Game designers can indeed give reasonable, logical forethought to the type of behavior they are trying to incent, and build rewards into their game to steer players towards game and community goals.
If they incent cut-throat destruction and murder, ruthless efficiency and theft, that is what they will get more often than not.
If they incent community building, cooperation, relaxation, and generosity, they might get that more often than not.
However, just because you incent something does not mean you will get it. Nor does it mean you can change public and player attitudes automagically. That requires social analysis, proper marketing, and more metagame social design.
If you incent your players to "play nice," but you attract a bunch of jackass PK'ers, they might need to have really powerful sociological 2x4's applied to their foreheads repeatedly before they decide to get with the program and play well with others.
Those types of social changes happen slowly, or not at all. Sometimes those not interested in your welfare might take such exception to the game rules and metagame structure you want to inculcate that they will do everything in their power to trash your vision.
In such a case -- where some portion of the demographic just will not adhere to the metagame requirements for the proper community -- you might do best be policing people out of your game and towards other games in order to let your game thrive. You might find that if you kick some people out of your game, suddenly others might come flocking. Yet if you kick people out in the wrong way, even one ouster of an annoying player can lead to a defection of otherwise happy players.
So even metagame community policing can have game theory applied to it to model distruptive customers, disciplinary actions or non-actions, and best payoffs for all players involved.
More I think about it, the more I take exception to the idea people do not play Art or Experimental games. I believe something Experimental and Artistic can also be a hell of a lot of fun, and thus wildly popular and commercially successful. There's no reason something that has great aesthetic values and pushes the envelope of the expected must, by its design, suck as a game or fail as a business. You're sort of saying "HEART OR LUNGS! CHOOSE ONE!" I'd think you need true art (game as art, not just graphics), experimentalism (novelty), solid game science (mechanics, equilibriums, payoffs, etc.), a good sense of fun, and a good business plan to succeed.
The game design community does need to consider what gamer culture is, yet also the kind of culture it is breeding amongst gamers. Take into account what gamers are looking for, but realize context switches are possible. What a gamer thought they wanted from a game might change if a newer, funner game came along that was not part of their schema beforehand.
Pendragon Online bucking the trend of games that reward, like Pavlov with fresh meat paste, that mindless syndrome of kill-things, collect-things, levelling, monster-camping and goblin bonking.
While that is fun perhaps for a while, it is highly hypnotic and mind-numbing. Pendragon Online is going to postulate many gamers would actually like a little more human drama, a little more intellectual interesting possibilities. Romance. Heroism. Narrative. Combat? Sure! But why are you fighting in the first place? Death? You bet. And it might be permanent. (They didn't have thousands of people re-incarnating in the Arthurian literature. You might have to face your own mortality.)
We'll put a lot less sugar-coated pellets in their food dish. "Ding! You've got monster!" If you kill 50 dragons, what's the dramatic value of a dragon? It leads to a dramatic inflation of expectations and a devaluing of heroic adventure. Munchkinism.
Our game turns the challenge around to the players to be actively part of the in-character and out-of-character world-building and world-running teams. We're getting people designing chainmail h
Green Knight Publishing has taken this challenge to heart for the Matter of Britain -- the legends of King Arthur.
We publish King Arthur Pendragon and Pendragon Online, games about the myth, history and literature of Arthurian Britain.
Pendragon Online is under development right now.
Consider it a High School to Post-Graduate level historical, literary or scientific research project, Internet drama school, or what have you.
We're drawing from Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur," the French "Vulgate" Lancelot-Grail cycle, and dozens of works of medieval and sub-Roman history form archaeology to culinary delights to religion to zoology.
The game will be a virtual world -- King Arthur's Britain after he's drawn the Sword in the Stone, and married Guenever, yet before he's defeated the Saxons at Badon Hill or founded Camelot.
We'll likely contrast ourselves with "Dark Age of Camelot" in the fact that we have "genuine Arthurian content." The actual Arthurian heros and heroines will be cast -- played by real players who will control their actions and political factions. Morgan le Fay will be her wily self -- but not an enemy of Arthur's at this time.
The game will also cover issues like cultural clashes between Saxons and Britons. While this is a fantasy based on medieval romances, and not truly historical, it will still bring to the player's attention the issues of the historical 6th Century: Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Picts, Irish and Scots all closing in on the Romano-British kingdoms.
This was an article I wrote up to highlight the essence of the discussion.
We are already at a few dozen staff members -- all of whom pledge to help create this virtual world. That open door to creative control as a coder -- a StoryBuilder of a new world, and to learn again about this history and myth of our real world -- is what our players get for their monthly fee. Not just the ability to log in and camp monsters, which I find sadly Pavlovian and ultimately empty in experiential value.
We'll have our own visceral satisfactions -- knocking your opponent "over their cruppers" (as they call unhorsing an opponent head-over-heels in the joust) -- and we might even split a few skulls down to the teeth as they did in the legends. But the point of the world is not just to rack up body counts and steal everything you can get your hands on.
Before anyone jumps down my throat "There are people already earning their way playing Counterstrike" and other folks who are minting new online game items, etc., hear me out...
This is just the "cottage industry" times.
