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April 27, 2004
Are MMO's fair?
Posted by Clay Shirky
So we don't talk about games much, as the intellectual competition is too fierce (*cough
terranova cough *), but Dave Rickey has an interesting article over at Skotos on
powerlaw distributions in MMO worlds.
He does a thought experiment on the emergence of that characteristically unequal distribution of outcomes in the language of gamers, and comes up with an interesting question and answer:
So very small changes in overall performance can make very big differences in overall result, depending on how the contests are set up. The question becomes: How much of a factor is personal skill, how wide is the distribution in performance? The more of a factor the personal skill of the player is, the faster the dropout rate.
The conclusion we can draw from this is that there are sound psychological and mathematical reasons for the de-emphasis of personal skill in these games, and any efforts to build MMO's around personal-skill based gameplay need to account for these.
If Rickey is right, designing a game that accurately reflects players' relative skills or investment of time will make them _less_ fun for a majority of players.
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1. Michael on April 27, 2004 5:01 PM writes...
Having time invested in a game as valuable thing has lead to much trouble in existing MMO games.
The effect of heavy time investment, or grinding, as it known, creates an environment that makes the casual players feel as if they simply cannot compete in the game. This is the 'less fun' aspect you refer to above.
Player skills on the other hand are a different issue. As Bartle explained ( http://www.brandeis.edu/pubs/jove/HTML/v1/bartle.html ) there are four main attributes of MMO players. Achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers.
Depending on which attribute is strongest determines the value you place on actual player skill. For example, socializers tend to find skills less important, while killers find them paramount.
Personally, I'm KSE on the Bartle Test and find skill important and achievement to be boring as all get out. To me, if you de-emphasis skill, I won't want to play your game.
But socializers and achievers tend to dominate MMO games and designers want to make them happy. How do they do this? De-emphasis skills and make interaction and leveling important.
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