[Thought Experiment] Player motivation map

Here's a thought experiment for anyone designing a game. Build up a 'user flow' diagram to determine what your players will do and why. Think about all the possible actions the players can do as well as all the possible motivations players have to do them.

For example, I'm going to take a basic eastern MMORPG.

 

Possible Actions: 

Grinding

Farming

Quests

In-Game events

Organized Play (Team Play)

Organized wars

Socializing/Community building.

Possible Motivators: 

Power

Greed

Competitiveness

Expression / Build creation

Exploring

Socializing

Then figure out what actions are "fed" by what motivators. That is, which actions will satisfy particular wants and desires of your players.

Farming

Motivators: Power, Greed, Competitiveness, Expression

Questing

Motivators: Power, Greed, Competitiveness

Grinding

Motivators:  Power, Greed, Competitiveness

Organized Play

Motivators: Socializing, Power, Greed, Competitiveness, Expression

Socializing/Community building:

Motivators: Socializing.

Then figure out which action is rewards some motivations *the most* in your game so you can refine your list down.  In most games, Organized play isn't the best way to satisfy power leveling. However, organized play can be the only source for some hard to acquire items. In this case, farming and organized play both satisfy greed the most in different ways.. so our refined list looks like..

Farming

Motivators: Greed

Questing

Motivators: None

Grinding

Motivators:  Power, Competitiveness

Organized Play

Motivators: Greed, Socializing, Expression

Socializing/Community building:

Motivators: Socializing.

Now you have a pretty good idea of what is going to be the dominant actions that are going to be taken in the game. If you have a better idea of specific actions in your game, you can further refine this chart to determine what actions a potential player will do. Further refinements to this list can include: availability of the various actions you can take (for example, if there are only 3 quests in the entire game then questing can't satisfy its motivators because it's not available all the time). You can also figure out if you need to design more actions to satisfy base motivators, like specific quests designed to attract players who are driven by say, greed and socializing.

On creative patterns

Almost all general game designs follow a slightly different pattern, I would endeavor to say that some of these patterns are far more successful than others. One of the most successful patterns I have seen is also one of the least understood and so I would like to give a short summary of it here. It involves 4 steps and roughly parallels to the 4 basic stages of learning how to do art.

1) Replication

"You start off by seeing if you can reproduce something you already know. An artists learns shadows and textures by drawing off of life."

In all forms of art and design, the first initial step is to replicate something you've seen. Replication is an exercise in both vision and execution. You have to see what is important or innate about the game and simultaneously be able to execute it and carry it out exactly.

Without being able to replicate something exactly, you often get the strange feeling that something is missing if you are lacking in vision or that something feels off if  you are lacking in execution.

If, for example, you are creating a first person shooting game, the first step would be to replicate a base that you know, like Doom or something. It does not have to be perfect. The key in this step is to understand what you are trying to create and make sure that you both can see what is there to do and if you can do it.

2) Variation

"Let us place the bowl of fruit in the sky, or paint it as if it was night."

Variation is when you take an already existing form and tweak aspects of it. It is mainly an exercise in coherence. By taking various related objects or concepts and putting them in the same form, you begin to see how things can interact with each other in new ways.

When you fail to do enough variations, it often feels like parts of the game don't interact with each other well because there's a poor understanding of how the various elements can fit together.

Going back to our first person shooter example, variation is when you start tweaking or adding things and seeing how the new patterns emerge. What if you could fly in Doom? (Tribes). What if it was a fantastic setting? (Heretic)

3) Innovation

"From first principles, what if we then painted the impression that a bowl of fruit left to us?"

Innovation is the introduction entirely new ideas into the scene. Innovation is mainly needed as an outlet for creativity and novelty. Only by introducing something entirely new can you achieve things that replication and variation can't. For example, if you abandon the photorealism of a painting and painted merely the effect it had on you, this would be something that perfect replication or variation could not do.

Going back to our first person shooter example, innovation is hard to come by. There are games that dramatically change the way you interact with your environment (Portal, Thief), or games that have deliberately dropped realism for artistic style (Team Fortress).

4) Refinement

"Sometimes we can emphasize our use of color by using only a little bit. A single red flower in a black and white painting is far more powerful than a painting full of color"

Refinement is simply to cut away unnecessary parts of the original form and to add elements to it that make it more streamlined. Just as using washed out colors can serve to emphasize color, removing elements that grab the players attention can serve to streamline attention.  Refinement is the hardest principle to embrace as it involves a deep understanding of what your original idea was and what made it work, the realization of how coherent the idea is to itself and the ability to add new things to streamline the idea.

In our FPS example, Team Fortress is a good example of where stripping away ideas or refinement brought about an increase in playability from the original Team Fortress Classic. Gone are the grenades and some classes. Gone are several "good" things in favor of making "great" things shine instead.

[Theory] Online RPG Game Economics and You, Part 2

It is obvious that in almost all online role playing games, that more experienced players who have played longer will have more money and in-game wealth than someone who has started the game.  In the last post, I established that price fixing and demand will generally be decided more by older experienced wealthy players than the majority of the players around.

