Posts tagged Game Design

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”

Daniel Burnham

As many of our readers know, Double Cluepon is based here in Chicago, home to the late Daniel Burnham. We tend to take the spirit of the above quote quite seriously. What’s the point of doing the insignificant or the mundane?

Yet, for all our technological advances, for all the wonder and “what if?” that brought us here there is but one thing in the game industry that is really truly unsettling. The people who find reasons, fair or foul to say “can’t” instead of “can”. We have personally encountered this behavior from the very people who we think should know better. We have encountered teachers and professors who cast a disdainful eye at us when looking at StoryTeller, because we feel that an artist, or a writer should not be *required* to always seek out a programmer to create. We have encountered so called peers who look at us with skepticism and outright scorn when we enthusiastically talk about some of the things we are attempting, and would like to attempt.

There are naysayers in any business. But nowhere can they be so heartbreaking and frustrating as in the game industry. What shocks us more is that these people show a scornful eye at anyone who is enthusiastic about this business’ stock in trade: the ability to imagine a “what if?”. They disdain the very core element of the trait without which they wouldn’t even be here.

Recently, a fellow over on gamedev.net posted this rather silly and contrived article. One of the folks we follow, Over00 made a post on his blog commenting about it. But, I wanted to really address it a bit more point by point. Because this kind of behavior among developers needs to stop. It’s truly bad for business. Game developers, and especially the ones who have a title or two under their belt and thus represent a kind of ambassador for this industry need to shape up or shut up. They need to learn to stop saying “can’t” when “can” will work just as well.

One of the things my dad used to tell me was, when someone begins a debate using semantics, he’s already lost the argument. No place is this truer than with ApochPiQ opening:

MMOs are expected to host dozens of servers running thousands of players apiece. Successful games may be played by over a million people; some notable ones are played by far more than that. Even a low-grade MMO serves a few hundred thousand players.

[..]

This is the root of the problem, here, this “massively” multiplayer business. Because going from just “online” and “multiplayer” all the way up to “massive” is a huge deal.

For one thing, I never realized MMO was an industry standardized term based on actual hard numbers. (READ: It’s not) Massively is a pretty subjective term in and of itself. But, let’s just get down to brass tacks here. A term in many ways is defined by it’s usage. By this definition, only WoW or Everquest (or similar titles) qualify for that supreme monkier “MMO”. But the facts just don’t bear that out. MMO is a generic term, and not a specific one. At it’s peak, the most I ever saw Sage Ocean on Puzzle Pirates hold was about 1100 users. I would also say, Three Rings is an established boutique/niche MMO developer. I mean, the ARPU metrics alone say so. So, I would say that Puzzle Pirates from Three Rings is an MMO, after all…it would seem Google, that barometer of what is and aint seems to think so. As a game designer, one would think you would understand a bit about Dunbar’s Number. I would say as a human being who can keep track of about 148 people…1000 is pretty massive.

So really, the MMORPG moniker is nothing more than a bit of semantics. “Massively” and “scalability” in this sense are not in any way the same thing. In reality, the scalability of any online game is something every aspiring developer should be thinking about in the early stages regardless of the genre he is heading into.

But, let’s get into a few of the other “you can’t do this” arguments…

I will bet you a beer (or suitable beverage of your choice) that you can’t find an MMO with over a million players with a development team of less than 100 people.

See how this fell into the scalability argument…again? In this case, it’s “You can’t do this because you have no scalable staff”. This renders the argument moot, really. Because not every MMO needs to be WoW. Sacred Seasons, Puzzle Pirates, Fairyland..the list goes on. This again is a semantic argument about scale.

I will bet you a second tasty beverage that the average developer working on an MMO has shipped at least 2 games prior to shipping a successful MMO. Many successful MMO titles are even the results of collaborative efforts from dozens of people with prior MMO experience.

Ahh, here we go. We here have seen this one before, many times. You can’t do this because you haven’t paid your dues. That’s what it boils down to. This kind of garbage argument does not belong anywhere in our industry. Not with the technology we have available these days. I can even name an MMO designed by a person who seems to have no prior games: Sacred Seasons, it’s even a flash based MMO.

As incredible as it seems, the semantics, along with the argument get more ridiculous…

Running an MMO is immensely expensive. Internet hosting and server costs alone can be in the tens of thousands of dollars a month range. Buying all the hardware you need to run the game up-front can be well into the millions. You need a dedicated datacenter for the endeavor, with redundant power, fire safety systems, industrial cooling, and hundreds of miles of both copper cabling and fiber optics. A single network switch capable of running an MMO backbone can cost ten grand by itself. And if you want a global reach, you’d better roll out a datacenter on every major continent, at the very least. Three or four per continent is more like it.

