The Loner: Why Some People Play MMOs Alone

[Music] hello can you hear me excellent I can't see any of you this is awesome I'd like to congratulate all of you for finding the secret talk I feel like the the Foo Fighters at South by Southwest - the secret show that no one knows about congratulations again what I want to talked about is sort of an interesting question I hear come up a lot which is why do people play massive multiplayer games alone I mean if you think about it's there in the title right the the title of the johner is massively multiplayer games it seems like people who aren't playing massive multiplayer games say massively multiplayer are missing the point somehow they're like if you like playing your first-person shooter game without picking up any guns just throwing flowers of the bad guys or something is there something wrong with these people now this is something I've been thinking about for a long time because well I've

been making massive multiplayer games for a long time I've also been talking about them writing about them thinking them thinking about them playing them and one things I'd like to point out is that I know it's a long time ago that even though everybody said that you should be playing massive multiplayer games with other people I was always trying to find ways to play them by myself so it's always something that I I've seen as a play pattern inside of these spaces now you know personally a lot of people follow me and never known me over the years know that I like to talk about various game design issues that sort of permeate the MMO sphere entirely such as should we have permadeath the answer to that is no by the way you know should we have virtual economies should they be sand boxes or theme parks our classes and levels destroying the genre well one of the things that start showing up relatively recently and I've certainly seen it on our boards and I've started seeing it on boards of our competitors is people asking on our boards can I Solo in this game now these are massively multiplayer message boards

right and so they don't actually say it this night so they more along phrase it something like do I have to really group up with a bunch of mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging idiots in order to do the most basic stupid banal tasks and your stew game yeah why is this an interesting question this is an interesting question because the answer used to be no you can't solo you have to play with other people you really couldn't do much of anything in EverQuest unless you grouped up if you try to like play you oh soul you to be assassinated when you left the city gates shadow Bane was a worthless game if you played solo but since then the answer has become yes all right games like World of Warcraft and free realms and and City heroes which I consider one of the the principle games that did this early on you know all took the stance that you should be able to play most of the game by yourself not all of the game there's still stuff we reserved for groups but you should be able to do a whole bunch of the game by

yourself and I think this is interesting because this is a full revolution of game design Canon it is something we've all collectively changed our mind its head well we were wrong before now there are still some zealots that say hey we make multiplayer games and people who play multiplayer games by themselves are doing it wrong and they sort of have this attitude that people who play by themselves are psychos or weirdos you know you know he kept to himself he did bug anybody they freaked out but one things that we have to keep in mind when we talk about the loners and think about the loners is that the loner is also a heroic archetype right people don't imagine being a serial killer but they certainly imagine big Batman or the Lone Ranger and more the point if you really think about it being a loner is an inherently social thing right you can't be a loner in a single-player game because you're not setting yourself apart from somebody in order to be a

loner you basically have to have a group of people that you're being standoffish and kind of ignoring right so so you know being a loner they're people who want to sort of be the loner inside of the game environment because well to them that is part of heroic fantasy anyway I don't want people to think for a second that we should be making just solely massively single-player games at the end of the day our unique selling proposition is still social it's still massive it's the things that we do well you know we you know raids or what Wow does that you can't do inside of say a baldur's gate or a Diablo or or you know one of these the single-player or lightly multiplayer RPGs similarly EVE Online there's a whole bunch of things that you can do in a space game if you don't have to worry about the massive technical problems and social problems that being a massively multiplayer games bring to the floor but this is what excites the imagination right this is the stuff that gets its Slashdot in Wired magazine the really

big epic fights that's what the johner does really well and we have to embrace that similarly the city siege games like your your Dark Age of Camelot your Warhammer your shadow Bane you know these are things that excite the imagination about the possibility of the genre the idea that there are lots of people that are somehow working together or working against each other for common cause and these are our unique selling proposition and we have to concentrate on this stuff because in order to get this stuff to work we have to kind of back off on this stuff we have to back off for the cloth sibs and all the animations and all the getting every lock of hair exactly perfect we will never be able to do as good with for example our avatar art as the guys who are only drawing two avatars we will never do as good as the guys doing environments when they only have to you know design an environment the size of a Pizza Hut and we're trying to make you know an entire continent run in our engine we have to rest are you selling proposition so how do people who

