Jedi Archive

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Holocron wrote:
Er, wow.

I have to admit that I didn't expect a thread like this. The love and hate is overwhelming. I figured that four words wouldn't be much of a big deal. I guess I was wrong.

It's interesting to see the mix of perspectives, and sort of uncomfortable to see how personal this all gets. I neither sit over all the designers, as Panthu put it, nor have I "abandoned any interest" as Jaspor puts it. The fact is, I am not really involved in SWG day to day or even month to month despite the fact that of course I still check up on it obsessively.

In general, the teams are going to know FAR better than I about the game that they run. That leaves me without very much that I can say on a game forum, if you think about it. It does no good to you or the team for me to come in and make pronouncements without knowing any facts.

Because of that, I feel pretty uncomfortable even being in this thread at all at this point. I'm happy (as always) to listen to whatever everyone has to say, and pass along comments to the team, but hopefully you can see why I feel that way. FWIW, I think the team truly does care deeply about SWG and its community, regardless of what the unhappy among you might think.

As to what I DO do--I mostly work on new games these days, plus run an R&D group, and do some other stuff. I work very closely with any teams that are working on new pitches, early stages of development, and so on.

I do very much miss talking with all you guys, though.

On specific things:

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Qui-Gonzalez wrote: Why does it seem like many of things I have read that you have written seem contrary to what SOE in general does?

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Well, as several in the thread pointed out, there's theory and then there's practice. A lot of things may sound great on paper and be hard to do in practice. I am unsure what specific things you are referencing beyond the two items you mention (communication and treadmills).

I can tell you that no games developer sets out to make unfun games or game systems. And yet it happens all the time, all over the industry. These are all passionate, hardworking people who do their best to entertain people, and yet arguably they all fail more often than not. If fun were clearly understood, I wouldn't have written a book about it.

On communication, I can tell you that SOE has made a major concerted effort over the last two years to improve communications with players. SWG was the first title of ours to go with the formal In Concept->In Development->In Testing->Latest Update model, but we've been rolling it out to every title. It hasn't been without bumps on the road, but (I'm trying to avoid the corp-speak here, but I'm gonna fail) we remain committed to making it standard policy followed 100% of the time on all our titles. In plain language, we believe that letting you know of possible changes so that you can affect them, letting you know exactly what is going to change and why, giving you details so you can try out changes in testing and make sure they go smoothly, and making sure that all changes are well-documented is critical to good service.

We've also been working to upgrade our newsletters, get more community involvement via things like Tigg's Toons, and so on. We hold guild summits where we gather together key community leaders to get their input. We now have a director of community relations across all our titles to make sure that policies are followed. There's a manual that describes how to interact with players, and its emphasis is on honesty, forthrightness, and timeliness. I am sure that this is the point at which many people pull out the old link from the GDC presentation I did years back, and try to twist it into something negative, but all I can say is that the intent is not negative. We've even worked hard to stop calling it "community management" and instead call it "community relations" because we think that the word "management" implies the wrong things about the relationship there.

On the treadmill--nobody likes treadmills. I do happen to believe that there's powerful drivers in human psychology that push towards treadmilling EVERYTHING, and I think that in life, it's an ongoing challenge to work to make everyday things seem fresh and fun. That doesn't diminish one iota of the responsibility of designers to work towards making every moment of gameplay fun. People often seem to take my observation of how treadmilling seeps into everything as an ENDORSEMENT of treadmilling, but it's not. I HAVE commented that getting on a treadmill (trading time for advancement) is a democratizing tool compared to making a game purely based on skill, but I don't think that's a bad thing. Having only the true hardcore powergamers be at the top isn't necessarily a recipe for fun for everyone either.

Getting away from treadmills is hard, though. I am sure someone will cite some other game at this point and say "what about them, they did it!" But all the MMOs consist just as much of repetitive activities (kill 5 things, kill 10 things, etc). What changes is really the moment to moment experience, whether people feel like there's a fresh take on the activity. There's a lot more about this in the book, but suffice to say, it's a tough problem. But not one that I think anyone is giving up on.

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SonGouki wrote:

He purposely tries to get into your psyche to make you think that that you're having "fun", when in fact it's a not-so-subtle form of mental addiction and manipulation being purposely applied.

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Yeah, right. We purposely create a product intended for entertainment, and shape it instead to controool your braaaaaaain! Heh. :0 Sorry, I couldn't help it.

No, seriously. You say we intentionally implement game systems to TRICK people into THINKING they are having fun, when in practice we're just trying to addict people. You seriously think this?

Since you likely won't believe any altruistic reasons why this is silly, how about you just look at the business case? Does it make good business sense to thus alienate and betray your customers? Why on earth would someone approach it that way? The best way to keep people paying, after all, is to deliver the entertainment that they are expecting. Overdeliver it, actually.

I honestly don't know what to say to this, SonGouki, other than noting that people seem to consistently overestimate how Machiavellian we all are. Somehow we end up being clueless idiot scheming geniuses, when the answer is generally going to be more mundane.

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Almagill wrote:
Paraphrasing 'slightly' here... Players who detect a pattern of actions which leads to a reward will carry out the actions over and over again to get the reward. This is 'fun'. However when players run up against 'noise', ie an apparently random or otherwise incomprehensible mess of options/outcomes/actions/chipmunks, they rapidly become frustrated and stop trying.

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No, running a repetitive set of actions over and over again in order to get a reward is not fun. Fun comes from the challenge of new problems to solve, and solving them right at the limit of your ability.

The problem is that people in general (not always, as Ihareo noted!) tend to get more focused on the end goal than the process, and the second a game designer makes the mistake of providing a low-risk repetitive process that gets the player to the end goal, the player will generally (not always!) choose to take it. It's bottomfeeding, it's grinding, it's boring.

It is a design mistake, don't get me wrong. But I do think it's an understandable one. No game can be of perfect difficulty for every possible player. All games are built out of repetitive mechanics and then ringing changes on the mechanics. Both of those facts make it very easy for a designer to fall into that trap. It's still something that you need to try to avoid.

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