“We just have to look at it and go, “Okay, they didn’t get it. We’ve got to fix it.” You’ve got to be very objective about that. Over a number of years you develop a very thick skin, so that you don’t get insulted. “Stupid players, we know what’s good for them!” That attitude has got to be wiped out.”
Four page article, so it’s not super important to read, but I thought it was worth the time. Essentially, one of the designers for Red Faction: Guerrilla talks about how they built the game to take advantage of player freedom rather than worrying that the player might destroy something important or kill someone before they’ve served their purpose.
One of the interesting things was the cost/return ratio of time spent building missions compared to building things for the player to do. Building a mission is expensive - you have to have dialogue, an intro part, an end part, an objective, etc. Players sit down and blow up that building because they have to. On the other hand, creating a building, marking it as an important enemy base or something, and rewarding the player for blowing it up costs a fraction of what a mission would cost. Rather than doing a mission because they have to, if someone wants to blow up a building, they’ll go for it and enjoy it a lot more.
So instead of saying “this is what you’re doing, this is why you’re doing it, now go do it” you say “here’s some stuff you can do, I’ll pay you if you do it” and they run around to their heart’s content keeping themselves busy without any need for writing a big script and stuff. It’s a smart idea, and I know it works, because nobody wants to spend an hour collecting widgets because they have to - if you say collecting widgets will get you a cool ability, they’ll spend as much time or more doing it.
Ever noticed how much more tempted you are to get three games you didn’t want, and one you did, for a relatively good price? Ever wondered why? Psychology has the answer! Three Reasons Why We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles over on Gamasutra.
I finished Slum Online, and one particularly interesting thing to me is that everyone in the book considers their online characters a persona they assume solely for going online. It’s not “I threw a low kick and chained into a dash-throw,” it’s “Tetsuo threw a low kick and chained into a dash-throw.” They see their concerns as solely those relating to outside of the game, and their character’s goals are their own. Tetsuo the street brawler (main “character”) wants to be the strongest fighter there is, whether recognition comes with it or not, and Hashimoto the ninja wants to investigate the mystery of Ganker Jack. Etsuro, the protagonist, wants to spend more time with his charming classmate and attends classes he hates just to be with her. Hashimoto’s player, by contrast, is a complete shut-in who won’t even respond to his mother. Hashimoto’s player plays the wise ninja as a way to escape his life, but doesn’t believe he’ll gain anything from Hashimoto’s growth as a character.
Hashimoto tells Tetsuo that “their characters are not them, they are enhancements of their personalities… while they may become friends online, there is no guarantee they would be friends IRL.” Hashimoto’s player doesn’t want to connect his useful online persona to his “useless” identity as a social shut-in. In the end, though, he’s wrong: his player, Jun, used to be friends with Etsuro. They reconnect outside of the game after working together to solve a mystery, and Jun looks like he’s going to develop a healthier life outside of the game. By adopting the persona of Hashimoto online, Jun did grow as a person and re-established an important connection with a friend he had given up on.
All of this just reminds me of the approach Persona 3 and Persona 4 take to this theory. There, a person’s persona is a deeper of themselves that creates (or evolves because of) conflict in their life. By misunderstanding or completely missing their true feelings or desires, problems arise for the characters you meet throughout each of the games. Your party members, who fight as you do with their personae, become stronger as you work together to help them understand themselves and solve their problems. The non-combat party members don’t consciously recognize this change in themselves, though your main character can tell and grows through their connection to all of the people they’ve helped. When your social links (the game’s representation of your relationships) get maxed out, that means they’ve come to terms with themselves and resolved the conflict in their lives. It may not be perfect, but after conquering their pivotal problem, nothing else can really hold them back.
Which brings me to my whole connecting point with this: how our online personae and the relationships we make online teach us about ourselves, and how it helps as much to consider them as separate from ourselves as it does to simply be ourselves. First, words typed online have no less meaning than words spoken out loud. The difference is when instant messaging (or e-mails) is a way to avoid potentially awkward conversations, or it’s a message that takes guts to deliver. I prefer to have important personal conversations in person, because it’s more intimate that way and it proves a point to go out of your way to connect with someone and have the courage to speak your feelings out loud. Aside from that, there’s no less value in a relationship that communicates based on usernames rather than given names.
I don’t think people make less personal connections online than they do in person. I couldn’t really say, either, if choosing the level of anonymity and being able to pick and choose what someone knows about you encourages close relationships. What I do know is that by acting like someone else, we can make friendships and form relationships online that we wouldn’t have the courage for, or otherwise be able to make, in person. Whether or not those relationships get closer, and move beyond the online personae, depends on the people adopting them. When we do choose to be someone else online, we do it for a reason, and developing relationships with others with that altered personality reveals things to us in much the same way the main character in Persona ¾ reveals the truth to the people he meets. Children learn things “they” couldn’t have learned otherwise by imitating others and playing roles, and doing the same online is a similar experience for an older child. Everyone and everything I’ve been online has contributed to who I am today, and it’s strange to imagine who I might be in an alternate world without the internet…
I have a hard time justifying all of the effort that goes into a truly complete role-playing experience, because I’m just not creative enough on a regular basis to become someone else entirely. When playing games, though, I do fall into the usual psychological trap: I consider one of the characters to be “me.” I’ll raise “my” agility, or train “my” skill with daggers, and then if I control a party, the others take secondary importance to my “main” character. They usually get to be their own characters, perhaps less developed than “my” character, but they’re unique and serve whatever purpose they need to for the success of the party. It’s an opportunity to learn things about yourself when you role-play your characters, but generally I go for role-playing lite and converse and make story decisions based on my own beliefs and values.
