts, resource blockage can serve as motivator, but if constant, simply serves to drain the fun from the experience.

Here is where a crucial difference between Hay Day and SimCity BuildIt kicks in. Hay Day is fun despite being freemium. SimCity BuildIt is not fun precisely because it is freemium. And the reason for that difference lies precisely with the way the game design, it’s pacing of time and resources is managed vis-a-vis the monetization lever.

In Hay Day, if you want to, there is always stuff to do. Wheat and eggs grow fast, visitor, truck, boat, and road-side shop offer a range of opportunities to turn products around. It takes a substantial effort to exhaust the options. The levers that encourage spending are there but somewhat subtle. Barn space early is very tight, and the flow is just easier and more pleasant with more. But the game is not impossible with the barn space. In fact the barn space limits early on just encourage more trading. Yet spending some real cash on materials to expand the barn doesn’t take away from the main gaming activity, which is building up and collecting resources to grow the farm, expand land, and gain experience. It does feel like a convenience boost, relevant enough to encourage spending, but tangential enough to not feel required or in the path of the fun to be had.

Both Hay Day and SimCity BuildIt have in-game money as a resource. However the ease of growing cash is very different between the two. In SimCity BuildIt it is fairly hard to get cash, while in Hay Day it is sensibly easy. In both cases on can spend real money to get game money, but in SimCity BuildIt it feels much more critical to do it. Sims go unhappy and cash is the only and only fix to build that new sewage drain that will address the problem. Hence money becomes a frequent roadblock to critical aspects of gameplay. And real-money spending feels like a strong suggestion if not a requirement to not sit at unhappy sims. Yet there is very little one can do to keep producing cash. Iron and wood produces quickly, but there are too few outlets to turn them into cash, and the cash flow is too slow to feel comfortable. Hay Day has visitors, truck orders, shop and eventually boat and town as outlets. SimCity has shop, city orders, and eventually boat as options. City orders are fairly rare and don’t offer the needed demand that say the truck system in Hay Day offers. Hence SimCity BuildIt creates a distinct, un-fun feel of waiting. Waiting for that boat, waiting for that order, and then getting little cash compensation for what is needed.

Despite SimCity BuildIt really being very close to Hay Day it fails in the critical thing for a freemium game. How monetization relates to the fun in the game. How critical does monetization feel, and how much does it interfere with what is fun. Hay Day may well have done the most critical thing correct for the freemium game and that is pacing. The pacing is not over-determined by monetization levers. There is plenty of fun activity to be had despite monetization being present. In SimCity BuildIt the monetization levers determine pacing too much, draining the fun and making the game a sub-par experience.

All I can hope is that game designers learn more and more how not to kill game fun with monetization strategies. SimCity BuildIt provides a good case study, that cloning game mechanisms is not enough. It’s how the mechanisms related to player activity.

Quasi-Censorship – Effects of Ratings on Online Games

Just today it came out that Blizzard actually self-censored content in Europe as part of an event that happens annually called Brewfest.
This event has been around for a few years now and it is very common that players across regions, specifically between US and Europe, as their content releases within a day and are fairly close culturally, compare their content.
It was noted early on that two quests as part of the event were available in the US but not EU. After long speculation by players in Europe that this is a bug, a CM of Blizzard finally spilled the beans:

The Brewfest quests ‘Pink Elekks On Parade’ and ‘Catch the Wild Wolpertinger!’ were removed to ensure that World of Warcraft contains content that complies with regional game rating requirements.

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=10921022886&pageNo=1&sid=1#12

So these quests were not included for European players because Blizzard wanted to protect its rating.

Now players are confused because the quests in question seem quite innocent:

Pink Elekks on Parade
Catch the Wild Wolpertinger!

and have been available in previous years. The confusion is exasperated by the fact that many players can easily come up with range of
content that is much more objectionable than these two quests, including depiction of murder, torture of humans and animals, scenes of temporary suicide and more.

So what happened here? Well for one the PEGI system is much younger than the American counterpart ESRB. The endorsement of the EU parlament for EU member nations to adopt PEGI only went out in January of 2009 (i.e. this year and after WoW Wrath of the Lich King launched).
WoW’s ESRB rating is T for Teen and WoW’s PEGI rating is 11/12+ (11 in Finland). So let’s have a look at the rating texts of these two of the current and the next higher category in the rating:

ESRB:

TEEN (age 13+)
Titles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older. Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, simulated gambling, and/or infrequent use of strong language.

MATURE (17+)
Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.

PEGI:

PEGI 12
Videogames that show violence of a slightly more graphic nature towards fantasy character and/or non graphic violence towards human-looking characters or recognisable animals, as well as videogames that show nudity of a slightly more graphic nature would fall in this age category. Any bad language in this category must be mild and fall short of sexual expletives.

PEGI 16
This rating is applied once the depiction of violence (or sexual activity) reaches a stage that looks the same as would be expected in real life. More extreme bad language, the concept of the use of tobacco and drugs and the depiction of criminal activities can be content of games that are rated 16+.

The crucial distinction here is that ESRB does not make a distinction in depiction of drug use (legal or illegal) at Teen rating, while PEGI does.

Posters in the WoW forum have various reactions, calling PEGI broken, or blaming Blizzard.

I am not really interested in this, rather I’m interested in the dynamics and how to handle this differently.

For example WoW does contain a quest that asks the players to torture baby gorillas. I personally find this more objectionable than the zapping of pink elekks while drunk for a 13 year old. Yet oddly Blizzard feels that self-policing on the latter is more crucial than the former, but let me back off for a second.

The way rating systems work is that they are meant to be self-imposed by the industry (hence not censorship). Critics of this, going back to the parental advisory controversy of the 80s always felt that the problem is that it is effective censorship or self-imposed censorship.

This example illustrates this nicely. All European players are barred from seeing this content, even though it is not objectionable for a large section of the gamer population, and indeed within their age bracket it would be allowable within the system. But because the rating system defines a high barrier applied to everybody it will block content that would be fine for certain eyes.

Blizzard does not really have a full choice here either. They could say “screw PEGI” but these self-regulatory bodies come with penalty mechanisms for companies that do not comply to the rating they have gotten. And clearly not having a rating may not get the game shelved at all!

Originally the idea of these self-regulatory labels were to give Parents a choice whether or not they want their kids exposed to this. Now in this case clearly this is not what is happening. In fact the choice is removed for everybody, more lenient parents, grown-ups and so forth. The content is indeed fully censored to comply with the rating system.

