The parlour, the lobby, and the sand box

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The parlour, the lobby, and the sand box

26 April 2005

In my continuing quest to discover alternative genres to the standard virtual world, I have come up with another approach...

The parlour

The most basic virtual world is a chat room, so I'll begin there.

Imagine that you create the ultimate chat room. It has every conceivable chat feature that you'd want in it, including voice-chat, E-mail, BBS, rendered avatars with full emote abilities, and a traversable world with fantastic scenery and sound effects.

Unfortunately, as we all know, players will eventually become bored with the chat room. Often times, players will get in a "rut", hanging out with the same friends, and never meeting anyone new. (Meeting new people is difficult and somewhat stressful.) The same old friends night after night eventually becomes tiresome.

To make meeting new people easier, and to alleviate some of the boredom with existing friends, the chat room adds social games, such as cards, checkers, and maybe even chess.

Players eventually get bored of these social games, and want an continuous supply of new games that they can use for entertainment, socialising with friends, and ice-breakers to meet new people.

At this point, a chat room can take a variety of approaches to the game problem, with two opposite poles:

It can add sub-games where a group of people chose to enter the sub-game and can subsequently exclude new entrants. Card games and board games all act this way.

In virtual world terms, this turns the chat room into a "lobby". Players meet in the lobby, and then go into their own private rooms to play sub-games. The rooms' walls might be transparent, letting other players watch, but players still have the right to control who is let into their sub-game.
The sub-games could be playable by all players in the world. Players don't need to sign up to play, nor can they be excluded. Everyone is in the same game; in virtual world terms, this extreme is a "sand box".

The sand box

If a virtual world consistently adds sand-box style sub-games, it eventually turns into a standard MUD/MMORPG, with features such as: Guilds, PvP combat, PvP trading, creation, housing, crafting, resource collection, etc. (Note: I'm intentionally leaving out quests; I'll get to those later.)

When a lot of players are placed into a world, their desires and activities often conflict with one another. Role players will get annoyed with non-role players. Only one guild will be able to slay the dragon of uber-loot when it spawns once every two days. Twenty players will want to fill the one slot allocated for a king. Etc. Basically, desirable resources are scarce and contested, whether they're dragons, kingdoms, inns, or intangibles like being top on the character ranking.

The virtual world designers (or some algorithm) must figure out which players get to use/control the resources, and hence, which players are able to fulfil their desires and goals. The mechanism that decides which players get preference is very important, and how much the mechanism favours a player affects how "powerful" the player is.

Players realise this. Once they have determined a goal/desire to fulfil, players try to acquire the power necessary to overpower other players competing for the same resource. Basically, they do what it takes to be successful, whatever their definition of success is.

Many years ago, I concluded that to be successful (in real life), you need luck, skill/intelligence, and/or hard work. (The definition of success varies from person to person.) Thus, if someone wishes to be a millionaire, they can win the lottery, be smart enough to invent a best-selling gadget, or work 16 hours a day for the rest of their lives. A combination of two or three of the factors improves one's chance of success.

Designers need to decide what factors will make a player a success, and consequently, how power is achieved and goals/desires fulfilled. The following mechanisms are possible:

Luck - One Briton in 60 million is born to be king/queen. A virtual world could similarly apportion power at birth, doling it out when a character is created. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in a virtual world; either someone with the bad-luck to be born completely powerless will leave the game, or they'll just create a new character until one of their characters ends up being a powerful one. In the case of a kingship, some obsessed individual will create and delete 60 million characters until they get their kingdom.

Of course, all virtual worlds include some elements of luck, but the effects are so small and frequent that the "luck" part ultimately has very little effect on power.

A world with gambling would allow luck to play more of a role in the power struggle.

Permadeath is a form of gambling. Eliminating permadeath from a world also eliminates a role for luck.
Skill/intelligence - Allocating power based upon a player's skill and intelligence is another approach. Player skill can be broadly divided into two categories, skill at the sub-games and social skills.

A world that relies entirely on skill/intelligence exposes a problem: Skilled players will quickly make their way to positions of power, and most other players will be stuck at the bottom. Player skills can be learned, but no matter how hard some players works, they will never be good at a particular sub-game or skill. Furthermore, for the few months that players play a game, it's unlikely that they'll improve their skill enough to make it to the top. Thus, they'll be frustrated and leave. As the unskilled players leave, the "bar" raises and fewer skilled players are "powerful" enough to achieve their desires/goals. The less skilled players then leave, and the bar raises yet again. Repeat until the world empties out... A world that relies solely on skill dies.
Hard work - MMORPGs rely heavily on "hard work" as an arbiter of power, and hence, "the grind". In most MMORPGs, he who can click the "kill monster" button for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, will be the one with the most power.
Altruism - Players could be rewarded for making the game fun for other players. Role playing points are one approach. Democratically elected political offices are another. (See Experience points.)
Fairness - It's possible to give each player a turn at being king... but I don't expect this would work well, as it would be easily exploitable... A player could create 10,000 characters and significantly increase the time he's allowed to be king.
Real-life money - As I pointed out in The player pyramid, real-life money can be used to acquire power in a virtual world. Many games allow this approach, both sanctioned and otherwise.

