Altoholics and randomness
When playing a MMORPG I am rarely able to stick to just one character. It feels like I am missing out on what the game has to offer if I do, so even before I have reached the level cap (the maximum level a character can have in the game) on my first ‘game toon’ I have created at least one more that I have tried out to make sure that the ‘toon’ I am focusing on is the right one. When starting out a game this mostly works out nicely.
But playing the same character with the same game mechanics doing the same kind of quests over and over can easily kill the joy of any game MMOPRG. And this is when ‘that other toon’ suddenly becomes a ‘game savior’ by letting me diversify my game experience by alternating a little between the different characters. This way I am able to keep the game interesting and it also lets me explore what the game has to offer in a broader sense.
Then we start ‘capping’ characters. And this is where the random element in the game starts messing things up. When I first returned to WoW (World of Warcraft) last year after a long break my plan was to avoid some of my original characters to make the game feel ‘new’. Initially this worked out quite well, but as the game progressed the altoholic in me took over and in due time all of my ‘toons’ got capped and opened up the door for ‘end gaming’ or ‘raiding’, which is also the part of the game I enjoy most. To avoid playing all of my characters at the same time I kept trying to focus on a few of them and preferably characters with focus on different ‘roles’ in the game (healer/tank/DPS). I would have preferred to make this choice myself, but this is where the random element appears and the game chooses for me. How does the game choose? Well, to be able to progress in the game and face new and more difficult raiding challenges I need to upgrade the ‘gear’ my characters have. And the ‘gear’ is randomly generated as ‘loot’ from these raid challenges and are largely out of my control. From a statistical point of view I know this is not the truth, but it feels like when I try to focus on getting certain items for a specific character I enjoy playing, they seem to have completely disappeared from the game.
When faced with this frustration over several gaming sessions in a row it is easy to pop over to one of my ‘alts’ to ‘calm down’ only to have all of the best possible items drop for this ‘toon’ without focusing on it at all. So suddenly the only character I can actually continue progressing with is a ‘side kick’ that I originally had not intended on playing that much. The randomness of loot from boss challenges has made the choice for me. And last night I was wondering if this is an intended element of the game or if this is just a random result of how certain game mechanics work together? The reason was of course that I have been trying desperately to ‘gear up’ one character and failing, when suddenly a character I have only been playing one the side ended up with some amazing gear that suddenly makes this character my best candidate for further progress in the game.
Naturally this is a situation that becomes even more prominent with the LFR (Looking for raid) tool that allows anyone to be teamed up randomly to take on ‘raid challenges’. Its easier for me to just sign up for a ‘raid event’ on any of the game characters that I play, and the ‘loot’ I might get is random. I could get loads and I could get nothing.
Time for game event reset
In World of Warcraft Wednesday is the day when all of the raid instances reset. It is also the day when your earning potential for the raid currency Valor resets. In short; all the challenges you overcame last week are now back in play to be confronted again, and you get to earn more Valor so you can upgrade your virtual gear or buy some new gear. Its with mixed feelings I log in on Wednesdays as I am part happy to be able to ‘continue’ advancing my favorite character, but at the same time its a hassle to have to work my way through loads of the same content as the week before…
Luckily this concept with weekly resets is better than the Daily quests; quests that add some kind of game value to your character that reset every night to be repeat again – and again – and again the following day. Some of these you only do to reach some kind of goal in the game, but some of them are endless and you can keep doing them until it drives you crazy. To counter this repetitiveness they have added a pool of quests that rotate to let you have some variation to the quests you ‘have’ to do, but it still feels a lot like unrewarding work to me and I am quite certain that I do not feel that these Daily quests add anything positive to the game, especially since most of these quests are mostly solo activities that turns this MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) into a MOQGG (Massive Online Quest Grinder Game). I truly hope the game designers out there are working hard to invent something new, something more meaningful and fun, than these tedious Daily quests that are driving me nuts and killing the fun of playing.
Collaborate versus cooperate?
