I'd say with some six billion people on this planet, there are bound to be some who: A) only will play a game with PKing in it, B) will play games that have it, but would prefer to be able to avoid it, and C) will only play games with no PKing (or a switch where they can "opt out" of it). My assertion would be that category A contains the fewest humans (most of them "hard core gamers"), B has more, and the majority of the human race falls into category C. The most popular multiplayer games online by sheer numbers are still simple card games like Spades and Hearts, mostly.
Of course this opinion applies mainly to the MUD style games, where being killed usually involves losing resources and/or progress you put noticable amounts of time and effort into acquiring. Part of the brilliance of Doom/Quake/Half-Life and the many others in that genre is that when you die, all you lose is the weapons you spent the last 30 seconds running around and gathering up. The victor gets the satisfaction of "I killed you", the loser doesn't feel as upset as when killed in a MUD. Also the fast pace and simpler gameplay makes it likely that most or all of the players will get at least *some* kills. Contrast this to MUDs/MMORPGs where often only the killer(s) will have a "win" to be satisfied about in a given play session, and the victims have nothing to be happy about. In "low impact death" games like Quake, a higher percentage of the population will be in categories A and B than in games like Everquest.
I designed the "DragonSpeak" scripting language in my game Furcadia primarily to be easy to learn and easy to use, rather than for power. I've seen 12 year old girls pick it up with ease and make fun things with it. I also know one guy that got really good at it, and then when he took his first programming class in high school, realized to his surprise that he was the best student in the class. Anyway we do need better editing tools and such, but I'm fairly proud of the language design in a lot of ways.
I worked on video slot machines, video bingo, video poker, and video keno for a pretty cool company called Multimedia Games. Their products were all made for Indian casinos, and the president had been made an honorary chief by one tribe (which had made an awful lot of money from the products, I'm sure). I got to design the payout tables for the video poker, because it had to fit with the new laws in the state of Washington where you could display any sort of animation to indicate a winning or losing result, as long as the underlying game was essentially a computer simulating a scratch-off lottery ticket. So you'd buy from the central computer and it would sell your player-station a ticket. The player stations were PCs inside an arcade-machine type cabinet, with touch screens. And it would get the virtual ticket with a "losing game" or a "pay out prize number 3" result, it would animate some spinning reels, and the slot machine would stop where it was supposed to stop. Different from the mechanics of a physical slot machine? Sure. End results about the same? Yup. Selectable house edge, you might win but will probably lose, more likely to end up statistically ahead if you play just a few games, playing a long time makes you more likely to get results closer to the house edge, no way to predict results that would let you engage in a winning play strategy even if you had all the source code to analyze... All these facts are the same as with a physical machine. The server computer used a random number generator that was certified as acceptable by the state gaming comission if I remember right.
Actually the physical slot machines use stepper motors and internal algorithms now to decide where the reels will stop, rather than things like inertia, etc. This was a huge and important breakthrough in the slots industry, because it allows large jackpots. Before that, no combination could be rarer than one over the number of permutations of the reel positions. So you couldn't pay off more than that many to 1, and still have a profitable game. The slots are "less intuitive", but people prefer the higher jackpots anyway.
What it really boils down to is whether people want to gamble in situations with the odds against them or not, whether they have superstitions that they can do something that will make them win on a particular game because they know a good "secret trick", whether they think they're "lucky", etc. Machines that cater well to player's superstitions and their tastes will do well. Those that cater to suspicions of the machine being rigged or unfair, won't. Having a "choice" that doesn't really matter is bad game design, if your players find out. Often they won't, but I wouldn't make a gambling game that way if I could avoid it (or a non-gambling game either, generally!)
The poker game was a tricky one - we had to convince the state of Washington that picking a lottery ticket that determined which of 40 different pools of second-round lottery tickets you could choose from was legal also. I couldn't mimic the exact odds of dealing real 5 card draw poker hands, so I came as close as I could under Washington law (none of the pools of tickets could have a payout percentage of less than 75%, for one thing - some video poker situations have worse odds than that!) Player's choices really did matter, though. If you got three of a kind and kept them, you'd be drawing into the lucrative "drawing to three of a kind" ticket pool. If you just kept a pair, or a high card from that hand, you'd draw into a pool that didn't pay out as much, on average. It was a fun project to work on, and I got my name on a patent application (along with three other guys), so I guess I can say that stealing money back from the White Man and returning it to the Indians is fun and profitable. As for the UK fruit machines... I guess what they're guilty of might not be so much "cheating" as it is "bad game design". And a little deceptive too - but then if you think you're gonna win a machine with a 30% house edge, you'
I think the most interesting academic writings and research on online worlds are coming from Nick Yee, who has studied demographics and patterns of interaction in games like Everquest and from Dr. Edward Castronova, who has a PhD in economics and has done work on figuring out the exchange rates between virtual currencies and real world ones, calculating the "GNP" of online worlds, etc. The links above go to collections of some of their writings.
Of course some of the best writings on the subject (not from academia, btw) are the seminal "Habitat Papers" by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer. Their main home at communities.com is gone, with the collapse of that company - does anybody out there have copies or links to another site that has them?
The problem isn't that a lack of new ideas, the problem is the journalists themselves!
While I wish the game magazines would spend more time covering the smaller, more obscure games (the way Computer Gaming World did back in the early to mid 1980s), I can't totally blame them for the current state of affairs. When the magazine publishers discover that having a cover that boasts of lots of screenshots of the new Mario game or the latest sequel from Blizzard makes their magazine sell a lot more copies, and that when they have an exclusive on the first screenshots from a hit game it boosts their sales even more... What do you think they're going to try and get for their next issue? The public shells out more bucks for a lot of coverage of big hits, and coverage of the interesting small games doesn't help sell magazines. If the public would show more demand for that kind of thing, maybe we'd get some better game magazines to choose from.
