Elder Game: World vs. Game, Emergent Gameplay, and the Fun Loop

This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on June 24, 2011.

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[This is part of a discussion of my indie MMO, codenamed "Gorgon" for no particular reason. This week is about some of the earliest questions you have to ask before you begin your MMO.]

Realistic or Gamey?

One of the first MMO design decisions is figuring out where your game falls in the “game” versus “world” spectrum. The idea here is that every MMO is a simulation of real life to some extent. However, it’s supposed to be a lot more fun than real life. So you have to make changes to the world that aren’t realistic.

If combat were realistic, a single sword-hit would maim or kill any human being. If travel were realistic, you would need to spend 80% of your time traveling between interesting spots. If commerce were realistic, … well you get the idea. Too much realism sucks. Every game has to find a point along this continuum.

For any given game, you make this choice based on who you imagine playing the game. And most MMO designers right now will tell you that the “casual audience” (by which they mean “nearly everybody in the whole world mwahahaha we’re gonna be so rich”) prefers an extremely directed game that drops realism by the wayside in order to focus on fun.

I generally agree with this sentiment: highly-directed games are more accessible, meaning they have more players. But my game isn’t designed for “everybody in the world” or even “everybody on Facebook” or even “everybody who loves Farmville” or even the rather pathetic demographic of “everybody who likes World of Warcraft”.

No, I’m making an indie MMO, and for once I don’t have to peg the world/game meter on “100% game”. I want my game to appeal to a niche of players who are willing to play those “100% game” games, maybe, but would prefer something a little further down the spectrum.

This doesn’t mean financial suicide, though, because there’s actually a ton of these people. And I don’t even need to find a ton of them in order for my indie game to be financially successful.

(Unfortunately, too many people think “more realism” means “more like EverQuest”, which is hilarious on so many levels that it makes me want to cry. So to be clear, I do not mean “realism” in the sense of forced grouping, not having a compass on screen, or camping monsters for hours or days on end. Stay with me here!)

The Tyranny of the Fun Loop

Normally, if I was contracted to do an MMO design, I would almost entirely ignore the “world” and focus on “making the most fun game possible.” A common successful approach to making a fun game is to divide and conquer: first you make the game fun in tiny 30-to-60 second chunks. When you’re confident that the lowest-level thing you do in your game is fun to do over and over and over, then you step back and make a fifteen-minute “fun loop” (or some similar time window). Thus in WoW, killing a monster might take 30 seconds, but completing a quest takes 15 minutes. These are loops: you are rewarded for completing them and are then pushed toward doing the loop again.

This is a very effective way to make a highly directed game. I’ve used it before with success, and I will no doubt use it again in the future. I’m not knocking this method. But it’s not a good approach if you want the game to have more “world” in it.

Consider the difference between WoW and Fallout 3: in the former, you always have numerous quests and have exceptionally clear directions on how to achieve said goals. In Fallout, you get quests, but they are often of the “big picture” variety, and you’re left on your own to figure out how to do them, or even if you want to do them at all.

I remember spending 30 minutes once I left the tutorial area of Fallout 3, doing basically nothing. I was picking over the post-apocalyptic remains, occasionally hitting a giant bug with a stick, and slowly getting my bearings. It was kind of boring at the minute-to-minute level. But it was lots of fun in the bigger picture.

Flash forward to a few hundred hours spent in Fallout 3, and I can confidently say that Fallout 3 doesn’t give a damn whether I have fun every 30 seconds or not. Sometimes I have fun for a straight hour, and sometimes I wander around being vaguely bored for an hour. It’s an inconsistent game.

(However, Fallout 3 does have a few long-term loops. Almost all games do! For instance, the inventory system causes you to return to town every hour or so of play, which causes you to shop, which causes you to spend money, which causes you to need more money, which causes you to go out and explore some more… a classic behavior loop.)

I’m not saying Fallout 3 was made carelessly, because it definitely had a ton of care put into the world. It just uses a different reward schedule than other games. It’s not chunked up or signposted nearly as orthogonally as Diablo or WoW.

This is one of the reasons that Fallout 3 feels more like a “real world” than WoW does. Without those directed loops to constantly guide you, you have to think about the world more and figure out what to do, and the more you think about the world, the more immersive it can be. However, lots of people find this lack of direction to be frustrating or boring. Fallout is certainly not for everybody.

But let’s do a quick reality check here: Fallout 3 sold 4.7 million copies. Even if that’s not “as big as WoW”, it’s incredibly big. Clearly there is room in the marketplace for games that don’t tell you what you should be doing every single moment of the game.

One of the neat things about a game that doesn’t try too hard to tell you what to do is that players find their own things to do. In fact this is often the most fun part of the game, and if it’s something the designer didn’t specifically think about when making the game, we call it “emergent gameplay” because we like fancy terminology.

Emergent Gameplay Comes From The Interaction of Game Systems

Many designers who hear “emergent gameplay” think it means “adaptive enemy AI”. That’s because FPS games use AI as the primary way to get unpredictable scenarios. But that’s just a common example. Actually, you get emergent gameplay whenever you have a complex set of interacting systems. Any systems.

I’ll give you an example from Asheron’s Call 1. There was a dungeon in the middle of nowhere that was full of mosswarts (your typical frog-like baddies). I don’t recall it being a very important dungeon, except for one thing: a few of the monsters dropped special loot. They would randomly drop either an “acid axe” or an “ice tachi”. These weapons were magical, but not particularly good. (Not even good to look at! The ice tachi’s “ice particles” were simple white triangles, so when you ran around with it, it looked like you were dropping tons of White Cheddar Doritos on the ground everywhere you went.)

But you could get lots of these weapons, and they were worth a lot of money! If you were a certain kind of gimpy character, at a certain level range, then this was the best money you could get.

