If you remember that the next best thing to playing a compelling and challenging game of drama and inventiveness is creating a game with yourself and your closest thousand friends with drama and inventiveness, you may have caught the spirit that is the Web. You also thereby are a great candidate for games on the Web. And games, which are designed only with the Web and a peculiar set of behaviors in mind, all seem to follow the same designs. Here are some example features:
1. Turn Based – wait for a player, wait for a content server or more likely, a Microsoft SQL server to go before committing play.2. Synchronous Advancement – everybody is rewarded at the same time.3. Linear Power Curves – everybody has an unlimited advancement theoretically available based on time in the game.4. Unlimited Resources – no constraint on the availability of play or the issuing of resources to advance.
Now, I’m not generalizing that all games on the Web are like this. Instead, I’m generalizing that only the most appalling ones are like this. Fun games like DiceWars or DinerDash or BookWorm etc. all have constraints. They lead to a finish. That’s not necessarily because they may be board games or card games ported to the Web. I think this is as applicable for more traditional narrative games as well. But when is there no apparent win condition, when you graft on the openness of an MMORPG and lack of a governing narrative or a similar mechanic to carry and limit play then you have trouble. The innocuous designs mentioned above can lead to the following results, in order.
1. Unresponsive or Inflated Play – players on the Web can either suffer from poor availability and time-out’s, and can’t commit a play when they wish, or they exploit the game logic being controlled on a web server by cron jobs bombing the host or worse kinds of intrusion. Turn based play works best when time is controlled by the action of a competing player. When there is no other player to wait on, when you are competing against an unknown number of other players, then you have to have good technical governance to guarantee your players equity of turn play. You have to actually ensure that when someone wants to “move”, they can, and move only as many times as the rules permit.
2. Anonymous or Mass Play – when there is no known competitor, when the game is open mass play, the sheer anonymity of drive-by interactions I don’t think endears a player to a game. Anonymity doesn’t allow for player reputation creation, doesn’t allow for meaningful interaction. If the only way to meet people is to challenge them and then drive-on, I think necessarily this creates a more hostile culture than when a challenge has to be voluntarily accepted or at least, recognized after the fact. But this is a product of rewarding everyone always at the same time. When you adopt an open, mass kind of play, the only way you can manage advancement and keep people in the game is to issue progress at the same time for all players. That gives the poorer players something to live on. Weak players advance or receive rewards at the same time as strong players, no matter what happens. So, from the start all players are the same and in one way are supposed to remain the same. The problem is, however, there’s no way or incentive for people in their play to distinguish themselves than to hurry up and get on with it. Advancement will come regardless of what they do. Strong players will be rewarded at the same time as weaker players, and unless there is a throttle against bottomfeeding, weaker players are farmed on schedule. There’s no staggering of play in mass play. There’s no cost for success. And because of that interactions are quicker and poorer as people sprint to survive making a more shallow game culture.
3. Godmode – Likewise, if you adopt the open concept of an MMORPG for your web game and don’t have a level or resource cap, if your power curves are not limited, because you want to retain players on your site for advertising $, you don’t allow for a win condition. No one can win, because the game never ends. But thereby a huge imbalance is created. Veteran players will have advanced far beyond anything new players can achieve, necessarily, since the advancement always occurs on schedule. Players who have been in the game longer will be fewer in number and far more powerful and will never be unseated. In fact, the only constraint that’s assumed by the designers on the power curve for veteran players is popularity. The provider assumes that popularity or just exposure will be a sufficient asymptote for veteran players’ advancement, because less powerful players will organize against them. But that’s naïve because it assumes that collusion or organization doesn’t occur at the highest levels. So realistically there’s incommensurability between differing sets of players depending on when they joined the game. This last state of affairs is the central problem for Eve Online. And like in #2 above, it reinforces a particularly hostile game culture.
4. Inflation, Real and Virtual — And finally, if you design a game that is turn based, synchronous, with time based power curves you necessarily have to supply endless resources. Since there’s no end state for anyone, resources have to be infinite. Well, if there’s an economy in this game, then there’s inflation and the other usual problems that occur. But for me the other issue is that infinite resources assume an infinite supply of time on the side of the player. When there is no constraint on “moving” in your game, on committing play, and when there is no throttle on advancement, and when there are no costs at all, then the only real constraint is on the abilities and circumstances of the [...]
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