I
wanted to talk very quickly about World
of Warcraft, because you said some interesting things about that. You
called it unethical in its game design, I guess because of its exploitative
qualities.
JB: Yeah. Although, when I use a word like
"unethical," that's a strong word. I do think it's a little bit
accurate to say that about World of
Warcraft, but what I'm really applying the word to is the widespread
industry practice that produces all of those games. I
t's not like World of Warcraft came out of nowhere,
and it's not like no other game is trying to copy World of Warcraft. Everybody is trying to, with the same gameplay
mechanics. They exploit these psychological phenomena that are pretty well
understood by designers right now, and will get a better understanding of over
time, because that's how it goes. But they know what they're doing. That's what
makes it unethical.
I
was going to challenge that, not in the sense that I actually believe the
challenge, but just to see what your take on it would be. Don't these kind of
mechanics mirror all game mechanics, in that it's small returns for repetitive
tasks that you learn, and with a social dynamic overlaid over that, whether
you're doing it with your friends or whatever? You're having a nice time, and
it's just a different way of framing Tetris.
JB: There's always a matter of degree. One
of the things... I've done a couple of lectures on this, and I never remember
what I said in which one, but one of the things that comes down to is natural
rewards versus artificial rewards. Every game has both of those.
An artificial
reward is a cool-sounding sound effect for when you... I don't know, Tetris didn't really have cool sound
effects, but imagine that it did -- when you filled out four lines, you got a
cool, Bejeweled-like particle effect
or something like that.
Maybe
it would've been a success if it had that. (laughter)
JB: Maybe the XBLA Tetris...yeah. (laughter) So that's even an artificial reward, and
lots of games do that. But what I feel is that there's some very fuzzy line
somewhere, where if you're on one side of the line, players are playing your
game because of the natural rewards, because they enjoy playing the game's core
mechanics. Tetris is like that. It
maybe feels a little addictive, and we feel a little wary of having that
addiction, but it's innocent in certain ways.
Tetris
had little cutscenes in it. It had the little dancing Russian guys in the
arcade version. But I think that was maybe more to provide a break so that you
don't fucking die from all the intensity of dealing with this. But for the most
part, when you're playing Tetris,
you're enjoying it because you enjoy fitting the blocks together.
Whereas when you play World of Warcraft -- and what I'm about to say is a generalization,
since different players enjoy different things, obviously -- a lot of the
appeal of playing World of Warcraft
is not in the core gameplay mechanic, because it's boring, a lot of the time.
Sometimes when you're on a really good raid with a team and you're getting
teamwork going and that's a close call, that can be exciting, but if you graph
out what players are doing over the average 12-hour play session or whatever...
That's obviously hyperbole, but if you're
looking at what activities they're actually performing, there's not that much
good gameplay in there. I think what keeps them in there is, at first, the
level ding, because it's very addictive to get that. "Okay, I've got more
gold. Whatever." And eventually, they've made this huge time investment
and they've got a character there and they know what that level ding feels like
and the next one is pretty far off, but they can get there! And it's not any
better, because this is like number 67. It's got to be better than 66!
And
they've got their time logged that says, "I've now logged 78 days in this
game, and if I throw that away, then it's all been a lie."
JB: It's all been for naught, yeah. There's
many different reasons that people play these games, though. One of the things
people have said to me after lectures is, "Well, I play World of Warcraft for the social
element," which I think is a little bit true, but again, I think it's
magnitude. They're playing World of
Warcraft, and aren't on IRC or a forum or talking to people in real life.
Social interaction in real life is way
better. If you look at how long it takes to communicate to people in World of Warcraft, and the depth and
subtlety of the ideas you can get through may be a little bit better on a
headset... often it's just typing, but even on a headset, it's not good
communication like you have with a person in real life. If what they really
cared about was rich, social interaction, they would be out there in the real
world.
Questing.
(laughter)
JB: Yeah. What it's really about is that
the social aspect is something that they value in the context of this game, but
it's really the game. In fact, what they've said is, "Oh, I like having
social interactions when I can go out and kill some monsters with people."
