I think its a good idea to play different roles in a "role playing" game. Thats exactly what material interdependency forces you to do. Also it gives you a way to make profits other than fighting an endless sea of respawning monsters for hours on end.

In gemstone IV they are beginning to work on adding experience for artisan skills (forging, fletching, cobbling, more to come). This will never provide as much experience as hunting but it does allow for a nice alternative...

I think part of the core problem here is the design philosophy of most "RPG" systems. Frankly, I think Dungeons and Dragons was simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen to role gaming.

The problem is, RPGs ever since have been perversely obsessed with classes, skills, statistics... all of this numerological gibberish to provide "gameplay substance" while creating a set of completely absurd artificial distinctions and delineations between characters. We want players to have a choice, so we go off and add more classes, races, special items, etc. etc. This is a lie. Adding more classes and races does not increase player freedom; it makes it ever more fine-grained and limited. The more classes there are in a game, the less access any one player has (percentage-wise) to the total sum of gameplay available. We divide the gameplay pie into many thousands of pieces, and so everyone ends up with crumbs instead of a good slice of pie. This might be excusable if the pie is the size of a planet and so a few thousand slices still add up to generous servings, but we don't have the money to produce planet-sized pies - RPGs cost too much as it is.


I wasn't part of the original tabletop scene, but I consider myself an oldschool role-player because I actually role play. I enjoy the experience of exploring behaviors and skills that I don't have in real life. That's great. But CRPGs do not encourage role-play; they encourage mechanical grinding and forced "social" interactions. (By the way, at the risk of being frighteningly rude, anyone who thinks MMORPGs are "social" activity needs to discover the world outside of computers.)

Clearly, real societies arise when humans do their thing. Real civilizations, nations, clubs, sporting franchises, and secret agencies. Obviously people will, given the right environment, develop a social structure. So why do online games have such a ridiculously weak excuse for social interaction?


I suspect that the core issue here is coerced, artificial behavior. Joe from Accounting doesn't know what an Orcish Warlord would do (after all, Joe is not an Orc - jokes at the expense of Accounting personnel aside), so when his RPG throws him into that role, chances are he's going to act like Joe, except maybe with more grunts and growls and smacking things around with a club. Yet our game designs naively - even stupidly - expect players to totally assume the role of their characters. You started a Hunter character, right? So obviously you never want to learn to cast magic spells, right? This seems all too "obvious" to most RPG designers, when nothing could be further from the truth.

One of the only online communities I know of where people role-play, have a social structure, and have developed a genuine microcosm of human society, is EVE Online. And I think that happened precisely because EVE does not use a class-based system. In theory, if you have the patience, you can learn any skill in the game, no matter who you are.

This is just one step in the right direction; as designers we must stop expecting players to play in our world, and instead give them a world in which they can play. The difference is subtle, but has profound consequences on how people conduct themselves. Joe from Accounting needs to be allowed to act like Joe from Accounting, not Grimthog the Orcish Warlord.

Suppose Joe isn't much of a role-player, and just got Uber Awesome MMORPG II because Bob from Security said it was great. Joe goes out and starts acting like Joe online. Suddenly he discovers that he can act a little bit differently than normal - and maybe he becomes Joe the Blacksmith. Joe learns to explore things, and eventually becomes Joe the Elven Blacksmith. Give Joe enough time, and he will adapt to the role-play possibilities of his game environment, and explore them at his own pace. Bob, being an avid role-player already, must be able to drop into the game and assume any role his imagination fancies - but Joe must be allowed to limit the differences between his real persona and his game persona to any degree he likes.

As MatrixCubed commented earlier, typical MMORPG fare (and any CRPGs, really) tends to attract number-cruncher types who enjoy level grinding and endless, repetetive questing. These games simply have no appeal to people (like myself) who aren't fascinated by watching our Hit Points increase when we put another point into Constitution. The design assumes that players will number-crunch, enjoy the grind, etc.; the design attracts certain types of players, and forces passerby (people with free trials, say) to either adopt the number-crunch mentality, or give up and go back to playing Flash games.

This is a terrible fallacy in a system that is supposed to support social interaction (that is, after all, the point of having multiple human beings in the same game world). Society is interesting because people are diverse, unique, individual. Class-system and race segregation is ridiculous because it doesn't increase diversity, it subdivides it into canned categories, and thereby destroys it. The very game design, by its nature, will attract only certain types of people. So the rest of us never participate, and there is no society - the differences between people is what makes the social aspect possible.

I think if we see a game environment where the world imposes absolutely no restrictions on how players are expected to behave, we'll see some of the social problems dissolve. We've long sinced developed solutions for problems like crime in the real world, so why are we powerless to stop PKers and griefers? Is it really that we need more moderators and PVP-only servers, or is it that the assumptions made by the game system literally preclude the development of a functional society?

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Original post by ApochPiQ The problem is, RPGs ever since have been perversely obsessed with classes, skills, statistics... all of this numerological gibberish to provide "gameplay substance" while creating a set of completely absurd artificial distinctions and delineations between characters. We want players to have a choice, so we go off and add more classes, races, special items, etc. etc. This is a lie. Adding more classes and races does not increase player freedom; it makes it ever more fine-grained and limited. The more classes there are in a game, the less access any one player has (percentage-wise) to the total sum of gameplay available. We divide the gameplay pie into many thousands of pieces, and so everyone ends up with crumbs instead of a good slice of pie. This might be excusable if the pie is the size of a planet and so a few thousand slices still add up to generous servings, but we don't have the money to produce planet-sized pies - RPGs cost too much as it is.

