OnyxRaven Blog

There is an excellent post on deviance in gaming (‘Deviance Revisited’) at The Gaming Bitch that I find very interesting. Online games are a very interesting thing to study from a sociological perspective: they provide a microcosm of society that presents itself in very unique ways. I love being able to take what I learned in some of the ‘other’ courses in college and apply them!

Sociologist Robert K. Merton’s theory of deviance describes anomie as “a discontinuity between cultural goals and the legitimate means for reaching them”. This provides a set of modes of adaptation on how to reach (or not reach) goals set up by society. Criminology uses this theory quite extensively.

The Bitch equates society in this theory with game developers (or really, a game design in general), where a set of goals is put forth for the players to achieve. The players then fall into one of the modes of adaptation from the diagram above to achieve (or not achieve) the goals.

Conformist: These are the players who play exactly as intended. Obviously these are the designers’ best friends, and this is probably the majority of players. These are players you typically will NOT see complaining on the boards, unless of course its about one of the other types messing up their current goal reaching adaptation mode (look at that use of terminology!).Obviously conformist players are great for a game as they’re doing exactly as intended, and not making things difficult, but in many ways nothing new is learned from these players.

Ritualist: These are players who play the game as intended, but don’t buy into the goals. The Bitch sees this as one who will stay below certain levels, or goes exploring in the game instead of leveling. In many games, and depending on your point of view, this could include a lot of the craft-only type people, or the primarily socializing people. By perfect definition, this is a hard one to pin down.

In my mind, the name ‘ritualist’ describes what I think this category may consist of within MMORPGs: the catass or pure grinder. They use accepted means to grind their way to the end game, instead of using grouping, quests, etc. They would rather bypass much of the content that the game designers wished players would go through just to get to the end game. Like I said, this isn’t a perfect fit for this type of player, but I think its probably the best fit.

The group that exhibits ritualism more obviously is the gold/account farmers. They use accepted means (for the most part) to grind out money, not for the purpose of playing the game, but for another purpose.

For the most part, ritualistic players players are a detriment to the game, but may indicate that something in the design is driving this sort of activity - whether it is by demand (in the realm of RMT) or because the content in the game is not interesting to the player (the catass).

Innovator: These are the ones that accept the goals, but don’t believe in the accepted means to get to those goals. Like The Bitch says, the title is misleading, because in the realm of MMORPGs, this is the exploiter, or the RMT buyer. These are the players who will do anything to get to the goals, regardless the means.

In some ways, innovators are as valuable as the name implies. Innovation means inventing new ways to get to the goals, and thats what these players do. There is probably a lot to be learned to either stop this activity or to adapt to bring it into the realm of the acceptable goals. Games with legitimized RMT (like the EQII Station Exchange) change some of these users to being in the Conformist group.

Retreatist: As The Bitch states, this is the griefer. They don’t care about the goals, and they don’t care about the gameplay. There is little positive that these players contribute to the game. A lot of these characters border on the Innovator or Ritualist to get to higher levels of Retreatist so they can just grief some more.

It’d make everyone’s lives easier if retreatists just… retreated - went away. Lots of time is spent in customer service, or within development dealing with these users, building ways to thwart their griefing. I’m not convinced that the existence of griefing is the result of any specific design problem or decision.

Rebel: Players who ignore the means and goals, and invent their own. Some of the examples The Bitch uses I think actually don’t represent this group. Mastering tradeskills, or completing every quest are sort of built in goals already, and typically they do this by accepted means.

Who I do think works in perfectly rebels are those that invent what are typically called ‘emergent behaviors’, or games within games. EQ raiding may be a good example of this. Other examples are doing footraces around areas hide and seek contests, or other, mostly social, games within games already there.

Many developers see rebel behaviors as good signs and are typically encouraged. It says the game is accepted and powerful enough to warrant good invention and ideas which do not negatively impact other gameplay systems. It definitely gives you a good feeling about the game and community as a whole when emergent behavior happens, because its typically a heck of a lot of fun.

Thanks to The Gaming Bitch for bringing up this topic, because it is definitely one of those things I think is really interesting. There is chance for a heck of a lot of sociology and psychology within virtual worlds. It can help describe behaviors we see already, and help to design new games and gameplay systems to bring more of the players into the conformist group - which is the goal of game developers and designers in general.