solo people play by themselves people who are loners fit into this so it's worth just thinking about I think it's worth thinking about what we could consider one of the original massively multiplayer environments which is the city so New York City one of the largest cities of the world and it's got I don't know how many I probably should have done the research a 912 million whatever it's got a lot of people in there the fascinating thing about New York City is that even though it is definitely a place that is bustling with you Hannah there are a couple things that we should notice as we think about loners inside of massive multiplayer spaces the first is that oddly enough Manhattan has the largest percentage of single individual dwellings of any city in the world that's Manhattan rent prices guys right

they are paying a lot of money to live by themselves a lot of people are choosing to live in New York City and still Playa B solo the other thing that's interesting about the big cities is that well people who are strangers coming into these cities find them alienating find them overwhelming find it hard for them to get a handle of what's going on and so the thing to think about is then this is a Mark Twain quote from some years ago a domed and steepled solitude where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race this Mark Twain guy said this like a hundred years ago before skyscrapers and taxicabs and and you know all the stuff that makes New York City what it is today even then it was seen as an alien hostile place but and and we have this sort of mentality and I think it's sort of funneled by TV or if you watch say CSI New York you think that New York

City is a deathtrap right you know you think that is a scary an alien place where there aren't communities and and sort of the myth of America you know real America versus I don't know fake America or something like that is that you know people who live in the country are more social and more civic minded but social sociologist have found that's actually not true they've actually found that people who live inside of cities tend to be more social they tend to be more civic minded they tend to have stronger social friends and they tend to be less likely to ascribe themselves as the country and part of this reason is because inside of the the cities is easier for them to find other people that share their belief systems it's easier for them to find groups for them to belong to New York City is full of thousands and thousands of little circle social circles where as you know podunk USA may only have one or two and if you don't fit in you don't fit in so anyway that was a fun digression let's go back to our loners and talk about how they need to fit into our

social games one of the things I'm gonna keep in mind is that a lot of people see loners people playing by themselves inside of our massively multiplayer games as an aberration but it's really not there are a lot of different reasons why people are playing alone inside of your social space some of these are actually healthy reasons they're you know deployed people are choosing to play that way some of these are broken design states that designers need to be taking more seriously and each of these have different design challenges that they're going to present to you so what I did is I helpfully made the the list of ten different kinds of loners every time I see this slide I initially think I wrote the ten different kinds of losers but that's not what I wrote because loners are not losers a lot of these people are loners for good reasons for valid reasons and sometimes unfortunate reasons you need to fix but sometimes because they're happier that way you know the one that we spend the most time talking about is the person who logged in for the first time all

right this is the person who's just bought your game has just come into the space knows nothing about anything doesn't know the social conventions doesn't have any friends it doesn't have any clue what's going on doesn't even know where fun is and as you may know we spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to get them into the game into a social circle because the theory is once they're into a social circle they're going to be more invested more interested in what's going on now a lot of times our tabula rasa player is going to be he's going to have come in with friends but that friend might have washed out right he came in with a friend but that friend the game wasn't for him or that friend isn't getting on for another two days because the pre-order is backed up or that friend logged in to a different server by mistake and this for this guy is riding solo until that comes along now our first instinct is game designers especially the more social engineering types is to try to dress Jam these people with other people as quickly as possible there's some pitfalls to that

one of those overstimulation you have to be really really we're wary of this so a lot of people mmm those are incredibly complicated things I mean the interface is uneven our simple ones put a are incredibly labyrinthine as a result of it it's really hard for people on how to play these games and some people really do not like to learn to interact with other people until they've actually figured out what's going on how the class works how the GUI works you know how to you know get out of town things like that and so if you think back to astron scroll back in the day they had a fealty system where basically the high-level players would get an experience bonus for every experience point that a low-level player earned if that low-level player had declared fealty to them and the end result was that higher level players to basically camp newbie town and recruit low-level players as soon as they came in the door of course what this was to low level players was an instantaneous sales pitch