So there I was, having filled my inventory with Dorito Swords and Green Jelly Axes, and wondering what to do next. I didn’t have the ability to teleport. I could barely move because I was so encumbered (each weapon weighed a ton, and the system penalized you for carrying too much weight). And I was scared to travel in this condition, because if I had to fight anything tougher than a mosswart on the way, I would probably be killed from the encumbrance penalties to my combat skills.

Fortunately, there was a small town relatively nearby, and the NPCs would gladly buy these weapons. However, money in Asheron’s Call had weight. That meant I couldn’t just convert all this stuff into money and be done: the weapons were literally worth more than their weight in gold, so selling them would make me even more weighted down, to the point that I wouldn’t be able to move at all.

The answer: I had to convert the money into bank notes, at a 10% fee. (Yes, those bastard designers implemented bank notes in their MMO.) But here’s the dilemma: the nearby town only sold tiny 100-coin banknotes.

Each of these weapons was worth thousands of coins. That would require a lot of 100-coin bank notes! And each bank note took up an inventory slot, so I couldn’t just buy a million notes. I had inventory slots for a few dozen, but not the hundreds I’d need.

So there I was with a complex dilemma: did I try to limp to the nearby town and exchange some of this stuff for crappy bank notes, or just go straight to a better city, which was more dangerous? Or should I drop a bunch of these weapons behind a tree somewhere and hope that I can get back to them before they disappeared? There were lots of other perfectly legitimate answers, too.

This was emergent gameplay. And it was fun! (That’s the thing about emergent gameplay: it doesn’t always sound like fun when you describe it.) This gameplay came about because the game implemented many extraneous systems: encumbrance penalties, item-count restrictions, bank notes, the ability to drop items on the ground without them instantly being destroyed, and so on. These various systems are why I had a dilemma.

“Fun Loops” Don’t Need Extra Game Systems, but Emergent Gameplay Does

If the designers were focusing on making the game fun in 15-minute loops, it would be a stretch for a designer to think “You know what this fifteen minute experience needs? It needs for money to have weight, so that if you pick up too much money you move slower.” Somebody would slap that designer.

When you’re making gameplay loops, it can be hard to take the time to make those extra systems. By themselves, they seem somewhat extraneous, until you’ve created enough of them to start to see interactions.

And even if you do make time for these systems, you’re kind of going against your goal! The reason you’re making loops is to ensure a consistently fun experience, and emergent gameplay isn’t reliably fun. Sometimes the gameplay that emerges is dumb and boring. If you’re making a game for a target audience that will wander away if they’re bored for 30 seconds, this is unacceptable.

Relying on emergent behavior means being willing to have bored players sometimes. But for the right demographic, the payoffs are quite pleasurable.

I’m not trying to recreate any particular experience in my MMO. I don’t think my MMO has any “weight” system at all, let alone “encumbrance penalties”. I think I can create systems that are a little more fun than that, maybe. But the point is that the game will have dozens of these simple systems in it, chosen for having a lot of interesting interaction points, which causes emergent gameplay to happen.

Emergent Gameplay and Realism

I’ve conflated some different things here. I talked about “realism” earlier, but you don’t need realistic systems in order to get emergent gameplay. Any systems that interact with each other can cause emergent behavior.

But for whatever reason, a game that models a bunch of real-world concepts will automatically seem more “realistic” to players, even if the concepts are modeled extremely unrealistically. (In Asheron’s Call 1, even with the “realistic” encumbrance system, I could carry more than fifty axes. How realistic is that?!) In other words, it’s purely an illusion, but it works in our favor!

So when creating systems, it makes sense to use (and dramatically distort) real-world concepts like eating, sleeping, or banking rather than inventing systems that have no real-world analogue. You don’t have to go overboard and base every game system around the real world, though. A little bit goes a long way.

Emergent Gameplay = Fun Anecdotes

My favorite experiences in any PC roleplaying game come from emergent gameplay. Usually I don’t even remember the plots of those games, but I remember tons of anecdotes about being able to do some crazy thing by taking advantage of this other thing, and then this unpredictable thing happened, and it was so great. That’s the best-case scenario of emergent gameplay: a memorable anecdote where things came together and the player kicked ass by exploiting interacting systems.

Those anecdotes are very memorable because they happen on a random reward schedule rather than the minute-to-minute schedule of a loop-heavy game. Plus, they’re often entertaining enough to retell to others, which makes them all the more valuable to us. In a single-player game, those memories make it easier to sell sequels and add-ons. (The reason I was excited about Fallout 3 was because of my happy anecdotes from Fallout 1 and 2.) For MMOs, it means those memories can help improve your game’s rebound cycle.

Like I said before though, this design is not a mainstream choice. The game I’m making is much less directed than WoW, and WoW is like Realism City compared to most Facebook pseudo-MMOs. If you’re aiming for millions of players, the smart money’s on a directed game with tight controllable experience loops.

And just to be clear: I like those games. I enjoy playing WoW and even Facebook games. But that isn’t what I’m doing this time, because:

1. I don’t think I can beat a major company at that design: they’ve been honing it to an art form.

2. Facebook-style games are what I typically work on while contracting, so I’m kind of tired of making them. For an indie MMO, I need to stay self-motivated by making a game I’m excited about playing myself. And I do miss the systems-heavy MMOs of yore.

3. Hopefully a few thousand people per month will like the game enough to pay for it, and it will be a successful indie MMO. Perhaps a hundred thousand people will pay for my game each month and I will be rich beyond my wildest dreams. (I can’t even conceive of a scenario where a million or more people play my game.)

To be fair, there’s a very good chance the game will be a complete flop. But as an indie, I can afford to take that risk. And I can’t afford to play it safe.