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| On Bungie and the Value of the Player's Time | |
| Posted By: Cody Miller | Date: 12/13/10 2:12 p.m. |
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At first glance, things like achievements and challenges seem like good ideas. Challenges in particular, are like a set of constantly refreshing achievements, giving players new things to do ensuring they will never be bored. Pretty cool right? I thought so at first, but the more I look at it and see it in practice, the more worried I get, particularly for Bungie's next game. One upon a time there were only arcade games. You had to design arcade games with a certain philosophy, since both the time of the arcade operator and the time of the player was valuable. The arcade operator's time was valuable, since every second a player isn't putting money into the machine they are not making money. Floor space is limited, so if your game doesn't make money it will be replaced with one that does. So, you can't design your games to be long and drawn out, nor easy and boring. Arcade games start throwing things at the player right away, and are extremely streamlined with little filler - padding costs the operator money. Then there is the player's time. With any number of games right beside them, the player can simply go and choose another if they are bored. It only costs a quarter, so if your game bores them they can easily move on, potentially during play. So, you must design your games to be engaging and interesting at all times, since any lapse will result in the player leaving for another game. You keep players playing by making the game complex and fun, and encourage them to master it since masters get to play much longer on a quarter. This is a great philosophy, since everybody's time is respected. In particular though, these games are good for players. Every moment has to be interesting, and the game only entices you to play because it is fun. Thus, player plays the game only because he is having fun. You can't trick players into playing by using reward systems, since this funs afoul with arcade operators. Fast forward to Halo. Halo's multiplayer still very much embodied the arcade philosophy. There are no gimmicks, no achievements, no commendations, no challenges, no credits, and no armory. Halo's sole draw is its fun factor, because that's all that is there. The only reason players get together and have a Halo LAN is because they simply enjoy playing Halo. Something changed though, something that will alter how Bungie and in fact many developers design their games, and that is the subscription based multiplayer model with stat tracking. With Xbox live, players are paying a yearly fee to play multiplayer online. This in an of itself is not a bad thing; after all lots of people paid private servers to dial in and play doom back in the day. The problem though, comes with both Microsoft and game developers changing their games in order to maximize subscription number, and renewals. Let's take a look. Xbox live has stat tracking, in that you can see how many players are playing a particular game at any given time. Both publishers, and players seem to place a lot of emphasis on these numbers. Publishers look at the numbers and see one of their games on top, and use those numbers to boast its success. Players likewise use the numbers to defend their favorite titles (COD vs Halo anybody?). So developers are implicitly caught in the middle of all this now, and are pressured, either directly or indirectly, to get high numbers and to keep them high. Getting high numbers means your game is popular, but keeping them high means that your game is contributing to the sale and renewal of subscriptions to XBL. And so, we see a shift away from the arcade philosophy, because fun is no longer the only consideration when designing games. Keeping the players playing is a consideration now. Unlike the arcade however, which kept players playing through fun and complexity alone, console and PC developers can now be afforded the luxury of manipulative player reward systems, since the arcade operator is totally out of the equation at this point. There is no need to streamline games anymore, since the conflict between operators and players is no longer present. You can afford to draw things out and make the player play longer. It started in Halo 3 with multiplayer achievements. These achievements were only accessible via xbox live (and not via LAN), while at the same time mixing in elements of luck. Do you see where this is going? If you have multiplayer achievements that rely on capitalizing on infrequent situations, players will be inclined to play repeatedly in order to get that achievement. It is really quite similar to a random drop in Diablo 2, except instead of playing over and over until an item drops, you play over and over until 2 players line up so that you can kill them both with your spartan laser. Reach of course takes this a step further with commendations and challenges. Is it any coincidence that most of the challenges, and all the commendations are grind based? Kill X number of people in multiplayer. Get X number of multikills. They are designed this way in order to keep you playing. What should happen when the maps packs come out? You have 1000/1000 on Halo Reach and you get the Noble map pack. You open up your games window, and you see that you still have 1000/1000 in Reach, but below it is the noble map pack with 0/250. That's how it SHOULD work. But