of hey come in sign up for me you know me I want you to sign up to me for me right a lot of people and sherry green array who is one of the experts on women in game design points out that's a lot of women players in particular don't like to learn with any social pressure they want actually to be able to get a handle on the game before having this kind of pressure put on them to prove that they're good to prove that they're wrong prove that they have skills they would actually rather learn in a vacuum and then sort of once they're ready to join a social group once they feel they have their footing then actually start looking for their social circles and so as you as the designer you want to encourage them to get into social circles but you have to also leave them some space so that they can actually get a handle on things one of the corollaries of the the new kid in town problem is the Hollow Earth problem this is an old mud term which describes what happens in our class and level-based mmo's when you have a game

where there is a content progression and you know you do level 1 to 10 content and you're done with that zone you go to 10 and 20 content then you're done with that zone what happens is that people who come in late to the game are going to find even if they want people to group with they might find that there aren't any there as an example if you log in to Cataclysm today in World War craft and startup a worgen or a what was the other one a goblin today you're going to find that newbie town in those areas is a lot less crowded than it was in November in December when that game act when the expansion pack actually launched most of those people sort of graduated to the higher level content and if you crave that social interactivity it's just not there to be had and this is sort of a design problem that all these level based games have to have and even if you do get to max level you might find that the endgame has gotten incredibly cliquish even if you want to get into a social circle it's very hard for you to do so because you have to basically earn to other you have

to earn your spot and a guild and and and earn prove that you earn a spot in the raid in the battleground in the arena fight in the the Strikeforce for your territorial control game and it may be that those spots are very limited and hard to actually come by the second group is probably the group that I'm most like they basically see other people as a tragedy all right they see him it's like a joke for them they wouldn't want a group with anybody in the Barrens but they think they're good clean fun anyway right these are the people who like to slow down for car crashes this is probably my category as well they see other people as content and one of the things I want to stress is this is way more pervasive than most people casually think it is so very recently a media studies group did a

study and found that 90% of the readers on most mailing lists and message boards never post right they go to the message boards and they read things on the message boards and they never bother post in some of them it's still log in daily it's just that they're they're just absorbing the content that other people bring to the table they find the value in actually watching this but they don't necessarily feel they have to post in order to get the value outside of this community and I want to stress this is not new these numbers were also being thrown around back in the news net days and you know when all the alt groups were around you know and if these people find value in lurking who are we to tell them they're wrong but the thing about the concept of other people our content is that it really puts an onus on you as the designer to be sure that you have sort of a social critical mass that you'd be sure that the space feels full

and and proud and interesting so this is how casinos used to be designed the the trend of how to design casinos was to make them bigger more grandiose more palatial with the high ceilings and we want this to be a temple of opulence and this is the the Aladdin I believe you can't go there anymore because it failed and has been destroyed this this guy his name is uh bill Friedman he is a famed maverick casino designer and he basically did some research and found that a whole bunch of people would stay at the Ladin and then go gamble someplace else and what he found was that the reason why is that these are very lonely and desperate places to gamble and if you think about playing a slot machine for hours on end it is a grind it is a lonely soul sucking experience however if you play it in a room like this where the ceilings are

low and that the the areas are have alcoves that sort of keep people together there is always content going on around you right you always feel like there's something going on around you and while you're hitting that button on that slot machine you know you're going to see people winning over there this we're always going to be the sound of somebody winning around you there's going to be people fighting or getting drunk or you know there's gonna be like cute waitresses nearby there's always something something going on when you get more people closer together and this is true of any social space for example if I was having this talk right now in a room that only had 50 chairs this would feel like a very cozy and dynamic and standing-room-only talk but instead we're having it in this this very very large room and you guys are all feeling sorry for me for being the last talk of gee see and that's okay if we're just getting talking for teaching classes but if you are in the business of for example running a club running a bar you know you want to prove

that your space is the it space and part of that is being sure that the place feels like it's hopping feels like it's crowded it's coming in but we don't necessarily design our mmo's for people watching we don't necessarily design it so that there are lots of people interacting we try it you know lots of designers still think it's important to have really big super big worlds so that people get really spread out and those populations get diffused and that really really fights with what the social needs of the space are now sometimes your new kid in town comes in and as famously said that all babies are born sociopaths they don't know anything about anything they don't know what's right or wrong and they have to be taught that by their parents by their teacher by their Cleary's by their clergy by their Boy Scout Troop whatever much can be saying said the same for massive multiplayer game players they come into an environment and every environment has different rules for what is right what is wrong so for example what's correct

