Part II: Design and Development Considerations
Chapter 8. Getting into the Design
"(Design) teams regularly bite off more than they can chew. An MMP can easily become an impossible-to-complete reality simulator."
—Richard Garriott
"They (design teams) underestimate the complexity of the task. More moving parts drive complexity nonlinearly, and MMP games have a lot of moving parts. Rule of thumb: An MMP game is three times bigger than a standalone game, but 10 times harder to complete."
—Gordon Walton
KEY TOPICS
Acquisition and Retention Features
The Themis Group Player Satisfaction Matrix The Critical "New Player Experience"
It's the Socialization, Stupid!
The Importance of (the Other Guy's) Storytelling World-Building: Just What Is "Content," Anyway?
These comments by Richard and Gordon express a fairly common theme we found among the experienced people we interviewed for this book. Design teams tend to walk nose-first into a wall of complexity by trying to shove every feature they can into a game or by not fully understanding, at the start of the process, the complexity of the interlinking among the game mechanics, player skills, and attributes, the player-manipulable objects, and the fields that can modify the objects and players themselves. Much of this comes from not actually completing the game design before major coding begins; designers rarely move into development with a full and clear understanding of just what the player experience will be on a day-in, day-out basis over a long stretch of time.
The other major contributor to over-complexity is that designers can rarely articulate just who, exactly, the game is being built for. If you ask that question, the answer you're likely to hear is, "Uh, the hard-core gamer." If you ask a designer to define who the hard-core gamer is and why he/she should pay money for this game, you'll see a lot of finger-pointing at EverQuest (EQ) and Ultima Online (UO), without much substantive detail. They instinctively understand that they don't know who the real customer will be and, to make up for that lack, they cram in every feature they can think of or have seen in another game. Designers who do not have a clear idea of what their target player's profile is—especially designers who are inexperienced in a commercial atmosphere—are liable to revert to this shotgun approach when they would benefit more from marksmanship.
The solution to this problem is a relatively easy one, but it does require an experienced producer or executive producer to exercise
"tough love" right from the start of the design process:
Make the design team list the acquisition and retention features for each customer niche, including feature sets that take into account the calendar lifecycle of each niche.
Require the team to prioritize those features for development.
Make the team dig in with a cutting tool and trim the set down to a list that it believes doesn't require divine intervention to complete before the new millennium.
Go through the list yourself, reprioritize the features, and make the team defend why each feature should be in the game.
We guarantee it will be a sobering exercise, at the least. It will probably also create some true anger among some members of the design team, which is where the tough love comes in. As a team leader, you'll probably have to cut one or more features that the team
considers crucial or to which they have formed an emotional attachment. Be ready for histrionics and fireworks,[1]
and use the tools and information in this book to back up your decisions.
[1] It may seem that throughout this book that we're hard or "down" on designers and design teams. In truth, we
are, but not out of any disrespect for individuals or their responsibilities. To make these things work right, they have to be the brightest, most educated, and versatile people in the process. Designers have the hardest job in the industry because, at the end of the day, the game succeeds or fails financially and as a game by what they do.
If you think having $10 million in development funds and the jobs of 30-50 on your shoulders is an easy responsibility to carry, you're in the wrong business.
[ Team LiB ]
Acquisition and Retention Features
"I try and think of what every feature does in terms of acquisition and retention. More specifically, I try and rationalize every feature on how it ties a player to (1) other people within the game environment and/or (2) an in-game reminder of a valuable game accomplishment. There are dozens of other variables, but these are the big-ticket items in my opinion."
—Gordon Walton
Most computer and video games have only one distribution problem: how to acquire customers—that is, how to get the customers to walk into a store and buy the box. This includes retail hybrids, as most publishers don't provide an online distribution or multiplayer support solution for customers; they depend on the players to do that for themselves, or for one of several online hybrid gaming portals such as GameSpy or The Zone to do it for them. In neither case does online in-game support become a factor. Hybrids today are a product, but they are not yet a full service in most aspects.
Online games in the persistent world (PW) category, being both a product and a service, have a unique problem: They not only have to acquire customers, but they also have to retain them. If a subscription fee is involved, the retention factors have to work for a minimum of some months or, preferably, years.
