Collaborative gamification mechanics
Active collaboration in games today have certain common game mechanics that are used to promote such user interactions. This brings us to the gamification mechanics that will allow and motivate the users to collaborate. After analyzing multiple massive online games the following list of game mechanics seem to have become a standard for MMORPGs:
Chat and communication
Live chat services in one or more channels. These channels can also contain information feeds from the game system containing real-time game data. Both types of channels stimulate users to communicate.
Frequent visits
When users have a reason to visit the game often they will be able to make these visits part of their daily routine. As long as the interactions helps the user progress in the gamified solution, or adds value to the user profile, even the most trivial tasks can become part of a users day to day activities. McGonigal refers to this as ‘blissful productivity’, Deterding as part of what creates ‘meaning’.
Connections and relations
Take the two mechanics above and add mechanics to connect with other users as part of the gamified experience. This to ensure longer collaborative efforts between users that initially have no or little contact. Such a mechanic will add a list of connections to the user profile and add ways to interact with them. Allowing for ways to differ between how a users profile relates to the other users opens for more interactivity between the users.
User interactivity
Collaboration is possible if the users can work together to achieve a common goal. A solution will allow for multiple types of such goals, both related to ideas as well as achieving certain collaborative goals. Make it valuable not only to interact with the ideas but also with the other users generates a map where a user connects with both ideas and other users as an important part of the gamified experience.
In short we want the users to communicate with each other, we want them to do it often, we want them to connect with each other and we want them to interact on a regular basis. The large MMORPGs are doing it today, but will it work in a gamified solution?
Behavior in raids – conformation
Raids and guilds are like ‘The Borg’:
From psychology this phenomena represents almost ‘magical’ properties, and I am uncertain as to how to evaluate it beyond the questions it poses. Would a low performance gamer become hardcore by joining a hardcore raid community? Would an awesome PvP-gamer totally loose his ‘mojo’ if she/he continually helps out newbies?
At the same time there is also a social aspect to it that I am much more comfortable talking about as I constantly see this when playing. The moment a group goes social in a positive way the players will immediately try to find common ground. How are we alike? With the positive attitude comes the wish to get along. And once common ground is found there is no stopping the possibilities, and I have on several occasions taken my relations out of the game and into a bar or cafe and actually met the person. Some relationships I still have and nurture and some fade into history, not unlike in real life. But once a good connection is made you will rarely loose it.
On the negative side a good social foundation might also get the same raid group wiping for hours on the same boss even if they should have accepted the fact that there is ‘no way in hell’ they are going to be able to succeed with the present team. All you need is a few blindly positive players along with some insanely hopeful loot-junkies and the conformity can convince the rest of the players to keep at it for hours. Over time I have come to accept that I can get entrapped this way as well, and I usually try to operate with a 3-wipe rule before I give up, possibly pushing it to five if I feel lucky. Problem is that with the LFR-tool in WoW you will always have someone leaving when there is a wipe, and that means you get new members that might be just the ones you need to succeed and thus making it harder to leave if the group has conformed to a certain point.
In general the consensus seems to be that we all want to have fun and we are desperately willing to conform if this makes the fun more likely to happen. Of course ‘fun’ can be different from player to player, but for most gamers these days its about mastering the ‘toon’ you have chosen, to overcome tough game challenges, to win some awesome epic items and to have some fun while doing it.
Behavior in raids – initiation rites
The first part of this series of post covered the forming of groups; both the actual raid as well as smaller groups within the raid group itself. Now that the existence of the groups is established it follows to look a little closer on some of the initiation rites I have encountered will exploring Azeroth in the World of Warcraft.
First of all the game itself has several such rites included as part of the game. It can be quests related to your class or challenges to gaining access to certain places. Most of these can be completed alone, but sometimes you need the help of a group to be able to complete such missions in the game. These are all part of your characters story and progression in the game, and they have often given me some extra satisfaction to complete. Especially the ones that in themselves can be shown off as ‘proof of skill’.
Once we leave the game world we enter into the second arena for such initiation rites. Here we find rites from game play abilities to social compatibility. From my experience the game play rites exist in two variations; those you need to go through BEFORE you gain acceptance into a group and those you face AFTER. Both have their own pro’s and con’s and can be used to test players in different ways. In short both are a kind of ‘show us what you got’, but either you are performing to gain entry or you perform to avoid getting thrown out. As the game plays out today BEFORE is mostly related to gaining access to raiding communities and AFTER to keeping your spot as part of the active raiding group.
Social rites come in many forms and may not always be obvious or even consciously enforced, but in general they are relevant for conforming with your fellow raiders. From having similar interests, same type of humor or having a similar cultural background. As mentioned earlier a silent raid seems more likely to ‘suffer’ more when ‘the going gets tough’, and even if verbal abuse might work as a tool for the leadership to keep people in order it rarely helps the raids ability to perform to have one or more individuals harassing other raid members. In short what it comes down to is if ‘the others’ feel that you fit in, and as part of deciding there are multiple different rites of initiation coming from individuals, groups or ‘clicks’. All which brings us to the next part; once you are part of ‘the tribe’ you will be ‘assimilated’.