Certainly it is bizzare to not be able to zap pink Elekks but have it be OK to kill, torture and enslave humans. This too goes back to the arguments brought by people like Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver advocating against the parental advisory labeling. Where the line is, can be up to interpretation and this interpretation can have rather odd, unintuitive outcomes. For example Dee Snider was confronted in the Senate Hearings on the topic with supposed Sado-Masochistic content in lyrics of a song of his band Twisted Sister. In fact the lyrics were about the surgery experience of a group member. Dee Snider stated that in fact the S&M interpretation was in the mind of Tipper Gore, a parental control advocate, rather than actually in the lyrics. The same interpretation pitfall applies here. Which content is indeed appropriate for kids. The right answer likely is, that for the most part that should be up to parents, and labels are meant to advise them what to expect in the content.

Whether this is effective censorship, politically or otherwise is a discussion for another time, perhaps for other people.

Online communities have the worst situation possible. They try to cater to a wide audience, 12+ year olds as well as 35 year olds. Content that is fine for one is probably not necessarily for the other. So how to handle this?

One possibility is to actually commute parental advisory into the game. If you get close to brewfest, the censored content in WoW, parental advisory appears on the screen. This would fulfill the warning function without censoring the content.

Another possibility is to have age-based signups. If a 13 year old signs in, then brewfest is simply inaccessible, while the content does appear for players in the 17+ range. This would be censorship, but less broad. Still parents who think it is no problem that their kids zap Pink Elekks do not get to allow this option (unless they are willing to lie about their kids age).

Labeling content is much easier for off-line games. No player will randomly throw up curse-words, or pretend to be drunk, for example.

In many ways this is a new thing to happen in WoW and it does raise a range of questions. Is this the intend of PEGI? Is this suitable for online experiences which in many ways are closer to real-world encounters than to solitary gaming? What are good and practical mechanisms that inform parents of content while allowing grown-ups to experience content that is clearly fine for them? Would you allow your 12 year old to get drunk in an online game to zap pink elekks or would you find it worse to see them torture a human character?

What makes raiding fun?

I was just about trying to research what possible reasons where why prominent and successful World of Warcraft raiding groups disbanded, such as Death & Taxes (disbanded), Risen (disbanded), Nightmares Asylum (moved to Age of Conan), Flying Hellfish (moved to Age of Conan). But there are more movements too. On my backwater server the server first raid group disbanded with the core leadership joining a top 10 group.

But rather than actually execute the program of trying to understand what happened there, leave the obvious comments such as AoC came around, or that the wait was too long, or that the stepping up from the Black Temple to Sunwell was too much even for the hardcore, or that it’s just been a long long run with WoW, I’d instead like to pull up a quote of a Death and Taxes member after they disbanded, posted on the WoW official forum:

I miss 40 man raids.

Being social with 40 people > “feeling more important in a smaller group”

Thanks

Social and Family Gaming #4a: Prelude to Coop

Well I was busy, and I still am. So in the meantime just a quick teaser on the next topic on social gaming I wanted to write about: cooperative games! As the teaser I wanted to link up a brief blurb that Michael Fitch wrote a few years ago trying to argue why cooperative modes are harder to make than one might think.

Well it goes in hand with why some game devs have argued that competitive modes are easy to design. One offloads all AI concerns onto a non-artificial intelligence. But that not the topic.

Certainly fact is that there are loads of games that are either solo or competitive but one has to look to find your favorite coop game. There is a horribly incomplete list of coop games on wikipedia, but even if it was more complete the list is way shorter than what is published or what has competitive modes. As for interesting coop games over time and some guesstimations why these are rarer than others will have to wait until I have more time again.

Social and Family Gaming #3: Fun and being social

I’m not going to try to carve out a whole theory here, but rather I want to try, by critique to point at the open spots for social and family gaming. Really for all I know the psychology of fun is understudied. One can open recent textbooks on social, personality and developmental psychology and not find the words “fun” “enjoyment” in the index or as topic (if you know good texts that do, ones with actually are based on sensibly controlled experiments that is). Luckily serious psychology books are at the same time full of results about social behavior, benefits from having friends etc. We even have results that for many internet and computer game users, the social plays a very important factor.

It’s sort of common wisdom that games are about fun, maybe we call activities games because we do attribute to them fun in some way or another.

The reason why this is so interesting is because what is “fun” or perceived as being fun, defines game design. Certainly there are different views on this around and I already mentioned Dani Bunten Berry in part #2. Her famous quite epitomizes that the social trumps individual achievement and solitude in her mind.

Game designers like Raph Koster talk about fun, and he refers to a model that he credits to Nicole Lazzaro that categorizes fun into 4 groups. “Hard Fun”, “Soft Fun”, “Altered States” (Raph tends to call this “Visceral Fun”) and the “People Factor” (or Raph’s better term “Social Fun”). Really at least the credit for “Hard Fun” should go to Seymore Papert.

I find this categorization fine enough. Two of them deal with the social in some way:

*) “Altered States” according to Lazzaro can be “[..] the enjoyment from their internal experiences in reaction to the visceral, behavior, cognitive, and social properties”. Lazzaro really does not elaborate about those “social properties”.

*) And of course there is “the People Factor”. Here Lazzaro has more to say about the social:

“Many player comments center on the enjoyment from playing with others inside or outside the game. In addition to buying multiplayer games players structure game experiences to enhance player to player interaction. Participants play games they don’t like so they can spend time with their friends. Wisecracks and rivalries run hot as players compete. Teamwork and camaraderie flourish when they pursue shared goals. Dominant emotions include Amusement, Schadenfreude, and Naches. [..]”

That is fair enough. In practice I think there are two main challenges to these theories as they are set up and elaborates.

First one of those is the theory of emotions, another tricky topic in psychology but certainly more developed (that one you will find in virtually any textbook in some form). The sets of emotions most characteristic to a gaming experiences are described by Lazzaro as these:

*) Fear, surprise, disgust, Naches/ Kvell (pride for the accomplishments of others), Fiero (triumph of overcoming hard obstacles), Schadenfreude (gloating at the misfortune of others), wonder

What is curious about these is that only two are inherently about social emotions: Naches and Schadenfreude, and only one, namely Naches is positive. Even more curious is that most of them circle around achievement (certainly both Naches and Schadenfreude do).

A whole set of emotions or socially relevant feelings or states are missing from the list. Belonging, attachment, altruism, empathy, sympathy, support, affection. All are missing as potential states or parts of enjoyment.

Raph Koster cites Lazzaro’s model when discussing social fun he says: “One of the most fun parts of the game is [..] Schadenfreude, which is to say gloating is one of the most fun parts of games.” That’s the only discussion social fun gets. Raph continues: “Games honestly mostly focus on hard fun”.

So not only is the most important social emotion for Raph Koster (hopefully in jest) a negative one, but the most important type of fun is hard fun that doesn’t actually intrinsically talk about social but about individual challenge. But also Lazzaro sees this similarly when she is cited in the following way: “Video games, for example, fall into the category of what Lazzaro calls “hard fun” — fun that’s both frustrating and challenging. Creating video games isn’t about designing a smooth user experience, she says. Indeed, in a good game, players should fail in what they are trying to do 80 percent of the time.”