Just as with skill, a world that relies solely on real-life money for player power will eventually die as the bar is continually raised by people leaving because they don't have enough real-life money to acquire the in-game power necessary for their desires/goals.

A world that only allows for pay-for-power will attract two kinds of players: Those wishing to pay real life money for power, and those wishing to earn real-life money in the world. Everyone else will go elsewhere. Those who pay to reach the top will have a hollow victory since those underneath them (the workers) are acting differently than a normal population because their goal is to make money. Whoever buys the kingdom will find that his subjects are all paid actors.

I have been using the term "power" a bit too loosely. I have treated "power" as a one-dimensional value, but it actually represents a very complex and highly-dimensional comparison. The same problem exists in physics, where the term "energy" is conveniently tossed about, despite there being many forms of energy: kinetic, potential, heat, etc. Energy can be converted from one form to another, but the conversion is always lossy. Likewise, "power" can be converted from one form to another, but it is always lossy because there are many different forms of power, and one player's valuation of one form of power is different from another player's.

My intuition tells me that a world should allow luck, skill/intelligence, hard work, and altruism to be factors capable of achieving power. Maybe even real-life money should play a role. If this is the case, then contemporary MMORPGs are severely deficient on their use of luck and altruism, and nearly as deficient in skill/intelligence.

Some other tricks can be used to make the power flow more efficiently, and thus produce a better game.

Fill the world with a large population of players who have no interest in power, but who only wish to play the sub-games. (See The player pyramid)
Intelligent design and an AI that maximises desire/goal fulfilment. (See The virtual world equation).
Are there other techniques? Probably.

The lobby

The opposite approach to the sandbox is to allow people in the chat room to enter their own private worlds and play games with one another. These games can be any computer game playable by a small group of people. CRPG and adventure games are the most obvious sub-games, but auto racing, flight simulators, space combat, and real-time strategy games are also possible.

If the lobby just acts a gateway to traditional computer games, why would a player subscribe to a lobby-like virtual world and not just buy the stand-alone games individually?

A virtual world acting as a conglomeration of traditional computer games might be cheaper than purchasing the individual stand-alone games.
The sub-games are all from one company, and have a consistent UI and quality.
Even if a player's real-life friends are busy, the player can call upon chat-room friends to play the game, or just random "looking for party" requests. A player wishing to try out the new virtual-world racing game can find some chat-room friends that he has played cards with, and see if they want to try the game too. If the racing game were stand-alone, the player would forced to meet new racing-game friends, different from his chat-room friends.
All of the sub-games occur in the same world, and help place the sub-games in a larger meaningful context.

Why would a player wish to partake in a lobby-world instead of a sandbox?

Because a lobby-world has infinite resources, the "power" struggle largely disappears. PvP conflict and jerks are reduced. If a player in one's sub-game still persists in the power struggle and acts like a jerk, just don't play with him again.
There is no grind. The experience is all about fun and instant gratification.
The sub-games are more varied and more fun. See below.

What are the advantages for the author?

No mud-flation. Less griefing. Most of the typical problems of a MUD/MMORPG fade away.
A virtual world can produce a sub-game more cheaply than a company producing the game as a stand alone product. For example: A virtual world including a real-time strategy game could leverage its models, artwork, backstory, marketing, and (internet) distribution.
If the sub-games are completely isolated from the lobby, then players will be given new characters for each sub-game. These characters will be of appropriate "strength", skills, and have backstory providing them motivations. Ultimately, this can lead to the individual sub-games being more fun than MMORPG quests or instanced dungeons. Sub-games that allow players to use their own characters can't take advantage of this. (See below.)

What are the disadvantages?

The sub-games have no impact on the "lobby" world, not even the player's lobby-characters, which just end up being chat-room avatars without attributes, skills, or possessions.
Twitch games aren't possible because of Internet transmission delays, along with bandwidth limitations. Stand-alone games do not have these problems.
The sub-games all occur in the same world; a development team can't add space combat to a fantasy world, although dragon fights might be possible. This imposes some creative limits that stand-alone games do not have.
The sub-games will probably use the same (or similar) UI and technology, which means that the UI and technology won't be optimised for the specific sub-game. Ultimately, this produces a sub-game that is technically inferior to a custom-built stand-alone game. The overall experience of the virtual-world sub-game, once included as part of a whole, might be better.
Since players will get together and play sub-games, an individual sub-game can only last a few hours. Longer games aren't feasible because (a) it's unlikely that the exact same group of players will ever get together again, and (b) the developer won't want to maintain millions of saved games on its own hard drives. Thus, epic quests that are common in CRPGs and adventure games just aren't possible as lobby sub-games. (Mass-market consumers might prefer shorter games though.)

In-between... instanced dungeons

What's between a lobby and a sand box? A world with instanced dungeons, like GuildWars.

The difference between GuildWars and the lobby I described above is that nothing goes into or comes out of the sub-games in the lobby. When a player starts a lobby sub-game, a new character (appropriate to the sub-game) is generated with all its equipment, and is destroyed (along with the equipment) when the sub-game finished. GuildWars allows players to bring their own characters into a sub-game along with their own equipment, and likewise, changes to their character or equipment is brought out of the sub-game.