in quake is different than what's correct in Ultima Online which is different than the social mores of a world of warcraft and this can even be different per server what's acceptable on a role-playing server is completely different than what's acceptable on a pvp server and most of this is based on social convention now players have to learn these rules in order fit in and most people will actually try to sometimes they don't want to sometimes they don't bother to learn sometimes it's funny right so if you ever want to kill an entire weekend you can go to lamebook comm and see about the people who just do not understand what is appropriate or inappropriate to post on Facebook and on Facebook that's funny because you actually have control over your social circle but an MMO you don't necessarily have control over your social circle to wide open landscape and as a result of this the power shifts and it and the people who are sociopaths can actually do the griefing now Raph Koster

who's sitting right there said this some time ago on his blog where he pointed out that basically the more indirect your communication is with the people that you're talking to the more anonymous you come the less inhibited that you are in your social behavior and it came to an interesting conclusion which is something for the game designer to take to heart which is that it may be that the right way to solve briefing inside of your environment is to increase empathy not necessarily punish people get people to recognize that the person at the other end of the the other of that mud connection wire is actually a real person as opposed to a nameless faceless person I can abused and this is something that we see in real life as well we have a ton of studies that talk about how even the smallest nods can get people to actually care more about other people and want to do them correctly you are more likely to be rude in traffic if you make eye contact with the guy you're about to cut off right you are more likely to give money to a bum if he

manages to catch your eye that being said some people will never learn and you should not be afraid of expelling them from your environment if it's a prudent at the first sign that it proves they prove that they cannot be salvaged so on to loner type for some people are playing under unique conditions sometimes they're playing at lunch they're playing at their desk sometimes they're playing at home or their wife and kid are asleep next to their desk sometimes this is the only way they play and sometimes this is only how they play some of the day these people are playing under unique constraints and this is a good excuse why you always need to have some level of solo content in your game some stuff for these people to do these people can't commit to playing in a dungeon for 45 minutes because their lunch break might end then like if your dungeon can't be done in 45 minutes they'd have to abandon you and leave you there they might not be able to put on

voice chat for example because you know they can't talk and wake up the kid or it's just too embarrassing to put on the headset while they're at the office so these people might might want to do group content they just are in a position where they cannot for some part of their day but they still want to play their game you behooves you as the designer to give them the social content that they need or the solo content that they need and want so that they can sort of play when they have the availability to do so good news we're hitting the mass market and we're hitting the mass market in a big way the bad news is that means that does not mean that we get to stop making games for pimply-faced nerds and other people that just want to keep to themselves if you get the mass market well depending on what study you choose to believe between twenty-five and fifty percent of the general population is considered introverts you're still going

to be getting a whole lot of people who would prefer to keep to themselves or even if they do want to group up with other people would rather not be the ones who initiate the contact who for whom you know talking to the pretty girl at the end of the bar is scary and terrifying to them right and in fact despite the fact that playing video games is bigger than has ever been in the history of time according to the the Center for Disease Control and yes the fact that the CDC is doing Studies on gaming should tell you what the government thinks about our industry in general studies of the CDC have shown that gamers are still more likely to be introverted right and there are some dangers they've also like other studies have shown that introverts are more likely to be depressed and more likely to have social problems clearly but they also found that the people who play these games actually see video games online video games mmo's social games as a way of getting sort of the social

foods that they need right the social play that they need they see it as sort of a surrogate for social interactions inside the real world for them it's easier to have these interaction inside the game and and that's that's okay in that respect we're actually doing a service to these people but at the same time we have to keep in mind what our mechanics are forcing these people to do even if I'm an introvert inside of your game space that does not mean I want to go out and recruit people don't make me I do not want to ask xxx strangers if they want to help me kill something in vampire wars why I'm an introvert I don't like asking people for anything there are people that like to do that there are people that like to reach out and you can actually give them a lot of the impetus a lot of the push a lot of the control in actually doing things like building groups running the dungeons give extroverts the tools to do so and allow the introverts to pass off the control over these these