(I’m not sure if 80 percent of parents would agree that it’s a great idea that their child fails 80 percent of the time. Certainly Raph likes to emphasize the importance of teaching failure – possibly to a fault – by missing to carve out the important boundary between fun and frustration, and the important boundary of motivation by feeling competent enough to master the next challenge (“flow”) to the disillusion of being not capable to reliably achieve success. But this is an aside, that is didactic more than social.)

That is, at least some game designers overlook the social fun, and the visceral aspect of fun that is social. But I think there is more to this as well. Overcoming challenges is only one aspect of what we as people have to learn. We have to learn how to handle our emotions, how to interact with others, and how to meet our social needs.

This is an important aspect of family gaming that doesn’t fit the all to heavy if not pure challenge model of “hard fun” alone. We play social games not just to gloat and be proud of the achievement of our beloved ones. We also play social games to socially interact, learn about each other, foster social skills, form bonds, explore others in a safe context of an artificial game environment, learn to cooperate, learn to give in, learn to support, learn to empathize, learn to see things from someone else’s perspective, learn to argue with grace, learn to be able to accept that multiple points of view are present, learn to cope with interpersonal frustrations, learn to unwind together. And of course learning to not gloat and be a graceful winner as much as a proud and respectful loser.

A lot of social behaviors are about the ability to not win for the sake of someone else, to forgo competition for the sake of preserving a social bond, to seek activities that are cooperative rather than competitive.

The prevailing problem with family and social gaming may be that a lot of game theorists haven’t understood all aspects of fun and focus on one type only. And by focusing on this one type, exclude the types that matter to many social settings.

The theory of social fun in games seems starved. Social fun is not just gloating over another or having pride that another beat a challenge. It’s having a hearty laugh at an odd game situation, it’s supporting others on challenges they cannot master on their own, it’s making effort that is not rewarded by anything but the gratitude of another.

Some games are “fun” for these social components. People sharing their weird sims story with friends or even jointly playing sims despite the lack of immediate challenge. People hopping around MMORPGs without any points scored or ranks gained, emoting and chatting for long periods of time. Groups of people hanging on team-speak for hours cracking jokes or trying to solve a situation together. Some of the games are fun despite not having been aware of the social needs. People made it fun for themselves despite the game design. However many recent successful games are aware of the social and add social support to the game and cooperative activities. But there are pitfalls when the game itself becomes a barrier. Not so oddly, in SOEs study about RMT at Station Exchange one of the most important reasons to buy was for people trying to overcome separation with others they wanted to play together with.

Above all social fun disappears if you simply cannot do things together.

NPD 2007 PC retail sales in

NPD data for PC retail sales in 2007 is in (via Gamasutra). It shows only WoW and WoW TBC as MMO retail box top sellers. All other titles in the top ten are offline titles. Sims2 and it’s expansions are still going strong again.

Retail box sales are down again after a 1% recovery in 2006.

None of the titles I enjoyed, like BioShock, Witcher, or even LotRO made top 10, but the first two came out mid-year and Witcher for example just may have a bigger market in Europe than the US. 

Again this does not include digital download sales, and no alternative revenue models, subscription fees etc.

I really wonder how big the digital download segment is, given that for example both NCSoft (GuildWars etc) and Steam (Orange box titles etc) gear towards online sale of their titles once you have one of their games installed.

I really wonder when NPD will be able to give more direct market development estimates that include digital download sales, etc. I think they announced that they’d do that a few years ago but it clearly hasn’t happened so far.

Social and family gaming #2: History – How Dani Bunten Berry has said it all already

Well I am kind of sorry for the overly flashy title of this entry. But to be honest I am kind of sad how the gaming industry has developed with regards to social gaming.

Today one really has to look long and hard for game designs that put the social relating of gamers in the foreground. This is an odd critique because I’m sure many people will tell me that we are in the exploding age of “social games” which is “casual games” + “social networks” and surely a social network is nothing but social relating!

Well, yeah, but that’s not what I mean. I do cheer for these developments. But these developments happen kind of away from the mainstream gaming industry, or if they relate to the mainstream, are newly formed satellites to tapped a newly discovered market. Because “social games are exploding right now“, it’s 2008. But it is another reason to be said, because “social games” with another definition already made a kind of splash back in the 80s.

Dan Bunten aka Dani Bunten Berry is a very prominent figure in the history of game development. Surely loads of people know her, and if not loads know games of her. And there is a persistent thread through her work: social and multi-player gaming. 

I’ll be quoting or loosely refering to loads of sources. Most notably  the charming laudatio as part of the CGDA Lifetime achievement award (1998, she died shortly thereafter from lung cancer). Pre-AIAS hall of fame induction interviews  of industry colleagues (2007). Essential late speeches with the titles “Imaginary Playmates in Real-time or Why Online Games Suck” (1997), “Game Design Memoir“, “Online Multiplayer Games” (1996), a Salon article/tribute (2003), the Halycon Days interview, Interviews on World of M.U.L.E., 1-UP’s “The 50 Essentials – 19 M.U.L.E.“. I’m sorry for the heavy sourcing.

Dani Bunten Berry’s most frequenlty quote is this:

“No one on their death bed ever said, I wish I’d spent more time alone with my computer.”

She was a champion of what today we would call multi-player games. In fact she was the main pioneer of the notion in the form we know it today. But I’d argue she also pioneered “social games” in the sense that social relating of gamers was important.

In this sense the quote is to be understood, but it actually goes deeper, it not only talk to the need to having spend time with other people being important (and more important than high-scoring solo) but also it at the same time is a catchy one-liner for what she believed to be “what gamers want”. It’s quite radical if one traces the mainstream gaming development since the 80s. But it really shouldn’t be.

If one traces the chain of games she released you’ll find indeed this one persistent thread. Multiple people play the game. It binds multiple people to a joint activity. The first game she released “Wheelers Dealers” shipped with a button controller for 4 people. This was the first ever multi-player controller and it was a flop at the time (1978 for AppleII).

But the game Bunten is most praised for is M.U.L.E., a multiplayer economy game with action elements. The game uses resource competition and market auctioning to create a competitive setting but already contains other elements as well, such as random disasters or rewards. Despite it’s aweful graphics, even fit the time (1983) it was an instant classic. In MULE the player’s decisions interplay with other players decisions immediately. It’s competitive but it has a subtle (and possibly often missed) cooperative layer.

