A couple of years ago something happened while I was designing the levels on a LEGO video game that I’ll never forget. After the programming team added the “lives” to the mechanics of the game, our lead programmer demonstrated a new found enthusiasm for the project. Suddenly, he experienced some challenge and actually enjoyed playing the game. He was so thrilled that he let all of us on the development team know.
What changed a kids sandbox video game — a software toy as it’s also known — into something that worthwhile playing? Quite simply, by adding a finite number of lives that the player could lose if they played poorly we introduced the risk of losing into the game.
So what is risk and why do we need to have it in our MMOs?
Risk Defined
One definition of risk according to Merriam-Webster dictionary is this:
1. possibility of loss or injury
Robert Cialdini in his breakthrough book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion makes the case that people are more motivated by fear of loss than the joy of gain. This explains why the adding the “lives” mechanic in that LEGO game made the lead programmer suddenly start to caring about how he played — he just didn’t want to lose his precious lives.
When I ponder risk in a gaming sense, I also think of it as something that I as a player am wagering in order to play the game and more importantly succeed in the game. Risk can also be seen as an entry fee for a contestant. This fee can be expressed as time, material goods, even reputation or in the case of gladiatorial games in ancient Rome one’s very life.
Risk is a part of life and we are all acquainted with its pervasive influence. Life itself could be characterized as a constant battle to ascertain the correct risk to reward ratio for one’s abilities, situation and current comfort level. We see risk given serious contemplation in the realm of financial investing as certain investments are higher risk with potential high yields and unsuitable for certain people. Conversely, investing in secure bonds that pay almost nothing are not for everyone but may be perfect for those who are risk adverse.
We as humans naturally want to mitigate risk as much as possible and maximize rewards. Those people that learn how to risk usually succeed; those that never risk rarely succeed. Those people who continued to live in the small northeast factory town where I grew up often come to mind as examples of the latter.
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
As MMO players, we risk and face dangers because there is some kind of reward or payoff while we play and at the end of the play experience. If the reward is not adequate then we are less likely to participate and play. The quality of the reward is often the motivational carrot for why we risk.
So logically the following must be true: Risk without adequate reward is problematic; reward without adequate risk is likewise problematic.
For game designers there is at least something useful to be learned from games of chance: the higher the wager, the greater the risk, the greater the reward. The person who bets his life savings on a single toss of a dice is exposing himself to great risk as well as the possibility of great winnings.
In the MMO world, we often see examples of player dissatisfaction because of the failure to properly tune risk versus reward ratio. For example, a poorly tuned dungeon with mobs that are too hard and that drop loot that is considered weak results in players avoiding the dungeon and seeking greener pastures where there are better rewards and less risks.
Why Skill Matters
In the example I gave of the video game I was scripting, we had a very simplistic and almost childish game suddenly become more enjoyable and engaging all due to the addition of the lives mechanic. I recall my lead programmer talking about how he had to start playing better in order to avoid losing those precious lives. The result was that he stopped being sloppy, started caring about his performance and began to make an effort to play better.
All good games have one characteristic in common: they all motivate the player to become better.
What we can see here is that for risk to be leveraged effectively as an element of game design, there has to be some way for the player to mitigate that risk or risk becomes an arbitrary punishment. The way to do this is to ensure that your game requires skill on the part of your players. Without the requirement for skill all you have left is a game of chance where luck or a random number generator determines the outcome — not the abilities and choices of the player.
The art of game design is knowing how to calibrate the perfect balance between risk and reward to create adequate challenges that entice players to improve their skills.
Why Risk Is a Fundamental Building Block of MMOs
As a MMO player I often think back to those early thrilling days of EverQuest when your every step was potentially your last or would be followed by painful corpse retrieval and subsequent requests to get resurrections from clerics. We didn’t need the pyrotechnics and eye candy of current MMOs as any bit of small progress or accomplishment and surviving for another day seemed reward enough.
Almost every aspect of the EverQuest game world and mechanics was laden with excessive risk. There was lots of risk and very little reward back then. Even a crust of bread is like a banquet for a starving person.
Was EverQuest infused with excessive risk? Was the risk and danger a substitute for bona fide gameplay?
I’m torn on this question because on one hand it seems to me injecting your game with copious amounts of risk alone isn’t enough to rescue a poor game. Even a simple children’s game like Tic Tac Toe or a coin toss could be made very risky depending on what is wagered.