This starts with a letter from the Parents Television Council to the Denver Regional Transportation District, which calls for a ban of M and AO rated games on RTD Buses and Trains. They state that these advertisements are for games which promote violent and illegal behaviors. The PTC has also petitioned Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts for similar bans.

GamePolitics picked up on the story on Februrary 22, saying there is a New Mass Transit Ad Controversy in Denver. Westword had a pretty good article titled ‘Bus-ted‘, with a short interview with George Robinson, PTC Denver chapter president, as he plays GTA. George Robinson also wrote an editorial for the Rocky Mountain News calling for ‘No more violent video game ads, RTD‘, mentioning ‘countless research studies’ and the irresponsibility of RTD to accept advertising dollars to promote violent video games. RTD was still considering the issue a month later (RTD weighs parents’ pleas to ban violent video game ads).

The RTD Board eventually voted it down (’RTD won’t ditch video-game ads‘). Kotaku editor Brian Crecente (a Denver resident) interviewed the National Grassroots Director for the PTC, Gavin McKiernan about the whole process. At least RTD did not decide to wrap entire trains in ads as mentioned in a Westword article.

All of this generated plenty of discussion in the gaming news/blog arena as well as more mainstream press. The Rocky Mountain News states that RTD has the freedom to say ‘no’, choosing whatever advertisers they want. Crecente fires back about the editorial (as he used to work for the RMN) saying it missed the point, that the more interesting issue here is that they decided to go after games specifically, not all violent media. Joystiq mentions Throwing free speech under the bus.

Enough with the summary and linkfest. Though this is an issue a good few months old, I still had the links in my ‘to write’ category because I think its still an interesting issue to discuss, and I do have some thoughts.

I mentioned in one of the GamePolitics posts’ comments that RTD can certainly advertise who and what they want within the usual reason. There is certainly some controversy around violent movies, music and video games being advertised in public places, and I do understand that. I don’t think that any free-speech argument is going to hold up for these sorts of things (nevertheless that advertisements are not protected speech in the first place). They would be able to pull ads from any advertiser at any time (they just would no longer be paid for those spots, obviously).

I am a Denver resident and I’ve ridden RTD many times - both the light rail and bus systems.  Round trip ticket prices already started to raise - and I know that advertisements can bring in a lot of revenue to offset rider costs.  I’ve never seen a game related ad myself - but I haven’t ridden regularly in a few years.   As long as ads aren’t distasteful or annoying, I don’t see any other reason to keep a specific ad off a bus.  The GTA ads in the pictures in the links above don’t even depict many of the things that are so ‘evil’ to the complainers.

What is of concern, though, is that agencies may choose where to draw their line, as far as what ads they will show, on medium over actual content. They may show ads for The Departed and The Sopranos, but not show GTA: Liberty City Stories. This just seems odd to me. There is discussion in the above link with PTC Grassroots Director, Gavin McKiernan who specifically says games may be more influential because of the medium, where motion pictures are not as bad.

This brings up the global ‘violence in videogames’ discussion, which I won’t get into very deep in this post (I’ve got a couple more topics in my queue that cover this). What I will say here, though, is that the studies for video game violence have not conclusively shown that it is any different than movies, TV or music. This is a topic of ‘moral panic’ concerning a specific medium which is new and insanely successful. Motion Pictures, Television, and Music have all gone through much of the same criticism at one point or another - so its really nothing new.

My final word on the matter is that if one medium is going to be not shown because of content, it should apply to other mediums as well - so if theres not going to be GTA on busses, I shouldn’t be seeing The Departed, The Sopranos or KMFDM advertisements on buses either. Not showing them in the first place, of course, is silly to begin with, but at least be consistent!

One day a couple weeks ago, I got linked to this Kraft website. I paid the shipping and handling ($6).

I now have (still sitting in a box at home), one Kraft Dancepad. There are games linked on Kraft’s website, but I’m told that with a little hardware modification (for which I’m going to have to dig up my soldering iron and see if it still works), it will work with the opensource StepMania.

I’ll post later on my success.

Theres lots of discussion around This Tobolds Post, regarding Talent builds/specs in WoW. The main request here is to be able to have two specs, one for grouping (raiding), one for pvp.