After commercial solo-play smash hits (7cities, heart of africa) Dani Bunten Berry left solo-only games competely (1986) and produced probably the first multi-player only game in “Robot Rascals”. What’s so interesting about this project is that she spoke about the importance of accessibility here already, she discovered how one can make the process, discovery and learning skill interesting (something that later devs would not know of and hence call the “journey an f–ing lie” mostly because of a lack of ingenuity how to make the journey interesting). She said she wanted to think of it as a “family game” though realized that people weren’t looking for family games back then. Hence once certainly could give her also some credit to have pioneered that concept!

Further innovations, like the first commercial modem game in “Modem Wars” (1988) followed. Like other innovative concept (Rascals, Wheelers Dealers) it was a commercial flop, way ahead of its time. Two more model games followed with more success, and Global Conquest (1992) introduced what today we would call RTS.

Bunten was an innovator on many fronts, but I want to keep with the social, because not only I but many other commentators do see this as the common thread. The 1997 CGDA award laudatio says this:

Nobody has worked harder to demonstrate how technology can be used to realize one of the noblest of human endeavors, bringing people together.

This again is a deep quote. Because it begs the design question: What would bring people together to play?

Let me take this question as the operative definition of what I mean by “social games”. If you replace people with “family” you get “family games”. This is of course different from the newer definition that “casual games” + “social networks” = “social games” but bear with me… I think this is the richer and more immediately constructive definition.

So what did Dani Bunten Berry have to say about game design?

From her 1997 keynote:

I started out my career as speaker [..] in 1990. I told everyone that if we want to reach the mass market in this industry we’re going to have to become part of the main stream and stop being such nerds. I recommended that they go home, meet their neighbors, get married, have kids and to stop spending all their time alone in front of computers.

Be “people focused” not “thing focused”.

What kicked me into motion was a conversation with a “marketing specialist” at a recent online game conference. He said something innocently grandiose about how great it is that the online service he worked for has got the full gamut of games to cover all possible demographic groups.

You have no clue about demographics even if you say otherwise.

There were (and still are) numerous possibilities for social interaction and interesting play with the shared computer kind of design. However, there were a number of logistical issues related to getting groups of people playing games around a single computer (such as, it’s not usually centrally located and people need to be “invited”). Online games “fix” these problems while still offering several of the social advantages of multi-player games.

It’s nice to share in front of one game, but networking lets remote people share it too.

What I mean in my title, “Imaginary Playmates in Real-time”, is that for nearly all intents and purposes the current crop of games (and even the next crop that I’m aware of) have simply taken standard computer game genres from the pre-online era and replaced the AI opponents with humans.

Industry assumtion is: PVP solves tuning problems and dumb AI. She observes: You haven’t designed an inherently multi-player game.

If you’re playing one of those games, your interaction with those humans is at the same level as it was with the AI ones. What we’re experiencing now is just the fact that people make better opponents. They will do more interesting things than any algorithm. Those of us who have been pushing multi-player games for years have known this part.

PVP is trivial, you make the opponent into the proxy for the AI.

It’s just that this is such a tiny aspect of what having human playmates can mean. People can make you feel welcome and accepted. People can teach you and share with you. They can touch you emotionally.

Being a playmate is about bonding, about the ability to share and teach. And the ability to be emotional.

She goes on to critique why solo play ends up designed against human preferences. The argument goes roughly like this. AI is hard and dumb. Human choices need to be limited to what the AI can react to algorithmically. Replacing the AI then with humans has limited the interaction to the algorithmical and not the sensory-human. Rather compelling train of thought.

Another opportunity that I believe the online medium offers is a new demographic landscape. Although to look at the “successful” games online at this point you’d think we were stuck with the 18 to 35 year old male audience that populates the CD games world, it ain’t so. The demographic of web-browsing (see “Online Magazine”) has an average age of 33 and is 31% female. They come primarily from educational and computer-related occupations. Almost 60% have a college degree or better. They are information consumers and have an average household income of $59,000 (these two numbers make advertisers excited).

The original subtitle of this blog entry was “How Dani Bunten Berry lost to testosterone”. I decided to ditch it for a less edgy one. But this quote gets to some of this. If I look at many current online game announcements, they still are the 18-35 male audience demographics, onlineified. Anyone telling me the thought of highly educated tech savvy females when coming up with Age of Conan or Warhammer? Anyway, Bunten was very much attuned to the fact that even in 1997 the online demographics wasn’t the canonical CD buying one. Most of the industry must have slept through it though. Or they were 18-35 year old males themselves, making games for themselves.

She goes on to give specific design recommendations. Let me pick out a few more unusual ones:

* “Zero sum” is bad. Games where I win and you lose are bad. Worse still is “I win and all the rest of you lose”. Notwithstanding the current cultural obsession with endzone strutting by winners, losers do not enjoy themselves and if you can help take the sting out of it, you should. Alliances, cooperative play, ranked “winners” rather than “A winner” with a bunch of losers are all options.

Don’t turn people into losers. We can today ask if PK/PVP achieved this and why designers didn’t hear this? Player-looting PK is violating this badly. But why have it? Bunten implicitly knows that promoting one winner too badly is bad for everybody. People don’t play to lose, they play to play!
Strutting your win is kind of anti-social.

* Strategies need “wiggle room”. People have different personal styles and when playing against each other it’s great to let them “do it their own way” rather than a single approach that all must follow. If possible you should balance the game such that a strategic planner for instance might not always beat the joystick jockey or the detailed tactical type. A game that allows for diverse people to play diverse ways is always best.

Allow diversity! People are different, let the play regardless. Don’t punish people for their differences.

* Court your newbies. Nothing will destroy a player’s interest in your game quicker than being humiliated a few times when they are just trying to figure out what to do. If possible build in inducements for advanced players to help newbies in order to get something to advance further in the game environment — like taking an “apprentice” might be the only path to “master rank”. At the very least try to make starting as safe on player’s egos as you can.

Make it easy to enter, but Bunten’s vision also includes: promote helpful attitudes and make it social to enter as well! Not what one sees entering many MMOs today.

* Use time limits. Whenever possible design your game so it can be played within a fixed time limit. This will allow people to schedule their involvement. A game you can play a couple of times in an evening would be a good design goal. If you can’t end the game at specific times try to at least facilitate a graceful exit opportunity such that a player quits while they are having fun and not after they’re so exhausted they’ll never come back again.

Respect people’s time and schedule. And their desire to take a break/quit to RL.

What specifically she meant is elaborated more in an online article:

When possible, end the game after a certain amount of time. Time limits let players schedule their involvement to fit their schedules and their budgets. Games that drag on and on will let players lose interest and drop out (a disruption to the players) or they finish this game but don’t play again (a disaster to the designer). It’s better to have players finish a game and ask for another play than to go away exhausted and not come back. Games that last 30 minutes is a good goal for a single play and 2 hours should be considered a maximum.