Yet on the other hand, MMOs are more advanced than mere games, they are in fact complex virtual worlds. So the MMO designer has a far bigger responsibility than just creating good game mechanics, she must create a believable virtual world for the MMO player to experience and inhabit. In order to make a virtual world seem more alive, risk and the threat of loss (money, gear, death, reputation, experience) is used as a tool to elevate the sense of drama in order to compensate for the artificial nature of the world.
Risk in Single-Player Games?
As the MMO industry moves toward the glorified single-player MMO model it’s useful to look briefly at risk or lack of it in single-player games. Most single-player games are essentially a risk free medium thanks to the invention of the “save game” mechanic which is basically an insurance policy against the loss of the player’s time. Even still, there is a small element of risk as players can lose progress if they fail to use that feature. Also there’s the still the “lives” convention that many video games use and leverage to this very day as I noted in the beginning of this article.
But to any serious observer of both MMOs and single-player games, there is deep chasm of difference in the level of risk.
What is truly unique about MMOs is that they are played and experienced in real time with no option to save your progress and turn back the clock.
This sense of immediacy and unpredictability resulting from unafraid designers who infused their virtual worlds with risk and danger helped to make the MMO experience truly revolutionary compared to limitations of single-player video games.
Most Players Don’t Know What’s Best For Them
Sure, it’s a rather pompous and arrogant assertion but I believe it to be true: most players don’t really know what’s best for them — they only think they do. Players don’t really care about the long term health of the video game industry, nor should they. All they want is the DPS of their chosen class to be “awesome”. It’s the developers job to resist playing Santa Claus and instead show professional concern about the health of their MMO and long term health of the genre.
Raph Koster pointed out in A Theory of Fun for Game Design that due to the way the human brain is wired, players strive to make the games they play boring by learning patterns which lead to beating the game. The player in a sense is his own worst enemy as he is unknowingly sabotaging his future enjoyment of the game as he continues his quest to master it. The same could be said of the current convenience driven and risk averse mentality of player base as a whole. Players are not doing themselves any favors in the long run by clamoring for easier and safer MMOs.
The current generation of video game consumers are a demanding lot. Like our non-virtual counterparts in modern society, we want to feel we are progressing and we want less pain and more comfort. We want to experience more in less time, we want to get things done faster and more efficiently. Risk ends up being a needless roadblock on our daily commute on the pathways to fun and adventure.
So we put pressure on gaming companies to make our virtual lives within our fantasy worlds easier and more convenient by reducing inefficiencies such as travel, corpse runs, mob health points and so on — after all we are busy! Somehow, we’ve let the frenetic cadence of our own lives impinge upon the pace of what goes on in our virtual worlds.
So it should come as no surprise that MMO designers are only happy to comply with this societal and generational imperative to make our MMOs less time consuming and more efficient. Combine these trends with an aging genre that has been completely demystified and deconstructed and you have the modern MMO — a mere shadow of its former robust and severe self.
Conclusion
It seems the definition of a MMO is being changed before our very eyes and the core of what an MMO is being besieged on all fronts. With each passing year MMOs seem to be adopting more of the characteristics of single player video games and shedding more of the features and communal aspects that made them unique. The watering down and minimization of risk has been one of those casualties. MMO designers are becoming as risk adverse as the MMOs they are designing. The designers have become a reflection of the player base which seems to be continually clamoring for more rewards with less risk, more convenience with less tedium, more excitement with less grind.
To make matters worse you have the specter of MMO companies falling by the wayside. Until the costs of MMO production can come down to reasonable levels like it has for recorded music production, it is no wonder that developers have opted for the safe, predictable and risk averse route.
We should never forget that the genius and uniqueness of the massively multi-player online role-playing game was that for the first time developers finally created a medium where players could experience all the thrills and dangers of adventuring in a virtual fantasy world in the comfort of their own homes. Every time risk is incrementally reduced by MMO developers that winning magic formula is being diluted. One day we will surely all wake up and wonder where all the magic went.
-Wolfshead
Exactly. And there is nothing wrong with it. What does this means for MMORPGs?
Designers have to constantly fight our wish for convenient, easy and predictable gameplay. Players will always try to optimize the fun out of their gameplay experience, you can bet on that.
Today we have the problem of too much convenience which is exceedingly boring.
Right now we rather have an achievement driven time for MMOs. Check box gaming for the Hall of Monuments in Guild Wars or the achievement tab in World of Warcraft, which often asks the player to do outright stupid things.
I could rant about MMOs today, casual fun for slackers seems to be the primary goal of design. I wonder how many more years it takes designers and gamers to realize that this attitude deprives games of longevity. Cheap fun is no substitute for exciting adventure in a MMORPG.