responsibilities to the extroverts and the extroverts will have fun doing it and the introverts will be relieved they don't have to even little things like if I'm an introvert and I want to find a guild give me a way to advertise passively give me a way that I can reach out to people in a way that it doesn't feel like I'm rejected if I don't succeed now this is an interesting design challenge all the time inside our social spaces our social circles disintegrate right this might be that the friend that you play with all the time has decided to stop playing the game or your guild has just collapsed because of guild drama or something else and suddenly you had a social circle and it used to do social things you used to do the raids he used to do the dungeons he used to do the territorial control and that entire social structure has utterly disappeared right this is a broken game state and if you think about it like this guy has just gotten dumped

by his social circle and you think about all the emotions that you had going on inside of you the last time you got dumped you can understand this is scary and what is your job is the game designer your job is a game designer is to set up the rebound relationship as fast as you frickin can and get them back and play the game that you want to because these people don't necessarily want to play your solo game they were happy playing the raid game they were happy playing the territorial control before that was all jerked out from under them one of the things that our games don't do well enough is have redundant social groups so sociologists in the field of social networking have this concept of weak ties and strong ties and if you think about your real life your life is primarily defined by your strong ties is it this is your wife your kids your your parents the people you go to work with every day if you go to church it might be the people you see at church and your

weak ties are your more distant relationships right these are the the guy that you worked with three jobs ago and the kid that you went to high school with Facebook if you think about it is primarily a way of collecting these weak ties but sociologists found is that you know strong ties sort of govern our day-to-day lives and our day-to-day interactions weak lives is what we turn to when chaos strikes when you lose your job and all of your co-workers are also now scrambling and finding your jobs that's what you're going to go to the guy that you went to high school with that's when you're going to go to the guy you worked with two jobs ago and see if he has any leads on another job that's sort of these weak ties act as sort of a social safety net for individuals that allow them to actually get into the next thing mmo's aren't designed that way we turn aliy encourage people to get into a guild as soon as possible then these guilds become very solid and they become very insular and they don't interact with other guilds very often in fact very often there's intense competition

between the guilds and so when that guild dissolves it becomes something of a nightmare situation and there's a very real risk that players wash out of the game I don't have the answer for this but this seems like a great place for an enterprising designer to find a solution that we can all steal now your uh your kid had just got off the bus he gets all the way to level 50 he's maxed out he's there because he's heard about your unique selling position he's heard about the territorial control and the rating and the battlegrounds and all the stuff that's in the game in game he really wants to be in an arena team but he's got this problem he doesn't know if he's good enough and very often he may be right right a lot of these games are hard and in game is really hard on purpose because we're trying to create challenges that can keep you coming back over and over again keep you engaged and actually a be a challenge but that also means that it can very very hard again

to get into that Mean Girls clique to actually get into a social circle where you can actually prove that you belong and we can be a contributor Jonathan Baron famously described it as a glory and shame we have Tom Cruise representing glory we have Bill Buckner representing shame I'm a Red Sox fan what John said is that glory is the reason why people playing on those they want to be the guy that plants the flag on top of the tower they want to be the guy that lands that final death blow when there are only three eyes left on the raid that's what they envision their head and shame is the reason why they don't they're afraid of letting everybody down right they are afraid of being the person who wastes half an hour of everybody's lies because they just couldn't get the job done and very often it's because they don't understand you know that there might be low impact rules that they can take and one of the reasons one things that John Baron did in his game which was a long time ago was called Battletech was they basically

had cannon fodder roles the idea was you know you needed a stream of newbies for whatever their game design was that you would send out on the battlefield and he would tell him yeah you're gonna go out there you gonna really fire you you're gonna take a few potshots and you're gonna die and so Kay you want to come back you want to go out there and do it again and these these were low level low skill players could come in feel like they're contributing immediately to this in-game activity and gain some comfort with the social structure gain some comfort with the GUI gained some comfort and understanding of what is going on at all around them and gradually worked their way up the guilt the hierarchy of whatever they had guilds or clans or whatever it was you know finding ways so that players can actually contribute to a guild in a way that is is not going to induce shame is I think something that is very important it's getting people who don't want to be loners into a social circle and you know one of those things that keep in mind is to keep in mind how hard it is to actually learn

