Problem solving

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19 August 2005

by Mike Rozak

Hunting and gathering

Chris Crawford says that the first thing to decide when designing a game is "what players do".

To my eyes, both The World of Warcraft and Everquest II are the same game because players "do" the same thing. If you tear away the trappings of both games, and attempt to distil them to their essence, WoW and EQII are about "hunting and gathering". Players spend their time extracting resources (XP and loot) from the world and then use the resources to level up their character so they can then extract further resources. (This line of thought isn't at all new, by the way.)

Players quickly learn that hunting and gathering are made safer and more efficient by forming hunting parties (called parties or groups). They also learn that forming tribes (called guilds) leads to safety in numbers, a source of people to form hunting parties with, and a venue for sharing wealth and knowledge. As Raph Koster has pointed out, these tribes usually consist of 100-150 members, a social limit that seems to be hard-wired into the human brain.

The monotony of repetitively hunting and gathering the same objects is mitigated by quests, which provide a purpose for the hunt. A player's quest list also provides an unending array of satisfying milestones. If the completion of one quest doesn't produce a follow-on quest, the player still has a large collection of quests waiting to be finished. From my own play experience, quests are key; if quests weren't in the games, both would be incredibly dull.

In my opinion, The World of Warcraft creates a hunter/gatherer lifestyle more successfully than Everquest II. In WoW, players begin in a small village and complete quests that protect and aid their village. They are then encouraged to visit their racial metropolis, where they continue to protect and aid their city... which isn't exactly hunter/gatherer any more, but still has a tribal feel. Once part of the larger world, players learn their city is part of a confederation of four aligned nations, which they must protect and aid. Part of this duty includes raids on the enemy players' villages and cities. EQII wraps quests in a much more capitalistic and modern guise, with most of the quests ostensibly benefiting individuals in the city, not the community. At its initial release, EQII didn't have player-vs.-player raids either. WoW has sold more than four times as many copies as EQII. Does WoW's admission of its hunter/gatherer foundation have anything to do with its higher sales?

WoW and EQII are not alone in the hunter/gatherer foundation; Most MMORPGs (as well as most text MUDs) follow the same formula. Theoretically, a single-player hunting-and-gathering game could be written, but it would lose the important aspect of community that a multiplayer game allows. Having other players to interact with to the illusion of a hunter/gatherer lifestyle.

Defeating the boss monster

What I find fascinating about hunter/gatherer MMORPGs is that they evolved from text MUDs, which evolved from single-player adventure games, which came from pen and paper RPGs. Pen and paper RPGs have almost no hunting-and-gathering component.

To illustrate how different MMORPGs are from RPGs and other computer games, let me provide an example...

Imagine that a player of a MMORPG comes across a boss monster that's too tough to kill. What does the player do to get around the problem?

1. The player could keep attacking the monster and rely upon luck to get through. After all, if the player's character dies, it will be resurrected. Even if it requires a hundred deaths, the virtual dice will eventually roll in the player's favour, and he will overcome his foe. MMORPGs prevent this "try and try again" solution by introducing a death penalty.
   
   
2. The player could do some planning and come up with a strategy for defeating the monster. MMORPG strategies plateau at "pulling monsters"; more complex strategies don't provide much of an advantage. MMORPG designers intentionally design out strategic solutions, for a few reasons: (a) Any winning strategy against a boss monster will be published on the Internet and will be known by every player within days, eliminating the challenge of the boss monster and unbalancing other aspects of gameplay. (WoW recently had such a problem with one dungeon and declared the strategic approach "illegal".) (b) Most players will forgo strategy and rely on options (3) and (4) anyway.
   
   
3. Any boss monster can be defeated by a sufficiently large group of players. All the stumped player has to do is (a) team up with other players who are stuck at same the boss monster, or (b) call in some friends. MMORPGs are, after all, multiplayer games. (Of course, the more players involved, the less loot each one gets. But since monsters re-spawn every minute, the nicer players wait around so everyone gets a shot at the loot.)
   
   
4. Because there is an infinite supply of non-boss monsters to produce infinite experience that can be spent to increase the character's power, a stymied player merely leaves the unbeatable boss monster and returns after few days when his character has levelled up. Players won't even bother to come back unless the boss monster yields up a spectacular treasure, or is blocking another part of the world that, in turn, yields spectacular treasure, or some new scenery to break the monotony of hunting and gathering.

Compare the MMORPG solution to the approach players take in other types of games:

• In a single-player CRPG the player will use option 1 (try and try again) or option 2 (strategy). Option 3 (team up with other players) obviously doesn't work. Option 4 (level up and come back) usually doesn't work, since the boss monster isn't encountered until everything else in the dungeon has been slain, and all the experience has already been harvested.
  
  
• In a single-player first-person shooter, players will use option 1 (try and try again) and option 2 (strategy). The "try and try again" solution is augmented by the player's neurons adapting to the scenario and improving the player's reaction time (aka: "twitch"). Option 3 (team up with other players) and option 4 (level up and come back) don't work in a FPS, just like they don't work in a CRPG.
  
  
• To solve the equivalent of a "boss monster" in an adventure game, players will use option 2 (strategy) and option 4 (search around for the key to get through the boss monster). Option 1 (try and try again) doesn't work in most adventure games because luck is designed out, and option 3 (team up with other players) won't work.
  
