i worked for over a year as sr. game developer on a massively multiplayer online casual game for kids and tweens called GalaXseeds. i learned a great deal, and am happy to share these tips about MMOG development.

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When you own and operate a Massively Mutliplayer Online Game you are, in very many ways, a day care worker. You’re trying to keep a group of players happy all day long. These players are all at different stages of development. Some learn faster than others. Some are well-behaved, while some draw on the walls and throw wood blocks at the other players.

The content you develop for your MMO costs you money. If your game is free to play with an enhanced subscription or micro-payment model, you need to structure your game to get the most mileage possible from your content. Your game’s structure determines how quickly players will use up your content. If your game is level-based, prepare to have a lot of cranky toddlers on your hands.

Many of the most popular MMOs today follow the levelling systems introduced by pen-and-paper role-playing games from the 1970s:

1. Your character has a statistical list of abilities
2. When you take actions, your score improves incrementally
3. Once your score hits a certain threshold, your character “levels up”
4. Levelling up improves your character’s stats
5. The score required to reach the next level gets larger
6. The more your character’s stats increase, the more of the game world you can experience

i have a few problems with this time-worn system. For starters, it’s time-worn. Just like any well-established genre, RPGs have sunk into distinct ruts. Levelling systems are a rut. Elemental (ice, fire, water, earth, lightining) magic systems are pretty tired too. A number of articles i’ve been reading lately wonder why so many MMOs and RPGs take place in traditional Tolkien-inspired fantasy worlds with orcs, trolls, ogres and elves. The same question was raised at the 2007 Game Developers’ Conference.

The obvious answer is that established products sell better than untried ones. Sequels and spin-offs thrive not only in the game industry, but also in teevee land and filmywood. It often takes a young, upstart company to prove a new concept for a huge publishing giant to sweep in, buy that company (or steal the idea) and make good on it!

I Have a -5 Bonus to Tolerance

The second trouble with levelling systems is that they are dumb. If my character’s stats are Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity, and i kill the same rat species 500 times, i will eventually level up. Why did my Strength stat increase? Probably because my character got so much exercise thwacking away with his sword. Why did my Dexterity stat increase? This one’s a bit of a stretch. Maybe my character became a better sword handler during all that hacking and slashing? Maybe he learned how to do some cool sword twirls while he mundanely murdered a mob of matching monsters?

Fine. But why on Earth did my character’s intelligence stat increase when he levelled up? Was he reading an encyclopedia while he was fighting? Was he listening to some sort of Books on Tape series that i wasn’t aware of? The total abstraction of abilities to numbers forces artificiality on the game experience, an experience that could be much more enriching.

Skills vs. Levels

Games like Oblivion are more skill-based than level-based, and i prefer them. Oblivion still has levels and thresholds, but players improve their skills by actually performing those skills. To improve your acrobatics skill, jump. To improve your stamina, run. To improve your intelligence, read a book. To improve your magic casting skill, cast magic. It’s a very logical approach to character growth, and it’s much more rewarding than abstracted box scores that turn gaming into an undergrad statistics course.

The danger of levelling is that your players are encouraged to eat through your content as fast as possible. There’s a definite competition between your players to see who can reach your level cap first. And when players do reach the level cap, they complain on your boards that there’s nothing to do! Massively is hosting an interesting discussion about the pleasures and pains of levelling up quickly in an MMO.

RPGs Play You

The comfort of RPGs is that they require very little skill of the human player. i don’t have to be physically strong in order to complete a RPG. If my character dies, i can jump back into the game and monotonously beat up weak creatures until the game decides i’m strong enough to tackle larger creatures. i don’t have to be genuinely charismatic to sway the opinions of in-game characters. i improve that number stat, and suddenly the game gives me extra conversation options to woo the different people i meet. i know that i won’t be able to complete a twitch-based game that requires fast reflexes, but i can always rely on RPGs to let me methodically chip away at the game content, plodding through randomly-regenerated monsters until i finish the game … not by my own skill, but by dull brute force.

Some MMOs shake this format up a little. In Puzzle Pirates, encounters really are twitch-based. The player who can zip through a game of Puzzle Fighter (aka “swordfighting”) the fastest wins the encounter.

But at the risk of sounding like John Lennon: imagine an MMO without levels. Imagine a game where only the smartest players solved the game’s puzzles and riddles. Only the fastest players could compete in twitch-based challenges. Only the most creative players earned praise and attention for their in-game designs. Only the most methodical players could keep track of complex game stats. Imagine an MMO that played to the strengths of the human beings backing each digital avatar, so that players really had to band together and use each other’s actual skills to succeed in the game. Then success would not be based on who could repeatedly click on the same monster for hours on end.

i don’t know what that MMOG looks like. But i’m working on it.

Update: One day after this post, an author at Massively wrote this pithy observation:

Killing a boss on launch day may mean you’re one of only a handful of people to do it - ever. The chance to actually be heroic, in a genre that more often than not defines heroism as ‘investing time’, is exciting.

The rest of the artice, titled “MMOG - missing a sense of mystery” is worth a read.

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