MMO Teamwork Solutions

A brief interlude to discuss a gaming dilemma and outline some possible solutions.

The Situation:

An MMO guild partaking in endgame raiding has a bad week. Formerly defeated bosses wipe the raid despite almost all the same participants receiving the same instruction. Leadership percieves a lack of discipline and general paying attention-ness. Experienced raiders in particular are guilty of this and appear to be coasting, while inexperienced raiders are generally just lacking in knowledge. Raid Leaders report several instances of players who should know better making lazy mistakes and ignoring instruction.

Analysis:

It's frustrating for sure. The previous tier of content was downright easy and the guild blew through it. The 10-person version of this same content is much easier as well. So on the occassions when the guild confronts this top-tier 25-person content, they are slacking because everything before was easy. Particularly frustating is not the failings of newer or inexperienced players, but the disregard by the most experienced players of the mechanics of the fight and the instructions of the raid leader.

Solution:

I like to implement systems to create solutions. So the first thing I thought of when I heard this was that some additional structure was needed to shape things up. Like in any endeavor, skilled and experienced people 'coasting' indicates that they aren't being challenged. Even though the team as a whole is failing, the highly skilled individuals are not percieving that as personal failure. This is in part because they are over-exposing themselves to successful 10-person raiding, and while there is some control that Raid Leaders have over that, trying to starve them of raiding success in the 10-person version probably won't solve their engagement issues in the moment.

Instead, targeting the unchallenged players with additional responsibilities in the moment should drive them to focus instead of coasting. My suggestion is that Raid Leaders do the following:

On fights with specific mechanics that all players have to understand, charge a problem experienced player with explaining the mechanic to the raid.

In general, make problem experienced players responsible for mentoring less-experienced players. A great situation is when you have one or two new players filling a similar role to a more experienced problem player, tell the experienced player that you won't be slowing down to explain things and that they are responsible for making sure the less experienced player knows everything they need to know to succeed.

These practices are generally useful in situations where a single player is not living up to their potential. Apathy is one of the worst enemies of any group endeavor and yelling and chastising will not necessarily create the desired motivation, as especially in the digital world it is very easy for someone to just close a chat window or click over to another program to avoid a virtual berating. Especially in a gaming situation where negative consequences are very difficult to enforce (no one's job is on the line for instance) being the boss means having to use even more carefully considered methods of enforcing discipline and motivating.

There is a lot of distance between the feudal notion of "Do what I say or die" and the gaming notion of "Do what I say because...it's fun". Although the recent downturn has probably instilled a little fear into the young worker about job security, there is still a very strong sense of "If I don't like it, I'll just go somewhere else" in us. Increasingly rare is the idea that as workers we should have to pay our dues and put up with whatever our bosses throw at us because our survival and success depends on it. In one sense that can be seen as apathy or entitlement. But it's also social evolution - the greater social and economic freedom that we've won as a society is changing the basic rights we demand in any social or economic contract.

Older folks might look at that situation and forsee the end of society as everyone becomes to apathetic to work, or the failure of the machine because nobody wants to be a cog. But for the first time we have a very interesting playground (in the form of online social gaming) to experiment with these sorts of social situations and learn what works and what doesn't. I think a generation of managers raised on these sorts of gaming situations may come at real-world management problems from a different angle that is better suited to the changes that previous generations can only lament.

When is a game not a game?

In the past few days I have been playing a few of what you might call "indie" games. Lot of Dwarf Fortress (which deserves its own post frankly) and also Polaris, a Half-Life 2 mod that is partly a game but mostly a story - anyway I won't spoil it just check it out.

What the designer of Polaris is working to achieve is very interesting, and if you read up on it you'll see references to other 'games' that are more works of interactive fiction than straight-up gaming experiences. And that is what interests me most - that point at which what we generally classify as a "game" (because we play it on a computer or gaming system and it uses many of the mechanics of a game) but that really isn't a game at all.

In Polaris there are 3 different endings possible based on what you do, but none of them are really wins necessarily. How you react to the stargazing date that forms the plot of the scene determines the outcome, but what you walk away with after playing it is more a sense that you experienced a compelling story than that you 'beat a game'.

How often have I heard someone say "Oh yeah, I beat that" when discussing a game? But this brand of game we're talking about here isn't about beating it - it's about experiencing it, and in that sense they are much closer to a short story or novel, or television show or film than to a game.

A looong time ago I played this game that I wish for the life of me I could remember the name of. It basically had you in the shoes of a soldier in a future sci-fi world where you were supposedly part of a interplanetary or interdimensional research and resource mining team that was operating in a hostile environment. Most of the game you were walking around inside this underground bunker and never saw the outside. When the soldiers went outside they wore virtual reality helmets that depicted what they were seeing as atari-like graphics - so they never really saw the outside. The environment was supposed to be toxic and would result in painful death if the suit was breached so they were equipped with euthenasia systems in case of a breach. Meaning none of the soldiers who saw the outside lived to tell about it. The gameplay basically consisted of walking around and watching scenes play out as you talk to other characters, and you start to get the idea that something fishy is going on. The only actual game to speak of was a final scene in which you are sent out to fight off an assault by the strange bug-creatures that are the 'hostiles'. I believe there was no way to win that battle though, because you are quickly overwhelmed and mortally wounded. Your character hears the euthenasia system activating and in his last moments removes his helmet to see his enemy for the first time. Instead of a bug-like alien creature it is a tall beautiful woman with angel-like wings and a flaming sword. At the time I thought that it was the dumbest game ever. In retrospect I'm kind of amazed that so much of the story stuck with me. Now I'm wondering: was it inter-dimensional or interplanetary? Was the idea that the military were invading heaven? Or just another planet with winged women? Weird.

But those sorts of games have got me thinking about the next evolution in fiction. Consider the leap between stage plays and film. One can write a story for each medium, but when you write for film you have to consider the camera and more importantly the use of editing to manipulate time. A play can have successive scenes that take place at different points in time, but that's rare and unwieldy. A film does that all the time. What would Shakespeare have made of Pulp Fiction?

I think that the next leap in storytelling is going to be to Pulp Fiction what Pulp Fiction was to Shakespeare. Polaris hints at it - to fully experience it you play it three times and get three different stories, based on what you choose to do. Writers of the next generation of stories will be writing with interactivity and the choices of the audience in mind.

Bioware's writing system is along these lines: they want choices for their players and their writers create dialogue with choices in mind. Although in the end the stories of games still play out no matter which choices you make, the interactivity draws the player in in a way that isn't possible with passive entertainment.

There have already been some incredible stories told through games. I'll never forget my experience of playing Planescape: Torment. But currently those experiences are catalogued under the heading "games" and so don't really enter the mainstream.

Imagine however, a time when there is a Law and Order of interactive fiction. One that everyone knows and plays weekly, and talks about around the water cooler. An experience that isn't passive, where you participate in the solving of a crime and the telling of a dramatic story each week as a shared experience. Imagine when each summer studios release their slate of scenarios for the public with the star power of Hollywood and the appeal of blockbusters but they aren't movies - they're 'games'. And people like them not because they are gamers, but because they allow them to experience a story more fully than simply watching it unfold on a screen.

There are a lot of possibilities once you go down that route. And I find it very interesting that the games that really point the way on this are not the big hits of today - not Mario or Call of Duty but strange little games like Polaris and forgotten pieces from 15 years ago.