Behavior in raids – group forming
As my Master thesis is about collaboration the behavior and success of raid activity in any given MMORPG is one of the success criteria I am trying to duplicate. The field of psychology was an interesting choice for analyzing this, and to just have an initial reference I found a simple web site describing ’10 Rules That Govern Groups’ as place to start. For game reference I have been tracking raid behavior in Word of Warcraft from 01.05.2014 to 01.07.2014.
Raids used to be events accessible only through belonging to a ‘guild’ or ‘raid community’, but at this point their creation is more diverse. The most loosely created raids at this time are a result of Word of Warcrafts ‘looking for raid’ tool that is part of the game. You sign up with a role and what raid event you want to partake in and then wait until enough players are signed up for the needed roles and then thrown into a largely random group of 25 players. Another option is for one or more individuals to gather up a group on their own by recruiting these in one of the game chat channels or some outside source (several of these exist today where OQueue and OpenRaid are good examples). Such groups are less random as the creators control the recruitment process. The groups can be generated on the fly with the goal of starting a raid even as soon as possible or they can be set up for a specific time and date, where Word of Warcraft also has a Calendar tool to help organizers set them up. And finally the old school ‘guilds’ and ‘communities’ that are preferred for facing the more challenging raiding content, and that work with the fixed team setups of 10 or 25 players.
In addition to this ‘established’ group setup I continually experience the development of smaller groups within a raid. As mentioned in an earlier post the leadership represents such a group. Roles also tend to group up (tanks, dps and healers). Finally there are situational and social groups. Situational groups are usually a result of events occurring during the raid and social groups can randomly appear and disappear as players socialize in the raid chat channel. And groups can arise from any existence of common identity.
I found that becoming part of one or more of the groups that appear during a raid event both makes the event more engaging as well as secures my position as part of the team. Due to the socially volatile behaviors certain players have it is wise to make sure you have some friends around when the rage hits the fan.
To be able to face the more difficult challenges you are wise to establish contact with more permanent groups that will often require to interact in social channels outside the game interface such as online forums, web applications and audio chat software such as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. Most such permanent raid teams require you to submit an application for their evaluation before accepting you. This brings up the topic of ‘initiation rites’ which is the topic of my next diary post.
Does the content in your bags define how you play?
As mentioned earlier I am an altoholic, and the last week I have been roaming through my bags and reflecting a little over what I found in the and compared it to how I play with them. It would be natural to think that a toon with loads of materials is a farmer, a character with stacks of flasks and alternative non-PvP gear is a PvE gamer, and the reverse a PvP-gamer. And a character with a load of alternative costumes a roleplayer. But what I found was a little different than what I expected.
My farmers bags were usually empty, the materials were stocked in the bank of the toons that produce items. These toons are usually also the players I do PvE with, so add Flasks and gear to this. But also some PvP-gear on the toons I play most, as to grab some of the PvP-items is often a part of gearing for PvE. Add more gear to toons that handle multiple roles (tanking/healing/dps). I do not have any pure PvP-toons, so I lack this setup to have as a reference. My bank toon used to be stacked with loads of materials for levelling professions, but during a spring cleaning earlier this year I sold off most of these materials and opened up some more bank space. I also noticed that farming toons were the ones with the huge material bags to make sure there would be room for huge stacks those few times I had to take a few hours of farming.
So yeah, the content does tell me a lot about what I use my players for and often says a little about how I play them. Now this might seems very obvious, but I started to wonder if I would change the way I play my toons if the content suddenly changed. Would I try out a bit more PvP if I suddenly discovered some hard core PvP-gear in my bags? Could additional random drops add diversity to my game? I am quite certain I would try to find a use for an extremely rare type of material that was required to make an item, but at the same time I am not sure as to what extent I would actually change they way I play to accommodate the content in my bags.
Team structures for raiding
Having been actively WoW-raiding in as many different ways as has been available to me lately I have been able to gather up some data on how raid teams are structured and how they perform and behave. I have earlier mentioned the differences in performance based on active positive communication and leadership compared to those loaded with negative rants and no leadership present, and I have been looking into how team structure also affects performance as well as how a group works together.
First out; small groups are more likely to communicate more than a large one. Add voice communication and this becomes even more noticeable. The social balance in a smaller group is also more fragile, and even small negative outbursts can completely demolish a teams success rate.
So a large group will talk less, and more often you will have people chatting only to ‘hear their own voice’. For random teams leadership is only functional as long as the raid succeeds, and for someone to take leadership after a collapse, or if none is present in the first place, the support of one or two other players is all that is needed to make this happen.
Having a plan always helps. If you have players new to an encounter your best option is to present the ‘short’ version. Focusing on what makes an encounter special or different is all most players need to pull through, and learning by failing seems to be a much better option than a 15 minutes walk-through.
Having one or more ‘heroes’ on your team boosts morale and increases the chance of success for an encounter. A ‘hero’ here being a character that performs noticeably better than the rest of the team. The presence of someone that is likely to increase the teams ability to succeed has an obvious positive effect on the team performance even if the actual contribution of such a player is not critical in any way to the end results.
So what does this mean for the structure of your raiding team? Help someone lead the group – or take the lead yourself if you feel confident handling this responsibility. Get rid of negative players. Make someone your ‘hero’; the illusion of someone awesome in the team that will ensure their success works. Chat – silence is not a team builder. Have a plan and make it visible, but make it a short one. In the end this might not ensure your success, but it will sure as hell give you the best possible place to start.
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…
Gunnar Øyvin Fredrikson 