Hmm 30 minutes at a time, and no more than 2 hours max. I guess the 4 hour raid marathons of WoW could learn something here. In fact respecting people’s time and make them come back often but stay on shorter is the standard idea of what today we call “casual games”. The idea to worry about people’s time in game was already there with Bunten in 1997.

* Include chance. Although most players hate the idea of random events that will destroy their nice safe predictable strategies, nothing keeps a game alive like a wrench in the works. Do not allow players to decide this issue. They don’t know it but we’re offering them an excuse for when they lose (“It was that damn random event that did me in!”) and an opportunity to “beat the odds” when they win.

Randomness is there not for varied difficulty only and less predictability. More so it serves a social function! Not making people feel too bad about losing by giving them a neutral and uncontrolable reason for failing!

* Allow handicapping. Let players handicap themselves if they want. Some players are willing to play with one hand behind their back so let them. (The most common use of this will be parents and kids playing together).

Again note the direct reference to “family play”. Again Bunten realizes that people can be different but the goal should be to allow them to sensibly play together. I don’t see this used much at all.

Basically Bunten displays an array of important things to consider when social play is at stake: Don’t allow anti-social outcomes (don’t let one persistently be and feel like the “loser”), promote ability to play together (either via time, or via handicapping), promote helpfulness and positive social play. It may be a tad extreme to say that she has said it all already, but certainly she has said a lot more than one sees in a lot of contemporary designs.

Social and family gaming #1: Preamble

I wanted to write about social gaming for a while and in fact if you look back you’ll find some on social gaming in various guises already. The following comment by PurpleCar caught my interest:

I am the Mom. I have a lot to say about this. In fact, I could go on for hours about how I feel that the gaming industry is ignoring me and my family. For one thing, my husband and I, both in our mid 30’s, have a hell of a time trying to find an E or Teen rated multiplayer quest game to play with our 7 year old girl (we’ve played every playstation 2 game there is that remotely fits that description). For another thing, I have no real games of interest for me. Sims was too un-end-user friendly, and generally stupid/boring. The rest have too much fighting, which is again, boring.
Don’t give me that crap that there ‘isn’t a market’ for me and my family. I’m not the only mom out here who grew up in the arcades and see nothing wrong with a little family game play. And don’t tell me to buy the Wii – we don’t want tennis. We want more shrek, teen titans, spongebob, etc. 4 player adventure games where we work as a team against bad guys and not against each other. And throw in a few games for just me, ya head-in-the-sand-prejudiced-blind-stupid-arrogant fucks.

(sorry, that last bit wasn’t very ‘mom’ of me. I’m seriously pissed off, though)

while the debate this was contained in focused only on the multi-hyphenated explicative, I’m more interested in the parts that I set in italics.

See a lot of dev discussion takes the assumption about some “core” market. And in a way there seems to be the notion of that “core” market being the end-all of what keeps you afloat, while the casuals are a great way to add growth and sales. But the “core” is what will pay subscriptions, shell out extra cash for collectors boxes, and buy all expansions.

Looking at 2006 PC game retail sales, two francises dominated: World of Warcraft as a single title, and Sims2 as a game with many expansions. WoW courted the casual market at least initially, while Sims2 is by no means a traditional “core” game, yet people bought expansion over expansion in 2006. The PC retail market grew for the first time that year, after steady declines the years prior. (Note that these numbers don’t include subscription sales, and online downloads, they also don’t contain any alternative business models, “casual games” or browser games).

The data is from NPD, analysts who track many markets, including game retail markets (console and PC separately).

So given the Mom’s complaint above it really got me thinking. Why do I not know that many family-friendly but high production value retail games? Yet I can name many war games, many RPGs, FPS even adventure games, sports games and RTS. I know so-called family games, but they don’t jump at me as filling massive shelf space at my local game stores.

But independent of family. Where are the games that focus on social, joint play. That focus on collaborative gameplay, rather than emphasize solo or competitive gameplay. WoW certainly is all this: solo (lots of the leveling), collaborative (group PVE, instancing), and competitive (PVP, competitive instancing). But in marketing competitiveness is often emphasized. Recent MMO titles like Warhammer are advertised as PVP heavy.

I always liked games that are about playing together to achieve a goal. I never really liked games where I beat up on my friends. It’s certainly a personality thing. But given that I’m attuned to games that allow one or the other and I can’t help but claim that collaborative models are underrepresented compared to solo and competitive models.

It may be rather shocking in a way that only last month NPD released a press-note with the following title: “PLAYING VIDEO GAMES VIEWED AS FAMILY/GROUP ACTIVITY AND STRESS REDUCER – New Study Busts Myths on Attitudes and Behaviors of Various Gaming Groups“. Well, OK the title isn’t such a shocker. What is shocking is that this title busts myths about attitudes and behaviors! Anyone surprised that people play games to reduce stress? And it certainly isn’t shocking for PurpleCar, as she’s been looking for more family-friendly games all this while for NPD to announce this as an analyst-discovered need at the brink of 2008.

Let’s see what they say:

while heavier gamers are much more inclined than lighter gaming groups to prefer playing games alone, both groups are equally inclined to enjoy playing games as a family, group or as a party activity, and both groups value gaming as a way to bring their families closer together.

Now that is a shocker. How many game devs seriously put into their game description: “We thought long about how that game looked to a whole family playing it.”? I don’t know but I haven’t read many articles for sure!

What a shocker too when people want to bond and unwind together, rather than, what some devs promote as fun, be constantly challenged and brought to moments of failure and competition?

Family gaming amplifies the picture because the question is not only “how social is a game, how can a game be played together”, but also, “is this the kind of message I want my kid to receive?”

In future additions to this sequence I want to try to carve a little bit at these questions.

Your Mom! Beyond opposites and 1-dimensional design: Can the core/casual assumption be upheld?

It’s a funny thing. I’ve long been worried about the whole hardcore vs casual thing. And I wanted to post about it for a while. Now a wave of magazine articles and blog posts got ahead of me. I forgot though if I ever discussed Wolfhead’s last post. Even if I did I want to mention it again, as part of a wide arc about widely held models of gamers among developers, vis-a-vis gamers view of the same. Fittingly the post by Wolfhead from June 2007 is titled: “Are MMO’s in Danger of Becoming a Spectator Sport?“. This post really is of interest in the light of remarks of game designers. Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan, the WoW lead raid designer, has praised the rise of e-games and respectability of gaming as a serious endeavour in various video interviews, I specifically remember one at BlizzCon 2007 and Blizzard has featured exhibition games of top ranked raid and PVP guilds and runs public arena tournements.

So in a sense these are two sides of the same coin.

