Raph Koster has a good post today entitled the above. He’s basically right on the money as far as I’m concerned, but I wanted to comment on one of his commandments.#8: Thou shalt make every activity within thy world one that stands alone enjoyably; if it be a game, then thou shouldst make it a fun game on its own merits; if it be other, then thou shouldst make it true to itself. Thy world doth not make boring things into enjoyable things merely because it is thy world.
Here, I disagree somewhat with Raph. I think the demand that every activity be fun in and of itself is too reductionist and misses out on the incredible value of context. Few people would find repetitively left-clicking on enemies (like in Diablo 2) to be particularly fun as a stand-alone activity. It’s the context that the story, the graphics, the character persistence, etc set up that makes that repetitive left-clicking fun. If a pure game like Diablo 2 can afford to have activities that are not fun in a standalone manner, why can’t a virtual world in which, as Raph’s commandment #1 says, is more than ‘just a game.’The requirement that every activity be inherently fun on its own also, I believe, contradicts that first commandment in that if your world is to be a world and not a game, it makes little sense to demand that everything be fun. While actual punishment is not popular in the relatively roleplaying-less WoWs of the world, the context of the larger world and of your own personal story in more roleplay-oriented MMOs can make tedious activities valuable. For instance, I see nothing wrong with, in the right kind of virtual world, the requirement that a player perform some soul-sucking tedious task in order to absolve himself of an offence against a malicious God. If said activity was fun, then there’s really no punishment involved and the potential roleplay is milked of its meaning.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 3rd, 2006 at 1:58 pm
almagill
Hehe, the interpretation of the word has begun.
Perhaps what he meant by ‘activity’ isn’t ‘each and every individual action’ but the clusters of actions that go to make a whole activity like completing a mission, dungeon, etc?
In which case he covered himself by saying not to bung in the unfun just for paddings sake.
July 3rd, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Matt
Well, then you’ve accepted that an individual activity doesn’t have to be fun, and that it’s the context of them together that add the meaning. The sum of the parts is greater, etc. If you’re willing to take that step, then why not take the next logical step which is to accept that those clumps of individual activity can, in turn, be given meaning by a yet larger context (the world as a whole, for instance).
July 5th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
Boon
I agree Matt that not every activity needs to be fun if done solely in the virtual world. Too many of these games that market the RPG at the end of the MMO title have little in the way of pro vs. con, or reward vs. risk or punishment that help foster a role playing environment for the player(s).
I do see this commandment as meaning that crafting should be fun for those who want to craft solely in the game, or that questing should be fun if players just want to quest and combat should be fun if that’s all the players want to do. Vanguard is adding diplomacy as another mechanic to the game and that would also have to be fun if players just wanted to be a diplomat solely in the game world.