how to play some of these role who here has ever played a tank a tank and inside of massive went in Wow or in it's hard isn't it and it's a binary switch you either know how to do it or you don't and when you don't there is a lot of death and there is a lot of carnage and there is a lot of people who are really really mad at you because you suck and you're terrible alright you learning how to tank is asking for other people to die over and over and over again until you could figure this out that is an enormous social pressure and it's an incredible barrier for getting good tanks inside of your your your trinity based role-playing game some people just want to play by themselves and not all the time I actually just play Star Wars Galaxies I was a master crafter my biggest pet

peeve for that game was that I couldn't stop I couldn't log into my account without people bugging me for pants alright now as soon as I logged in they would see me come in and it was just be an endless spam of tells why haven't I made you your pant your your your your pants yet and it was it was very very frustrating you know some people just want to get away from their responsibilities even their online responsibilities but they still want to play this game that and that's okay being by yourself from time to time even in little bite-size chunks can be very very healthy there has been some research done that found that some people prefer having a commute to not having a commute that's crazy right well not if you think about it that's 20 minutes that you have that you aren't being bothered by your boss you aren't being bothered by your wife you aren't being bothered by your job responsibilities you aren't you know being bothered by your kid it is that

small period of alone time that you have that you can laugh or cry or crank ACDC on the radio or pick your nose or whatever the hell it is you like to do when you're by yourself and so giving people a way to play alone giving them people way to escape to jump to alts to to do other things is something I think is actually very valuable in something I think that people sometimes understate the value of and some people don't are loners because well they think that other people are idiots I I admit being somewhat sympathetic to this point of view but you're these people they may even like the idea of taking part of the raids but they jeez I was in a raid once it took us 45 minutes to actually get everybody in the same place and get started and get going and whatnot you know if these people you know this is a possibly slightly broken player state you want if they want to raid you want to get them

into there and you need to find ways to knock down these social barriers so that they can actually get into the game a lot of these people have been scared off by guild drama a lot of these people have been scared off by incompatible guilds somebody wants described being in a rock band as like being married to four other people being in our rating guild is having it's like being married to 40 other people and it only takes you know finding your way into a bad guild to sort of color your relationship for the whole game right if you find yourself into the leet-speak cool-dude guild your idea of what that game is going to be is going to be entirely different than if you actually stumble into the the guild that likes to quote Shakespeare and yes I have found that guild and it was it was weird

so actually finding you know you know you can never make guild drama go away but one things you can do is do what you can in order to help people find compatible guilds find guilds of people like them find servers of people like them right so back in a ultima online one of the things that they had was they had a guild full of people who like to play elves which pissed off the people who were all roleplay role-playing who believe very firmly the elves did not belong in the Ultima universe but these people who played elves all found themselves and they went off on and played by themselves and that's actually part of the magic the Internet is as easy for like-minded people to find each other right and our games with all of our server divisions often put in arbitrary barriers that make it too hard for you to find the right circle of friends your game is infinitely stickier if you can get them someplace compatible just a

side note about voice chat on the balanced voice chat is good for the social near an MMO but voice chat is also a commitment right when you start talking you reduce your own anonymity to other people so I've noticed when I've played raids the the people who refuse to turn on voice chat are very frequently the people who wash out of the guild because it's just a way that they haven't signed into your game experience yeah that sometimes they're also guys pertaining to be girls and girls who don't want people to know that they're actually girls and stuff like that but sort of the retention inside the guild was much stronger once they actually commit to other people by turning on their microphone and some people just won't play your game by themselves and that's okay I saw a study of a World of Warcraft data somebody had analyzed the armory and found that a huge percentage of players in the armory

had reached level 70 and this was back when level 70 was max but had no raid gear no dungeon gear and and had no PvP gear on we'll just say they went from 1 to 70 playing by themselves and if that's the game that they want to play ok it is important to remember that there's a clear difference between being alone and being lonely I mean I think we all kind of lis know that but one of these is a lot healthier than the other in this book which is good being lonely is actually vaguely not good for you it has been known to call psychological problems it has been known to call physiological problems like high blood pressure on the other hand almost any psychologist can tell you that having some alone time choosing to be alone can be actually very healthy for your mental state of being I found this interesting

