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Designing Videogames For The Wage Slave
Thanks to Ron Gilbert's weblog for pointing out a GameDev.net article discussing the topic of "Designing Games for the Wage Slave" . The author explains: "We balance on the knife's edge between our glorious time-squandered youth, and the commitments of inevitable middle age... If games can adapt to the needs of the working gamer, they can find a lucrative niche." He goes on suggest practical tips for game developers, including 'Don't Waste My Time' ("Make every moment count. I don't play games to punish myself. I play them to be entertained, rewarded, and challenged"), 'Curiosity Killed The Cat...' ("Constant death was a necessity in the days of video arcades... Now, in the comfort of our lounges or offices, what reason is there to keep dumping us out of the game we bought with our hard earned cash?"), and 'I Need Help' ("Make any necessary information available from within the game.")
I find this happening to me (I'm no wage slave, but a college student). I used to play every kind of video game under the sun, but in the last two years I don't care as much anymore. My younger brother can spend all day playing a game, but I've missed a lot of games he's gotten (Mario Sunshine, Prince of Persia).
I find myself, however, gravitating towards Tactical RPGs (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Disgaea, Fire Emblem). I think it's because the rules don't suddenly change in a TRPG (you'll never have to do a move the blocks puzzle like Final Fantasy or as I saw my brother do, in Tales of Symphonia). You don't have to wander around looking for the right villager to talk to or anything - you get right into the action. Instead of trying to figure out some convoluted puzzle, you have one level after the next. They have new challenges and rules, but none of the "fluff" of finding the right item, talking to the right person, etc.
This is kind of the argument for retro gaming too - you can play Mario 1, just pick it up and play for 30 minutes or so. You can't really do that with say, 3D Zelda games or Mario Sunshine.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
THIS GAME DOES NOT ALLOW SAVES!!
So instead you have to spend 20, 30, 40 ... 90 minutes working your way though the game only to have one of your guys take a bullet and make it all one big WASTE OF TIME.
Nope, the point of middle age is to be able to afford the things you want. If they still happen to be similar to what you wanted ten years earlier, good for you!
I play video games still. I also own a sports-bike, used to own a fancy car, have plenty of things going on that fit the profile for my age but I still like video games.
The ones that really bug me though are the ones where you can only save once every hour or so. Hunting for a save-point when you only have a few minutes to wrap up your gaming bugs the hell out of me. One of the realities of "growing up" is that your time isn't always your own. Often you get interrupted, either by work, kids, partners, or just life in general. If games are going to be pitched at an older audience, they need to take these things into consideration.
..now that I can't sit on my ass all day playing games anymore due to having a job:
1. A proper save game system whenever possible. None
of that "save point" bullshit, which is the main reason I don't play console games, btw. It's insane to have to waste my time playing through the same level again when I just want to carry on with a game after I get home from work.
2. Cut down on aggravating shit. Like, the weapons
wearing out in System Shock 2. I mean, WTF?! They have FTL travel in that game but I can't get a gun that will fire more than 20 rounds without seriously degrading? I mean, shit, even my old hand me down M16 in the army worked mostly fine after pumping out a few dozen rounds in a row at the range.
3. Fuck mazes.
You could use a sort of time dilation effect - game time starts to slow as the time since last control movement increases.
Maybe not so good for multiplayer, or at least require some tweaking.
Here's another benefit - anyone who's been a kid (or dealt with kids) and trying to distract their attention away from a game, the excuse is always "I can't pause now" or "hang on, just a minute". If you have a game that you can literally drop and walk away from, it changes the way you interact with it.
What he didn't hit on, though, is something disturbing I've seen in recent games: games that diss on you when you lose. The one that comes to my mind the most is Civilization 3. For those who haven't played the game, it can take a lot of work to master a difficulty level, and often times the downfall of any civ (a computer controlled one or yours) is when every in the world gangs up on it and crushes it. Okay, bad things happen sometimes. But do I have to see the enemies spew juvenile trash talk at me when I lose? Things like:
Gimme an 'L!' Gimme an 'O!' Whatever... LOSER!
Don't worry "champ," you'll get 'em next time.
Go back to chieftain! (Ed note: Cheiftain is the lowest difficulty level in Civ 3... imagine getting this while trying to learn how to play!)
Aww... was that your last city? Maybe we should give it back...
and so on. Really, if I wanted to listen to stuff like this, I'd go play some random game on a public forum, like Warcraft 3 (the ladder actually isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, though) or an FPS. And I'm pretty sure there's been other games in the recent past like this, either by way of insulting you or over heavily punshing you...
It's funny that this guy picks Grand Theft Auto 3 as an example. I loved its sequel, Vice City, but I hated GTA 3. Why the big difference? Well, let's consider:
And there's more. GTA3 seems to very strongly embody the faults he highlights in his article, so it seemed an unusual choice. I wouldn't be surprised if he only played Vice City, because he makes references to things from that game not in GTA3 (like robbing stores). Or maybe he's just better than I am at GTA3
Still, he makes excellent points all around. Often asked is "What happened to the fun in game designs?" particularly when MMORPGs are concerned.