It makes plain sense, then, to know just who it is you want to play and pay for the game and what features those people want that will keep them coming back month after month. If you accept the market demographic niche definitions found in Chapter 1
The Bartle Player Types
Dr. Richard Bartle was the co-creator of the first MUD in 1978. Over the years, as MUDs proliferated on university mainframes and eventually as commercial products, he noticed certain types of common play behavior in MUDs and made the first attempt to categorize those behaviors. The categories he defined were achiever, explorer, socializer, and killer, and he explained the behavior patterns in an article titled "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds."[2]
The article was first written in 1995 and gained widespread recognition quickly. Over the years, Dr. Bartle has periodically edited and revised the article to keep it current.
[2] See Dr. Bartle's full article and the new introduction to it in Appendix D; used by permission of the author and The Journal of Virtual Worlds.
Here is how Bartle described what he saw:
The four things that people typically enjoy personally about MUDs are:
Achievement within the game context.
Players give themselves game-related goals and vigorously set out to achieve them. This usually means accumulating and disposing of large quantities of high-value treasure, or cutting a swathe through hordes of mobiles (i.e., monsters built into the virtual world).
i.
Exploration of the game.
Players try to find out as much as they can about the virtual world. Although initially this means mapping its topology (i.e., exploring the MUD's breadth), later it advances to experimentation with its physics (i.e., exploring the MUD's depth).
ii.
Socialization with others.
Players use the game's communicative facilities, and apply the role-playing that these engender, as a context in which to converse (and otherwise interact) with their fellow players.
iii.
Imposition upon others.
Players use the tools provided by the game to cause distress to (or, in rare circumstances, to help) other players. Where permitted, this usually involves acquiring some weapon and applying it enthusiastically to the persona of another player in the game world.
iv.
So, labeling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers.
This was the first attempt to define general player and gameplay types in a virtual world, and these motivations still hold up well in today's market, where games with 20,000–100,000 simultaneous players are no longer unknown or even rare. These types more than adequately explain the gross motivations of the general player base and provide a good framework from which to start designing a massively multiplayer (MMP) game world.
Moreover, players rarely exhibit just one form of play behavior; they tend to mix and match styles and change behaviors over time.
Several years ago, Erwin Andreasen put up on the web a survey of questions, the answers to which would allow MUD and PW players to rate their own play styles and discover how much of their play time was as an achiever, socializer, explorer, or killer. Table 8.1 includes some of the results from the Bartle Quotient Survey[3]
on the web, showing how players rate themselves in various combinations of those four general categories created by Dr. Bartle, sorted by response rates, combinations of play in the categories, and percentages of the total respondents. The responses to the survey gives you an inkling of how players see themselves and their own playing styles in PWs.
[3] All stats used by permission. For more information, see Erwin S. Andreasen's "Measuring the Bartle Quotient"
online test at www.andreasen.org/bartle/.
This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to register it. Thanks.
Table 8.1. Survey Results from "Measuring the Bartle Quotient"
From the "Measuring the Bartle Quotient" web site, http://www.andreasen.org/bartle/, March 4, 2002 at 2:28pm EST.
Abbreviations: E= explorer, S= socializer, A= achiever, and K= killer. The numbers in parentheses represent the total number of respondents scored in that percentile. The Combination Play column represents the total percentage of players scored by combination players, such as socializer/explorers (16% of the total respondents). The Combinations of Three column represents
an even finer gradation of play, such as 12% of the total respondents showed elements of socializer, explorer, and achiever in play style. As of the date and time this sample was taken, there had been a total of 111,926 respondents included in this
composite.
Despite the fact that the survey is unscientific, it has been the experience of the authors that these percentages fairly closely match the reality of the customer base in current commercial PWs, with the exception of the "importance" of the killer class of players. The importance of that class has been overblown by a vocal minority and by PvP combat-oriented designers. For example, check out the specific survey results for the top five commercial PWs[4]
in Appendix C "The Bartle Quotient Survey and Some Results," and you'll find few people rating themselves as pure killers in most games.
[4] Lineage: The Bloodpledge, which claims four million subscribers, was not included because fewer than 30 Lineage
players had rated themselves in the survey at the time the sample was taken.
