Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
granted both exciting and interesting in play? How do you use social competition to
create conflict?
MMOG Player Categories
The MMOG has also helped to annihilate rigid player categories. People of all ages
and genders (from grandmothers to grade-schoolers) play the most popular
MMOGs with passion. It’s becoming harder in some gaming segments—MMOGs
are probably a good example—for marketers to clearly identify “the gamer” or “the
audience.” I predict it will become harder every day. This fact alone opens up new
vistas and venues for game makers.
Trying to build games for unknown, growing, or changing audiences (in other
words, trying to be all things to all players) can also have a negative design effect. The
idea of trying to please a wide and diverse audience can dilute a game to the extent
that the kind of play that might have made the game successful simply gets lost in the
dilution. You simply can’t be the game of everything for everybody. Believe me,
you’ll get design input: don’t make it too fast for the older players, don’t make it too
complicated for the younger players, don’t make it too boring for the teens, don’t
make it too aggressive for the female players, and so on.
Deep Social Factors
The deep social factors involved in playing MMOGs are some of the most interesting
informal sociology experiments to watch and build design orientations around.
Players take tremendous psychological ownership of their characters. I suspect this
will continue to be true for noncharacter items in MMOG worlds as well (earned vehicles,
houses, riches, or status). The social aspect of MMOGs, missing in many other
game forms, seems to attract more female players than similar content titles with very
little or nonexistent social features. Guys like to chat, too, but taking on the role of a
true character requires development, nurturing, and socialization.
Some MMOGs, like The Sims Online and Everquest, have created entire virtual
economies. You’ve probably read news articles on the economics of Norrath (a land
in Everquest), where players can actually earn $3.42/hour via bots that collect virtual
goods that are then sold for real currency. This leads to the odd result that if Norrath
were a real country, it would be the 77 th
richest. We’ve only just begun to see the impact
of these kinds of virtual economies in MMOG gaming.
Appealing to the use and allotment of status items and status issues seems to work
successfully in connecting emotions with play ideas. So does providing a means for
players to “rise above” in game world rankings, as some players believe they will not
or cannot rise above or transcend their own day-to-day lives. Remember when we
talked about the importance of engaging emotions? MMOGs capture player emotions
very well in some cases, often leading to emotional fervor for some.