How can a small developer produce enough content to keep a massively multiplayer game interesting?
Fun is not a full time job
More and more browser games want to be World of Warcraft, which, in practice, usually means that they try to suck you into spending your whole day grinding. Our game is designed to be played for about fifteen minutes per day. Why? Mostly because we expect that our players will have lives outside the game, and we don’t want to ruin them. The side benefit is that we don’t need to produce content as quickly, since players can’t burn through everything in a single insomniac sitting.
Rough Sea needs you
The MMOG content problem arises because there are more players than developers. So why not allow players to make their own content? Everyone wins: creator players get in-game rewards and the pleasure of seeing their work in the game world; consumer players get more copious and varied content. Of course, vetting submissions is a lot of work, but we may be able to use voting, etc., to get the players partially to supervise themselves! Many web sites (eBay, flickr, facebook) and computer games (Sims, Spore, Little Big Planet) are either founded on or enriched by “user created content”, but browser games haven’t twigged yet.
Use your words
The convential wisdom is that people hate having to read while playing a computer game — it’s a visual medium, like film — and that “reading” on the web consists of skipping as much text as possible. Our game, while primarily graphical, uses text to describe special events that occur in the course of play. Are we crazy? Possibly — and if playtesting shows that reading sucks, we’ll scrap it and redesign. But since players will only see a couple of text-based events per day (and since we hope to attract literate players, not twitch monsters), we hope that these will be seen as welcome variety, not as a chore.
And what are the advantages of text?
- it’s faster to write an atmospheric text than to create the same mood with art or sound. That means we can deliver more content.
- writing requires no special software or equipment, which makes it especially suited to user created content as described above.
Left to Chance
Computer games discovered early that a computer, given the right formulae, can create a huge, complex world much faster than a human can. The procedurally generated approach isn’t suited to text, nor to our style of graphics, but it is excellent for creating spaces for people to explore.
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5 comments
Seba says:
December 8, 2008 at 8:54 am (UTC 1 )
While user generated content sounds like a great solution to let players populate the MMO and relieve the studio from such pressure, I’m curious as to how to manage and control that gauge of new content.
You mentioned vetting submissions and voting, but I really believe this topic requires careful planning. Think of the flying swastikas in Second Life or the borage of walking penises submitted just hours after Spore’s Creature Creator was launched. These guys still don’t know what to do about it. In small scale, it’s probably not too much of an issue; the question is how to effectively deal with the scope once the MMO has a strong user base.
Rafael says:
December 10, 2008 at 12:49 pm (UTC 1 )
I may be naive, but I think it boils down to this:
You have to decide whether you want a moderated system, in which user content doesn’t appear in the game until it’s been approved, or a policed system, in which user content appears immediately but can be removed if someone complains.
If you choose to moderate, you have to realize that a lot of work is involved and hire enough people to take care of it. This should still be cheaper than producing the content yourself. Since both rate of user content creation and revenue scale with number of players, it should scale. If it turns out not to, you’d need to recruit player volunteer censors.
If you choose to police, you have to accept that there will be a lot of unacceptable content in your game.
In either case, you need mechanisms to deal with griefers, which in this case means people who repeatedly and deliberately violate your standards, whatever they are. This implies defining standings (or your freedom to be arbitrary) in the Terms of Service.
I’m pretty sure Second Life is deliberately laissez-faire; I don’t know about Spore, but I think it likelier that they don’t care than that they “don’t know what to do about it”.
If you have better suggestions, I’d certainly be glad to hear them!
Sirko says:
January 30, 2009 at 7:02 pm (UTC 1 )
I suggest giving players full freedom to input what they want, but to add a “Give a notice against it”-Button for any player seeing it, that sends an email to the supporter/community manager to have a look on it, for any cases of “h1tler” and other content. By this, you could get away because you are at least making effort against inapropiate content, because you as owner of the gamer are responsable for what happens there.
My concern is more for the reading. In my experience, most of the players just don’t. For the ones that do, it is worth putting it in, but what about the others? Hence, you should offer content input in graphics. Not uploading pictures of course, because that would open a mess to copyright infringements and server bandwidth. But, offer some graphics like a set of castles, skies, other environments plus objects and persons, and offer the option to make your own picture for your own written text just by choosing size and position of some pictures out of the set you like and thinkg they fit to your text. How about that? I think its a compromise. And additionally, you could add a system which allows players to at least propose pictures to add to the set.
Rafael says:
January 31, 2009 at 12:18 pm (UTC 1 )
I like your idea of allowing user-created graphics through clip-art! I don’t think we will have time to include that in the initial release version, but I’ll certainly note it down for later.
“My concern is more for the reading. In my experience, most of the players just don’t.”
You are right that text in browser games is a waste of time for most players. I love reading, and I love role-playing, and yet I still skip browser game texts. Nonetheless, I’m betting on text for our game. Why?
There are two reasons why I (and presumably others) skip text:
It sucks: it’s there to set the mood, but it doesn’t. We hope to avoid this by writing text that doesn’t suck. We may fail, of course, but it’s worth a try.
It is irrelevant: there is no game benefit to reading it (presumably because everybody knows that people don’t like to read, which thus becomes self-fulfilling). In our game, the player is regularly called upon to make decisions based on the situation described in the text — reading is integral to gameplay. If people really hate text, then this is a terrible decision; if, as I believe, people only hate boring, irrelevant text, then we should be ok.
TheTurnipKing says:
October 5, 2011 at 12:01 am (UTC 1 )
I’ve always thought that the visual side of video-gaming is massively over-emphasised. Video games are not a single media, they are multi-media. That means using the strengths of all the media types as and where they are more appropriate – and as Infocom showed all those decades ago, there is a LOT you can do with in-game text.