this is how the hotel did some research on the kind of people that play their games nineteen percent of them is in a group that they classify as the loner now I don't know if you're familiar with have a hotel but at the time that these metrics were done have a hotel was a purely social game there weren't any game mechanics there weren't any rats to kill there there were you know it wasn't like that right it was a social space and yet even in this space 19% of the population was proving just preferred to stay by themselves and do their own thing so anyway wrapping down one of the things I think that you should all take away is that even if we pause it which i think is important that we do that the in-game stuff the massive stuff inside

of our games is the unique selling proposition and is the stuff that we should polish and and really deliver and really you know that's what we need to compete with each other on and that's what you need to compete against the single players on alone is the default state of the massively multiplayer and this is a you know both on the macro level of the first time they log in there alone and they're alone until they actually find a social circle to run with and even once they do that every day that they log in they are alone until they actually find someone to run their dungeon with until they find somebody to get in the battleground with and the game needs to understand that and recognize and offer them the the single-player gameplay the solo game play that can act as the backbone of their experience even if they want to socialize consider the bar this is probably one of the oldest multiplayer environments in human history bars are now become incredibly sophisticated offering excuses for you to come to their bars and interact with other people speed dating book clubs Super

Bowl watch parties they don't force you to take part in these activities if you want to come and watch trivia happen they're more than happy to take your money and serve you drinks but these environments are richer because of that and they're hoping that you'll come in and actually find people and come back on a weekly basic basis for the trivia they're hoping that you find a social clique that you're going to associate with that bar we build little communities and it's very important that we do that we're trying to create strong social tottentot ties we're trying to find the extroverts and the evangelists that can actually encourage people to come into this game space we want our gameplay to be richer because other people are there but one of the things that we have to acknowledge is massive multiplayer designers is that our magic our secret sauce this stuff the raids this is hardcore stuff this is hardcore gameplay even a basic raid is incredibly hard for players to

grasp and get comfortable with you know this game playing Eve is hardcore gameplay you have to figure out how to get the solo player in a position where they want to take part in this where they feel comfortable at the social circles where they feel like they can be contributors you know this crazy hardcore and man I hope you have a good machine to run most of these games because you know it's it is an entirely different game than what you're gonna learn when you play solo and that's okay you just have to figure out how to walk people to the conclusion that playing these games is okay you know people start any game that they play as casual and this is true of whether or not it's bejeweled or puzzle pirates or or you know World of Warcraft and Star Wars The Old Republic they start casual and uncommitted to your game space and as they do they get more and more deeper into the game they're going to get closer and closer to the hardcore experience as they and and the different activities inside these games are going to be tailored more and more to these different people you notice that in the

massive multiplayer charts that has this progression of what's going on inside the game it becomes more and more about grouping and becomes more and more about coaxing people out of their loner shell and getting them into these higher-level in-game experiences but it's hard right actually getting people from casual to interesting and interested to commit it especially going down to hardcore you know if our core is massively multiplayer game experience you have to overcome a whole bunch of social problems you have to overcome a whole bunch of you know shyness cliquish this distrust fear of commitment you have to overcome all of these issues to get these people to actually go down the ladder and play those games and you know what it may be that you don't want to it may be that they're happy to stay at that casual level that interested level and and not go further down the ladder but at the end of the day being lonely is a problem that you have to solve but

not being alone right being alone can be healthy if people choose to be alone they're not lonely that's okay people of all walks of life value being alone but if you're actually in a massive multiplayer environment the irony of being lonely is inescapable that's all I have for you today thanks for coming out and I'll take any questions you have any questions at all there's a microphone back there I think you were talking about the weak ties problem that made me think of a system in Dark Age of Camelot where you could combine guilds into alliances and a system in Final Fantasy 11 where you could have multiple guilds linked pearls in your inventory

and decide whether you wanted to be in a guild or not in a guild moment-to-moment the guild leader could revoke your link pearl but you could carry very many of them do you think there's a reason we've gotten away from those more complicated multi guild connection systems so the question was was that there have been games have experimented with that sort of thing such as allowing people have multiple guild affiliations or having guild guilds join into alliances and it's a reason why people have gone away from I think that in many cases is because the game designs have kind of gotten away from them because they don't understand what's important about them so shadow Bane had alliances for example and that provided that social safety net if your your guild collapse you would often jump to someone else in your alliances but you know when you have in shadow Bane we didn't design the alliances for that reason and I mean actually right now to remember if they were informal or not and then when they weren't they were codified into the

