Should MMO developers try not to get us hooked?
Filed under: Culture, Game mechanics, Opinion
There have been debates and discussions since the days of EverQuest (or EverCrack) about the addictive nature of MMOs. Here at Massively we've repeatedly discussed the nature of addiction. Whether it's commentary from Dr. Phil, gender-based addiction studies, China's schizophrenic attitude towards online games, crazy gaming spouses, or out-and-out comparisons between MMOs and drugs ... we've talked about it.Whether MMO addiction is all perception or has some basis in reality, it's a topic of discussion that just won't die. I think this stems, at its base, from some basic components of MMO game design. Massive games are designed, simply by their very nature, to be played for long periods of time. The speed of going from 20-60 in World of Warcraft may have been increased, but it still takes a fantastically long time. Compare 'beating' WoW by hitting 70 with finishing the story in a game like BioShock or Half-Life 2. What many argue is the best game of last year, Portal, takes about as long to complete as some guilds use just to get organized for one raid.
Should designers try to make these long play sessions unappealing? Cameron Sorden over at Random Battle wonders aloud about this, and I'm forced to wonder along with him. Read on for my thoughts.
Cameron's commentary is based on an original article over at GamesIndustry.biz. That piece covered a meeting of the UK-based Children's Charities Coalition for Internet Safety, a group trying to keep kids safe online. While that's an admirable goal, executive secretary John Carr delved into the realm of design when he opined that online games should 'dis-incentivise gamers from long periods of play'. The way he offers to do this is to '[allow] players to achieve the highest scoring aspects of a title early on in the game's life cycle.'
Essentially, he's saying that the big-ticket experiences in a game should be front-loaded. Imagine doing all your raiding at level 20, or getting epics at level 15, and I think you'll get what he's driving at. Cameron talks a bit about the challenges this could pose for game designers, and eventually concludes by saying this is more a social issue than one that can be solved by tweaking mechanics.
Says Cameron, "Developers shouldn't be artificially limiting how long someone can play a game based on a state-mandated "appropriate play time limit," or something (which is the ultimate logical conclusion of his argument). What is this, China?"That's a pithy way of addressing the issue, but ultimately doesn't solve some of the deeper problems MMOs create. The next time you want to be thoroughly depressed, go do a survey of all of your MMO characters (on all of your games) by using the /played command. Add up all the time across all your characters and you'll see how much of the last X number of years you've spent in an online world. For me, as you might imagine, that number is pretty high. My oldest WoW character, for example, has been in-world for over three weeks. Itinerant gamers like myself (and you, I imagine) who have characters spread across games from here to Meridian 59 have even more to sigh about.
I feel like the answer to this problem is more design than social. Publishers should be working to ensure that users are educated, true. That said, it's hard to take "don't play too long" with a straight face given the grind-time needed to play some of these games. It seems a little disingenuous to me that 'tip of the day' messages tell you not to play too long, and the first thing you see in game is another event, contest, or quest intended to keep you in-world for another span of hours.
At the same time, it's foolish to think that you should get all the good stuff up front, as Mr. Carr seems to suggest. He seems to be missing a basic understanding of the whole risk/reward structure games are built on. Instead, designers should look to provide meaningful experiences in smaller chunks; if you play for 24 hours in seven days that's not so good. 24 hours spread out over a month is a lot more understandable. And designers are responding to this kind of thinking, across many of the new games we see on the horizon.
Warhammer Online is attempting to bring the raid and PvP experiences down to a more approachable level. Public quests are basically raiding without the setup time; instant-action large group experiences that can be enjoyed no matter how many people are participating. Most of WAR's PvP instances are going to be timed to avoid endless deadlocking. SOE's upcoming titles The Agency and Free Realms are also built to avoid requring long play sessions. Agency missions will come in short, medium, and long flavors, allowing players to customize and evening's play experience as they see fit. Free Realms, as a title aimed at a slightly younger crowd, requires nothing from the player when it comes to time commitments. Heck, you'll be rewarded just for wandering around the world.
Playing an MMO has been referred to as the "Fine Art of Wasting Time". It's tempting to think that way. But for every session spent meaninglessly trudging through levels how many nights have you had a blast chatting with guildies on vent, or arguing with PUG members, or actually playing the game with your friends? It seems like so much of the MMO experience is the not-playing parts that sometimes actually getting in and interacting with the game world gets left behind. What we're really looking at, when it comes to MMO addiction, isn't so much addiction to gameplay or world design but an addiction to the shared experience. Spending time with people isn't so bad at the end of the day, right?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-17-2008 @ 3:43PM
Scopique said...