I think that's true, but you just look at the whole of it and how diluted all
these things are -- how diluted the gameplay and social interactions and all
that are -- and it just doesn't make it worth it, I think. It's on the wrong
side of the line.
Now what's scary about that is that World of Warcraft was the most
concentrated gameplay version of an MMO ever, right? They have the least
downtime. I haven't played some of the games since then, but certainly EverQuest is like fucking downtime
forever. It's like you have one fight, then you go sit and meditate for like
five minutes before you can have another fight.
Think
about what you've done! (laughter)
JB: (laughter) Think about the tragedy of
killing the poor swamp rat that you just killed, and the next 100 that you're
going to have to kill. That's I think is one of the core reasons... obviously
there's audio and visuals that WoW
has that are better and stuff, but they also did give the player more gameplay.
I don't want to say, "WoW is
completely barren," and things, but by the standards of any good
single-player game, the gameplay in WoW
is really kind of terrible.
Is
it possible to have an ethical MMO? How would you go about doing that? Or are
MMOs basically about hitting things for numbers?
JB: No, I think that you easily could. What
is an MMO? It's just a game where you have a lot of players in a world. That
really could be almost anything. I actually had a plan for my next project
after Braid, which I almost would've
started by now if I hadn't decided not to do it, which was like an MMO with a
different core gameplay mechanic, which was heavily about communication and
puzzle-solving and that stuff.
It had a level progression system, but it
was more about having pacing to how the levels open up. It was like a Diablo-style, isometric perspective, 3D
rendered game, but like that, where you're looking down at a dungeon.
So the
leveling system is more about having the dungeons open up at an appropriate
pace of complexity. It wasn't about keeping people playing. In fact, people
would max out relatively early, and hopefully they would keep playing the game
after that because the new levels they could explore are interesting, and they
actually enjoy exploring the levels.
I think there's some extent to which some
games have already had gameplay that people enjoy for the gameplay. Puzzle Pirates is an MMO that's done
very well, especially for an indie game, and for the budget they developed it
on.
It doesn't have WoW kind of
numbers, but it's an MMO, and you go in there and there are games like Bejeweled and Dr. Mario and stuff like that that you play.
I haven't played that into the late game,
but I played like eight hours of it or something, and the time that I was
playing it, it was really about the gameplay. It was like, "Awesome! I'm
going to beat a carpenter on this trip and fill in the little gourds," and
it was fun.
I enjoyed it for what it was, unlike every other MMO that I've played.
And I'm sure that there are other ones. I haven't played one percent of MMOs,
and if you count all the ones out of Korea
and stuff, I don't even know what they all are. So I'm sure that there are some
doing it, but they're not the most popular ones.
One
final question. You sat out the start of your session about how you just want
to make games that change peoples' lives, in a way, which is a good vision, but
a grand one as well. Is that possible? Has that ever happened before, you
think?
JB: Absolutely. In fact, it's not a
question of whether you can change peoples' lives, because that was the point
of my three-minute opinion thing that I gave. And actually the first Montreal
lecture where I was talking about World
of Warcraft being unethical, which is that games are part of peoples'
environment now. They're everywhere.
And it's the whole nature versus nurture
thing. The old philosophical question is "Are people products of their
origins or their environment?" And it's kind of been resolved that it's
sort of both. We always seesaw in different ways, but your environment has a
big effect on who you are, so games have to have an effect on who you are,
because they're just there, and you play them. They're a mental environment and
an audiovisual environment that you spend time with.
So then the question is not "Do they
affect you?" but "What is the effect and how big is the effect and
how long does it last?" And I don't know the answers to those things, but
it's definitely something that we should explore thoughtfully. That's all.
Which is something that previous people
haven't done. Television, obviously, has an effect on people, whatever that is,
and various contradictory studies say different things, but it does have
effects. Television very rapidly degenerated into just crappy shows, like
"whatever we can get viewing eyeballs for."
In some sense, the same thing is inevitable
in the games industry, because if you're just chasing money, that's what you
do. The big companies are going to chase money, and that's fine, but I'm hoping
with the internet, people who have different goals than just chasing money will
be able to find distribution for their game. It may be a smaller audience, but
they hopefully can find it.