experience you know we put the alliances in because we didn't have factions the way that for example world Warcraft has factions and as a result of that we need to create sides dynamically on the fly you know similarly marine 59 which I also worked on had guilds and secret societies right and I put it in specifically for this reason but the secret society it was kind of weird and you couldn't really do anything with the secret society because it wasn't a secret anymore and you know more to the point you know one things I've seen talked about is having two guild affiliations that presents a you know really simple GUI issues like okay how do you Syntel to your I can guild right you know how do you know how do you interface with with both guilds and and so I think it's a lot of how do you make it some simple enough that people can actually understand and interface with it without mucking up what is already an incredibly

complicated user interface any more questions we have one more question this may be simple this may be not um EVE Online specifically has a guild or corporation history um do you think something like that is more of a good thing or more of a bad thing I know an EVE Online if you're trying to if you're if you've pissed off your Alliance or whatever and you didn't do it for the benefit of somebody else it can be really hard to move on to somebody else this is a corporation or Alliance because of those prior standings and because those are just written in stone on your character I think it's a very good thing in your classic server based MMO because it really helps to address the problem of sociopaths you know once you realize that you will have a black mark on your record for as long as you

keep this character around people actually start to play nicer really fast the question is always is it impossible for you to hit the reset button I don't know how well it works in EVE to be honest I haven't played it very deeply but you know cautiously I'm in favor of people having a history to deal with the problem of sociopathy Brian so not so much a question but a comment I think one of the issues when we start talking about soloing versus grouping especially reading the blogs yeah that tends to be people that fall into each category one of the big issues about people like to group is you know they feel like that the pendulum is kind of swung toward the so lowers I know personally in one game I play with my girlfriend and annoys me to know and when I go do the signature class and open oh sorry it's it's solo only you have to break your group and I think you know that's that's one thing that a lot of people who like to group find annoying where you know with our games kind of really so so much cater to the solo that

becomes well the default assumption is obviously people are going to solo so especially when we want it's a tall story we're gonna do the the the feature quests that you have to go through solo and especially if you've built a character where I'm gonna really you know especially I play my girlfriend I'm always gonna be playing with her so I build a character so that we can build our strengths and weaknesses together and all of a sudden we have to separate now we feel like you know incomplete and it gets really frustrating yeah so the answer I would give to that is that splitting groups is almost always bad you know you don't want to force people to play solo because even if you ascribe to the fact that people should be able to solo most of the time there was such social pressure regarding getting a group together getting the group on the same step of the quest getting the group you know started at the same time on the same step of the instance and and you know everyone having the quest before they get in the door you know doing any group contents really hard so anytime you make them break off from each other

you risk them getting their experiences out of sync again and you increase the chance that they won't form back together again do I think that it's bad to have solo only content no I think that having solo only contents okay I just think you have to be wary of if you put it on the critical path that a group might run into and therefore be forced to splinter some designs they might be unavoidable they might have anything another question so how do you feel the random dungeon finder which basically lets you come together as a loner with potentially other loners that break apart do you think it helps that or do you think it just makes it more okay to be a loner in the game I think that it creates some very odd behavior I think that has I think as many good points I think one of the problems that I have with the the dungeon finder is that it

creates a very odd sense of lack of empathy for the other people in your group because you know that you'll never see them again you know before you have cross-server stuff you you knew if you pissed off the tank if you needed another pug tank that you know there weren't enough pug tanks go around and so you really don't want to piss this guy off but now people feel like they can be jerks to their tanks with impunity I also think that it also makes the strong tie weak tie problem worse because again a lot of times if your guild would fall apart you would say hey I did some dungeons with this guy he was fairly confident maybe his guild doesn't suck and now you don't have that sort of social network that's sort of the background that being said playing from the as the experience of the loner who likes to run pugs and because I played dealers mostly and am therefore high-valued man it's a lot easier to get groups and so if you can put up with

that psych psychology it might be the right decision for you game anything else I'd like to thank you for coming to this talk and thanks for coming to GDC and I guess we'll see everybody next year Oh everybody should have a white piece of paper if you could just pick them up and circle the word excellent and give them to the person by the door thank you very much [Applause]