Heres a possible implementation:

• Buying an extra spec slot is much like a Hunter buying a pet stable, it costs money, and to switch it, you have to go to a stable master. Much the same way, class trainers (why not use the current class trainers, since they already do the talent reset functionality) would be able to sell you a slot - for a pretty penny (probably as much as the upper cap of talent reset, 50g?).
• To add a spec to an empty, you must reset your talents at the going rate (max 50g) - your previous build then gets saved in that slot.
• To switch between specs, just visit a trainer and select the spec (no, or low, ongoing charge)
• To change the stored spec is just like adding a spec, you must reset and your old spec will be saved
• You could buy extra slots (for extra money), and it would work like a first-in first-out queue, where resetting ’saves’ your spec, and the last one falls off.

I’m actually somewhat questioning the FIFO mechanic there, though. I think it provides a challenge and prevents template-of-the-day syndrome better, but it could be a bit of a pain to manage. Maybe the better way is to just have multiple slots that can be changed out with an interface just like the pet stable.

Challenges:

• Interface - though it could be pretty simple (represent a talent build via an icon you can drag around, just like the pet stable
• Talents that are Skills/Spells - when you change spec, those items need to go away, which means removing or greying them out from an actionbar - certainly not a showstopper, just somewhat inconvenient, but the talent reset already has this issue

I’ve always been a big fan of flexibility - frankly, I think you should be able to switch your class for work/money something like you can in FFXI - it helps those of us with major alt-itis. Doing this with the talents is definitely a way to get there.

If your game doesn’t have someone as excited, passionate and downright funny promoting your game as Warhammer Online has in Paul Barnett, you’ve got something wrong.

He brings up a very important point near the end of the video. Its not immersion that designers should be striving for, but imagination - buy this game, and never buy another. Think, draw, talk, everything about this game. Immersion is playing a game and not realizing the house is burning down. While thats something that is part of a successful game, its not nearly as cool as imagination.

Video should be after the jump.

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Something that we’ve discussed when brainstorming MMO ideas is the issue of Magic Numbers - that is, how many of anything is ideal? Even more specific, how many things can a person keep track of and still be effective?

This applies to a number of MMO constructs: group size; number of races, classes, skills; range of hit points, experience, skill points; number of quest entries; number of bag slots… its really quite amazing how many areas have somewhat ‘magic numbers’. Now, obviously I’m not saying that all the numbers were pulled out of someone’s ass - lots of balancing and tweaking went into the 5 person group in WoW, etc.

But it all starts somewhere. There is some ideal for the maximum manageable number of things at one time. Generally this is somewhere between 4 or 5 to about 9 or 10, though Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror thinks “magical numbers are a red herring”. I’m not too sure about this - I’m generally pretty good at remembering things like numbers or strings (given some hinting, I could probably still remember the corporate OEM keycode for Windows 98 from my first IT job), but in an MMO, you’re tracking things that change, not something that you use over and over (and over, and over…) and memorize almost by muscle memory.

This is why we don’t see games that display 5 resource pools (mana, health, etc) on the screen. That’d be insane - you have to pay attention to 5 different resource pools and make sure you’re not running low? Heck, two is sometimes hard enough.

Its not just how many stats though, its the range too. One of the worst was (well actually, still is) Anarchy Online - the numbers were all into the high thousands if not millions and above, and thats how the game was designed from the beginning. Browsing through the skill screens and trying to discern which one you should buy up was a chore, and those high numbers start losing their meaning. Obviously, since we’re talking computers here, these high numbers are all possible and easy for the game to arbitrate - pen and paper games kept with low numbers to make those easy to arbitrate for people. But maybe there’s something easier to deal with using those low numbers, especially if you don’t like having your scientific calculator out while playing your MMO.

How about no numbers at all? This is an avenue that has been little explored in the MMO space yet. Let the computers deal with all of the number crunching and go as far as hiding it from the user. It’d certainly take a different type of player (likely, more roleplay focused) than the general gamer these days who expects (and loves) those numbers. A game set up like this would probably end up being a niche game, because it doesn’t appeal to the broad spectrum of gamers. Now, if you can set up the interface and game mechanics in a way that can hide or display those details, you might have something.

This is one of those topics that is pretty fun to explore and imagine. There is definitely something more to it than just picking values out of ones ass - there are comfort levels and other human factors to consider. There is a lot of tweaking and adjusting that can be done, not just to balance, but to make it ‘feel’ right.