I couldn't agree more. The more class-systems, skill-systems and special items(non-random items) they put into a game, the more the game "forces" a certain behavior onto the player, thus preventing the player to bring out/develop his own behavior. They claim these features give the players more choices but instead the features restrict a player's behavior.
E.G: Going on a boring dungeon-raid with 50 other players because it has some special item only attainable with the "help" of 50 other players, all hoping to get the item as well (not giving a damn about you).
E.G: Choosing the not so nice guy over a seemingly nice guy because he plays a class unsuitable with your own class.

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By the way, at the risk of being frighteningly rude, anyone who thinks MMORPGs are "social" activity needs to discover the world outside of computers.

Not frighteningly rude, but perhaps frighteningly close-minded? Have you actually visited the "world outside of computers" recently? It must seem very strange to you that many people who love to socialise are addicted to their cellphones. Socialising is obviously possible through many mediums, although some may be more preferable to others.

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Original post by Argus2 Quote: By the way, at the risk of being frighteningly rude, anyone who thinks MMORPGs are "social" activity needs to discover the world outside of computers. Not frighteningly rude, but perhaps frighteningly close-minded? Have you actually visited the "world outside of computers" recently? It must seem very strange to you that many people who love to socialise are addicted to their cellphones. Socialising is obviously possible through many mediums, although some may be more preferable to others.

My point is that the materialistic, selfish, and horridly finite "socialization" of MMORPGs is not sufficient socialization. Sure it is possible through many media (what do you think we're doing here?) but each medium has its limitations and baggage that will seriously color the nature of the interaction. (Case in point: I hate using the phone, because it precludes the use of body language. Discussing things on the Internet can be a remarkably frustrating exercise in futility because the nature of the medium heavily constricts the ability to interact.) I'm saying that the interactions found in online games are seriously crippled, and that genuinely social involvement requires extra work to escape the limits of the system, not that there are no interactions at all.

It seems to me that the line of thought is "MMORPGs involve more than one person, and you can interact, so obviously it's a social system! Hey, it's social, we're done, we can leave it alone and totally ignore the social problems because the social part is already done." Social interaction is far more complex than just people talking or running a dungeon and fighting the same enemies. We're doing our own players a disservice by assuming the depth of their social potential is so mundane and shallow.

I brought up the point because your original (quoted) statement indicated that you did not believe MMORPGs involved social activity. After clarification, you mean to say that you believe MMORPG social interaction is extremely limited/simplistic/mundane/shallow etc.

Is the gameplay at fault for this? Or is it simply the fact that stat-based RPGs tend to attract the kind of people that aren't particularly social in the first place? In an MMORPG, people can communicate by voice, text, and visual actions/emotes, which is sufficient for socialisation on a level above that of many communication mediums. And it is not as though social events are impossible to create in MMORPGs either.

So I think the problem is really people like me - I'm generally anti-social, and you might call me a "number-cruncher" although really I just enjoy strategy in games (which is the fun part for me - eg. choosing which stat to increase). Your suggested alterations (where you take out strategic choices) immediately loses its appeal for players like myself. So it's a tough call for game designers - do you make WoW or Second Life?

Exactly - as I said, the challenge isn't finding a way to interact with other people in WoW. There's plenty of ways to do that. The challenge is to find ways to develop a deeper, more genuine social interaction. Yes MMORPGs are "social" in that more than one person is involved, but to say that MMORPGs encourage the development of functional societies is a heck of a stretch, if not outright false.

Currently, designers seem to be favoring the number-cruncher constituent, and then wondering why the socialites aren't flocking to their "society." Maybe it's overly idealistic, but I have a hunch that there is a happy medium - a way in which to allow number crunchers to crunch numbers, without demanding a specific type of behavior from the socialites. It's definitely not an easy problem to solve, though - but I'm confident that the solution to the problem will fundamentally involve the replacement of the false illusion of choice (class/stat systems) with genuine player freedom. What that system will look like from a technical perspective I don't know.

Anyone have any thoughts?

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Original post by ApochPiQ Currently, designers seem to be favoring the number-cruncher constituent, and then wondering why the socialites aren't flocking to their "society." Maybe it's overly idealistic, but I have a hunch that there is a happy medium - a way in which to allow number crunchers to crunch numbers, without demanding a specific type of behavior from the socialites. It's definitely not an easy problem to solve, though - but I'm confident that the solution to the problem will fundamentally involve the replacement of the false illusion of choice (class/stat systems) with genuine player freedom. What that system will look like from a technical perspective I don't know. Anyone have any thoughts?

Thoughts on classes and groups:
A way to get rid of the pseudo-social behavior created by material interdependence, would be to get rid of the classes as we know them. The material gain of playing solo would be the same as when playing in groups and vice versa. This is a balance that must not be broken in any way. This means that the typical group-setup (Healer, Tank, Mage) we know from most MMORPGs wouldn't be present in our game. Instead the classes would be selfsufficient.
The only point of getting a group together would be the social aspect.

(I know there are so many more aspects to it, but hey it was a thought!)

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to say that MMORPGs encourage the development of functional societies is a heck of a stretch, if not outright false. ... Currently, designers seem to be favoring the number-cruncher constituent, and then wondering why the socialites aren't flocking to their "society."

I don't think anyone has claimed that MMORPGs encourage the development of functional societies, nor have I seen any evidence that MMORPG makers are wondering why they don't attract more "socialites". Let's be serious about this: would you really spend millions of dollars on a very difficult game to design and architect, in order to attract a segment of the population that is in all likelihood going to prefer real world interactions anyway?

Decisions and payoff are fundamental to the concept of games. You call opportunity cost in a game (eg. having to choose which stat to increase, or which class to play etc.), a "false illusion of choice", and yet these are the only meaningful parts of the game from a game-theoretic standpoint. You say you want "genuine player freedom", but you offer no suggestions either on how to implement that OR how it would somehow produce a fun playing experience. Perhaps it isn't a game you are seeking?