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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 very interesting.. people who work 40-60 hours a week dont have time to be playing EQ for 10 hours a day everyday, or likewise, any game that wastes my time (and doesnt allow me to skip past the bullshit to the actual game). I noticed when I was on spring break or winter break back in college, I had all this free time to sit and play video games. Now I come home from work, cook/eat, pay bills, etc. And then maybe I have time for a video game.
Growing up sucks...
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Please, please stop this. Thief 3: Deadly Shadows is a great game, but half the time I can't skip the logo crap on startup. Why do you do this? For godsakes, show them all the first time the game is started if you really want to, then GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME PLAY THE GAME. Thank you. It would be one thing if the game was loading while the videos are playing, but nope. Morons.
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)
My biggest issue with time drainers like EverQuest is the notion of risk vs reward coupled with lack of player/player interactivity. Post-Ultima Online, the notion of player killing, as well as certain notions of freedom to operate within a gaming environment, have disappeared. I have always thought the greatest risk and rewards took place in that kind of combat. There was no difference in EverQuest for me, new monsters sure, but everything remained the same, I found that bots could have taken the place of the other players. It was the world's most boring single player game, except I paid for the privellege of having an IRC window tacked onto it.
This also brings about ideas of "death" in games, like in games like SWG where you would get warped back to the nearest city, or lose stats/skills upon death, or even those ever-elusive "permenant death" games. I always thought that games that encouraged cowardice never captured my interest, you could lose all this WORK (because on the MMORPG treadmill, you are working) that you did if you attack a monster that is above your level.
Sadly, I don't quite have a solution. But the second year of Ultima Online is pretty much the perfect game of that type, as the treadmill wasn't as emphasised, death wasn't that important, but the rewards weren't out of proportion either. There was a freedom in that game, it wasn't just whacking monsters like a single player game, there was true player interaction. Early Ultima Online was a fine gaming social experiment.
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.
This game looks promising.
This may exist already, not sure, but what I'd like is an auto-pause - so I can just get up and walk away from a game, and it will figure out that since I'm not moving the controls any more, I'm probably not playing any more either.
Nethack does this. If you don't press any keys, the game pauses.
You could use a sort of time dilation effect - game time starts to slow as the time since last control movement increases.
Nethack does this too! The faster you press the keys, the faster time in the game passes.
The point of middle age has nothing to do with money. Someone's been living in middle USA for a little bit too long I think. To suggest that middle-age is all about "being able to buy things you want" is some kind of preposterous, grotesque parody of life. I imagine you work for a marketing department somewhere?
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
> The problem with MMORPG's, no matter how good
> the game play is, no matter how great it is
> for the casual player - there's always going
> to be groups of people that will play 10 hours
> a day and advance further along in the game
> then you ever could. And eventually, the game
> developers tailor to this group because they
> keep paying the bills.
Simple solution: lifespan.
You create your character, they have a lifespan measured in real-time hours of play (quite a high value, though). As this runs out, they get slower and slower, their stats start to drop, they get a beard and walk around with a cane, and when time runs out, they die. Irrecoverably.
Now the game is no longer about how much time you can put in. It's about using that time as productively as possible - in other words, it encourages the "fun now" design theory that working gamers want. Wanna sit on your ass camping that dragon spawn for 3 hours? See you in the pensions office, munchkin boy.