Advantages of Online Games


Advantages of Online Games

As we said, online games have many positive qualities. Some of them are advantages to us as game developers; others are features that attract players who might not otherwise play computer games.

Player Socializing

The single greatest benefit of online play, as far as the players are concerned , is that it offers opportunities for social interaction. Of course, they can't talk as well as if they were in the same room together, and they can't give each other the high five, but these are minor considerations. The social aspect doesn't affect the internal economy of the game much, but it has a distinct effect on the players' enjoyment of the experience. One of the reasons that girls and women have traditionally been less interested in interactive entertainment, especially games for personal computers, is that it is often a solitary activity. But women represent a much greater proportion of the online game market than they do the single-player game market, chiefly for this reason: They enjoy interacting with others.

At the moment, this capability is usually limited to typing text ("chatting"), which is awkward while trying to play a fast-paced game, but a few games are beginning to include voice communication. When enough people get broadband access, they will probably include video as well. A time might come when we see players dressing appropriately to their roles in the game so that they'll look cool on camera.

The social element makes online games more than just games. They become clubs, caf s, casinos ”places where people get together for fun. As the creator of such spaces, you're more than just a game designer; you must also be a social architect. This is actually your toughest challenge, far more difficult than designing the core mechanics of a single-player game. An online game isn't an experience that you lead a player through; it's a Petri dish for growing social situations, and it's nearly impossible to predict in advance what will happen there. For further discussion of this topic, please read the excellent and insightful Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim.

Human Intelligence Instead of Artificial Intelligence

In single-player games, the player competes against the computer, so the computer has to have enough artificial intelligence to be a good opponent . If the game is complex, building the AI is a huge programming task and is difficult to get right. If the players are competing against each other, as they are in most online games, you don't need any AI. The players provide all the intelligence required. This feature of online play is second only to the social aspect in terms of the benefit provided to the player.

Of course, you can still design the game in such a way that AI is required: You might have nonplayer characters (NPCs) who need to behave intelligently, or you might design a game in which all the players play cooperatively against an artificial opponent. But many online games rely on their players to provide the intelligence in the game, and this can make the game easier to develop.

Psychological Tactics

Intelligence, in gameplay terms, means more than just smarts; it means an understanding of human behavior. Computer software is particularly poor at this; humans are particularly good at it. Playing against other people, you can bluff, feint, ambush , lure opponents out of hiding with lame-duck tactics, and try all manner of ruses de guerre that would never work against an AI opponent (or, worse yet, would work consistently every time). You can learn another player's style and look for ways to exploit his tendencies ”while being aware that he is learning from yours, too. Except in simple games, playing against human opponents is a richer, more subtle experience.

Online Gameplay Versus Local Multi-Player Gameplay

Multi-player gameplay offers great flexibility to the game designer: It allows purely competitive ("everyone for himself"), purely cooperative ("It's us against the machine"), or team-based play. Multi-player play can be either online or local. In online play, players are linked by a network and are ( generally , but not necessarily ) in separate locations. In local play, all the players sit in the same room, playing the game on the same machine and, most important, looking at the same screen. For the last 30 years , local play has been the standard mode of interaction for multi-player console games: Each player has a controller, and they all look at the TV. That could change as the new generation of consoles introduces network capability, but it's likely to remain the most common way people use them: It costs nothing and lets people play together in social groups.

Problems with Local Play

From a design standpoint, however, local multi-player play has serious drawbacks. For one thing, because all the players share the same TV, any user interface elements have to be duplicated for each of them, taking up valuable screen space. If every player has a separate point of view, the screen must be subdivided into little windows . Each individual window is harder to see, and the other players' windows are a distraction.

More important, however, in local play there is no hidden information. Each player can see what the others are doing. This is fine for fighting games, but not so good in any game in which players might want to keep their activities secret ”war games, for example.

(The Nintendo GameCube does allow players to plug in a Game Boy Advance and use it as a controller; the Game Boy's screen is then available for displaying hidden information to the player. However, this feature requires players to own both devices as well as the necessary cable. Although it solves the problem in theory, in practice any commercial game that requires it as a gameplay mechanism limits its market to those players who actually own all the gear.)

Finally, local play necessarily imposes limits on the number of people who can participate at once. Consoles seldom support more than four players; PCs support even fewer. Even if you could add players indefinitely, the machine itself would be bogged down as the computing task grows.

Benefits of Networked Play

Online gaming solves all these problems. Each player has her own screen, and the entire area is dedicated to supporting her gaming experience. The game can present her with her own unique perspective, including exactly as much information as she is supposed to have, and no more. And online games can support any number of people (although, if they require a central server, there are still some limits) ”it's not uncommon for some games to have tens of thousands of players online at a time. With an online game, you can always find other people to play with at any hour of the day or night.

Of the three forms of player interaction (single-player, local multi-player, and online multi-player), online playing offers you the most flexibility as a designer. However, it is not without its problems, as we'll see in the next section.



Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
ISBN: 1592730019
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 148

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net