Psychochild's Blog

Games are supposed to be fun, duh. It seems to be a regular comment that if something isn't fun, it should be removed from a game. Why are game developers so stupid to leave in systems that nobody finds fun? Or, just look at those EEEEEVIL free-to-play games with their "pay to win" strategies, forcing people to pay money to avoid the parts that aren't fun, amirite?

Except, there's a good reason why games have parts that don't seem fun on the surface, but that build a long-term feeling of satisfaction. Let's take a look at satisfaction and why it matters in games.
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What makes a game successful? Well, if I had the answer to that, I'd be bottling it and selling it and buying a gold-plated sports car. The reality is that there are a ton of little parts and pieces that contribute to the whole. You have to figure out each of those little elements (and have a healthy dose of luck) to succeed

Let's take a look at one particular aspect: how much of the game should be new, compared to how much should be familiar to your players.
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One recurring complaint of MMO players is the "grind". It's interesting taking a look at the history of MMOs, because it becomes obvious that it's mostly player perception that determines what is a grind. Every mechanic that people deride as a grind started out as something fun. In fact, sometimes it is a particularly new or novel feature that eventually becomes the dreaded grind.

Let's take a look at how something fun devolves into a grind.
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Okay, I made a big deal about the economy of Guild Wars 2 and how I did not view it as a fun system supporting to the game. Given that there was a lot of discussion about this, and that I'm an MMO designer, I figured I should post something detailing what should go into the design of an MMO economy.

What are the goals of economic design? What are the important factors? What should be avoided?
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I had occasion to go to Las Vegas recently. I'm not a big gambler (at least not when it comes to risking money), but I did go see a show. I went to see Tony and Tina's Wedding, a show I had wanted to see for a while. I particularly wanted to see this show because of the possible lessons one could learn as a game designer for stories in a multiplayer environment.

Let me explain a bit more about this show and what I learned.
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In my analysis of Steam's Greenlight project, many of the solutions I suggested centered around community management. Unfortunately, community management is sorely misunderstood, so I think some people didn't understand how this could help the situation.

Let's take a look at what community management is, what it should be, and how it is treated these days.
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Hooray Steam sales! It gives me a convenient excuse to buy a game I've had my eye on for a while: Legend of Grimrock. My Storybricks co-conspirator Stéphane Bura had gotten the game near when it launched, and I made up my mind to take a look at the game when I got a chance. The Steam sale was that chance.

I'm a big fan of older RPGs, especially the ones based on grid movement. So, this last weekend I played through the entire game. Twice. So, yeah, I enjoyed it.

Let's take a look at some of the interesting design lessons we can take from this?
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There's a tendency for people to want to boil things down to the very essence. We don't want to deeply analyze an issue and figure out all the complexity, we want to find the one magic element that we can use to understand and/or fix the issue. When facing a problem, we want a magic bullet or miracle pill that solves the problem. When analyzing success, we tend to want to believe that it was something simple that we can copy to duplicate that success.

As any experienced game designer knows, humans are terrific at matching patterns. Unfortunately, that also means that humans are terrific at creating false matches for patterns as well. Often the patterns we find, especially when analyzing something as complex as success in game development and business, tend to not be as simple as we first think. Trying to analyze success often results in more confusion than enlightenment.
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I recently attended a conference on social and mobile games (yeah, I know) and they talked a bit about cloning of games. Again. A few high-profile examples of cloning have brought this back into the spotlight. So, let's take a look at the business realities of cloning and how it affect small game companies.
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Last time we were left with a sticky balancing issue of how many feats to give out. Paladins were feat starved, whereas a Sorcerer had plenty of feats to go around. This week I'll provide some thoughts about how to tackle this to try to bring some balance to the system and some other considerations.
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