The takeaway from this exercise should be obvious: 55–60% of players in both the general population and those playing for-pay games classify themselves primarily as socializers and explorers. These are people who form and join guilds and teams, spend quite a bit of time in-game chatting or engaging in social events, and wander about the world, exploring its secrets. For three of the five commercial games, 20% or fewer of the players rate themselves as killers, with 26% for UO and 25% for Dark Age of Camelot, two games that are attractive to the killer class of player due to the faction-based conflict inherent within their designs.
What this says is that, even if you build a game heavily weighted toward the killer classes via PvP and faction or team/guild conflict, chances are you're going to be attractive to only 20–25% of the total player base. The dichotomy of this is that most of the PWs that launched in 2001 or are being developed today for launch in 2002–2003 are heavily weighted in design toward the killer class. This is likely to cause increased churn rates for the socializer and explorer classes, whom the killers look at as their intended victims by virtue of that same design.
Unless you're firmly set on appealing to one player type and you're comfortable with the thought that such a design may greatly limit your subscriber total potential, the idea is to have a balanced design that appeals to a number of player niches.
Features: Acquisition and Retention Over Time
For purposes of the following discussion, we're going to assume that you want to appeal in some fashion to all four Bartle types, in an attempt to maximize the subscriber total of your game.
Now that you have a general idea of the size and scope of the basic customer groups, you can take the design treatment discussed earlier and begin to match up the vision of the game with the features the players will want to have available.
Exactly what those features are, however, is a matter of some controversy within the industry. Some general features that apply to all four player types, such as secure player-owned housing and no-conflict safe zones, are unanimously accepted among the design literati as required to attract and retain customers for the long term. After that general feature set, however, few design teams actually give much thought to applying features to player types. They have a general understanding of the features they want in the game and which features have worked or not worked in other games. They rarely dig very deeply into player needs and motivations or list them out by the Bartle types, or any other analytic measurement for that matter. Thus, the features list tends to be scattered and a bit incoherent for the design as a whole, and that usually comes back to haunt the team later on.
[ Team LiB ]
The Themis Group Player Satisfaction Matrix
"As we talked with various developers and publishers," says Alex Macris, CEO of The Themis Group,[5]
an online game consulting and full-service support company, "we began to notice a trend: The teams had no firm grasp of who the potential customers were or how their feature set appealed to those customers. They just assumed that everyone played for the same reasons and wanted every possible feature. Trying to make the teams understand the differences between the general player types and what they wanted in a game was frustrating at times."
[5] Disclaimer: One of the co-authors, Jessica Mulligan, was president of The Themis Group at the time this book was being written.
To get a handle on this problem, Macris devised an unusual and innovative solution. What he realized is that, although many people in the industry knew what the separate features were, no one had taken the time to plot them out in a logical, easy-to-see manner. He also knew that development teams understand issues and concepts best when arranged as data points in a matrix; trying to just explain features to them as concepts made things more difficult, not less. So he sat down and drew out a basic matrix chart that correlated the Bartle player types against the game features they needed or wanted at various stages in their lifecycle for an online game.
The format Bartle arrived at was one of those simple solutions that the industry has needed but somehow missed for years. Table 8.2 shows how Macris expressed the player lifecycle and satisfaction factors in a simple matrix.
Table 8.2. Basic Player Satisfaction Matrix
The Player Satisfaction Matrix is copyright Themis Group 2001–2002 and used with permission.
Down the left side of the matrix are the first three periods of the average player lifecycle, as noted in Chapter 1. Across the top run the major activity types that parallel the four Bartle types: socializers, achievers, explorers, and killers. The boxes that cross- reference each lifecycle period with a player type list the features those players want or need at that stage of their "career" in the game.
What The Themis Group does for a game is first fill in all the relevant features for the "complete" PW, with the features prioritized from highest to lowest needed, as shown in Table 8.3.
Table 8.3. The Player Satisfaction Matrix, First Step
Examining Table 8.3, you'll see at the left are the first three phases of the player lifecycle. At the top are the four main PW player types according to the Bartle index. In each box are the general features each player type needs or wants at each phase of the lifecycle.
