How much Immersion?

June 16, 2006 on 12:05 pm | In MMO (Live), General Gaming, WoW, Eve, Playstyles

The Technology section of Guardian Unlimited posted a good summary article on Tuesday about griefing in video games. While written for the relatively uninitiated, the article covers the basics well enough to have prompted further discussion. To me though, this all revolves around one core question:

Just how much immersion do people really want?

This article, the discussions that followed, every discussion that preceded and the success of certain types of games over certain other types of games can be said to answer the above question. Asking where the massive was at all was a prelude ot this question:

How much immersion do people really want?

Apparently not that much.

Years of experiences hint that, for the most part, players want to be left alone to achieve their own goals on their own time, and are willing to ask for help (and provide it) on their own time. Everything from the Player Pyramid to Why we Play to Knowing Oneself builds upon this most basic of elements. In games about achievement, sometimes other players are simply in the way.

The Guardian article talks about Player Governments (quoting Scott Jennings/Lum), but I basically disagree that this is part of any sort of Utopian ideal.

If we break down the genre between open-ended games and those with contrived linearity, we see that far and away the majority of players are in the latter. These extensions of the RPGs of old provide a fun experience players can jump into and out of for 30 minute blocks or live in for hours at a time. Their central motivation being about acquisition means that players have goals as laid out partially by the game, resulting in the endgames usually involve mass cooperative play to help someone advance in some way.

How hard is that really? I mean yes, doing this is pretty hard. Getting six or four dozen people to work together can be time-consuming, and there'll always be something going wrong. But at least the goal is set. At least someone can log in, know what they need to do, go try and do it, and log out. Everything else is left to the game developers and GMs to handle.

Meanwhile, in an open-ended game, like old SWG, old UO, SB or current Eve (among a dozen others), players have to figure out not only the game, but what they want to do in it. Adding to this the griefing that exists in all of these games is complicating enough. But actually permitting that griefing because is part of the game rules is one of the very things that drives these titles to limited appeal.

Just how many times does someone want to log into Eve, see that the pipe they need to run is still contested and see that they can't even leave their station because that too is being camped? I ask that partially in jest of course, because that isn't really as common as non-Eve players may think it is. But it is only partial jest because it can happen.

The easy answer, of course, is to be prepared. Have insta-jumps set up, have an alt you can log into, get your Corp/Alliance to work together, all sorts of different things that happen daily. All of them though require not so much more work than a typical diku-inspired game, but rather different work. And that is the core problem.

The open-ended games sometimes fall down on the very thing they thrive on: their open-endedness. Without proper direction for the uninitiated player, the open-ended games can be overwhelming. The experiences are still billed as games, and players come to new games with expectations built upon their experiences in earlier games.

Add to this the rules players need to create for themselves, the diplomacy of pushing those rules, the politicals of maintaining them and finally the need to go enforce them. That's a lot of work for a game, and in my opinion the reason why such rules so often fall down. It's nice that SEED is trying to integrate some sort of player policy making (which could be like ATITD's player voting for rules changes or merely a SWG City Mayor), but that is ultimately something that has a very narrow appeal in the first place. Does the player who gets voted in have a lot of authority? Will that authority used and misused compel more players to vote? Or will it just drive players away in droves because the authority someone has over them is even worse than someone's ability to camp a zone they wanted to go farm in?

Open-ended games are hard. They seem to require more of a player than most want to give.

At the same time, an open-ended endgame (or midgame) is something else entirely. Using a traditional game approach on the front end, a game can rope a new player in through a long series of activities and growth. Then when they're "ready", that player is unleashed upon the game world with a good foundation of knowledge hopefully coupled with the necessary self-motivation needed to go off and continue growing.

This sounds like old UO because in some ways that's what it was. By the time I played they had integrated Haven, newbie island where people go and got quests while learning what skills did what. Then when they were done they were dumped into the world proper with some knowledge and a lot of motivation to go learn more.

This can work for other games. It is, in theory, the foundation of Age of Conan, where players play a single-player RPG (with persistent-world commerce and community) until level 20. Then they join the persistent world for further RPGing.

The genre seems to be learning. It's all fine and good to be capitalizing on the technical ability to put thousands of people into the same game world. You just need to provide some guidance for them at first. How much guidance you need depends on the game and the players you want in it.