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The Laws of Online World Design

Posted by Zonk on from the make-sure-they-have-ground dept.

Next Gen has an article up republishing Raph Koster's seminal laws of Online World Design. The piece is one of the basic texts used to think about the way to put a MMOG together. From the article: "Design Rules - The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal : have multiple paths of advancement (individual features are nice, but making them ladders is better), make it easy to switch between paths of advancement (ideally, without having to start over), make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant (having 600 meaningless milestones doesn't help), ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones (try to make your ladder not feel finite) "

1 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Part of what's wrong with gaming today by DrunkenTerror · · Score: 4, Insightful

    FTA (emphasis theirs):

    Is it a game?
    It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.

    I think this is exactly the WRONG point of view to be promoting among devs. Heh, I guess I miss the author's point, but to me he describes exactly the mindset that has lead to all these so-called games that are really just FIFO inventory models.

    MMORPG's exhibit no required skill, they just present a time-sink that anyone with enough life-energy to click a mouse can participate in. Some make it to lvl 60 (or 100, or whatever the max is) quickly, others more slowly, and some never, but there is never any real test of gaming ability other than, "I'm more persistent at putting up with this repetative crap than you are, that's why I'm higher level."

    Pen and paper D&D at least had an element of outsmarting the other players and/or GM. To succeed you had to think, act, strategize, out-intellegence, and talk your way to a victory. This type of experience is sorely lacking from modern MMORPGS, in my experience. It's more an excercise in collecting the sparkly eq that the giant glowing snail drops and selling it to noobs. MMORPGs as we know them are not games, in the traditional sense of video games, or role-playing games. I would suggest that they are barely even games.