But before I go on I want to contrast another two sources, one is hard to cite though. One is a recent “scare” by Raph Koster (and I think I have figured him out, he sure knows how to create buzz by taking extreme positions or at least controversial titles, titles like “death of high fidelity games” is another example verifying that theory) compared to a much more level-headed discussion as the title feature of the 4/2007 issue of the German game dev magazine /GameStar/dev called “Casual booms, background, analysis and forecasts” (my translation, all futher english quotes from that source are also my translation) which contains the opinions of many game developers ranging from casual only developers to Igor Manceau of Ubisoft and Tim LeTourneau of Sims fame.

While Raph thinks that casual gaming threatens the “core gamers”, none of that scare appears in the discussions of the other developers. For example Igor Manceau emphasizes that casual games are simply different “The best [core] game is the one that keeps players in the game the longest [..] With casual games this is completely different, because the point is to repeat the incentive on a daily basis rather than within a playing session.” I.e. for Manceau a casual game just has a different focus, and is not better or worse. It emphazises fun for short sessions but repeatable on a daily basis. I think some “core” games like WoW could learn from that design difference even. But the clue is that the difference in design outlook is value free. Short game sessions are “OK” in fact desirable. 

Even then, what unifies all the discussion though is the tacit assumption of two categories describing player populations well: core vs casual.

It’s part of game dev lingua, of game dev assumptions, and also of gamer language who worry about game tuning and gaming experience enough to post about it.

The more sophisticated will allow this to be a one-dimensional object, a line continuum between the extremely casual (whatever that is) and the extremely core (whatever that would be). The graph posted by Nick Williams in his Gamasutra article (also a “scare”) about a supposed dilemma for nintendo. I also remember Jesper Juul, an academic studying game design used a linear continuum to categorize games along casual vs hardcore in a talk I heard. It’s very interesting to note here that in Juul’s graph World of Warcraft was the most hardcore game on the chart. (Sidenote: Casual games always existed, but they didn’t get that label. Tetris, mine sweeper, little computer people, duck’s ahoy? What is new is the label and the awareness of it as a separate design and market.)

Contrast this with what Jonathan Blow had to say at the Montreal Game Summit about WoW (via gamasutra):

Blow believes that according to WoW, the game’s rules are its meaning of life. “The meaning of life in WoW is you’re some schmo that doesn’t have anything better to do than sit around pressing a button and killing imaginary monsters,” he explained. “It doesn’t matter if you’re smart or how adept you are, it’s just how much time you sink in. You don’t need to do anything exceptional, you just need to run the treadmill like everyone else.”

Does that sound like a description of a hardcore game to you?

What according to Blow is cheap food to get the masses addicted, is the extreme end of hardcore in current gaming for Jesper Juul. I actually asked Jesper what he meant by a “casual game” and he said something along the lines of that a casual game is that you can pick up, play immediately for a few minutes and drop immediately. Clearly in that view WoW isn’t casual. There really is nothing interesting to do in WoW for just 3 minutes, just traveling to where you want to continue from your inn will take up that time and returning to the inn may or may not be immediate depending on whether your HS is available (or if it is even set to a desirable location!). In fact 10-20 minute trips are not unusual.

But I don’t actually care to take a position regarding whether Blow is right or Juul is right. In fact they are both right with some mental flexibility (and possibly modulo some specific reservations).

It much rather goes to show how deeply ingrained the tacit assumption of the words casual and core is in individuals minds and how these can be extremely stark, and also have utterly incompatible uses.

The Raph & Nintendo scare posts can be understood if one is an anxious gamer who considers WoW generally to be rather casual. While the positions of most developers in the GameStar/dev/ magazine take a more neutral position and embrace casual gaming as a separate category of gaming.

But even going back to the WoW design Rob Pardo discussed the design assumption of core vs casual (see the first blog entries I ever made). What is interesting about Pardo’s remarks is that indeed Blizz realized that the casual market is faster growing than the core but they tried to define game content for hardcore (instanced, grouped) and a path to become hardcore as entering instanced content.

There is a lot of data that Blizzard has that I would love to see. Specifically this specific one: What is the time spend in game by average long-time subscription gamers? And also: How many subscribers enter dungeons?

I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually turned out that most gamers even if they don’t play that much do enter dungeons in WoW. In fact Nick Yee’s article about how people play mostly alone in WoW actually gives the surprising indication that at level cap players spend 60% of their time grouped, i.e. don’t play alone (casual) at all! (People only play alone a lot while leveling, which may be more a function of levels causing dividers for joint play.)

And I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that in fact Jesper Juul is perfectly right in classifying all current WoW gamers as hardcore by some rather meaningful metric derived from the data that Blizzard has! But of course someone who expects hardcore to play 7 days a week for 4 hours at least will have to see a large fraction of the player base as casual. Because 5 days a week for 30 mins to 2 hours or even just 2 days a week for 1 hour is a vanishing fraction of time spend in the game. Of course I wrote about the extra time-dimension with respect to hardcore vs casual very early on.

But this doesn’t cover it really. Because the tacit assumptions run deeper. Read the following list of assumptions:

* Whoever doesn’t like PK/PVP isn’t hardcore

* Treadmills are ways to cater to no-skillers aka “skill is not accessible”

* Pressing buttons is easy aka “if a macro can do it it’s easy”

* Your mom sucks and so do games she would like

I disagree with all of these because they collapse dimensions of what makes games good. (Or just make assumption without testing them or are assumptions that having nothing to do with games but flow into categorizing players as hardcore vs casual)

Let me just pick up the last one because it appears in the arguments I quoted above.

Raph quotes a post by IQ212 who talks about the mass market of casual gamers based on the Mom example. While Raph concludes that “Core gamers are almost certainly going to have to adapt to a world in which a lot of developer attention is going towards a much broader array of titles than in the past.” IQ212 however actually had a positive intend with his Mom example. He writes:

So as you consider the gameplay, theme, platform, difficulty level and marketing of your game, consider your mom as a mirror of the mass-market. Don’t ship without observing your mom playing your game cold, and seeing what she finds fun, rewarding and challenging. Doing so could expand your market reach, and the average American represents a potential market of 300 million people.

Note to the guys making “Panzergruppe Tactics 4: Eastern Front”, you already identified the 59 people who will buy your game, so good luck with that.

For the rest of us making games for the mass-market, we’ll keep thinking about your mother.

Clearly he doesn’t see anything wrong with your mom finding a game “fun, rewarding and challenging”. IQ212 doesn’t paint a mom that has no sense of fun, of reward, or of lack of interest in challenge. Rather he pains a Mom who for her specific gaming need has a right to access fun, reward and challenge.

Or read this as a bullet:

* Accessibility has nothing to do with challenge, fun or reward (if done right)

Basically IQ212 says the Mom test is good. And the Mom test is actually game dev procedure! Cathy Orr of PopCap located in Seattle who specialize in casual games says in said GameStar/dev/ issue:

At PopCap we use the Mom-test to find out if a game works: Our CEOs sit their Moms in front of the game to gauge the success-potential of the game [..] We leave our Moms alone with the alpha- and beta-version of a game. After 30 minutes, we return. If they are still playing, then we have learned that we are on the right path.”