I participated this year in the Independent Games Festival (www.igf.com), which is the industry's attempt to encourage something like the art film scene for low budget independently produced games. There was definitely more variety there than in a random selection from a game store's shelves. One game had enough audio cues in it that it was playable by blind gamers. I mostly left the big company game development scene in the early 90s, after over a decade doing that, and I like to think my work is somewhat innovative too. But of course I'm biased there. (Hey, we did make the finals in the IGF, at least.)
One of the big problems in the hardcore gamer market is that most players demand millions of dollars in art and animation budgets to produce enough eye-candy to outdo the last round of hit games. This cost won't go away even if all the game engines are licensed and bring the programming costs down thereby. I think the real hope for innovation lies more in the mass market - even if a lot of them are out there now just playing online Hearts and Spades. They have a broader range of tastes and interests, and they've made games like Tetris and Minesweeper and Shanghai big hits, even without much of an art budget. Also they've made The Sims the biggest selling PC game of all time - it was expensive to produce, granted, but it certainly represents a developer putting out a new and different form of gameplay, and the market rewarded it. So I think there's hope yet.:X)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this opinion applies mainly to the MUD style games, where being killed usually involves losing resources and/or progress you put noticable amounts of time and effort into acquiring. Part of the brilliance of Doom/Quake/Half-Life and the many others in that genre is that when you die, all you lose is the weapons you spent the last 30 seconds running around and gathering up. The victor gets the satisfaction of "I killed you", the loser doesn't feel as upset as when killed in a MUD. Also the fast pace and simpler gameplay makes it likely that most or all of the players will get at least *some* kills. Contrast this to MUDs/MMORPGs where often only the killer(s) will have a "win" to be satisfied about in a given play session, and the victims have nothing to be happy about. In "low impact death" games like Quake, a higher percentage of the population will be in categories A and B than in games like Everquest.
I designed the "DragonSpeak" scripting language in my game Furcadia primarily to be easy to learn and easy to use, rather than for power. I've seen 12 year old girls pick it up with ease and make fun things with it. I also know one guy that got really good at it, and then when he took his first programming class in high school, realized to his surprise that he was the best student in the class. Anyway we do need better editing tools and such, but I'm fairly proud of the language design in a lot of ways.
(End shameless bragging)
Actually the physical slot machines use stepper motors and internal algorithms now to decide where the reels will stop, rather than things like inertia, etc. This was a huge and important breakthrough in the slots industry, because it allows large jackpots. Before that, no combination could be rarer than one over the number of permutations of the reel positions. So you couldn't pay off more than that many to 1, and still have a profitable game. The slots are "less intuitive", but people prefer the higher jackpots anyway.
What it really boils down to is whether people want to gamble in situations with the odds against them or not, whether they have superstitions that they can do something that will make them win on a particular game because they know a good "secret trick", whether they think they're "lucky", etc. Machines that cater well to player's superstitions and their tastes will do well. Those that cater to suspicions of the machine being rigged or unfair, won't. Having a "choice" that doesn't really matter is bad game design, if your players find out. Often they won't, but I wouldn't make a gambling game that way if I could avoid it (or a non-gambling game either, generally!)
The poker game was a tricky one - we had to convince the state of Washington that picking a lottery ticket that determined which of 40 different pools of second-round lottery tickets you could choose from was legal also. I couldn't mimic the exact odds of dealing real 5 card draw poker hands, so I came as close as I could under Washington law (none of the pools of tickets could have a payout percentage of less than 75%, for one thing - some video poker situations have worse odds than that!) Player's choices really did matter, though. If you got three of a kind and kept them, you'd be drawing into the lucrative "drawing to three of a kind" ticket pool. If you just kept a pair, or a high card from that hand, you'd draw into a pool that didn't pay out as much, on average. It was a fun project to work on, and I got my name on a patent application (along with three other guys), so I guess I can say that stealing money back from the White Man and returning it to the Indians is fun and profitable. As for the UK fruit machines... I guess what they're guilty of might not be so much "cheating" as it is "bad game design". And a little deceptive too - but then if you think you're gonna win a machine with a 30% house edge, you'
Of course some of the best writings on the subject (not from academia, btw) are the seminal "Habitat Papers" by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer. Their main home at communities.com is gone, with the collapse of that company - does anybody out there have copies or links to another site that has them?
The problem isn't that a lack of new ideas, the problem is the journalists themselves! While I wish the game magazines would spend more time covering the smaller, more obscure games (the way Computer Gaming World did back in the early to mid 1980s), I can't totally blame them for the current state of affairs. When the magazine publishers discover that having a cover that boasts of lots of screenshots of the new Mario game or the latest sequel from Blizzard makes their magazine sell a lot more copies, and that when they have an exclusive on the first screenshots from a hit game it boosts their sales even more... What do you think they're going to try and get for their next issue? The public shells out more bucks for a lot of coverage of big hits, and coverage of the interesting small games doesn't help sell magazines. If the public would show more demand for that kind of thing, maybe we'd get some better game magazines to choose from.
One of the big problems in the hardcore gamer market is that most players demand millions of dollars in art and animation budgets to produce enough eye-candy to outdo the last round of hit games. This cost won't go away even if all the game engines are licensed and bring the programming costs down thereby. I think the real hope for innovation lies more in the mass market - even if a lot of them are out there now just playing online Hearts and Spades. They have a broader range of tastes and interests, and they've made games like Tetris and Minesweeper and Shanghai big hits, even without much of an art budget. Also they've made The Sims the biggest selling PC game of all time - it was expensive to produce, granted, but it certainly represents a developer putting out a new and different form of gameplay, and the market rewarded it. So I think there's hope yet. :X)