There is a concept of "quality" good or "substitute" good in real world economies that also apply online role playing games as well. For a designer, these represent particularly complex pitfalls with itemization. Consider the fact that there may be the possibility of an item found extremely early on in the game that is still useful throughout all levels of the game. This good can be acquired by anyone.

Goods or items that are in demand with few substitutes will have their prices determined "fair" by the most powerful players.

Consider a low level item that is perpetually useful. For example, a useful little trinket that stuns an enemy for 3 seconds. Now, since this item is perpetually useful, every player in every single wealth bracket will desire this item. The free market will then decide the price of the item, most likely, to be the highest price a player will pay for it. This will naturally fall within the "elite" player's wealth bracket. 

Even if the item wasn't particularly powerful, the item's valuation will be determined by the elite player's wealth bracket.  For example, let us assume that the item is worth no more than 1% of your income. For the elite player, this could be two to a hundred times greater than players of lower levels. This common low-level item then will have ridiculously inflated market value relative to the players finding it.

Such things naturally lead to: Farming.

Farming is a horrible process as it disrupts normal gameplay (advancement and progression) and replaces it with a tedious repetitive process. Players are no longer encouraged to play what/where it suits them (or where it will challenge them) but to rapidly incur financial gain by repeatedly doing a simple area.

Combating this is even riskier. Suppose that, to encourage players to move onto new areas, you decrease the amount of items/gold from monsters that are too easy for the player. Now, players have a disincentive to level. If there is so much more gold/wealth to be obtained from killing this set of easy monsters for a low level item that can't be found anywhere else and sells for millions because elite players will pay millions, you'll see players actively make the choice to either not level or the choice to roll dedicated farming alts designed to farm this area.

With too many people farming the same resource, the rise of automated gatherers and high competition naturally occurs. If there is high collusion between player groups for highly desirable items with only one location to be obtained then you may have entire gangs of players "camped" out at a specific spot to acquire. This problem is worse if said location was originally intended to be an area for new players!

[Theory] Online RPG Game Economics and You, Part 1

I'm sure that this has definitely been done before, but here's my quick musings on multiplayer game economics.

Multiplayer economics is often a tricky subject because the designer doesn't know what factors, incentives or disincentives exist. However, there are some wonderful key factors here that I feel have been ignored in the larger scheme of things.

Resources are created for "free" but they are never permanently consumed.

For example, there are two primary sources of obtaining in-game wealth. The primary source of income in a game is any system in which the game gives the players currency. This includes the reward of gold or money or items that could potentially generate gold and money. This is the first major break from reality, as it represents an unlimited money supply which must be addressed.

The secondary source of obtaining in-game wealth is the trade of items of value with other players in exchange of items for wealth in trading systems. This is the main "economy" problem that players speak of.  The main problem with economies in general is the fact that if in-game wealth or gold is generated at too fast a rate from "nowhere" then there is no point in trading for it.  The game then needs to revert to a Barter system, where items are primarily traded for other items.

Improperly managed resources/economies can lead to trade "lock", where no parties are willing to trade.

A barter system would be fine as a secondary currency, but only *if* there are sufficient units of lower denominations available to make "change", so to speak.  I would gladly trade my sword of vorpal destruction for your shiny shield of gold. But if my sword is vastly superior to your shield, I would need something extra to compensate the difference in value. However, if there is no agreed upon secondary currency, then the trade cannot continue and the barter system will break down as everyone is locked with the items they possess.

The primary failings of both the money based and the barter based systems is the fact that the supply is essentially infinite and with no external systems, there is an infinitely growing supply of items. This problem is sometimes exacerbated by the  introduction of real money trade in the system in games that are dependent on micro-transactions for their cash flows.

The rate at which resources are obtained, inevitably favor those who are more powerful.

The second major fallout in multi-player game economics is from the rate at which wealth is acquired. Naturally, as players progress through the game, they obtain more powerful and more desireable items. They also receive increased rewards to discourage players from taking the easy road. There is also usually an increase in "cost-of-living" expenditures such as perishable consumables and item costs in general (as barriers to player growth) and thus neccesitating a rise in the ability to obtain in game wealth.

I'll give an example here, as that may have been too wordy. Our level one hero finds one gold on a slime. This is fine because his sword only cost 5G.  If our hero gets one gold a kill, he can obtain his sword in 5 kills. Now, if the next more powerful weapon costs 100G, our hero will need to kill 95 slimes in order to obtain his sword. But what is usually termed as "fair" in an RPG is that, as our hero acquires more power and defeats more powerful enemies, he should be rewarded more gold as well. That is, our hero can now kill demons and get hundreds of gold per kill.  If we only awarded our hero one gold per demon kill, our hero might as well just kill slimes instead as they were much easier.

However, with an increase of power, also comes the increased ability to gather wealth. A high level player in online rpgs can gain gold perhaps tens or hundreds of times more than a new beginning player. This creates a serious discrepancy in the wealth accumulation of the system as now, the vast majority of the wealth in the system is controlled by proportionately few people.  In real world economies, this would rapidly lead to: Price inflation and Price fixing.