But Raph reacts to IQ212’s description of the canonical mom like this: “Yah, that’s not us, now is it?” Where “us” is of course us (hard)core gamers who have played for ages.

I actually disagree to that for the simple reason that it mistrusts your mom to identify fun, to identify early access rewards, and to identify early access challenges. But Raph Koster sees hope for the million Mom march on games. “In other words — gamers may not want to become like Your Mom. But Your Mom is gradually becoming more of a gamer.”

This brings me back to Wolfhead’s post. A veteran EQ raider and a WoW raid leader. He grieves the loss of access to design for the core due to time constraints. Wolfhead is not your canonical Mom with no extensive gaming experience. Wolfhead is the growing number of demographics of long-time gamers who have a life (due to growing older). The people who became Moms and Dads and by that virtue cannot fulfill a game dev’s fantasy of gaming 40+ hours a week to access desirable content (like the most interesting and lore heavy content of WoW).

These are the new Moms and Dads that want accessible/”casual” design that isn’t dumb. And I dare wager a lot of canonical moms don’t want dumb games either. After all they are a huge demographics buying and solving Sudoku puzzles at substantial difficulty!

So maybe the tacit assumption that:

* Your average mom is dumb

is just a corollary of the equally false assumption that

* Most gamers are lazy

Certainly the core vs casual dimension doesn’t describe Wolfhead or myself, or some of my MMO playing buddies, some of which I know to be Moms in real life.

Rather than designing along a core vs casual dimensions, people should design based on X-tests, where X are gamers you like to reach. And if a designer thinks they can only design a game that passes a mom test and not a elitist-jerk test they haven’t even tried.

Rather than assuming a 1-dimensional model to design one-dimensional games, maybe designers can learn to not assume silly models, and instead design rich, deep, accessible, fun, challenging, rewarding multi-dimensional games.

Also listening to your Mom may have told you a few things earlier:

* Your mom probably likes collaborative games over competitive ones, if she likes competition it’s the friendly competition of a bridge game and not the one of a ranked boxing fight.

* Your mom doesn’t like the idea of killing other players/people

* Your mom considers grieving rude and doesn’t like game mechanisms that support it (like poisoning carrots or nude pickpocketing in UO)

* Your mom wouldn’t want to spend extra cash to bypass arbitrary game barriers via RMT but accepts if RMT is build into the design as sensible payment method.

The vast majority of people switched off PK in UO the second they were given the change. I think that just means that most of us, the “carebears” are legitimately like your mom – in a good way. And your mom would have the wits to identify those that demean others for not liking to kill people as bullies and those that don’t want others to enjoy the game as rather nasty and selfish.

But of course some absolutely want to exclude others, so if that means ditching your mom so be it? Well I guess we gotta be scared of her now if we believe Raph Koster or Nick Williams. After all, games that are designed for her gotta stink big times. Well, not, if game designers have a clue.

Finally, I love the Mom example for another reason. Noone is like her! Rather than having one model for what Mom wants how about people actually get a clue about what “people” want.

Malcom Gladwell’s TED talk is oft cited recently in the comments on Raph’s blog. I think it describes the fallacy of tacit assumptions in an industry perfectly. And the core vs casual assumptions are one of those that need to die to actually serve soup sensibly to everybody. And that’s not one soup for all, as some seem to be scared of. It’s a whole lot of soup and many types of soup that many game devs seem too opinionated to even think about. But to figure it out you cannot be scared of your Mom, Elitist Jerks or players like Wolfhead. They all are right if they say: “I didn’t find that soup fun or rewarding.”

—
Postscript: Raph posted the following reaction on his blog:

I just read Moroagh’s reply post to this… where there’s the mistaken assumption that *I* am worried about the moms taking over. As I said in the opening to the article, I’m commenting on something I get a lot from core gamers. Me personally, I’m not particularly worried.

My post never really was meant as a reply to Raph’s, but rather a post I wanted to make for a while but got catalysed by various source, including Raph’s article.

Just briefly an actual reaction to Raph’s article. I don’t believe that “core gamers” are a homogeneous blob either and I don’t think people who loved wolfenstein were particularly scared/worried by zoo tycoon or mine sweeper or solitaire being around. So I do still hold that there is a kind of scare going on that tells core gamers they kind of ought to be worried, when for years most never have. Taking Nintendo as an example: I have to date seen no evidence that the booming Nintendo DS market in any way diminished Nintendo’s console market or that the existence and scope of Nintendo Wii has honest-to-good alienated many gamers. Some gamers always look at others and peck against them, that’s a completely different matter though. I for one have not noticed any discussion about “core gamers” being worried (beyond the standard pecking that’s always around) until Raph blogged it as a broad concern. I’d conclude that for most gamers it actually isn’t a topic at all and loads of my core friends happily play Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS alongside TF2, Portal, BioShock or Crysis. And they weren’t worried that their Mom played away at Zoo Tycoon or Yahoo Bridge or some variant of Sims. So my answer to Raph’s blog title “What will gamers do?” is simply “nothing” because most don’t even have the concern, so they won’t as Raph postulates, complain. Those that do complain always have complained about their specific needs not exclusively being met (“only the hardcore should be able to kill Illidan”, “PVP is welfare epics” etc etc), and that isn’t new or particular to Mom gaming.

But all this detracts from my post above which really wasn’t in its core about whether gamers are worried about an increasing casual market. It was about how game designers can be more multi-dimensional and experiment/evidence based in their outlook at gamer demographics and game design (learn from the “mom-test” idea), and it was about how the persistent “core vs casual” assumption and debate is rather very flawed and narrow. “Your mom” is just an excellent way to look at these points and I am indeed grateful that Raph and the GameStar/dev/ magazine articles both brought that idea to my attention (I actually read the GameStar/dev/ article before Raph’s blog entry. That both touched the topic of “Your Mom” is a happy coincidence).

Game devs learning from gamers (yes, I know it’s hard), part II

Good communication between gamers and devs

The original intend of the series of posts is to discuss the learning devs
can get from gamers, and look at the difficulty involved in the process.

A good chunk of it got sidetracked in the specifics of the first post in the
pair, so I don’t actually mean these to be read as a sequence. The first will
muddle the clarity of this one. And this one doesn’t want to really touch the
specific terrain that the first one did.

Here I want to give positive examples and discuss more what gets in the way
on the player’s side.

I want to be rather concrete and take concrete examples:

The trash debate in WoW raiding

An interesting example of the interplay of game developer and gamers is the question of “trash” in raiding.

First a quick explanation of trash. Trash is a colloquial word for mobs that are in a raid instance that are not special named mobs. They typically occupy the path between named bosses and may or may not respawn after a given amount of time.