Taken from Merriam-Websters online dictionary;
collaborate
: to work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something
: to give help to an enemy who has invaded your country during a warcooperate
: to work together : to work with another person or group to do something
: to be helpful by doing what someone asks or tells you to do
: to act in a way that makes something possible or likely : to produce the right conditions for something to happen
In terms of gaming ‘cooperate’ has become the common term for playing together with others. At the same time my thesis focuses on a gamified solution and is not a ‘game’ as such. Which is why I early on chose to use ‘collaborate’ when referring to the objective of my thesis prototype. The use of ‘achieve’ as part of the definition for ‘collaborate’ also weighs in for choosing this term. But even so I am worried about the loss of attention my work will have from a gaming perspective as ‘coop gaming’ has become something of a standard when referring to this kind of social interaction.
I found an article online discussing the similarities and differences between these words and from this perspective the outcome of an innovation process is ‘owned’ by the ‘collective’ that worked together to make it happen. A cooperative effort does not automatically hold this kind of ‘collective ownership’.
Another comparison also implies a difference in the ownership of the final outcome where ‘collaboration’ implies that it is collective, and ‘cooperation’ does not hold the same strength of common ownership as you can participate or help with generating the outcome without holding any rights on the outcome.
When doing my initial analyzing of games I found that the individuals ownership of both their character/avatar as well as the items in their inventory are very important. At the same time they feel a mutual ownership of game achievements that require a team effort. This leads me to think that for an innovation process the idea and its content when it is ‘completed’ in the gamified solution needs to be ‘owned’ by the collective that worked with it, but that as an individual you can take credit for certain parts of it. Working with the game analogy this makes the completed idea an achievement, but the parts that it is made up of are virtual items ‘owned’ by individuals.
As I am interpreting collaboration and cooperation at this point there is a path here representing an players involvement with an idea. A player will go from being unaware of an idea to be aware of it, then interested in it and then seeking involvement. When becoming involved you move from contributing to cooperating to collaborating. For a gamified solution to work all of these levels of involvement must be represented and have different interactions connected to them to help clarify their differences. And the players level of ownership to an idea is central to making this part of the gamified solution work.
My first collaborative game experiences
It is hard to state what my first collaborative game experience was as it depends on how you define it. Personally I subscribe to looking at it from two perspectives; one involving collaboration outside the game itself and one that involves the in-game multiplayer experience we have grown accustomed to today. Even today I feel both are equally relevant, but naturally the in-game collaborative game experience dominates my gaming schedule today.
My first memory of collaborative gaming was with the 1982 Atari classic Choplifter. A friend taught me the basic concepts of the game, and then after this we had a part competitive and part collaborative relationship when playing. Competitive regarding score and progress, but at the same time watching each other and discussion problematic elements of the game and trying to solve them as a team. This collaboration introduced a social aspect to the game even if at any given time only one of us was actually playing.
A few years went by and I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, and with it all of the early games of the 80s. This included the game Bruce Lee (1983, Datasoft Inc.) which became my next collaborative memory. Conceptually the same type of game experience as with Choplifter, but this time the collaboration ended with a complete success and the game was completed. Alas completing the game just meant you would start again from the beginning, but it still felt ‘special’ to have made it to ‘the end’.
Shortly after the success of Bruce Lee we discovered M.U.L.E and everything changed. While competitive at its core – naturally you want to win – it also included options for collaboration. Both keeping the ‘colony’ alive as well as making sure that the computer did not win created a window for a collaborative gaming experience, and many hours were invested in this game at the time. Even if it would take some years until we could sit at home and enjoy a multiplayer experience this game will always be my first.
I truly believe that a good game should include a social element. And even if you play the game alone the experience can be enhanced by having someone to share it with. That said, even outside my gaming I prefer collaboration to competition. When comparing the element of winning versus participation I believe that participation will always end up as the most important of the two. Given this, combined with the fact that it feels better to have everybody ‘win’ and at the same time avoid forcing anybody to ‘loose’, games the focus on collaborative game play are just more interesting. And of course it never hurts to be able to grab a beer with your collaborators to get some time away from the computer screen…
Positive goal oriented communication enhances performance?
This weekend I had two experiences with LFR (Looking for Raid) in WoW (World of Warcraft). LFR is an in-game tool that lets you sign up for a raid event with 24 other players facing some of the tougher challenges in the game. Both experiences relate to what happens once a raid is unable to handle the game challenges they encounter.
