Chapter 8. Getting into the Design

"(Design) teams regularly bite off more than they can chew. An MMP can easily become an impossible -to-complete reality simulator."

” Richard Garriott

"They (design teams) underestimate the complexity of the task. More moving parts drive complexity nonlinearly, and MMP games have a lot of moving parts. Rule of thumb: An MMP game is three times bigger than a standalone game, but 10 times harder to complete."

” Gordon Walton

KEY TOPICS

• Acquisition and Retention Features

• The Themis Group Player Satisfaction Matrix

• The Critical "New Player Experience"

• It's the Socialization, Stupid!

• The Importance of (the Other Guy's) Storytelling

• World-Building: Just What Is "Content," Anyway?

These comments by Richard and Gordon express a fairly common theme we found among the experienced people we interviewed for this book. Design teams tend to walk nose-first into a wall of complexity by trying to shove every feature they can into a game or by not fully understanding, at the start of the process, the complexity of the interlinking among the game mechanics, player skills, and attributes, the player-manipulable objects, and the fields that can modify the objects and players themselves . Much of this comes from not actually completing the game design before major coding begins; designers rarely move into development with a full and clear understanding of just what the player experience will be on a day-in, day-out basis over a long stretch of time.

The other major contributor to over-complexity is that designers can rarely articulate just who, exactly, the game is being built for. If you ask that question, the answer you're likely to hear is, "Uh, the hard-core gamer." If you ask a designer to define who the hard- core gamer is and why he/she should pay money for this game, you'll see a lot of finger-pointing at EverQuest ( EQ ) and Ultima Online ( UO ) , without much substantive detail. They instinctively understand that they don't know who the real customer will be and, to make up for that lack, they cram in every feature they can think of or have seen in another game. Designers who do not have a clear idea of what their target player's profile is ” especially designers who are inexperienced in a commercial atmosphere ”are liable to revert to this shotgun approach when they would benefit more from marksmanship.

The solution to this problem is a relatively easy one, but it does require an experienced producer or executive producer to exercise "tough love" right from the start of the design process:

• Make the design team list the acquisition and retention features for each customer niche, including feature sets that take into account the calendar lifecycle of each niche.

• Require the team to prioritize those features for development.

• Make the team dig in with a cutting tool and trim the set down to a list that it believes doesn't require divine intervention to complete before the new millennium .

• Go through the list yourself, reprioritize the features, and make the team defend why each feature should be in the game.

We guarantee it will be a sobering exercise, at the least. It will probably also create some true anger among some members of the design team, which is where the tough love comes in. As a team leader, you'll probably have to cut one or more features that the team considers crucial or to which they have formed an emotional attachment. Be ready for histrionics and fireworks, ^[1] and use the tools and information in this book to back up your decisions.

^[1] It may seem that throughout this book that we're hard or "down" on designers and design teams. In truth, we are, but not out of any disrespect for individuals or their responsibilities. To make these things work right, they have to be the brightest, most educated , and versatile people in the process. Designers have the hardest job in the industry because, at the end of the day, the game succeeds or fails financially and as a game by what they do. If you think having $10 million in development funds and the jobs of 30-50 on your shoulders is an easy responsibility to carry, you're in the wrong business.