Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Toward Creating Better Videogames by Chris Bateman

Author:Chris Bateman [Chris Bateman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Game Development
Publisher: Course Technology PTR
Published: 2009-02-28T22:00:00+00:00

What This Means for Designers

This is an integrated system: everything is in balance. You can’t simply provide compelling content of a certain type to satisfy your players, because players need other players around them who will not be satisfied by that content.

Put another way, if you saturate a virtual world with content aimed at one type of player, as GoPets originally did, not only will it fail to attract players of other types (which you might have expected), but also it won’t completely satisfy the type you did aim at. Player types don’t exist in isolation; there’s a balance to be maintained.

When designers create content, they need to consider why it’s attractive, not merely that it’s attractive. “Killing bosses satisfies achievers” may well be true, but it’s not all that satisfies achievers, and achievers aren’t the only people who are satisfied by it. Furthermore, there may be other player types who are dissatisfied by it—it might make a poor end to a narrative that was engaging an explorer or socialiser, for example.

Content is not made out of construction bricks that are labelled with those player types that find it attractive, yet believing it is makes for a common beginner’s error. You can’t say “we’ll put in a PvP battleground system for the killers,” because people can find player-versus-player combat fun for all kinds of reasons; the ganking of other players is only one of those reasons. However, if you read the forums of large-scale commercial game worlds, time and time again you will see people relating PvP directly to the killer player type as if the connection were a given. It isn’t.

Likewise, it’s often assumed that people who do crafting don’t do combat, and must therefore be carebear socialisers who spend all their time gossiping when not baking virtual pies. Although this may well be true in some cases, nevertheless players can also find crafting rewarding for other reasons (as anyone who has grinded reputation in World of Warcraft just so they can brag about being the first in their guild to have the recipe for some über item will tell you).

Whenever you look at a gameplay mechanic in a virtual world, always remember that different player types will have different reasons for engaging with it. True, some features might indeed constitute “flagship” methods for particular types (such as chatting for socialisers), but this only makes them necessary, not sufficient. Sure, many socialisers will tend to chat a lot, but other types will chat to various degrees too, and the socialisers will themselves use content that is flagship for other types. If there is no such content, they’ll feel they’re missing something, and their enthusiasm will be damped until they get it (which is what GoPets discovered).

Remember, too, that individuals progress through different types over time[19] If you don’t cover all the types, you could well lose players sooner than you might otherwise.

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