Wednesday, July 15, 2009

two new books and some important rambling

Alright, I don't have a lot of time to post today so I'm going to try to make this one quick.

First, I just picked up two new design books that I'm beginning as soon as I finish this post. The first is called "Postmortems from Game Developers: Insight from the Developers of Unreal Tournament, Black and White, Age of Empires, and Other Top-Selling Games" by Austin Grossman. The other is called "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" by Jesse Schell. The first is basically a bunch of designers that each contribute to a segment of the book by going into detail about their own successes and mishaps throughout a particular game’s development cycle. The second is a book about different perspectives one may apply to design, and it so often quoted and referenced that I finally caved and decided I will have to read it for myself. I'm undecided on which one to read first. I'm leaning towards the latter, since I may be able to apply its insights directly to the real-world experiences of the first when I read it.

Additionally, I realized that I had not mentioned something that I should have stated from the beginning about my philosophy of MMORPG design. You can basically boil it all down to one thing: If you do not understand the world you already live in, you cannot possibly expect to create one of your own. This is what I mean when I suggest that knowledge in breadth is better than knowledge in depth when it comes to MMORPG game design (although clearly both traits are desirable and they do sometimes beget one another). It is for this reason that I freely go into discussions on things such as social philosophies - they are a big part of your world. In the theory of MMORPG design practically all knowledge and experience is not only useful - it is urgently so. If your worldview is not solid, then the world you create will fall apart. Your worldview is built on everything you know and have experienced up to this day.

Programmers tend to be intellectuals. While I have no raw data to back this up, I can remember scarcely a single one I've met who wasn't. Intellectuals tend to be progressive, generally liberal in their political leanings – the programmers I know are no exception. Progressive, generally liberal people tend to believe in socialist philosophies. Socialist philosophies inherently micromanage people in their daily lives. The micromanaging of men’s lives tends bring free societies to shambles.

Now, let me say real quickly that I am a Conservative's conservative. I'm a conservative in the way Ronald Reagan was and probably even moreso in the way that Ron Paul still is. With that said, please read on.

The most profound flaw found in raw intellectualism (and by extension progressivism) is that people who consider themselves intellectuals tend also to consider themselves more intelligent than most people around them – aside from socially higher ranked intellectuals. The fact is, often times they are correct - perhaps even always (it makes no difference). The flaw is that intellectuals by extension believe themselves to be more intelligent than all of those lesser intelligent people, combined. This popular sentiment is what leads to the belief that what we need in, say, a President, is in fact a brilliant intellectual (if you haven’t heard that rallying cry then your head has been in the sand for the last 12-20 months).

Now, the intellectual, believing that they are smarter than the sum of the lower intelligences beneath them, begins to espouse actions that control the lives of the individuals intellectually inferior to them - in order to help them. From the President’s vantage point, we are talking about millions of people with literally centuries of evolving experience, culture, knowledge, etc. behind them. The intellectual President, believing that he knows better how to run their lives than they themselves do as free individuals, begins to micro-manage them by interfering with the economy (individual's exchange of goods and monies), with medicine (where doctors practice, how they practice, who they aid), with insurance (who they will serve and with what policies), with mortgages (who must be given loans regardless of risk), with investments (socializing their risk), etc.

Intellectualism is thus an inherently flawed worldview when it takes on this form, a form manifestly common in our society. In addition, its personalities tend to manifest themselves as exceedingly corrosive and arrogant due precisely to this highfaluting nature, which is yet another hallmark trait of many game programmers and designers whose blogs and forums are found all over the internet.

Now, with at least the basic understanding of why I see this worldview as flawed, you can begin to see why I am so critical of current MMORPG designers. It is extremely clear to me that these brilliant intellectuals (and I don't say that ironically, they are brilliant men) aspire to a destructive and ultimately flawed view of the world, and more specifically of society. It is precisely for this reason that the current generation of sandbox MMO's (the only kind of MMO that attempts to actually mimic a full-on world) are failing miserably. The reason that they fail is not a wholesale condemnation by the market that sandbox MMOs make for bad business, it is a condemnation of the worldviews that form the very premises upon which those sandboxes are built. These men rarely understand the natural laws that govern the relations between free men, and it becomes abundantly clear in the way in which players are allowed to interact.

You see, the constraints within which players may interact within these “sandbox MMOs” reflect a mind that looks in on itself for its own version of what a society should look like, and then attempts to create rules and methods of interaction that will allow players to form societies in the likeness of the designer’s own image. Not in the image of the society that the players want. The problem is that no true sandbox MMORPG has yet been created; not that sandbox MMORPGs are a lost cause.

And no, I consider neither UO nor Eve true sandbox MMORPGs, each for different reasons that would take a wall of text to properly explain. They are among two of the closest examples, however.

Now
, with that understanding, perhaps if you go back and read my third entry, you will be more successful in understanding some of my more nuanced reasoning.

There was a third unrelated item that I wanted to discuss, but this entry is long enough. I’ll save it for next time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

UO and EVE aren't sandboxes?

Their fans certainly fancy them as such from time to time, but I never really gave it any thought that they weren't.

I can see a valid point, though. Technically the developers aren't letting people create societies that can evolve - they're merely throwing their players into some kind of perpetual social drama that always revolves around the same issues.

The same issues that the designer conveniently knows how to perpetuate and control. Like some sick, perverted God who plays with and destroys people's lives for their mere enjoyment!

Ah...well, maybe not that drastic...

Zenodotus said...

That's a nice, succinct way of putting it.

I will say that I think they are great examples of sandboxes for the sake of giving us a benchmark of what the next generation needs to ensure it surpasses. Other than that, I think it's better for designers in general to admit that even these games haven't gotten there. If we don't admit this, then the genre won't improve, at least not as fast as it can.

The issue of "control" you speak of sounds similar to the idea of excessive social micro-management that I've alluded to. I think would we agree on much more than we would disagree.

Followers