Another Perspective

Like many game designers I've seen or read, I adhere to the belief that it is important to look at a video game's design through more than one perspective (some might call them "lenses"). If you are reading my blogs in order (and I hope you are, since that's how I intend they be read), you'll remember that at the end of my last blog I gave special credence to the game Asheron's Call.

I stopped short of explaining specifically why. I'd like to hold off on going into too many specifics and continue to speak in terms of generalities if I can get away with it for a little while longer.

I recently read a book called "Game Development Essentials: Online Game Development," by Rick Hall and Jeannie Novak. I absolutely could not put it down. The book focuses largely on the business aspects of game design, and successfully makes the case that a MMORPG designer must not consider him or herself at odds with the players, the artists, the level designers, the corporate suits, etc. Instead, the successful designer looks at all of those components as pieces of the same puzzle - pieces that must be made to interlock. In game design, even those pesky "griefers" should be thought of as a force not to be avoided or obliterated, but harnessed. Rick Hall makes the same case for anything one would normally consider a "constraint." Instead of thinking of it as a constraint, he urges readers to think of it more as a direction, as a guidepost, as one more technicality that we no longer have to worry about deciding, as a force to harness, or one of many other things aside from a "constraint." Of course we have to deal with constraints, but the best designers construct games that make those constraints work for them. They don’t stifle them, they use them to make their world more dynamic and interesting.

Now before I go too far, I want to say bluntly that I do not believe that all perspectives, or "lenses," were created equal. In fact, as I'll illustrate in a later blog, I believe that some are decidedly more useful and truth-telling than others. With that said, however, one never knows if a lens distorts perception or magnifies it until one has in some way compared it with their most trusted set.

I'd like now to quote a post I made on another message board concerning the game "Asheron's Call." At the time I never anticipated using this post in a blog, but I believe it suits our purposes here quite well. Essentially, the purpose of the thread was to discuss nostalgia regarding the game, and to a lesser extent discuss what made it such a great game. This was my first post on those particular boards (I had happened across the thread through a Google search I was doing.)

"….I think there is a kernel of truth to those who say we are nostalgic for [Asheron’s Call] because it was our first, however I believe that that statement only goes so far. AC was not the first video game I ever played, and it was not the first MMO I ever played, it was only the first 3D immersive MMO I played. The truth is that AC was great and will not be easily surpassed for the same reasons Plato and Socrates were great philosophers who will not be easily surpassed - it was designed philosophically from the ground up. Philosophies since Plato's era have appeared, but they largely take their foundations for granted, and build upon premises that they don't bother proving (Marxism comes to mind). Occasionally, however, we still see a philosophy appear that actually bothers to start from the beginning, define all aspects of self and life, and then move on to social proofs only after that is complete (Objectivism comes to mind) - but these are rare. In video games we see the same thing happening. Older MMO designers had to literally sit down, ask themselves what is a game, what makes a game fun, what makes it feel immersive, what makes players feel free, what is "progression" and how should it be defined, is there a thing as too much freedom and if so what is it, how is an immersive game different from a 2D game, etc. They literally had to go back to root questions.

Philosophically, the earlier designers overwhelmingly concluded that the best kind of immersive MMO is that which leaves as many decisions as possible to be made at the lowest level - the player. A Republic operates on the same principles - counties/cities make as many decisions as they can, then come states/provinces with only the big decisions, and then the "federal" government only when they absolutely must. The most efficient system always leaves decisions to the lowest possible level. That is the fundamental "sandbox MMO" premise as well, and early designers probably didn't consider an MMORPG being good for much other than a sandbox design - why would you take an MMORPG and make a theme-park type game out of it? That would be like taking a flat screen tv and using it as a table - sure you can, but there are plenty of other ways to make a table. The same goes for directed, handholding gameplay - it can essentially be done with single player games, so why take this awesome new (at the time) technology - the immersive MMO - and do directed gameplay when we can create something totally new? So they did. [As an aside, of course from a market perspective creating a theme park single-player-like game that never ends (such as WoW) is a neat idea, after all, its like guaranteeing you sell a new single player game every month. But some of the early designers don't appear to have considered this, probably because they were looking at how to use this new technology to create a brand new experience out of it - not a never-ending version of an old one. I will elaborate on this point in a later blog.]

The newer MMOs, however, are not asking the fundamental questions anymore. The newer MMOs glance at the old "philosophies," do not bother to fully understand the ancient texts, and start writing nonsense. They take the decisions away from the lowest level and put them in the hands of the state, aka the game. The rugged individualism of Asheron's Call has given way to the communism of Maoist China. And not enough people bother to ask: Why are these my constraints? Why is my life pigeonholed? Is this really the most efficient way? Is it the most fun? The most fulfilling? Instead, people look around, see that millions of other people are doing what they are doing, and conclude that this must be the best way (ala World of Warcraft).

There will be another Asheron's Call, but it will require two things: First, a team of designers must step back and design their MMO completely from the ground up, and actually be able to fully articulate why they make the design decisions they do. Why utilize levels? Why make character progression directed? Why have a radar on the screen? Why make a level cap? Why make death trivial? If they can't answer these kinds of questions, or if their answer is "Because the industry has shown that these things work," then they definitely can't articulate their beliefs on truly fundamental questions, such as "how free is too free." Second, the team of designers must be able to obtain funding from a committed entity that is willing to put its trust in them and not micro manage the process. If the funding comes from a source that actually believes that decisions are best left to the lowest level, then they should see the error in micro managing the designers anyways...."

