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Online Game Design Theory Questioned
hergin writes "In his recent column, Engines of Creation, Dave Rickey reviews Richard Bartle's new book on online game design and questions many of the basic precepts: 'I believe that if [a theory relating to a game mechanic] isn't testable and disprovable, it's not a theory, it's simply an argument.'" The article goes on: "It is possible to create meaningful social theories and test them, through online games... Handwaving in the direction of 'game experience as Hero's Journey' (as Dr. Bartle does extensively) may be an intellectually satisfying exercise, but how can it be tested?"
How is his idea on theories breakthough? Karl Popper defined a theory as such about 100 years ago. Are computer programmers just catching up to modern scientific philosophy? I doubt it. Sounds like typical book publisher hype.
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What the hell is this claptrap and what does it actually have to do with the real art of putting together good, successful games that people actually want to play?
I have a very difficult time with the idea that game designers sit down and plan a game around the modification of social dynamics and provable theory. Maybe a few niche games are like that, but I can't imagine that is part of the ingredients for an entertaining game.
Maybe, in the future, it will be like the movie industry, and we'll have Art Games (that no one will actually play) and Experimental Games, and then the things that people actually enjoy.
Beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if we get enjoyable, artistic masterpieces, but those are a long way off. At this point we have a new technology, a new sector in the game industry, and we're having fun with it.
Because they're games. Really. Just games.
Karl Popper must have been quite a man to have, 100 years ago, predicted the World Wide Web and virtual societies like EverQuest and Ultima Online. Richard Bartle's argument that theories have to be disprovable needs to take a step back -- they should at least provide a guidance on how to prove them in the first place. We can disprove theories as well as we can disprove opinions. We can even disprove facts if we refuse to agree to underlying assumptions and axioms and contexts. I believe that game design -- and Internet game community design -- is still far more of a black art than it is a science at this point. While there are tremendous strides being made in game sciences -- mathematical theories, huge studies being made -- the vast majority of the successful games toss the "game science" out the window and go to the heart of it: FUN! That's emotional. That's visceral. That's where the money is. In pure, unadulterated joy. While many game designers believe they can work like pure scientists and "manufacture fun," at best all they can do is incent certain forms of fun. Fun is not testable. Fun is not provable. Until we have calculus that proves "fun", then gaming is an art to me. Some aspects of game science are just now starting to address markets, psychology and desires in players. However, most of what I see is not really science. Or if it is science, it's a nascent science -- ludology. It's not 100 years old, no matter what people might like to believe. Elements of what we might call Internet game sciences can go back millennia, but what we have today is a new field, brought upon us only since 1984 when the Arpanet changed to the Internet, and moreso, when the World Wide Web started to take off in 1994. The question is -- what game theory can we postulate now that will be provable when sciences catch up with it in the next 20-30 years? My prediction is: we shall have Internet game economies, where there will be people who make their living off of servicing Internet game economies like vendors at ballgames. And we will see our first professional online game players -- those who are paid salaries to play games, like actors in Hollywood, or like sports figures on a professional circuit. We are not there yet -- but in the future, there will be professional gamers. And there will be professional scientists -- from psychologists to economists -- who will study game worlds to learn what they can through simulation, and how it effects individual and group social behavior in the real world.
Before anyone jumps down my throat "There are people already earning their way playing Counterstrike" and other folks who are minting new online game items, etc., hear me out... This is just the "cottage industry" times. I'm talking more like "player unions" -- Actor's Equity or Major League Baseball. Recognition of this as a profession you go to college for. Something you can even get a scholarship for.
Disclosure: I work for Skotos where Rickey's column is published.
As someone from a hard science background, I sympathize with Rickey's desire for testable hypotheses, but I also wonder if this will prohibitively limit the scope of inquiry. It is one thing to know that there is a natural limit on the population density of a PvP server. It is quite another thing to combine that fact, perhaps with numerous other facts gleaned from testable hypotheses, into a cohesive theory of game design that allows you to answer the one million user question: "Is it fun?"
[a theory relating to a game mechanic]
mechanism, shurely?