This could be adapted to MMORPG by having a casual gamer class of servers that would give you 2-3 hours of playing time per day, perhaps giving you 8 two hour blocks you could withdraw extra for occasional weekend playing.
That way, you wouldn't have to spend 10-14 hours per day to keep up. And, there could be associated chat/spectator service for the people who still wanted to stick around and socialize with gaming buddies after their playing time had been spent.
Just think of all the lives and relationships that could be salvaged by bringing this terrible addiction to a manageable level!
I think the thing that people miss is that middle aged (and by that I mean gamers with jobs) gamers are becoming more and more common. True, the kids are the ones who really got into gaming, but now a generation of gaming kids are becoming adults and getting jobs. They are running into the frustration of not being able to game any more because they can't blow 40 hours a week on a game. This problem is no more evident then in MMORPGs.
MMORPGs are designed around time sinks. EVERYTHING in MMORPGs these days revolves squarely around time. The equation is simple, time = power = fun. For this reason many gamers with a job are giving up on such games and going to things like Unreal.
For me personally, I am a great gamer. I pop into a FPS and generally rock the hell out of it after playing it a couple of rounds. This means that when Unreal 2004 came out I could jump in and start having fun right off the bat. The game design was fun and it didn't require anything other then skill to play. I didn't have to sit in a field killing rats before I could play it. The same thing would be true if you dumped me into an MMORPG with a level 50 character. Learning the ins and out is not a problem. It might take some time, but not much in the grand scheme of things. The big problem is that I simply don't have the time to be level 50. If I play an MMORPG I am pretty much relegated to running around in a field by myself killing rats. Oh joy.
MMORPGs need to take a clue from FPS and RTS games. Make the game based upon player skill, not time. This does not wreck the fundamental formula of an RPG. It just changes the nature of the game. Imagine for a moment SWG done in this style. If you wanted to smuggle, you would play the game like it was a space simulator and occasionally perhaps play the game like it was Thief. If you wanted to go explore you would jump on your land vehicle of choice, ride around, jump off, and the game would play like Jedi Knight or Dark Forces. If you wanted to be a Jedi the game would be more of a social game with elements from a Tail in the Desert combined with combat elements from Jedi Knight.
The real important thing to do is to be sure that any reward that increases someone's power is balanced. A n00b with skill should be able to kill the most jacked out person in the game. So perhaps it takes a little work to be a Jedi Knight, a total newbie with a blaster should still be able to cap you in the back of the head or stab you in the back killing you.
MMORPGs are obsessed with steep power curves, and nothing - absolutely nothing, is going to drive away a gamer with limited time more then that. Nothing pisses me off more then logging into an MMORPG and knowing that there will always be people I can never, under any circumstance kill, not because they are so skilled, but simply because I can't spend the 10 hours a day to actually gain the power to inflict any harm. In most MMORPGs a newbie could attack someone who is high leveled and AFK and still not be able to kill them. This is wrong.
Part of what is killing (or has killed?) SWG is that the Developers have lost sight of so much of the original concept and mismanaged what they *have* produced. It was initially announced as a game that casual gamers and power gamers could play together.
The problem that resulted was that because their testing was so woefully inadequate players were able to very quickly "cap out" their characters in unanticipated ways. Their testing hadn't included bounds checking so when good resources showed up on the servers armor, weapons and medicine were suddenly far, *far* beyond what their testing environment had been set up to handle.
Now the powergamers had uber-weapons, armor, buffs and abilities and were burning through the existing content much too fast. What had been intended to keep the players busy for at least a year had been played out inside of 3-6 months. Then the Holocrons and the Jedi were introduced to maintain powergamer interest while the casual gamers were still trying to maintain a roleplay friendly and social environment.
The casual gamers began to catch up to the powergamers and gave in to the lure of the Holocrons and Jedi-dom and abandoned their roleplay and social play which had previously "kept them busy", enough so that they didn't notice how little content was in the game. Now that most of the players had adopted a power gaming attitude there simply wasn't enough content in the game. The fixes necessary to make a sustainable game took a back seat to the content needed to keep an entire community of powergamers busy.
Now they even had a hand in the acceleration of the community turning into powergamers who tore through content and they had to make the game more difficult somehow. They turned to rebalancing combat, which was necessary in its own right, but about that time management said "We need at least half of your manpower to be diverted into the Space Expansion".
Now there's an unfinished Combat Rebalance already partially implemented, broken professions, broken content and hundreds and thousands of disappointed players who have now done all of the available content, done all the professions they care to do and see nothing worthwhile being patched out until at least 4 months from now. The social play has been decimated by the Hologrind which turned everyone into an AFK zombie or a powergamer who consumed all the available content in far less time than the team anticipated.