I completely agree with you. The achievement ethos that has recently infected game design philosophy is very troubling. The a company like Blizzard would add an achievement system into WoW but not a player housing system is symptomatic of this problem.
Here’s a small vignette that may be related. There’s a sign on the front door of the Gold’s Gym where I work out every day it says the following:
“Half the battle is just showing up”.
While it’s a cute slogan for a gym, it’s part of a generational theme that just by virtue of “showing up” you should pat yourself on the back. I feel it’s the same way with most video games and MMOs now. If you show up you are made to feel as if you are entitled to rewards.
Although I’ve put the blame squarely on game designers in many of my articles I think it may be time to start doing a generational analysis of the current video game demographic. I think the current slacker culture is part of the problem.
People today have become lazy. They feel a sense of entitlement. Just observe how children and teenagers behave today and also consider how much is lavished on them by their parents. No wonder we have a problem with MMOs and video games becoming ludicrously facile and easy.
Designers seem to want to reward us for just showing up, much like the “self-esteem” movement prevalent in schools today that rewards mediocrity and gives out awards for participation.
I think Richard Bartle said it best in that this issue is like the eternal struggle to get children to eat vegetables instead of candy. There are things that are good in the short term (candy, easy gameplay) and things that are good in the long term (vegetables, a sense of wonder). As adults, we understand that it’s important to eat vegetables to maintain our health, but kids would eat candy until it nearly killed them if they could. (I thought this was in the “Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies” article you have linked to the side, but I guess I don’t remember the reference for this, even after looking through all the links on your sidebar.)
The struggle is to convince players that they should seek out things that are good in the long term. However, this is about as easy as convincing kids that eating vegetables is the best option. The worst option, as Bartle quipped, is to try to serve candy-coated vegetables.
I don’t think this is necessarily a generational thing, but a mindset of many players that games are “just for fun”. They specifically seek out the experiences that are fun in the short term, telling themselves that “work” isn’t fun and games shouldn’t have it. Any company that wants to stay in business has to cater to this inclination on some level, and the result is that players get all the depth and complexity that one would expect from a diet entirely of candy. Sadly, those of us who enjoy our vegetables are the minority, or at least are not seen as a profitable minority.
I wish I had the solution, though.
That’s a great analogy about candy and children. In a way the sense of taste can deceive the brain and operate in a manner that is not in the best long term interests of the consumer’s nutritional needs.
I think it’s just a reality now that a MMO dev certainly has to front load their MMO with lots of “fun” and bells and whistles in order to attract the player and keep them subscribing.
Back in the good old days, just being simultaneously online with thousands of other players in a virtual world felt pretty amazing. Now everyone is “connected” and online so it’s not really a big deal anymore. That initial awe and wonder that we experienced 10 years ago may not be so awesome for newer players who are used to experience of being online.
Developers now are being forced to pull out all the stops in order to impress these jaded teenagers who are used to playing pretty sophisticated shooter games on their PS3s and Xboxes. The result is a sort of arms race where every MMO has to keep outdoing the previous MMO — with better graphics, more pyrotechnics, etc. Where MMOs will be in 5 years from now will be scary if we don’t get off this trajectory.
Getting back to the candy analogy, the challenge is going to be how do we teach players about the benefits of fine dining and more sophisticated cuisine — in other words, there is better fun to be had kids if you’ll just stay around long enough. I think Blizzard tries to do this with their so-called “donut” approach with grouping and raid content in the middle of the donut. This is going to be a challenge with our ADD culture that we live in.
Maybe another analogy would be addiction to narcotics. You get the instant gratification of a high but at an unsustainable cost to the person using the narcotics. So we have that time tested issue of delayed gratification versus instant gratification. The only highs really worth experiencing are the sustainable ones which don’t kill our minds and bodies.
Which leads to the realization that in many ways video games are instant gratification delivery systems. You get to be the instant hero. You get to do things that mere mortals can not, such as wield huge swords and slay fantastic dragons. You get to mete out instant justice and save the world.
Thanks for the thoughtful post Brian 🙂
I think it’s just a reality now that a MMO dev certainly has to front load their MMO with lots of “fun” and bells and whistles in order to attract the player and keep them subscribing.
I’ve noticed two distinct stages for people getting interested in MMOs, based on observing them and chatting with people in Meridian 59. The first is the initial attraction, usually based on the production values. If you have sub-par graphics, it will instantly turn away a lot of people. The second is the gameplay. After the initial attraction, the graphics really don’t matter much unless they get in the way of the gameplay. (This includes having friends mock you for playing an “ugly” game.)
