This morning I was rather intrigued when I received a link to a Gamasutra article that dealt with rewarding players for dull tasks. The developer in question, Chris Hecker, discusses some of the pit falls of doing this and envisions a future where games are so awful that players must literally be bribed to play them. I’d have to say he makes some really great points and it seemed like something interesting to discuss.
Hecker’s nightmare is not directed at MMOs specifically. He is looking at aspects of the industry like achievements and in game rewards. The analogy he uses is that “bonuses” and “treats” seem to achieve the desired result but really don’t do so. If you give a dog a treat every time he uses the news paper he is eventually going to focus less on doing his business and more on getting to the reward. That thought right there really struck me as profound because it basically sums up a large degree of what the MMO industry has become now.
“The reason this “nightmare scenario” is a genuine concern is because people are clearly perfectly willing to engage in repetitive dull tasks if they are extrinsically rewarded, even if their appreciation for the play itself is diminished.”
In one sentence Hecker basically sums up what I’ve decided to dub the “Cult of the Ding” (CotD). Players are so addicted to achieving their next level in MMORPGs that they’ll gladly follow dull lines of quests that offer nothing but a movement of their experience bars. How many MMO quests do you read these days? There are so many that it is hard to sort between the quests and the chores. Even when we do find a quest we rarely bother with reading it anyway. A perfect example is what is happening in EverQuest 2 with my guild. We’re doing the access quest for the Vigilant x2 zone. I do not know the name of this quest. We merely call it “the access quest.” I don’t even remember what I have to do for it or why. I just know I go through three zones in order and I’m done. For all I call SOE could have literally named it “Vigilant x2 access” and I’d be okay with it. All we want is the reward. The journey is meaningless.
The shame is all this is that I used to be a quest reader. In EverQuest I read all of the quests I did. I knew why I was doing them. It wasn’t just about the final reward because the stories were interesting and, more importantly, if you didn’t pay attention you could mess them up and have to redo work. We just don’t see anything like that anymore and the sheer volume of quests has desensitized us. Walking into a hub and seeing ten question marks or feathers doesn’t inspire me to read. It inspires me to grab and then run towards whatever is marked on the map.
At any rate I just wanted to bring attention to the article. It was a great read and I would love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on it. Hopefully someone at GDC took something away from it!
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Quants is shorthand for the number counts of different items or features within a game. If your game has 215 different types of monsters or 100 levels a player can reach or 27 zones – those are all “quants”. Studios love to talk quants.
Why? Because quants are quantifiable. They’re measurable. It’s a yardstick that can be trotted out when the discussion gets murky about “difficulty curves”, “itemization progression”, “story arcs”, or any of the other hard-to-nail-down features of a game that make it…well, a game.
When Everquest II shipped, there weren’t nearly as many different individual quests. Oh sure, there were a lot, but as a general rule a lot of the quests took longer to complete, had multiple steps and stages, and involved a lot more understanding than current quests. Then, around the time Rise of Kunark came out, we started hearing about “hundreds of new quests”. All that had happened was that old quests with multiple steps were now broken up into “quest lines” – a series of much smaler quests, each with its own reward and leading into the next part of the quest.
Oh sure, the quests were ultimately the same basic idea – in the old world design, you quested a long multistage quest that resulted in a reward at the end. In the new world design, we run a long multi-quest quest-line that results in a reward at each step of the way and a reward at the end.
Same effort…magnitudes more rewards.
The main issue here is what the goal is. Am I doing quests to enjoy them, or am I just trying to advance a character? Your examples are illuminating here: in EQ1, the quests were mostly there to add flavor to the world. There were a few quests that gave big rewards, but for the most part you did a quest in order to give you a reason to visit some specific location.
Your EQ2 example shows the flipside of this. The goal was to get access. Period. They can dress it up any way they want, but the main focus was to get access. That takes the emphasis off the story and puts it on the reward. You are exactly right, this is what Hecker was warning against.
Personally, I’ll read some quest text but some of it I can’t be bothered. I like reading the epic quest text in LotRO, for example; that’s half the reason I’m in the game is because I like the lore. But, do I really need to read the 100th quest that gives me some flimsy reason about why I need to go another dozen goblins? Not really. Unfortunately, this also means that I’m going to miss the few gems hidden in the mound of… stuff…. But, when the quests are so numerous they lose their importance.
In a subtle way this ties back to your post on the grind. When you make the reward for the grind getting to max level, then people focus on the reward and get frustrated with the “journey” they’re supposed to be enjoying. Killing stuff and doing quests becomes the boring routine stuff you have to do in order to get your reward. Oops….