An instanced dungeon is a sub-game where players can bring characters and equipment in and out.

The advantages of players being able to bring their characters and equipment into the sub-game are:

Players get attached to their characters and like being able to bring them into different sub-games. This creates a more unified experience, whereas a series of lobby sub-games feels like what it is, a series of independent games, albeit in the same world.
The equipment purchases necessary to enter a sub-game, and the loot extracted from them, produce a market for equipment and services, which is a sandbox game.

The disadvantages are:

Producing a sub-game where players can bring in any sort character with any sort of skills makes balancing the sub-game impossible. A player whose character is too weak, or with the wrong skills, will find the sub-game too difficult (and not fun), while one with a character that is too strong will find the sub-game too easy (and not fun).

Furthermore, a character with non-standard skills (like basket-weaving instead of swordsmanship) will find most instanced dungeons too difficult. Consequently, players build characters that can participate in the most sub-games, and VW designers eliminate those sub-games that can't eventually be participated in by most player characters. Basket-weaving goes out the window, and all characters (and instanced dungeons) become combat oriented.
Likewise, players in a group must all have similarly-skilled characters. This makes it more difficult for friends to play together.
If the author can control the player characters' backstory, he can create more compelling reasons for the characters to be in the sub-game, along with a more interesting plot. When players bring in their own characters, PC backstory can't be a motivator for the sub-game. Instead, exploration, gold pieces, experience points become the primary motivators. Romances, for example, are difficult for an instanced dungeon, but possible in a lobby sub-game or stand-alone game.
Being able to take loot out of a sub-game often leads to mud-flation.
Because players become so attached to their characters, they are reluctant to experiment with different roles.
Because players become so attached to their characters, and because their characters' level/skills are monotonically increasing, new content (sub-games) must continually be added that requires ever higher levels and skills. The new content can't be played by newer players, which causes worlds to dig their own grave.

In-between... quests

The next step up from instanced dungeons are quests and areas of the world that are typically only visited by one group at a time. Quests are semi-private sub-games that other players can barge in on, if they wish.

Quests have the following advantages over instances dungeons:

Quests feel like they're part of the world, not some special reality.
A quest could potentially change the world in significant ways, although virtual worlds don't allow quests to change the world because that would invalidate the quest and all the work that went into generating it. Worlds that reset once a day, like older text MUDs, could have quests that genuinely changed the world in significant ways, if only for a day or two. (Dynamic quests would also work.)
Quests force players from different groups to interact with one another. Instanced dungeons allow players to avoid other players.
Because a virtual world with quests only has one instance, the author is better able to control resources than an instanced-dungeon world. An author with tight control of resources has better control of how players get power, and what they use power for. For example: A super-duper magic sword might only spawn once a week in a quest-world, making the item very valuable. In an instanced-dungeon world, it would spawn in every instance of the dungeon, devaluing the item.

And the following disadvantages:

Because contemporary virtual worlds don't use daily/weekly resets, quests cannot change the world in any way. In some ways, they provide less change than an instanced dungeon because at least a monster killed in an instanced dungeon remains dead (in the instance). A quest-based system must resurrect the monster in a few minutes for the next party that comes through.

When quests cannot change the world, the variety of content possible for a quest becomes even more limited than an instanced dungeon, which is more limited than a lobby sub-game. Quests are largely limited to FedEx and killing specific monsters for specific monster parts/loot.
Some quests are very popular (because of their XP and loot rewards), so they're overcrowded with players all waiting for the same monster spawn.
Griefers can invade a quest and make life miserable for players, but they can't invade an instanced dungeon. (Griefers are sometimes beneficial to the the player's overall experience though.)

Conclusion

This thought experiment has provided a few interesting results:

I mentioned the lobby-based virtual world in The game with a thousand faces as a brain-storming exercise. After going through some of the pro's and con's, I'm more confident that that a lobby-based virtual world might "work". It isn't necessarily a "virtual world" in the traditional sense though.
If the lobby-based virtual world "works" well, does that mean that instanced dungeons and quested-based worlds work just as well, better, or worse? Is the peak number of players to be found in-between a lobby and a sandbox, or at the extremes? At the moment, it appears that in-between is more successful.
Technically, quests are inferior to instanced dungeons, which are inferior to lobby games, which are inferior to stand-alone games of the same sort. What makes a quest compelling is the fact that quests are integrated into a larger world, which instanced dungeons, lobby games, and stand-alone games are increasingly weak at. Instanced dungeons and quests could also be made more compelling by being free to play, thereby providing players for the base of the player pyramid.
In The trouble with explorers, I began the thought experiment with a game, and added a chat system to it. "1 game + chat system" ultimately leads to a sandbox virtual world. I didn't perceive the possibility of a lobby virtual world. Starting with a chat system, and adding a game revealed that either a sandbox or lobby are possible. The starting point affects what local minimas can be seen. What other local minimas have been missed because people began with the wrong starting point?