When it comes to the usual fantasy/sci-fi RPG, it’s a bit hard to “be yourself.” But this is where the recent Persona games come into play. They’re set in a modern setting, and when someone has a problem, it’s a run-of-the-mill problem normal people might have. I played through both Persona 3 and Persona 4 playing the main character as myself, and acting how I would act in that situation, even if it didn’t get me the best in-game results. Oddly enough, Persona 4 in particular showed me things I had no way of experiencing previously: Naoto’s struggle with her gender identity and Kanji’s struggle with his sexuality have been surprisingly useful to me. By considering myself the main character, I got to test myself in situations I’d rather not screw up in. Of course, a live human being is almost guaranteed to react differently than a scripted character in a video game, but it’s the experience that matters. A lot of people panic when they run into a situation they’re completely unfamiliar with, or feel uncomfortable, and at least thinking about what I might do in a situation like that left me well prepared for the future.
Bonus thought: “Like magnets: opposites attract. People are the same. Everyone has their flaws, their quirks. Rub them together, you get friction. It’s the places where they’re different that locks them together.” You ever meet someone and just click? Maybe it happens right away, maybe it happens when you aren’t looking over the course of a few months, but I like that as an explanation for it. Comes from Slum Online like all the other quotes here.
It’s not so much about opposites attracting as it is about why some people stick together and others don’t. It’s like velcro, or anything else that works using interlocking pieces - similar pieces rub together and only create friction, while different pieces lock together and form an intense bond. You don’t need similar interests or personalities to get along with someone or make a relationship work - you just need something to lock together and make that connection.
I would have Insomniac’s babies. No matter how many eyes or how much fur they might have.
Spoilers: The president of Insomniac called a guy, at his home, for making a youtube video about how awesome Insomniac is. Insomniac is that awesome.
After finishing Wake in three days and ordering its sequel, I’m back to Synthetic Worlds again. At least until Watch gets here. Let me summarize, once again: this is an amazing book, and I’d love to see Synthetic Worlds 2.0. If you have ever in your life used the internet for social interaction, played a video game, been interested in economics, sociology, psychology, technology, or even if you’ve done NONE of those things, you will enjoy this book. Seriously, this is some intense delving into the subject of MMOs.
Here’s the amazing thing about Synthetic Worlds: it was written when WoW only had five hundred thousand subscribers. The global total of MMO players was ten million, less than the estimate thrown around by those WoW ads! This is six years ago, people. Two-thousand-and-four. I haven’t gotten to the part where he talks about the future yet, but I can guarantee some of the stuff he predicts has come to pass.
Here’s another thing: it was written before the Wii was called the Revolution, when gaming was something mainstream but not necessarily a household activity. Digital distribution was only beginning to pick up Steam (oh, come on, there was no way I could resist that) and the average person likely didn’t play video games on any kind of regular basis. Maybe some… oh, wow, this is even before Guitar Hero. Maybe they might have played some Mario Kart, some Mario Party? I mean, we’re talking your grandmother and her dog here.
There’s a lot of data in there just to say that no, people playing MMOs aren’t sweaty teenage nerds living in their mom’s basement, many of them ARE the fathers/moms of regular kids. The average age was, off the top of my head, something like 29? Many were married, most had good jobs. The results were divided between those who considered themselves “residents” of their chosen game, and that they “visited” Earth much the same way a casual player would “visit” Azeroth or Norrath. Many considered themselves to be addicted, but there was surprisingly little difference between the two groups in terms of time spent playing. The author questions whether “playing those silly video games” more than other people counts as an addiction by default, and suggests that addictions are the things that have a negative effect on our life when we aren’t doing them, such as drinking or drugs.
He also gets into why exactly someone would get deeply involved with these games at all. Why would you want to live on Earth, where you’ve got a crappy office job and will never amount to anything? Why not live in Azeroth, where you’re the leader of a guild and everyone loves you? There’s a bit of psychology thrown in there, too, about how we get immersed and how it’s actually harder to suspend our belief when we play an MMO than it is to suspend our DISbelief. When there are 50 people around you, equally involved in slaying some giant dragon, it’s hard to step back and go “no wait, this dragon is a worthless pile of code and actually means nothing because it doesn’t really exist.”
The idea of emotional immersion rather than physical immersion isn’t exactly new, but this gets into WHY your brain wants to believe you can cast Magic Missile rather than “waaah this game had no immersion” or “blah blah the characters were so realistic and I was so immersed and I cried blah blah blah” crap. There’s a history of virtual reality, the goggles and giant suit and no fun kind, compared to the fun, interesting, made to be enjoyable rather than a tech demo kind of synthetic realities engineered specifically for the benefit of the player.
Wake had interesting ideas and it was really cool and awesome to read, but that was a novel. Synthetic Worlds is 300-something pages of statistics and sciencey examination of things that are likely near and dear to you, and in a word, it is wonderful.