All things in moderation; including moderation
wow, someone else who has heard of Popper and falsifiability. It was actually more like 50 years ago. But its the same theory. Bear in mind that "falsifiability" can't determini if a theory is true or not. Only if it is scientific or not. for those not in the know http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Philosophy /Philosophers/Popper,_Karl/
Two things plagued ICO. First, a lack of promotion. The only reason I heard about it was Penny Arcade. Although they were talking about the ICO version on a demo disk, so there wasn't a total failure of advertising.
This wouldn't nessecarily doom a game. If a game is compelling and robust enough, word of mouth might be able to carry it along. The problem is that the game is too short. The action is somewhat clunky compared to Zelda. And those damn birds haul Yorda off so fast if you're not near the portal they pull her to, its probably game over. The audio is very subdued. The main characters have no personality; they're both exhude a victom aura. Thats what the game buying public sees.
I see that there's plenty of redeeming value, some of which the latest Zelda appears to have borrowed. Some people speak an ancient language which you cannot understand unless you play the game through a second time. You can now go through select dungeons with a partner you can coerce.
But ICO wasn't a total market failure, either. The game did well enough that somebody decided a sequal would be doable. If the people behind it (I believe its Sony) are wise, a little bit more marketing would go a long ways. Re-release ICO under a directors cut style, with all the features that the European edition had, a month or two before ICO 2 comes out. Maybe get a magazine cover or two. Buy some TV time. And continue to make ICO an incredibly abosrbing game.
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Dr Bartle works for the Themis Group a company that has a unique specialty of promoting online games. You can find his company bio here.
If they incent cut-throat destruction and murder, ruthless efficiency and theft, that is what they will get more often than not.
If they incent community building, cooperation, relaxation, and generosity, they might get that more often than not.
However, just because you incent something does not mean you will get it. Nor does it mean you can change public and player attitudes automagically. That requires social analysis, proper marketing, and more metagame social design.
If you incent your players to "play nice," but you attract a bunch of jackass PK'ers, they might need to have really powerful sociological 2x4's applied to their foreheads repeatedly before they decide to get with the program and play well with others. Those types of social changes happen slowly, or not at all. Sometimes those not interested in your welfare might take such exception to the game rules and metagame structure you want to inculcate that they will do everything in their power to trash your vision.
In such a case -- where some portion of the demographic just will not adhere to the metagame requirements for the proper community -- you might do best be policing people out of your game and towards other games in order to let your game thrive. You might find that if you kick some people out of your game, suddenly others might come flocking. Yet if you kick people out in the wrong way, even one ouster of an annoying player can lead to a defection of otherwise happy players.
So even metagame community policing can have game theory applied to it to model distruptive customers, disciplinary actions or non-actions, and best payoffs for all players involved.
More I think about it, the more I take exception to the idea people do not play Art or Experimental games. I believe something Experimental and Artistic can also be a hell of a lot of fun, and thus wildly popular and commercially successful. There's no reason something that has great aesthetic values and pushes the envelope of the expected must, by its design, suck as a game or fail as a business. You're sort of saying "HEART OR LUNGS! CHOOSE ONE!" I'd think you need true art (game as art, not just graphics), experimentalism (novelty), solid game science (mechanics, equilibriums, payoffs, etc.), a good sense of fun, and a good business plan to succeed.
The game design community does need to consider what gamer culture is, yet also the kind of culture it is breeding amongst gamers. Take into account what gamers are looking for, but realize context switches are possible. What a gamer thought they wanted from a game might change if a newer, funner game came along that was not part of their schema beforehand.
Pendragon Online bucking the trend of games that reward, like Pavlov with fresh meat paste, that mindless syndrome of kill-things, collect-things, levelling, monster-camping and goblin bonking.
While that is fun perhaps for a while, it is highly hypnotic and mind-numbing. Pendragon Online is going to postulate many gamers would actually like a little more human drama, a little more intellectual interesting possibilities. Romance. Heroism. Narrative. Combat? Sure! But why are you fighting in the first place? Death? You bet. And it might be permanent. (They didn't have thousands of people re-incarnating in the Arthurian literature. You might have to face your own mortality.)
We'll put a lot less sugar-coated pellets in their food dish. "Ding! You've got monster!" If you kill 50 dragons, what's the dramatic value of a dragon? It leads to a dramatic inflation of expectations and a devaluing of heroic adventure. Munchkinism.
Our game turns the challenge around to the players to be actively part of the in-character and out-of-character world-building and world-running teams. We're getting people designing chainmail h