Good post, although asking developers to not get the players hooked like like asking car manufacturers to not offer a smooth ride and a decent stero system, or a restaurant to not offer delicious and ingenious cusine, or a TV network to not offer engaging and interesting programming.
Every product and producer has one goal: addict the consumer to the product. Not necessarily as a physical addiction, but they want to position their product as a "thought leader", to be the first thing that the consumer thinks of when he want's to eat, watch TV, or play a game.
In the case of MMOs, the developers main goal is to retain the subscriber. Their current method is, of course, to lead the players towards that "just one more quest and I'll call it quits" feeling. Really, this should have nothing to do with the amount of time one spends in-game, but it does. Some quests are amazingly short and effective, while others are just so friggin drawn out that you wish you could slap the NPC who gave you the quest in the first place.
The more time a single quest takes, the fewer quests that the developers have to create in the world. If WoW (or at this point, EQ Classic) were nothing but a bunch of 5 minute mini-games, consider how many of these mini-games there would have to be to entice the player to stick around more then a month! These MMOs would end up being more like WebKinz then the MMO genre we know today.
But how long a player plays per session is always in their own hands. Some people play for an hour a night, or just a few a week. Others neglect their families, or drop dead at an internet cafe. I don't think you can really say that developers have a say in how "addictive" the players find their games, really. Some people live for WoW, others have tried it and have quit. It's not the game, it's the player.
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3-17-2008 @ 4:45PM
Ghen said...
If you have an addictive personality then you should steer clear. Same thing with drinking and gambling. If you can't hack it, don't jump in to begin with. Maybe MMOAnon needs to be created?
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3-17-2008 @ 5:00PM
GRT said...
"Add up all the time across all your characters and you'll see how much of the last X number of years you've spent in an online world. For me, as you might imagine, that number is pretty high"
If only there was a /played command for watching tv. We could run that against these people griping about us spending too much time playing games.
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3-17-2008 @ 8:21PM
spiral-soldier said...
Pfft. Your definitions of value are arbitrary anyway. The time you spend working on a wow character vs achieving a life goal are equally worthless. One day you'll die and all of it will have been for nothing.
My /played time is in the months range. I'm far more ashamed of my years of /lived time. It's not gonna contribute anything to my afterlife. At least WoW has contributed memories to my life after I finished playing. Experiences I can share with other people.
Obviously since ultimately WoW is a part of life, those memories and experiences are worthless as well, but I think the relative comparison still stands.
WoW means more to your life than your life means to the universe.
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3-17-2008 @ 10:19PM
politico said...
These games are very deliberately designed to take as much time as possible to preclude other activities and keep people playing and paying. Look at WoW for instance. It has badge rewards and the good rewards take 100 or so badges. If you do a heroic instance you get around 3-5 badges and it takes between 1 and 2 hours depending on group quality. That means for one item you will have to play and average of 33 hours. Considering you have something like 14 equipment slots thats a lot of time. PVP rewards are very similar. A good item takes around 15000 honor and most players will get just under 1000 honor an hour, thus one PVP item takes at least 15 hours of battlegrounding possible more if there are long ques or you lose a lot.
Raids could be more rewarding then they are, but they're purposely made unrewarding to keep people doing them multiple times. Instead of having 2 drops from a loot table of 20 options it would be very easy to give everyone a token for their armor or weapon of choice upon completion of a raid, thus if they did the raid 4 times they could get the 4 items from the boss they wanted. This of course would never be done since doing the same encounter 30 times to get a 25 person raid most of the drops it needs for the next tier (lets say 6 hours per run, 30 runs, 180 hours).
This is where the job analogy comes in. Do you spend 40 hours at a job you probably don't like that much because its fun? No you do it to keep up because you feel a need to accomplish this or that financial objective (buy this, rent that). The same thing is what drives behavior in WoW. People don't want to be left behind in progression so they raid 30+ hours a week and spend all that time doing BGs and heroic dungeons. Then of course a new patch makes the last tier of gear obsolete leading to another set of 30+ hour a week raids and so on. At the end of all that the cap goes up and everything becomes totally useless leading to, you guessed it, a whole new process. I wish more games....any games...would use an objective oriented process where if you can do the raid, you get the item instead of a grind oriented process that asks you to redo things you've done once 100 times.
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