Within this matrix, any experienced design team member at Themis can go through the filled-in features boxes and highlight the features that exist in the game, as denoted by the bolded features in Table 8.4.
Table 8.4. The Player Satisfaction Matrix, Partially Filled
This method has proven to be of enormous help in focusing design and development on just what should be in a game at launch to help acquire subscribers and which features are needed to retain subscribers long term but can be added at a later date, say, through an expansion pack or server-side patch.
The trick is to know what feature set is needed for your game to function competitively at a base level in the marketplace and build from there. Table 8.5 is a partial list of features we believe necessary for the acquisition and retention of subscribers at all levels, from hard-core gamers to mass-market non-players. Bear in mind that while many acquisition features are also retention features, a retention feature does not always work for acquisition.
Table 8.5. Basic Acquisition and Retention Features
[ Team LiB ]
[ Team LiB ]
The Critical "New Player Experience"
Designers love complexity; nothing gives them more of a sense of satisfaction than watching interlocking game mechanics work together or providing an interface that can do anything and everything, including walking the dog and making coffee. There is also an element of competition among designers to provide more features than the previous guy did, under the assumption that more is better.
What many designers forget to plan for is how long it will take a new player to learn how to operate the necessary features in a game compared to the average new player's patience level. Designers play games for years before they get the financial go-ahead to work on their own game. Then they spend dozens of months building their game. Naturally, they know how everything works (or how everything is supposed to work). By the time they get funding approved for their game, they are strangers to the sense of wonder and frustration that a new player experiences.
Space shuttles are wonderful, but the number of people qualified to pilot them is small. The average middle-school youngster could drive you to a hospital ER these days—seat, mirror, ignition, gas, brakes (maybe), and you're there. If a new player has to be fairly adept at using most of the capabilities in your everything-under-the-sun feature set to grow a character's stamina, wealth, skills, and so forth fairly quickly in the game world, then the only players your game will retain over time will be from the hard-core segment. Remember: These customers are not buying a car for $15,000—they're test-driving a virtual world that costs $25–$50 to enter and $12.95 a month to rent a life in (and you're giving them the first month's rent as an incentive to stay). You have 30 days, and often less time than that, in which to hook them.
Having nothing but hard-core players can still be a winning formula, assuming that within the next 3–5 years, nobody develops an interface that walks the dog, makes coffee, kills spiders, and then takes out the garbage. If you could keep 50% of the hard-core gamers playing your PW for a year, someone would probably come along and try to seduce your shuttle pilots with their newer, better feature set and interface. As you will see, what you drive is important (getting there may be fully half of the fun, indeed), but so are where you go, what you do when you get there, and with whom.
Another thing that is often ignored is whether the new player experience is compelling enough and entertaining enough to make the player stick around, or whether it is a frustrating experience that causes him/her to churn[6]
out and go looking for entertainment elsewhere.
[6] "Churn" stands for "change-turn." It is most often used in the industry to describe players who change from customers into non-customers.
The quality of the new player experience is your key retention factor. The player has already decided to try you out; if he/she can't figure out the interface easily, or the environment is so hostile the player can't succeed at something early on, you'll probably lose the player in the first month. Historically, the churn rate of new players from online games, after garnering the hard-core players in the first three months of the game being available, is well over 80%, and in some cases, exceeds 90%. Overall, long-term retention (two months or more) varies, but 40% retention of all those who try the game is pretty standard.
There are a number of reasons for this churn; fixing these reasons during the design phase should be of paramount concern.
Following are some of the worst offenses:
Complexity of the interface— If the client interface is cumbersome to use, employs non-standard commands or methods for everyday issues, or employs so many buttons and capabilities that even a shuttle pilot would have trouble figuring out how to use it effectively, you can expect only a small, dedicated core of players to bother learning it.
Complexity of the game mechanics— Sure, lots of interlocking moving parts are cool and represent a triumph of design;
they also tend to limit your subscriber base to those players with the determination and sheer grit to work through them.
Experience has shown that this is a limited market. It is fine if your game world is interesting enough that hard-core players spend time on Internet sites sharing special hard-won information, but new players should not need to go to those sites to master the basics quickly.
A hostile new player environment— If the new player represents nothing more than a crunchy snack to experienced