New content to keep the powergamers busy? That's a neverending treadmill.
New content to keep the social gamers busy? That's a development nightmare. Social gamers are finicky and given the right environment tend to make their own content, given the wrong environment they blow you off altogether.
Stop the hologrind and unleash the AFK hordes upon a galaxy already short of spawns and content? That's a revenue bomb.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
Oh yes. That irritates on so many levels. It's also worse when combined with two of the major uses of Plot in RPGs.
Not that I don't like plot. I love it. But still...
Exposition followed by no Save Option:
You go into a new level, boss fight, or whatever. There then follows a segment of plot. The first time you go through it it's fine, but you often have no chance to save before going into the action. So if you die (and with Boss-fights it can take a few goes to get right...) you've got to sit through the exposition again. It's not as bad when you can skip these segments, but in some games you can't.
Post-battle Story Mode: After several hours of attempts, a long battle, and a good helping of pure luck you finally win a Boss Battle. Geek-instincts scream "Save now, before you do anything else." Instead you're treated to a 5-minute unskippable section of Story Mode. (The Final Fantasy games are notorious for this)
Usually this would have the bad timing to occur when I'm already running late for something. Meaning I either had to be more late, or just power-off and hope I could still win the next time. (I was reluctant to leave the console running when I went out after an incident with a SNES, a loose power-connection, and a kick-on-return induced reset)
I just wish that after major battles the first thing you were treated to was a save-point and not a plot segment.
I have to say that I like the feature in recent Square-Enix games where you can save-quit during a battle, and re-enter it later. (Albeit you can only load it once) It means that at least you don't have to lose progress in an important battle if you have to leave.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
> New content to keep the social gamers busy? That's a development nightmare. Social gamers are finicky and given the right environment tend to make their own content, given the wrong environment they blow you off altogether.
> Stop the hologrind and unleash the AFK hordes upon a galaxy already short of spawns and content? That's a revenue bomb.
The key is that given the right environment, social gamers can create their own content. SWG with user-supplied story arcs (a'la NWN) subject to balance constraints might have been fun, as social gamers can usually spell "you" and "your", by using "y" and "o". (And I could have simply chosen not to do player quests that start out with "ur quest is 2 whak u self 10 foozlz of d00m" :)
But SWG didn't offer any ability to create content. Putting that ability in would have been a tough call to keep player-generated quests from turning into XP and loot farms. So they can't be faulted for that.
That leaves the "new content to keep the powergamers busy" option. Which is a treadmill, but it's a cheap treadmill!
Grok: with 100,000 subscribers (and probably more like 200,000), SOE was pulling in $1.5M-3M a month in revenue. Let's call it $20M/year revenue.
Are you seriously telling me that with 20,000,000 per year in revenues, profit margins on running a MMORPG are so slim that they couldn't have hired ONE GUY at $100,000 a year ($50K salary, $50K benefits/bonus/cubiclespace/overhead) to write quests?
I'm not talking about an art team to develop custom assets for every quest (though maybe he gets an allocation of 10 artist hours per month). (SWG started with a "monthly" story arc that degenerated into a "quarterly" story arc. Each segment had custom art that cost a small fortune to develop. Compounding the problem, they *removed* the early arc segments from the game, so that new players couldn't even play through prior parts of the story. Who the fuck thought that up? Gee, let's spend a fortune to make custom assets for two hours of content every three months, and blow away the old stuff while we're at it, so that there's never more than two hours of content in the game! :)
I'm talking about a guy who can place a building, an NPC, and when you find the building and do what the NPC asks you to do, you get a shiny and a text message. And you use the text message and the shiny to play a little game-on-rails for a month.
Look at KOTOR: Go to 4 planets. Solve 4 puzzles. Find 4 shinies. What made it work was that as you progressed through the storyline, you unlocked progressively more information about your fellow (NPC) characters and the history of the world around you. In the space of 10-20 hours, you went from "WTF am I doing on this starship?" to a pretty good basic understanding of the Jedi/Sith ideologies and the ancient pre-history of Star Wars early universe.
You can't code KOTOR in a month, but MMORPGs are just graphical wrappers around text-based MUDs. You could code (the text and triggering events, and don't creat any new art) a similar set of quests into SWG in a month. With $20,000,000 a year of cash coming in, could SOE not have hired one goddamn Star Wars Geek to write quests that actually taught the players about the universe in which they lived?
As a simple example, consider the trivia 'bot in the SWG Theed Palace -- if you don't know the answer, you just click at random until you get it right. (So you don't even need to shell out to Google the answer!) Why not have the answers to the 'bot's questions be discoverable by the players in the game through in-game actions? Solve the walkthrough/cheatsheet problem by having the game not ask a question until it knows that the player's avatar has discovered the answer.
Look at Morrowind - possibly t