The Theory of Fun by SOE's Raph Koster...

[Zannon]

http://www.theoryoffun.com/theoryoffun.pdf

I found it kinda neat.

[xyryn]

And thought provoking. He certainly explains why RPers stick around longer than the PvPers.

I liked his thoughts about the nature of art, too. At first glance, they feel correct. Gotta ponder this.

[Dwilah]

I can't get it to load past the first page. Bleh.

[Ekade]

And thought provoking. He certainly explains why RPers stick around longer than the PvPers.

I liked his thoughts about the nature of art, too. At first glance, they feel correct. Gotta ponder this.

Yeah.. I really enjoyed that.

...we are fighting a losing battle against the human brain, which always fights to optimize, assembly line, simpify, maximize ROI.

This is one of the first things that amazed me about MMO players. The devs would spend months trying to devise clever content.. then you look at what the players do it.. They analyze the problem and break it down until they have the simplest possible solution.. then it gets farmed to death for the maximum possible return.

Players do this every time!

Most long lasting games in the past have been competetive, because they lead to an endless supply of similar yet subtly varied puzzles.

The picture that accompanies this is a chess board.

Balance and competition = fun. It is sooooo important to have balanced classes in PvP. If you can compete, you will have fun. If you can't.. you won't.

Chess would suck if White had 3 queens instead of 1.


I like the fact that he wants to design his puzzles to be like chess.. because the game is the same.. but it is different each time you play it. Civilzation is a great example of a game that does this well.

We talk so much about emergent gameplay, non-linear storytelling, or about player entered content. They are all ways of increasing the possibility space, making self-refreshing puzzles.

Well talk about it some more! You are on the right track.. make it happen.

Honestly I think the key to having fun in MMO's is to have player-GM's.. just like we do in tabletop. People who try to GM now in SWG are very clever, but do get frustrated with the limitations. Our creative minds try to work around the limitations and barriers, but I think we could do some amazing things if the game enabled us more than it got in our way.


I know some of you would love this idea:
Give me an instance where I can place objects and define their behavior, where I can control the NPC's directly. I will have normal powers in the rest of the environment.. but in this instance I am like a "pex". Players entering this instance will know it is under the control of a player, and will do so at their own risk. I can "promote" certain players from "normal" to "GM" so they can help me digiteer the NPC's.

This way I can make things happen without messing with the rest of the world.

So the challenge we all face is to solve our own puzzles that don't have one right answer (PVP, instancing, player entered content!).

Until then all other games are destined to be like tic-tac-toe.

Childs play because the patterns are too easily perceived.

So true... why do we stop playing games? Because we figure them out and get bored with them. They run out of interesting possibilities.

This is why I stopped enjoying the combat part of SWG a while ago. The puzzles (lairs and creature behavior) are too repetetive and too simple. The monsters don't move much.. there are no patrols to watch out for. It is too easy to control the game. There are no suprises. It is just an endlessly repetetive exercise.. like playing tic-tac-toe.

Like the guy says.. the human brain will order, organize, and simplify everything it encounters. Even games with much more variety and depth in their combat encounters (like WoW), will eventually get "solved" by the human brain and become boring.

Unless of course they find a way to give some encounters a chess-program like intelligence.. that could be pretty amazing.


A machine can only do so much. The only counter to the human brain is another human brain. This is why we love RP, this is why we love PvP. We, the players, entertain eachother more than any game ever can. It is our job to make the game fun for eachother. If I have but one goal, it is to do just that.

[Isleh]

...we are fighting a losing battle against the human brain, which always fights to optimize, assembly line, simpify, maximize ROI.

Maximize ROI... There is and example of this on the last page ( 51 ). Look at the tic-tac-toe games in the background. It's the same game just flipped and rotated...

And, since I saw this, that brings us back to the beginning, about pattern matching....

[Ekade]

/bump