Icarus Studios News

The Business of Being Social

(Continued from Part 1) 

Why should designers spend extra time making sure that their game has a quality community experience? Well, there’s the obvious response, addressed in the first part of this post: “Because it makes for a fun game.” A fun game equals player retention, which equals continuing revenue, and so on. But beyond that, a quality community can become an end unto itself; it can even become the primary reason a dedicated player sticks with a game for the long haul. Guilds, groups, and even one-on-one friendships all become reasons for the player to return to the world, eager to play the game day after day, month after month.

Design and Implementation

It may seem obvious that community is an important part of the MMO experience—it is a “massively multiplayer” game, after all; but all to often, MMO quests and storylines don’t take the “multiplayer” seriously, much less the “massive.” How many quests in an average MMO could have just as easily been placed in an offline, single-player game? You get a quest, you run it, and on the way, you discover a couple of other people running the same quest. Maybe you group up, meet some people, and share the fun and the rewards. Or, you end up competing for the same goal item, so that only one group can actually complete the quest at that time, and the others are left standing around, waiting for an item or a boss to respawn.

Players are used to this kind of thing and probably even take it in stride by now, but how can designers take the community into account to give players a richer experience—one that takes advantage of the thousands of players sharing the world?

(Continued from Part 1)

When Is A Good Time To Give?

So, once you’ve made sure that your MMO caters to many users by balancing greed, dominance, ego-stroking, playthings, and nice new pristine areas where avatars can reenact the better parts of manifest destiny, the only thing left to figure out is how often to reward a player.

What Makes a Good Gift?

Let's just assume, for the sake of this blog post, that my team and I have come up with a great core concept for an MMO that appeals to many different player types; after its initial release, it gets awesome press reviews. And the gamers, they do come to investigate the world; and lo, they see that it is good.

What then?

Part 1 described the two types of LARP: salon games, which often have permanent death, and boffer games, which often have a player character respawn mechanic. But how do those inform the permadeath debate for MMOs?

GAME DEVELOPER CONFERENCE, AUSTIN, TX – Icarus Studios, which provides a turnkey solution for creating virtual worlds, MMOGs, and serious games, has announced the expansion of their development platform to the iPhone. Icarus will demo a prototype of their 3D platform running on the iPhone for the first time in booth 316 at the Austin Game Developer Conference where it will also showcase its RealTime™ online development suite and the Icarus 3D and Flash based client software.

Modern graphical MMOs have evolved from text-based multi-user dungeons (MUDs). MUDs, in turn, owe a lot of their origin to tabletop roleplaying games. Yet another direct evolution of the tabletop RPG was into live-action roleplaying (LARP). The parallel evolution of LARPs to MUDs and MMOs explains something of the permadeath debate.

Many modern video games, particularly MMOs, have an unbroken line of evolution back through MUDs, past tabletop RPGs, to wargames. Many conceits common to video game engines are little changed from their origins 40 years ago: hit points, consumable items that heal damage or buff, character classes and party roles, dungeons, etc. Of course, these little-changed elements were not originally intended for the play style of a modern MMO. Instead, they were meant to color hours or days of playtime, not to reset completely as soon as the avatar can take a rest break. Hit points and mana bars have, in particular, gone from semi-realistic abstractions of wounds and fatigue (that might maintain their state for days) to arbitrary timers for how long a single fight can persist before a player will die, rest, or flee. Many games are even moving to hit point systems that refresh almost instantly as soon as the avatar is out of direct fire, made famous by Halo 2’s shield.

These adaptations to the online form make for a level playing field and gameplay that can be taken in as small a chunk as the player desires, but they tend to eliminate the long-term tactical resource management play they were originally designed to model.

Why do I get out of bed each morning? (Besides the fact that the cats sit on my face, slowly trying to suffocate me in an attempt to ransom my oxygen for their breakfast.) I get out of bed because I’m a game designer and editor. Which means my job is creative. Which means I get to make stuff up—really fantastical, random, certifiable stuff, like talking pillars of flame that bear close resemblance to the symbolic representation of deities in ancient Sumerian mythology—and people pay me for it.

Software development timelines are inherently hard to predict: some aspects of design have well-understood ratios of person-hours to functionality, while others can take anywhere between weeks of work and a moment of inspiration. For the former, assigning more personnel or using overtime crunch can allow you to meet a milestone on time no matter how far behind you are at the moment. For the latter, the typical tools of acceleration can just result in delaying the creative individuals that might have quickly found a solution if left alone to think.

A surprising amount of virtual world development fits into the latter category.