Icarus Studios News

(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.

Keep in mind those experiments where the mouse presses a lever and gets a substance, and it feels so good, the mouse keeps pressing the lever in order to take more and more of the substance... until it diesⁱ? That’s not a good idea. Under the index of Game Design Options, that falls under the category “Not Good.” You don’t want all your users to die of starvation, their motionless, emaciated bodies still in their chairs, pale and hunched before their glowing PCs. Why? Well, aside from the purely altruistic reasons, because then they’ll be no one left to buy the game’s ancillary products and expansions.

Hence, it’s very important to time rewards. I’m not saying you have to ration them out like it’s wartime. I’m just saying, in addition to knowing how to drive complex, multi-branched narratives and varied, creative game-play in unique settings, a good Game Designer understands when to giveth and when to taketh away.

In most MMOs and RPGs, a player earns a reward after doing a certain number of tasks (kill ten rats, gather ten flowers, feed ten orphans, whatever—the thing is, doing only nine of those activities gets the player exactly bupkis). Discipline and follow-through must be required of the player, or the value of the reward is practically nil.

Other times, it’s a good idea to reward players at random. Think of those slot machines at Vegas: Some people just love to pull levers again and again, because, every once in a while, three cherries line up, and then a ton of quarters get spit into their laps. The same holds true for massive multi-player online games. Sometimes, the exact outcome or reward for an event is unpredictable—but the mere chance of a big payoff becomes the player’s impetus to take risks.

In addition to tit-for-tat trinkets and random rewards, it’s always a good idea to have something everybody wants in stock. For example, during the holiday season, can you think of anyone you know who wouldn’t welcome a $50 gift card from Best Buyⁱⁱ? Similarly, one welcomed gift that keeps on giving is regularly scheduled rewards, most often in the form of new programming. An online game can only be interesting for so long before it requires an update; assuring players that such updates will happen on a fixed schedule keeps people excited for what the future holds.

Of course, it’s also good to hold back and then surprise folks with a (seemingly random) reward that suddenly appears in an old place. As any self-help book about relationships will tell you, sometimes giving a gift “just because” ends up being way more meaningful (and appreciated) than presents given on an expected occasion. Easter egg hunts are, for the most part, one of the big thrills about being rewarded for strategic game-play. But stumbling across a hidden treasure trove just by being in the right place at the right time is also exciting. As with the slot machines, players will always wonder when it’s going to happen again, so they’ll revisit previous content.

You see the cyclical pattern here, right? Players subscribe to a game because it looks interesting and entertaining. Once inside the virtual world, game-play makes them feel good (or important, or gleeful, or even deliciously vengeful, etc.), because players are given both controlled and randomized rewards. Players then continue to subscribe to the game, which allows Game Designers to continue to be employed and give the players newer, better, stronger, faster, quicker-picker-upper controlled and randomized rewards.

Now, this may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often the industry needs to be reminded of this one little factoid: Games are popular because fun feels good. People’s pleasure buttons are pushed for different reasons—and those diverse desires are always important to take into account when making an MMO—but, in the end, a successful game is a game that makes sure those buttons are pushed more often than not.

The bottom line about designing in-game rewards can be summed up thusly: Gifts are good. Starvation and imprisonment are bad. Therefore, always aim for addictive rewards—but the high-functioning, skill-building kind, not the need-a-twelve-step-program-afterward kind.

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team

ⁱ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center

ⁱⁱ If you do know such a person, stop associating with them. They clearly have no soul and are probably a Cylon, anyway.