Some isolated quotes:
- But some choose to play it in ways that doesn’t allow others to play the way they like.
- That’s where the anger comes from.
- They prevent the fun of others.
- You have rights only until it impedes the rights of others.
- Others want to be able to play the way they choose too. Because when they can’t they leave. It’s that simple.
- When you spend more time in the MA you’ll start to notice irritating patterns.
Those are good points points but those things are hardwired into the game.
That sentiment was expressed very early in the evolution of the game. I'm thinking of Jonathan Baron’s 1999 article “Glory and Shame: Powerful Psychology in Multiplayer Online Games”, which referenced Air Warrior. The article explores how glory and shame work in online gaming, their consequences, and how they influence the culture that develops within a game. It describes something that seems particularly relevant here.
Baron argues that, in competitive online games, “glory is achieved at the price of shaming others.” He specifically discusses multiplayer air combat games where kills are publicly announced, identifying both victor and vanquished. That is exactly what our text buffer does. When you kill someone, everybody sees who killed whom. Your success is therefore not private: your glory is somebody else's publicly recorded defeat. The two go together.
The same principle extends beyond individual kills. To win the war we must take other players' bases, achieve local numerical superiority, destroy their equipment and resources, and generally make it harder for them to fight back. Our success necessarily means players on the other side are losing something.
So, expressed rather bluntly, a large part of the competitive structure of the game amounts to pissing off as many enemy players as possible while preventing them from doing the same to you. You prevent them from playing the way they like, they sometimes get frustrated and angry.
That does not mean players set out with the intention of annoying other people. They are simply trying to win. But winning involves killing enemy players in front of an audience, taking their bases, destroying resources such as hangars and field guns, and using superior numbers, strategy, tactics or teamwork to prevent them achieving their objectives. You prevent them from doing what they want and you do it so everyone can see.
Putting other players on the receiving end of defeat and loss is therefore not an accidental side effect of victory. It is built into the process by which victory is achieved. Whether any particular player actually gets pissed off by it is another matter, but that some will is an almost inevitable consequence of the requirements for victory.
Baron points out that this can have a serious downside. In multiplayer air combat games the levels of glory and shame can become so high, particularly for new players, that many simply don't stay.
That doesn't mean every player is motivated by glory and shame. People play for combat, skill, teamwork, immersion, flying particular aircraft and plenty of other reasons. But the competitive achievement system itself is fundamentally adversarial: success for one player or side is produced by imposing defeat, loss or frustration on another.
Glory and shame therefore have a powerful effect on game dynamics, player relationships and, inevitably, some of the dialogue we see here and on Channel 200.
That raises an interesting design problem: how do you preserve enough glory and competitive consequence to make winning meaningful without allowing the corresponding shame and frustration to drive players away?
Baron does offer some answers, particularly protecting new players and designing games so that different kinds of players can make useful contributions. We already have attempts at balancing mechanisms here: training for newcomers, restrictions on aircraft and vehicle availability for larger sides, and so on. But all of them have costs. Restrictions frustrate players on the larger side. Being overwhelmed by superior numbers frustrate players on the smallest side, particularly when the imbalance happens at regular daily intervals. Training cannot make a new player competitive with an experienced one quickly enough to prevent many from leaving before becoming hooked.
It is a difficult balance because conflict and frustration are not unfortunate things that occasionally intrude into the game. They are consequences of the way competitive success is created. If I shoot you down, capture your base, destroy your equipment or prevent you achieving your objective, I have succeeded precisely because you have failed. Making those successes and failures visible to everybody adds to the glory and shame.
So perhaps saying “the object of the game is to piss off the enemy” is deliberately crude, but there is a serious point behind it. Nobody needs to be trying to upset anybody. We are simply trying to win. It just happens that many of the things we have to do to win are exactly the things most likely to frustrate the people trying to stop us.
Perhaps the real design challenge is not to remove glory and shame, because doing that would remove much of what makes victory and defeat matter. It is to keep them in balance: enough glory to make success rewarding, without so much shame that defeat stops being fun and players decide they would rather play something else.
But some degree of shame, disappointment and frustration is probably unavoidable in a genuinely competitive game. If one player's success necessarily requires another player's failure, those emotions cannot be eliminated entirely without also removing much of what makes the competition meaningful.
So part of the solution may not be trying to design them out of the game, but helping players put defeat in perspective, cope with it, learn from it and come back wanting another go.
That has always worked for me.
Badboy