  
• In a pen and paper RPG, players can't use option 1 (try and try again) because pen and paper RPGs have permanent death. Option 3 (team up with other players) can't be used since it's not possible to pull players off the street to join in the campaign for just that one combat. Option 4 (level up and come back) probably won't work either since the dungeon has probably been emptied by the time the boss monster is reached, and leaving the dungeon to kill monsters for XP would undoubtedly annoy the GM so much that the party would be struck down by a bolt of lightning. Option 2 (strategy) is all that is possible, and is likely to work since the GM designed the dungeon with the PC's skill levels in mind.

Problem solving

I claim that most MMORPGs are about hunting and gathering. Conversely, pen and paper RPGs are about problem solving. (Some role players might disagree; if so, just pretend RPGs are about problem solving, for the sake of the argument.) When RPGs are distilled to their essence, the players enter a room and are faced with a challenge. They must come up with a proposed solution to the challenge and act upon it. The challenge often includes combat, but can also take the form of traps, puzzles, or NPCs that must be placated. Magic items and spells usually provide new ways to overcome the challenge (such as invisibility or flight) while magic items and spells in MMORPGs just result in more damage capability. In all cases, a party that spends ten minutes producing a strategy or plan is more likely to succeed than one that just rushes in.

Hunting and gathering (MMORPG-style) doesn't even vaguely resemble problem solving. If pen and paper RPGs are about problem solving, how did their MMORPG descendants turn into games about hunting and gathering?

The transformation occurred when RPGs were translated from pen and paper (and the minds of the GM and players) into a computer simulation. Human brains can imagine a much more complex and varied "world physics" than can presently be programmed into a computer. When the pen and paper RPG party encounters a boss monster they can charge in and attack it, as can a party of players in a MMORPG. The RPG party could instead send someone to climb into the rafters and cut the rope that holds the 16 ton weight suspended over the boss-monster's head; a computer can enable this solution, but only with a fair amount of programming and 3D modelling. Alternatively, the RPG players could invent a solution the GM had never imagined, like going to the store and buying superglue, which they then splash all over the boss monster. The enraged and perplexed monster then chases the party through a narrow crevice where the monster gets glued to the crevice walls, giving players enough time to take his loot; computers can't handle such creative solutions.

When a game whose basis is problem solving is translated to the computer, the problem solving must somehow be simplified:

• Theoretically, a designer could allow for several (3-5) of the most popular solutions to the problem. Early adventure games tried to allow multiple approaches, but rarely do so now. It simply costs too much to implement all the alternate solutions, especially when graphics are involved.
  
  
• Contemporary adventure games simplify problem solving by limiting the number of solutions to the problem to one. A problem with only one solution is called a puzzle.
  
  
• "Choose your own adventure" books provide the player with a menu of solutions. Players can chose the solution and read what happens. Because the possible choices are listed, players often take the opportunity to try all of the solutions and read what happens with each branch. The "fun" part of a CYOA book is not the problem solving, but exploring all the branches; there are no problems left to solve.
  
  
• Real time strategy games, as well as most single-player CPRGs, constrain the world physics that can be applied to the solution. Players are given a geography, enemies that can move and attack, their own characters (that can also move and attack), and must solve the problem by taking advantage of the geography and combatant locations. Players aren't able to cut the rope holding up the sixteen ton weight or use superglue.
  
  In a world with constrained physics, strategy (aka: problem solving) is relevant so long as both sides are "balanced", but is unnecessary when the players are significantly stronger than the enemy, and useless when PCs are significantly weaker. Scenarios (problems) are created with balance in mind to maximise the use of strategy.
  
  
• At first, it appears that MMORPGs could rely on the same sort of strategic scenarios that RTS games and CRPGs use. However, players will stack the odds in their favour by teaming up with more players, or by putting off problem until they're a higher level... So much for balance. Consequently, MMORPGs are not about about problem solving... in the traditional sense. Killing the boss monster doesn't require that players see the 16 ton weight or purchase the superglue. Instead, players must work with other players to kill the boss monster, and solve the socially-based problems that result from the players teaming up in order to accomplish their goal. The game, by itself, posits no problems. Instead, the game is the agent that causes/instigates the socially-based problems.
  
  Notice how the "problem" established by the game is transformed from one based on the mechanics of the world or its NPCs (as used by CRPGs and adventure games), into a problem involving the real-world players. It's like showing a drama on TV, but the real drama occurs when the family sitting in front of the TV argues who controls the remote.

Back to hunting and gathering

The "problem" to solve in a MMORPG is how to deal with other players, how to cooperate with them, how to get them to do what you need them to do, and how to defeat them. The world is only a setting for these problems to arise (with some encouragement from the world design) and then be resolved by the players.

The hunting-and-gathering foundation works because:

1. Hunting and gathering both encourage players to work together. Players must solve the problems of how to find and join a similarly-minded group. They must resolve personality issues, resolve real-world schedule constraints, determine one's functional role within the group, etc.
   
   
2. Hunting and gathering are based on limited resources, causing conflict amongst the players over who harvests the resource. Players must solve the problem of limited resources amongst themselves, through combat, negotiation, or whatever other means they come up with. These issues must be solved for intra-group and inter-group conflicts, where the group might be a party or a tribe.
   
   
3. The formation of small groups (aka: parties) and tribes (aka: guilds) produces social structures that, in turn, present problems to members of the group/tribe. Players in a group contents leadership positions and/or convincing the group to follow a specific agenda.