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Part 4
Glory and Shame
by Jonathan Baron
The Problem with Glory
Okay, you know that shame is bad, but there are other emotions multi-player gaming can tap into that are quite positive; namely, shame's opposite, glory. Shame can feed glory - the greater the shame, the greater the feeling of glory. What did Conan say when asked what's good in life?
But there are plenty of opportunities for glory, or at least opportunities to reward players and make them feel good about themselves, that don't require the other players be humiliated. What then is the problem with glory? Ask yourself this question: what is the problem with money? Stressing glory, even when it comes without shaming others, emphasizes achievement over development. Although we may think we're motivated by recognition in multi-player games (and, the more competitive people would argue, in most of life's activities), the reason we keep coming back after we know what we're doing is due to our development in the social fabric of the game's community. The distinction can be confusing, and I will try to clear it up some. I'll start with the most recognized forms of today's true online games, how they handle issues of achievement versus development, and by extension, how gracefully they manage matters of glory and shame.
*Pure Meritocracy - the Ultimate Glory Game*
In the massively multi-player realm, this sort of game is best represented by the multi-player air combat simulation. This can also apply to some degree to the first person shooter, but I will restrict my comments to the air combat sim, as it has a long, established history. These games demand skills rare in human beings, skills that you're expected to master to become a force in the community. Earning respect here is not like religion, as devotion alone won't get you there. If you can't think in terms of three-dimensional geometry, and interpolate multiple vectors in your head, then you'll never achieve star status here. It doesn't matter how many hours you play. There is no cumulative character scheme. You cannot earn extra hit points for your fighter aircraft. Put another way, achievement and development are very closely coupled.
Glory and shame here are unambiguous. The two major examples of this genre broadcast notice of your demise, when you perish, to everyone in the game world at that time. One goes so far as to broadcast the game names of both the victor and the vanquished. Not surprisingly, both games have an unspoken ethic that approves of, encourages in fact, attacks with words as well as war planes. Finally, both player communities prefer to resolve major disputes through duels. If they could issue dueling challenges by slapping each other with gloves, they would. Yes, most of the players of these games are men.
That said, both have developed communities that have, over time, matured to include members that aren't hot shot fighter pilots. This is, in part, due to the spiritual influence of the underlying subject matter of these games; that is, aviation in an important and actual war that is still in living memory. In part this is due to the sheer age of the genre. Its first example, Air Warrior, is 12 years old. The point is that the ultimate depth and eventual development of elders, as opposed to just killers, in these communities was not a direct product of the design of these games originally.
*Multiplayer air combat sims like Air Warrior heavily emphasize glory and shame through achievement*
Is this genre successful? Few genres in computer gaming have been as enduring; indeed, in computer years, the genre dates back to the Pleistocene epoch. Is it a worthy model of multi-player game design? Yes, if you'd prefer a small, dedicated customer base. Ninety percent of the people who try these games don't hang around. Quite simply the glory and shame levels are so high, in particular the shame level for new players, that there will only be a mass market for this sort of game when society as a whole gives over to the worship of sadomasochism.
*Cumulative Character Games - The Devoted All Go to Heaven*
Best represented by the fantasy role-playing adventure genre, in these games you can get there through devotion alone. Nobody, regardless of native skill, intellect, reasoning ability, or reflexes can be anything more than meat in these games until they've put in time acquiring attributes an qualities bestowed by the game itself. Being smart can help you become a force to be reckoned with faster, but you have to pay your dues.
Although at first these may seem like purely achievement-oriented games, probably because you usually spend your first few hundred hours acquiring skills and game stuffs. They do evolve, however, into development games. Players either acquire so much stuff that it loses its meaning and utility, or they carve out a niche for themselves, deciding, in effect, to leave the rat race behind them. In either case, players will eventually develop beyond, or in spite of, the reliance of these games on game-created goodies to drive their game mechanics. Although most examples of the genre are established in early medieval settings, online FRP design is dominated not by the pre-Christian mythology of swords and sorcery, but by pure, raw, unseasoned capitalism. You are who you are because of what you've got, what you've acquired, what you can afford to buy.
*Multiplayer role playing games like Ultima Online focus on development*
But, like the occasional over-wealthy soul, player communities move from achievement to development when they learn there's more to life than money, and you're not something special because you have more of it. Just like the meritocracy-based game, cumulative character games over the years develop rich and warm societies that value their members and bring out the best in them. And just like the meritocracy game, they do so for reasons that seldom have anything at all to do with the intended design of their creators. To-date the only cumulative character online game that was ever designed, from the very first, to create a mature, multi-tiered society where money didn't matter was the original Multiplayer Battle Tech which is, alas, no more.
Next: Achievement Vs. Development
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Part 5
Glory and Shame
by Jonathan Baron
Achievement Vs. Development
The time has come to dispense with abstract and semi-concrete examples. What, once and for all, is the difference between achievement and development in multi-player game design, and what does any of this have to do with glory and shame? Achievement is all about meeting the challenges posed by game design. Development is your growth in the society of the game world. Achievement, in a competitive environment where hundreds or thousands are striving for a sharply defined set of goals, is glory for the winners, shame for the losers and also-rans. Development comes not from your ability to achieve game goals, but rather from the ability of the game, intended or not, to reveal who you are. This is how people can come to believe they genuinely know people they've played an online game with. This is where the lasting bonds among online gamers come from, and is the reason why the emergence of online gaming as a major entertainment medium is inevitable. As game designers, however, it is our preoccupation with the achievement side of the games we make, and the side effects of glory and shame that we, with little thought, unleash upon our customers, that retard this medium's emergence.
*Development over Achievement*
The day we become conscious of the power of our medium, and of the power our design decisions have over it, is the day when online gaming leaves its Keystone Cops, silent movie era. Here are a few suggestions that can help you get there:
* Don't build a pyramid. If your game mechanic can only be mastered by a rarified slice of humanity then you will have the harsh, rough, chest beating culture of the meritocracy game. It may evolve into something better, but if it does, it will be no thanks to you. People tend to think that these games have the testosterone-poisoned cultures they do simply because they involve combat. This is simply not true. Look at Tribes, and its ability to employ a variety of contributions from people in a combat setting. Imagine the culture it would create if it became a massively multi-player offering. Instead of a pyramid, build a game structure like a collapsible camping cup - many interlocking layers, nearly equal in size, needing each other to work.
Starsiege: Tribes allows players to occupy a variety of roles
* Shelter your young. Perhaps the most powerful developmental tools the multi-player game has at its disposal are rites of passage, yet only rarely does it employ them. Don't tack on training to your game. Make raising your players part of the game. One major difference between shame in multi-player games and in real life is that, in the former, it can happen inexplicably and without warning. This, more than any other single factor, drives promising new players away from multi-player games - forever.
* Devise a game design where achievement allows and encourages many different sorts of people to make themselves useful in many different ways. Do that, without falling back to the database driven, cumulative character scheme, and player and community development will follow. Do that, and you'll conquer the world.