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?"

Comments

100 Years Ago?

[GreenKnightPublishin]

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.

Asking the right questions

[DanielCSilverstein]

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?"

Re:Speaking of handwaving...?

[pythorlh]

Not to tell you to RTFA, but Rickey makes his point. In short, awhile back, nobody thought PVP games were worth making, because PVP servers for existing games were poorly populated. They assumed that only a small number of players wanted PVP. Rickey's theory was that the 'population pressure' on PVP servers was higher, so people went to non-PVP servers. He predicted that more content would mean a lower pressure, and more players would join the PVP servers. Release an expansion pack, and voila... PVP servers had their numbers go up. Maybe that's not because Rickey was exactly right, but obviously the other theory was wrong.

And as to what this means to designing good games, many of the PVP only games out there would never have been made if Rickey had been proven wrong.

Re:Speaking of handwaving...?

[ksquire]

For what it's worth, a number of commercial game designers (i.e. Raph Koster, of Ultima Online / Star Wars Galaxies) use Bartle's ideas in developing commercial games. At the very least, it provides a language for thinking about different player types. I know that Richard is active in the MUD dev community, where his ideas are taken very seriously and held in generally high regard as well.

As for games as art, I'd also cite Rez, Ico, Frequency, GTA3... but why not go back to some oldies like guns n butter or hidden agenda as well.

Part of the problem is that art is going to look very different in this medium, IMHO.