I'm talking more like "player unions" -- Actor's Equity or Major League Baseball. Recognition of this as a profession you go to college for. Something you can even get a scholarship for.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
If they incent cut-throat destruction and murder, ruthless efficiency and theft, that is what they will get more often than not.
If they incent community building, cooperation, relaxation, and generosity, they might get that more often than not.
However, just because you incent something does not mean you will get it. Nor does it mean you can change public and player attitudes automagically. That requires social analysis, proper marketing, and more metagame social design.
If you incent your players to "play nice," but you attract a bunch of jackass PK'ers, they might need to have really powerful sociological 2x4's applied to their foreheads repeatedly before they decide to get with the program and play well with others. Those types of social changes happen slowly, or not at all. Sometimes those not interested in your welfare might take such exception to the game rules and metagame structure you want to inculcate that they will do everything in their power to trash your vision.
In such a case -- where some portion of the demographic just will not adhere to the metagame requirements for the proper community -- you might do best be policing people out of your game and towards other games in order to let your game thrive. You might find that if you kick some people out of your game, suddenly others might come flocking. Yet if you kick people out in the wrong way, even one ouster of an annoying player can lead to a defection of otherwise happy players.
So even metagame community policing can have game theory applied to it to model distruptive customers, disciplinary actions or non-actions, and best payoffs for all players involved.
More I think about it, the more I take exception to the idea people do not play Art or Experimental games. I believe something Experimental and Artistic can also be a hell of a lot of fun, and thus wildly popular and commercially successful. There's no reason something that has great aesthetic values and pushes the envelope of the expected must, by its design, suck as a game or fail as a business. You're sort of saying "HEART OR LUNGS! CHOOSE ONE!" I'd think you need true art (game as art, not just graphics), experimentalism (novelty), solid game science (mechanics, equilibriums, payoffs, etc.), a good sense of fun, and a good business plan to succeed.
The game design community does need to consider what gamer culture is, yet also the kind of culture it is breeding amongst gamers. Take into account what gamers are looking for, but realize context switches are possible. What a gamer thought they wanted from a game might change if a newer, funner game came along that was not part of their schema beforehand.
Pendragon Online bucking the trend of games that reward, like Pavlov with fresh meat paste, that mindless syndrome of kill-things, collect-things, levelling, monster-camping and goblin bonking.
While that is fun perhaps for a while, it is highly hypnotic and mind-numbing. Pendragon Online is going to postulate many gamers would actually like a little more human drama, a little more intellectual interesting possibilities. Romance. Heroism. Narrative. Combat? Sure! But why are you fighting in the first place? Death? You bet. And it might be permanent. (They didn't have thousands of people re-incarnating in the Arthurian literature. You might have to face your own mortality.)
We'll put a lot less sugar-coated pellets in their food dish. "Ding! You've got monster!" If you kill 50 dragons, what's the dramatic value of a dragon? It leads to a dramatic inflation of expectations and a devaluing of heroic adventure. Munchkinism.
Our game turns the challenge around to the players to be actively part of the in-character and out-of-character world-building and world-running teams. We're getting people designing chainmail h
We publish King Arthur Pendragon and Pendragon Online, games about the myth, history and literature of Arthurian Britain.
Pendragon Online is under development right now.
Consider it a High School to Post-Graduate level historical, literary or scientific research project, Internet drama school, or what have you.
We're drawing from Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur," the French "Vulgate" Lancelot-Grail cycle, and dozens of works of medieval and sub-Roman history form archaeology to culinary delights to religion to zoology.
The game will be a virtual world -- King Arthur's Britain after he's drawn the Sword in the Stone, and married Guenever, yet before he's defeated the Saxons at Badon Hill or founded Camelot.
We'll likely contrast ourselves with "Dark Age of Camelot" in the fact that we have "genuine Arthurian content." The actual Arthurian heros and heroines will be cast -- played by real players who will control their actions and political factions. Morgan le Fay will be her wily self -- but not an enemy of Arthur's at this time.
The game will also cover issues like cultural clashes between Saxons and Britons. While this is a fantasy based on medieval romances, and not truly historical, it will still bring to the player's attention the issues of the historical 6th Century: Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Picts, Irish and Scots all closing in on the Romano-British kingdoms.
Pendragon Online as University
This was an article I wrote up to highlight the essence of the discussion.
We are already at a few dozen staff members -- all of whom pledge to help create this virtual world. That open door to creative control as a coder -- a StoryBuilder of a new world, and to learn again about this history and myth of our real world -- is what our players get for their monthly fee. Not just the ability to log in and camp monsters, which I find sadly Pavlovian and ultimately empty in experiential value.
We'll have our own visceral satisfactions -- knocking your opponent "over their cruppers" (as they call unhorsing an opponent head-over-heels in the joust) -- and we might even split a few skulls down to the teeth as they did in the legends. But the point of the world is not just to rack up body counts and steal everything you can get your hands on.
In Arthur's Britain, honor matters.
-Peter Corless.
Green Knight Publishing
gawaine@greenknight.com
http://www.greenknight.com
Before anyone jumps down my throat "There are people already earning their way playing Counterstrike" and other folks who are minting new online game items, etc., hear me out... This is just the "cottage industry" times. I'm talking more like "player unions" -- Actor's Equity or Major League Baseball. Recognition of this as a profession you go to college for. Something you can even get a scholarship for.
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.