it doesn't. Do you know why? Well because that doesn't entice players. Instead, when the noble map pack comes out, your score in Reach goes from 1000/1000 to 1000/1250 without doing anything! Your perfection is taken away, and if you are a completionist, you are now more compelled to buy the map pack. What's more, the map pack achievements are all multiplayer with a dash of luck… So why is this bad? You say "But Cody, I am having fun getting these achievements and buying things in the armory, why does it matter?". The answer is twofold. On one hand, developers are treating your time as a commodity to be manipulated through the illusion of progression. Rather than merely creating a game, and leaving it up to you to choose when to spend your time playing, they are manipulating you to spend as much time as possible, not for your benefit, but for theirs. It's not for your benefit, since such systems should not be necessary - players play as long as they are having fun, so any effort to artificially extend that is an effort to get you playing beyond when you would stop having fun. Then there is the notion of opportunity cost. One cannot do two things at once, so whenever you do something you are giving something else up. If I am playing Dodonpachi, it means I can't be playing Street Fighter. If you are playing Reach, it means you are not doing any number of the things that you could be doing. The insidious part of all this, is that through this manipulation, players are misled to believe their time has real value. I will explain. Let's say you have a choice between 2 games, Starcraft 2 or World of Warcraft. Let's say a player invests heavily into each game and gets good at them. The Starcraft player will be able to play well, making good decisions and winning a lot of games. The World of Warcraft player will have a mastery of spells and skills, as well as a high level and good gear. Now, what would happen if Blizzard's servers crashed and everything were lost? Your win loss record in Starcraft, and your character and all your gear in WoW would be wiped. Who would be better off? Well, the WoW player would still have his knowledge of the game and the spells, but he would lose their character and gear, requiring hours and hours of work to re-obtain. The Starcraft player on the other hand, loses nothing. He is still a skilled player, and could instantly start a game and play at the same level as he did before the crash. Thus, the Starcraft player is better off, since his time with the game gave him things which cannot be taken away. His skills are a part of him, etched into the neurons of his brain, whereas the WoW player was dependent upon bits on a server. One could say that the Starcraft player's time is well spent, because no matter how much time he spends with the game, nothing can be taken away from him - each moment he betters himself and it is meaningful. Yet, far more players are addicted to WoW, because the game uses psychological tricks to make players feel as if they are accomplishing something and having fun. They may be having genuine fun, but their time is being robbed from them. Their opportunity cost is being able to play a game or do an activity that actually benefits them. Not only that, but is in the developer's best interests to rob as much time from the players as possible to make as much money as possible. This is not black and white, since the player retains something valuable by playing nearly every game. It's a matter of degrees. On one end of the spectrum is Farmville, while on the other end Starcraft Brood War. Closer to Farmville are things like WoW, with largely external accomplishments but requiring the players have some knowledge of the game and interact socially, and closer to BW are games like Reach which is largely skill based but features the credits system to encourage grinding. So even if Bungie's new game isn't an MMO (but especially if it is), I feel it is going to be based around treating my time as a commodity. Why? Bungie's job page has an opening for someone to oversee the creation of a 'player investment system'. This suggests that such a system will be a more fundamental part of their next game than even with Reach, and such systems are by their nature directly oppositional to the creation of real fun. If your game is fun and complex enough, such a system is not necessary, so it is either there to be a crutch because you can't make a fun game, or it is there to supplement a fun game to keep players playing beyond when they would otherwise get bored. Especially if Bungie's next game is an MMO, and even if it isn't an RPG, its design philosophy runs afoul of respecting the player's time. What good is an MMO with a persistent world if people aren't in it? Thus, the main concern is to keep players in the world even if it's free to play. One need not kill the player every 90 seconds to embrace the arcade philosophy of player respect; after all Halo 1 embodies this completely with no manipulation and no grind in the multiplayer system, while remaining the best of all the Halos (Reach's Beta is a close second). With each further Bungie release though, we are heading farther and farther from this ideal, and that saddens me. I am interested in what Bungie has in the pipeline, but I do really hope that it's a game that entices people through depth, fun and complexity rather than player investment rewards. The best rewards are the ones we keep that can't be taken away.
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