Let’s break this down by rejecting his straw man argument of “An MMO is only for millions of users”. Once we get that fallacy out of the way, the rest of this is a great deal of scare tactics. Further diminishing the credibility of the argument being presented. It makes you consider the source. Double Cluepon has created a Flash Socket server that runs and scales pretty well in FreeBSD machines hosted on Xen. Anyone not dealing with virtualization now is already behind the curve. Our server costs right now? About $500 a year. It will go up. We know this, and have planned for it. Not just in the code either. In the budget. Indeed, in our chosen technology, there are even folks who will do a lot of the hosting for you. Sites like Kongregate. The rest of this is just silly. Blizzard may need to run an “MMO Backbone”, but I can tell you right now, there are plenty of boutique and niche MMO’s that don’t need an “MMO Backbone”.

But, let’s go on…

Graphics are amazingly critical. If you don’t have a great looking game, don’t expect to attract too many players. The MMO space more than any other genre is dominated by players who are into aesthetics and first impressions. A great game with bad graphics might still get some hardcore fans, but it’ll never compete with a great game with great graphics.

With this statement, he loses any credibility he may have had left. As he seems to be of the mind that “I work for ArenaNet, makers of Guildwars” so you have to listen to me, let me just deflate that a bit…First off, in my opinion, calling him a game designer might be a stretch. He may write code, but my best guess is, it’s probably in a cube farm. That’s all well and good. But to see the complete fallacy of the above…replace “Graphics” with “Gameplay”….and any real designer will tell you right now the above is a bunch of malarkey. It’s also one of the biggest problems facing the game industry today: shiny vs gameplay. When I look at successful, money making MMO’s…sure, WoW is there. But WoW is a roll up of a lot of other games that came before it. Let’s look at Minecraft, let’s look at Puzzle Pirates, let’s look at the sheer number of isometric MMO’s still rolling out of Asia. I’m still seeing a lot of MMO’s that don’t require serious graphic cards. Many of them which don’t even come close to photo realism. This incessant need for picture perfect graphics is a fallacious argument. It is about, what it’s always been about: the game play. Double Cluepon chose isometric because we could still produce quality looking stuff, but focus more on the game play.

But, it’s par for the course. Just like saying “can’t” where “can” will do nicely.

And we haven’t gotten to the networking side of things yet.

The client side is pretty easy; it just has to connect to a server and spam some packets back and forth. But the server itself is a place of truly dark voodoo.

…and again with the scale argument. It’s really the central idea of his whole post.

At this level, everything becomes important.

…more technical talk, which really is just about establishing his “authority” than actually saying anything useful.

Every single “You can’t make an MMO” article, post, tweet, blog, I have ever seen…seems to come from disillusioned cube farm residents. I am not discounting that an MMO like Guild Wars has millions of lines of code. But just because it does, does not exclude the possible success of others. In other words, just because you did it that way, does not automatically mean someone else CAN’T. Want to play a sharp MMO in 15 seconds? Try Sherwood. (Shockwave based If I recall…perhaps we should ask them about their MMO Backbone?)

This attitude among developers needs to stop. The article by ApochPiQ could have been much more constructive, and still conveyed a bit of the same message. Had he called it “Planning for Scale in online games”, perhaps he would have gotten a bit farther. At the end of the day, the MMORPG, the Persistent World, the MMORTS…they are becoming tangible targets for underground and indie game developers. The numbers (read: facts on the ground) seem to bear out that small MMO’s are collectively bigger than any of the AAA’s. But addressing the game development community as a whole in this way, as if they were a bunch of 16 year old kids on a basement computer with a warez’d copy of RPG Maker is insulting at best. It’s a black eye to our industry at worst.

It needs to stop. This continual attitude of “you cant”, or outright derision toward the dreamers in this industry needs to stop.

Perhaps instead, we should be trying to feed each others dreams. Perhaps instead we should be honestly trying to help each other realize new things, and new ways to play and have fun. Perhaps we all need to do our part to help creative people channel their creativity into works that are fun, works that inspire. You do that not by telling someone you cant, but by telling them how they can.

When it comes to an MMORPG, it does take a lot of hard work. It does take a great deal of creativity. Not always from one person, but certainly a strong and fiercely creative mind. It takes scale, and organization. But it does not need to require 200+ people.

You can make a smaller game, or an MMO, or an RTS. Create! Fill the world with content! But if you want to shout anyone down…shout down the ones telling you something can’t be done. Those people are not patriots of our chosen profession. The designers I admire most are the ones who use “can”, the ones who plug away every day in the trenches of their own code and dog food. The ones who keep trying, and learning, and refining.

If you’re one of these people who feel that it’s your job to do nothing but deride, cop an attitude, and subtly discourage people, do us all a favor: get the hell out of this business, and please don’t look back. You don’t belong here. Your attitude is the antithesis of what brought us all here today: the ability to ask “what if?”, dream of new ideas, and trying like hell to make those ideas come to fruition. People worthy of praise make no little plans, because they don’t stir the blood.

Don’t worry, we will be just fine without you.