Now, if we can put some of the more loaded statement made here aside for a second, we can examine the overarching point I was attempting to make. Yes I am aware that a "republic" is not necessarily governed in the way I described, and yes you may be a big fan of Marxist theories and hate Objectivism - let those thoughts go just for a few minutes please. Most people reading this blog should know that there are two overarching genres of MMOs: "theme park" and "sand box." Those extraordinarily shallow labels have been used ad nauseum to describe virtually every MMO ever made.

In my last blog I attempted to take a very cursory look at MMOs through what one might (somewhat sloppily) call the perspectives of Live-Action Role-Play and Pen & Paper Role-Play. If you haven't quite caught on yet, in this blog we are beginning to look at games through the perspective of social philosophy.

We can take a look at social philosophy through the lense of real-world history, and when we do, we see that a strong case can be made for rugged individualism as the greatest overarching societal rallying cry ever made. Now, why on Earth would I say that? Particularly when game developers are known to hold widely liberal viewpoints - aren't I shooting myself in the foot here? Well, consider the greatest superpower the world as ever known: the United States. To fully appreciate the dominance that that country has held for the past several decades, one must have a solid grounding in history, but as I don't have time to make this already long post a history lesson as well, I'll assume that the reader is willing to grant this fact as indeed true.

The relevant question then is: What made America so powerful? It wasn't particularly rich in resources, and it wasn't the only country on the planet with oceans on two sides. In fact, many countries have oceans on three sides, and several on all sides. It certainly wasn't the most isolationist country, nor was it the most imperialistic in human history (albeit it has become much more so in recent years). The singular thing that has always separated America from every other country on the planet is its continued deference towards individualism. At the root of the Constitution is the fundamental belief that the most fulfilling life is a life of freedom. An unforeseen consequence of that belief has been that the decisions of men are consistently made at the lowest possible level. Only a fool actually believes that because they are more intelligent than a farmer, they are more intelligent than all farmers combined - yet that is the fundamental flaw made via the micromanagement we see in socialist countries of every flavor. As a consequence, their “farmers” are not only less efficient, but are also less happy. This same phenomenon infects every facet of the socialist state; not just the farmers. This same phenomenon also illustrates the fundamental flaw of the restrictive MMO, and highlights why it can never be anything more than a "them park."

You see, the socialist state does not see man's desire for wealth and other market incentives of private citizens as forces (aka "constraints") that they should elegantly allow to work for them. Instead, they view the men and women as tools to forcefully set on various pre-formulated paths, which they then periodically tax. It is the brute-force method of game design applied at the state level. A state that allows the natural tendencies of man to work for it, i.e. the United States, ends up as the greatest power the world has ever known. The state that constricts its people, tells them what they will do next, and then taxes them for it, ends up one of the most repressive, unfulfilling experiences the world has ever known. It's an extraordinary shame that many of the people of China have no concept of what they are missing out on. In the MMO world, a “China” has already been created in the form of World of Warcraft, among several clones, and it is certainly not a mere irony that many of the players of those games have never experienced an MMO world outside of that game type. But this begs the question: Where is our “United States?”

Let's say you find all that stuff to be a bunch of nonsense: Then consider for a second what the purpose of a "state" is. Is it to advance technology, or provide order, or keep its citizens alive, or advance itself in a global market, or....? What is it? You see, in my mind, the "state" is what sets the rules by which its people act, which is very similar to what a game designer does when they design their MMO. The two are practically synonymous. Now you may very well respond: "But the purpose of a game is to have fun! Not create jobs, provide health care, etc." I would counter that the purpose of a state is none of those things, it is actually to allow its citizens to define their own "fulfillment" for themselves, and then simply allow them to seek it within reason. MMOs are eerily similar. Everyone plays MMOs for different reasons, and everyone wants to define themselves and their role individually; they each have their own idea of fulfillment within the context of their alter ego inside the game. The question for the designer is whether or not they allow that inborn desire to work for them, or whether they attempt to eradicate it from their players with pavlovian carrot... after carrot... after carrot. Isn' this same type of conditioning seen in socialist states of all forms? Ironically, it is...except it isn't really ironic at all, is it?

When a designer sits down to create an MMO, does he recognize that the rules he is crafting are similar to the rules governing a state? Does he even know what his own social philosophy is, and can he articulate why? If so, can he take that social theory and distill it down further, digging into those questions that define morality itself? If he cannot, because he has not bothered to work them out for himself, then how is it that he can be trusted with millions of dollars to design a virtual world based on premises that he does not understand, or worse, has not even considered? You see, the answer "because he spent six years as a QA tester and ten more as a level designer" just isn't going to cut it when it comes to world design. This is partially why we see so many MMOs flopping, and a bunch of corporate suits left scratching their heads wondering what went wrong.

Now, was Asheron’s Call a totally free game? Of course not. However, it was clearly designed philosophically from the ground up – or at least closer to it than any of its near competitors (circa 1999). What Asheron’s Call did suffer from was very poor marketing and corporate micro-management. Perhaps I will attempt to elucidate particular examples in my next post, this one’s long enough.

Thank you for reading.