The first episode happened in a raid where there was were little communication going on between the players, and the little communication that was there was either casual or negative. The moment the raid started to have performance problems or wiping as it is often called, the negative comments in the raid chat channel increased and players were looking for someone to blame rather than looking for solutions. As the raid had no established leadership and no one trying to hold the team motivated, annoyed players left the raid rather than trying to collaborate and look for a solution. This is where episode two becomes interesting. Later during the same weekend in another raid the same level of chatter was going on, but this time there were also a few people trying to lead the group. The raid encountered the same performance problems as in the first episode, but due to the presence of leadership very few players decided to leave. The presence of leadership analyzing the problem and working on finding solutions kept most players focused and motivated, and having these solutions solving the problems kept the raid from loosing any more players as the raid progressed.
It seems that even the smallest presence of leadership or guidance is enough to motivate a team to continue working on overcoming problematic challenges that the game throws at them. For collaboration to work this part of the collaborative effort must be kept present and positive. For LFR in WoW this is a role that one or more players need to perform, but it should be possible to introduce mechanics in the game that would help motivate players into taking on these types of responsibilities. Motivational game mechanics that create a solid communication platform for positive social interactions is an interesting design challenge for MMORPGs today, but so far I have yet to see any attempts on solving this aspect of game play.
Why write a game diary?
When I started out working with my Master thesis it was largely inspired by my long history as a gamer. It was also part of my initial hypothesis that game design patterns can be identified and transferred into a gamified system, and part of my initial research was looking into games that contained some form of collaborative game experience. After having browsed through several different types of games I landed on using a combination of MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) and RTS (Real Time Strategy) to look for the earlier mentioned game design patterns. To get started I chose three games that each contained game design elements I believed could be relevant to my thesis; EVE, World of Warcraft and Civilization V.
Why did I choose these three? EVE was chosen due to its massive space battles that involves collaborative game play at an unprecedented scale. According to an article in Wired more than 7500 gamers participated in the event making it a very interesting game to analyze. I have tried the game, but have no recent game play to refer to and my documentation for my thesis here is based on interviews with active players. World of Warcraft was chosen both for its popularity as well as its collaborative PvE (Player versus Environment where the environment is the virtual reality of the game world and its game challenges) team game play with focus on raids (large teams of 10 or 25 players). An enormous number of gamers join up in guilds to spend several hours every week facing the raid challenges in highly efficient teams where collaboration is a key element to succeed. Finally I spent some time playing Civilization V for its turn based game play. I found this interesting since a turn based gamified solution for open innovation would allow for more flexible collaboration that would not require the players to be online at the same time to interact with each other.
I spent time from November 2013 and until the end of February 2014 to look for relevant game design patterns, and during march I found three game elements that I would work with to design a prototype to test later this year. These were user profiles, game activities and ranking, each representing core game elements that I believe to be important for an open innovation gamification application. Since then the design process has included both participatory design workshops as well a several hours of actual game play. Both have been important sources of inspiration for the design work and contributed with key findings to help improve and innovate the prototype. To document how the game play has contributed to the design process I have created this game diary that will contain entries referring to actual game play experiences that have yielded interesting findings or input to the design process. I am quite sure I will not be able to make use of the data from these entries, but hopefully that will be something I will be able to work on later.
Finding collaborative game mechanics
Having spent several hours working with an assortment of MMOs it has always been my assumption that it is possible to identify specific game mechanics that enable collaborative gaming. Gamification uses the term game mechanics very loosely about both simple and complex parts of a game, and for now I will adopt this practice until I can establish a better set of terms and definitions. At this point there are three game mechanics that I feel are critical for collaborative gaming to occur.
- 1. User profile
The user profile is the players base of operations in any kind of game experience today, and for most MMORPGs it includes one or more avatars and their virtual belongings. The players ownership of these avatars and virtual commodities gives them a reason to invest time in the game with the promise of increased value to the user profile. Value being individually different. - 2. Events
Collaborative play occurs when there are game mechanics that enable players to ‘play together’. An event here being a game experience where players participate together. - 3. Rating
For some winning is important, to others achievements is more important. No matter what motivates a player the game experience needs to be able to give the player some way to measure their successes or failures.
Moving these game mechanics into an open innovation process helps define critical requirements that a gamified application will need include. The player must be able to feel ownership to their participation, preferably through a user profile. There must be events that will let the player participate in a collaborative way, and there must be a way of letting the player see how their participation affects the game as well as how they are rewarded for their participation.
Gunnar Øyvin Fredrikson 