The frustrating part is that generally the initial period is really short for the most part, but demands so many resources. Once people got into Meridian 59, the “ugly” graphics really didn’t matter because the gameplay was really appealing to people.
The other problem is that the initial perception can set the tone of the rest of the game. A recent example is how WoW was so solo-friendly until you got to raiding and then HAD to group up, thereby creating the “casuals vs. raiders” divide. The early game didn’t prepare people for an endgame full of raiding, which is why many people focused so much on creating a variety of alts rather than focusing on a single character as was typical in earlier days.
So, that’s the question I think is important: How can we show off the tasty core gameplay to people? Is there a way to attract people without the “sugar rush” type gameplay that typically attracts people and sets the tone for the whole game?
Nice essay. I posted excerpts, along with a link back to this page, on my game design blog:
http://handyvandal.com/2010/10/risk-in-mmo-design/
Keep up the good work.
Regards,
Karl Jones
While I agree with a lot that was said here, I find myself in the situation where I truly begin to wonder if the majority of MMO players wants the same things we do. It seems to me that a staggering majority (for example in WoW) does not actually seek challenge or risk and does not perceive them as a goal of the game – they find them annoying, obstructive or even relate them to player elitism. They’re happy to use MMOs in other ways, be it to only socialize, to collect items, to farm gold etc. etc. They want things to be easily accessibly and they don’t attach the same value to hard-won victories the way I would for example.
So I ask myself whether we are not facing a huge paradigm-shift in the genre altogether. From a dev’s point of view surely, the way to go is whatever hooks paying customers longterm and WoW has shown how to hook the widest audience. And that audience does not look for the same things I do.
If this new philosophy was actually harmful (to developers) from a longterm point of view, surely blizzard would have reached that point by now. so why should they change anything?
I agree. Much of the success of mass marke MMOs like WoW is that they brought with them all the trappings of traditional MMOs such as an explorable world, NPCs, mobs, dungeons, etc. but these things are really just window dressing that disguises what’s really going on which is the reward mentality, collection mentality, the achievement mentality — all trends in game design that were basically invented and popularized in the last few years.
The average game designer working at a company like Blizzard has to go with the flow and they have a very little say if any, in the direction of the MMO which is controlled by the people at the top.
With all of the layoffs and MMO companies going bust I really doubt that there is any tolerance to deviate from a winning formula that appeals to a mass market demographic. It really feels to me that we are still in a period of infancy of this genre much where there are just a few choices for people who want to play MMOs. It reminds me of the dominance of the big 3 American broadcast networks for a couple decades after the invention of television. Basically due to the lack of choice, everyone watched the same shows and the content was very family oriented.
I’m hoping that a revolution will happen where people will just get fed up with this continual downward spiral — much like when Grunge music killed those ridiculous hairbands in the early 1990’s. It’s not going to happen unless we get some serious alternatives. Only then will people look back at a MMO like WoW and see it for the simplistic and banal MMO that it truly is.
Beautiful article.
One thing I love about this blog is that it goes into topics that I’ve thought about myself over time. However, it then goes further and analyzes them more deeply.
On the issue of risk versus reward in MMORPGs, all I can say is that with newer MMOs, my only half-facetious response is “What risk?”.
There is hardly any risk in your typical post-WoW MMO anymore. It’s been systematically sucked out over the past several years, replaced with a larger and more generous rewards pez dispenser.
Developers are making things easier and easier, while making the rewards greater and greater, fully supporting that “entitled, slacker culture” mentioned in the article.
Further, what measures Devs aren’t taking, the players are taking for them. All these add-ons they use for questing, for raiding, for crafting… for just about anything. All those add-ons basically remove another piece of the player from the game, giving them one less thing to do or figure out on their own.
Players and Devs, together, are reducing MMOs to little more than a game of connect the brightly colored dots. You can’t miss them. They have bright yellow !’s over them.
And then they wonder why they’re bored.
I find it ironic, but mostly sad, that players are complaining about the very thing they are contribute to.
One of my favorite examples is when people will argue that “nothing in a MMO is challenging because there are add-ons and walk-through guides for everything”.
Go ahead, you can facepalm. I already have, multiple times, every time I’ve seen that argument made.
I’ve also tried suggesting that they maybe try playing the game without the add-ons and walkthroughs. Based on the response I typically get, that’s about on par with telling them to poke out their own eyeballs; it ain’t gonna happen.
Those players are, ultimately, their worst enemy… and they don’t realize it. The devs have some hand in it, too. Though, it can be argued that the devs are just trying to deliver on what players say (or at least think) they want.
It’s a sad, sad state of affairs.