In TBC raiding especially in the beginning, there was a lot of arguing and complaining by gamers about trash. Sniplets like “too much”, “annoying”, “time sink”, “respawn too fast” would dominate the debate.

In this debate we did have the devs comment on their choices. Jeff Kaplan
(“Tigole”) who is lead raid designer of WoW had the following to say to the
trash complaints of the gamers:

”Trash” Concerns

Equally interesting yet non-epic-dropping non-bosses (or “Trash” as he community likes to call it) has been of concern lately on these forums. In all of our 25 person raid zones we’ve made a number of bug fixes and tuning adjustments. For example, the trash should be significantly easier to clear in most cases – and take less time. Also, we’ve lengthened the time between respawn on a lot of the trash. Yes, trash will respawn in some cases. It’s a pacing mechanic and one that works well when tuned correctly. For example, the trash before the Prophet Skeram or the trash before Attumen the Huntsmen or the Maiden of Virtue works well. You get a couple of tries on the boss, and if you fail, you spend a short time re-clearing. Yes, there are cases of the trash respawning too fast or the trash being too difficult or too lengthy. Those are the cases we hope to fix. We’ve also fixed some bugs that were allowing the trash to respawn after the boss for a certain area was dead.

Basically Kaplan was confirming the gamer’s observation about the scaling of
trash and they responded to it. He also includes the motivation for trash
respawns, a mechanism that not all gamers feel is really necessary. But
overall Kaplan’s post reflects a desire to understand the concerns of the
gamers and make an effort to explain the function of the mechanism in the
game.

Later on during BlizzCon when they unveiled the plan for the second WoW
expansion, Kaplan presented a video of a fictitious raid instance that
consisted only of bosses without any trash between them. It was a fun way to
display the need for trash to create a build-up to boss mobs and make them
special and also make the context more realistic.

But at the same time Kaplan admits to more questionable trash designs,
specifically the magic immune trash after Curator and the length of the clear
up to Aran.

In many ways the exchange on Trash in WoW raiding has very good
qualities. The devs do see the core concern and make adjustments.

The video is of course more humorous than real part of the debate. I don’t
recall people really calling for no trash, mostly no respawns.

Kaplan explains the issue pacing. This doesn’t invalidate the gamer’s
observation that trash respawns aren’t really a fun mechanism, rather they
are a mechanism in place to achieve something necessary (pacing) in lieu of
having yet a better more fun mechanism.

In many ways I think this is a good example of gamer to dev communication and
a good example where game designers were open to observation of gamers about
a design. And the designers learned and adjusted.

In many ways this has qualities of good dev/gamer interaction.

That doesn’t mean that the phrase “Equally interesting yet non-epic-dropping
non-bosses” became a running joke in the community. Nor does it mean that all
comments were constructive.

“It’s so loud I can’t hear you”

A very real problem is indeed the noise floor and the sheer amount of
feedback that devs get nowadays. Another problem is that the gamers may have
sensible requests but they cannot be met easily for whatever reason (balance,
technical, time).

One of the biggest problem of raiding is how to accommodate diverse time
commitments. People often ask “what is the intended minimal time commitment
for raiding” even hardcores discuss how to “reduce the time investment“. Yet
of course the developers are torn between making raiding that withstands the
onslaught of raiders that will raid 6 hours a night 7 nights a week, and
raiders that would love to raid 3 hours a night 2 nights a week. That’s 42
hours a week vs 6 hours a week or a solid 7-fold factor in
time-investment. What is a proper mechanisms for pacing raiding that would
serve both settings and everything between?

The real question is not if the 6 hours a week players are slackers or
lazy (“free epix crowd”). It’s how to design a game that allows all people to experience content
and gameplay that in principle they enjoy.

A big problem is in fact spite. Some of the 42 hour folks in fact do not want
the 6 hour folks to see the same content. Why? “Because they didn’t deserve
it, they didn’t work for it”

So far there is still a prevailing attitude that buys into this spite. This
isn’t necessarily dev to gamer communication. It’s also gamer to gamer
communication.

“Carebear” is a player who does not enjoy adverserial player-to-player
play. Rather than this choice being neutral, some players will seek a
derogatory like “carebear” to display their disrespect for different
preferences.

In terms of balance some players will want to indeed have content to be tuned
exactly to their specific need, while at the same time have it tuned to make
it harder for others. This more overtly happens with respect to PVP where one
class may call for another classes nerf, and it may be hard to distinguish
the legitimate concerns compared to the ones that actually seek imbalancing
ones.

Case in point are hunters in arena. Hunters said as early as March 2007 that
hunters are grossly disadvantaged in WoW arena play. Only late in 2007 did
detailed statistics surface that indeed did show hunters least represented in
all top ranked teams. Only then did the hunter class see rather drastic
changes to their gameplay (see my post on deading the deadzone).

But of course the forums were filled with how hard other classes had it and
they were also filled with hunters who derided hunters who tried to point out
the problem as whiners. Even when the statistic appeared there were some
arguing that there just wasn’t skilled hunters and the distribution was
fine. Some of those were hunters.

For practical matters, the gaming community provides a tremendously noisy
environment where legitimate concerns are covered between lot of other not so
legitimate things.

In PVE the spite principle also holds. For example a raid group may have
passed a stage, or an attunement. Some of these raid group will heavily
complain when if attunements are lifted or content is retuned, even though
they long left that content behind. So remarkably the changes do in no way
impact their actual gameplay. It only impacts their self-perception.

For example in WoW TBC when it cames out both attunements and comsumables
were way out of tune. Despite that fact there were advocates for the
situation. Famously one of the top-tier guilds argued heavily on the Elitist
Jerks forum that the consumables situation wasn’t so bad and provided
screenshots to supposedly support the point. The shots however showed that
most players had multiple consumables on them, which clearly for that very
specific group was acceptable. But more importantly the out of tune state of
consumable favored groups like Death and Taxes. They could race away from the
rest easier because the rest had a harder time meeting the consumable
requirements.

The same was with attunements, even now Death and Taxes argues against
lifting attunements they have long passed on the Elitist Jerks board and clearly it now mostly
serves to slow down groups that are behind them. The easy argument is that
they are “slackers” otherwise and didn’t “deserve it”.

So some players do not only want a game design to be good for them, they also
want a game design to be bad for others. However clearly a good game design
does not cater towards spite of that kind. The consumable situation was
rectified and some attunement (though not all) was lifted.

I had a while back liked when Kaplan actually commented against the lack of
accessibility of raid game design. Again a sign of insight into the troubles
here. For me this is a sign that a game designer if he has open ears and mind
can hear what’s in trouble even despite the substantial noise floor we have
and make good decisions regarding a game design.