Design Blog

Thursday, November 26, 2009

The Intention of Design

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. It's been a while since my last post, my new job is pretty busy, and pretty awesome. Here's something I've been writing up in the meantime:

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This is a topic that came up when a friend told me the story of a City of Heroes character named "Twixt" and another story about an Everquest character known as "Fansy the Famous Bard". This eventually led me to another article about how David and Goliath works in real life.

The gist of these two stories was that the player's of these characters became the most hated people on their servers... and they did it all by playing by the rules that the designers developed. It brings up some interesting questions about the goals of designers versus the goals of the players, and how even when the two goals sometimes match up, things still don't go quite right.

For reference, here are the articles

Twixt (City of Heroes)

Fansy the Famous Bard (Everquest)

How David Beats Goliath

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Now that you've read them (you did read them right?) let's break each part down.

Twixt, the Outcast
The Twixt case involves a player (specifically a university professor) who noticed that players in a certain server of City of Heroes/Villains did not tend to PvP in the designated PvP zones. Instead the players preferred to chat with the people the game designers intended to be their enemies while fighting NPCs that happened to be in the zone as well. The professor in this case decided to go against social convention and play by the designer's rules.

He PvPed villains. And he did it really well. So well in fact that for breaking this particular social agreement between the players, that he ended up being ostracized by both camps. The whole time, by following the game rules.

Now it should be obvious that this would happen. If someone breaks a social convention that is established and followed by many people he will likely draw a lot of their ire. What makes the case of Twixt so interesting was that what he was doing was EXACTLY what the designers wanted him to do. As a result, despite many other players complaining about him, the developers never acted against him. In fact, the player behind Twixt reported several people for threatening him, and as far as he knows, they have stopped since then.

The professor in this case was studying human behavior, and certainly deviation from social convention gave him a lot to work with, however, I'm more interested in how the game design factored into all this.

While my experiences in City of Heroes are somewhat limited parts of the article and the professor's paper seem to imply that the PvP zone was simply more lucrative for players to engage in NPC combat rather than combat with other players. This is a design issue, and this is the truly important takeaway from the article in my opinion. When players do not play the game as the designer intended, and more so, actively ostracize those who do find the best way to play with your rules as in the case of Twixt, then there is a problem with the design and it needs to change. There are many ways that this could have been accomplished, but there are two overall goals that a designer can follow in this kind of situation.

They can either change rules to force the players into the correct behavior, or they can change the rules to make the players' behavior the correct one.

Now, I'm not going to say one or the other is more correct, since I think this depends on the situation. And really, in any game, players will ultimately discover more than a designer or a tester will find during the games production. What matters though is how the game and the designer react to them. Now in the case of City of Heroes, I would say that changing the rules to encourage the correct behavior would have been the best choice. The game already has many zones where players can kill NPCs and if players were continuing to do so in PvP zones, then the first thing to look at is how the rewards are assigned. The players in this case could clearly tell that it was better to attack the NPCs, so it's up to the designer to make it better for them to attack other players to preserve the intent of the zone.

Fansy, the Rebel
The case of Fansy is a similar case of following the rules of design, however this case ended differently from that of Twixt. Like Twixt, Fansy existed on a server where certain social conventions had occurred. The server that Fansy was on had a specific rule set which seems to have precluded the players to choosing the "evil" faction in this game. (The website refers to it as "no play nice rules" and that it would probably have "many unfair battles".) With only 11% of the server being on the "good" side, much of the server was taken up by these "evil" characters. Fansy was one of the exceptions, and made it his quest to defeat the bad guys.

However, because he was excessively outnumbered in this case, he took advantage of certain server rules which made him invulnerable to certain enemy skills while he low level (presumably to prevent newer players from being killed off too early). With this invulnerability to direct attacks from the other faction, and not having enough power to defeat them in a direct confrontation, he used a "monster training" strategy, to lure high level monsters into his enemies where they (and occasionally he) were killed.

What's interesting is that, while this type of behavior is not very sporting, and probably not necessarily how the designers intended the game, this was still a valid tactic, and apparently there was even a GM who told him that this tactic was perfectly legal. Even one person who was personally against him, still had to admit that the server he was on had "no rules". Another person compared Fansy's actions to other legal game techniques that are frustrating to other players, such as going into the enemy zones at low levels and preemptively defeating monsters that they use to level in order to deny them that resource.

Fansy's adventure terminated differently from that of Twixt however, as the designers changed the rule that kept Fansy invulnerable to higher level players. They removed this ability across the board for zones deemed "mid-level" and above. This was a case of the designers changing the rules of the game to fix the problem. While this does seems like a somewhat heavy-handed solution, I won't say that it was the wrong one, especially given my low familiarity with Everquest.

What's important about this story is that unlike the Twixt story, Fansy was doing something that was NOT intended by the designers (but still playing by the designer's rules). This seems to be the important distinction on why no action was ever taken against Twixt. For the designer, it's very important to remember that your intent with the game rules is not something that the player necessarily has to follow, even if he plays by your rules.

Bringing it Together, David and Goliath
The final article talks a lot about how underdogs can overcome those in power. One of the big points it makes is that David should not follow the established conventions if he hopes to beat Goliath. Goliath in these situations is much more powerful when operating under these conventions and David will most certainly lose if he follows them. This article brings up two actual games, basketball and a naval game, and shows how David can win by going against Goliath's preconceived ideas about how the game should be played. In the case of the basketball game the coach instructed his less skilled players to play full-court press the entire game, which the other teams were not used to, but is perfectly legal to do. For the naval game the winning player used strategies that no real fleet commander would ever use in a real war but within the scope of the game they were the most efficient.

Both of these players met with similar fates to Twixt and Fansy as well. The basketball team was forced to change their playstyle when a referee who didn't like their playstyle started calling four times as many fouls against them. The naval game player was asked by the organizers of the tournament not to enter again because his strategies were "not really in the spirit of the tournament". For these situations, those in power worked to coerce the players into playing their way or not playing at all. This is a somewhat more extreme example of enforcing the intent of design than the previous two examples since it involves going after the players themselves instead of the designer changing the rules. However because these examples were not video games, its possible that this approach was less feasible in the context of the problems (though I'm not entirely convinced of this).

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So that was three different articles, all tied together by the same thing. INTENT of design versus design RULES. These examples all show that developing robust game rules can go a long way to preventing behavior which deviates from the intent of the designer. It also puts a great burden of responsibility on the designer as it should be clear from these examples that players will always try and seek out the best way to use the designer's rules to their advantage, regardless of if this type of gameplay goes against the designer's original intent.

There's a second facet of this too, and that is for situations where you discover that your rules do not accurately convey your intent and have the chance to change them. I think that when these situations come up, it's better for the designer to try and develop better rules that accurately convey his intent rather than simply trying to develop rules to stop the player. And that even developing hard rules to stopping players is better than making players who go against your intent feel unwelcome in the game as in the case of the player in the naval game.

A game is nothing without its players, even if they don't want to follow your rules, the fact that they are playing in the first place is an indication that they find the design fun. Design needs to work with players in order to convey the intent of the designer, but it should do that through the rules, rather than through mandates to the players.

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That was a long one this time. There are a lot of games I need to play this holiday season and a lot more I want to talk about. Although I may be busy with my awesome job as well, I hope to find more time to talk about these issues.

Labels: design intent, design philosophy, game mechanics, PvP

posted by Saikyo at 11:05 PM