Summary: Development over Achievement

The day we become conscious of the power of our medium and of the power our design decisions have over it is the day when online gaming leaves its Keystone Cops, silent movie era. Here are a few suggestions that can help you get there:

• Don't build a pyramid ” If your game mechanic can only be mastered by a rarified slice of humanity, then you will have the harsh , rough, chest- beating culture of the meritocracy game. It may evolve into something better, but no thanks to you. People tend to think that these games have the testosterone -poisoned cultures they do simply because they usually involve combat. This is simply not true. Look at Tribes and its ability to employ a variety of contributions from people in a combat setting. Imagine the culture it would create if it became an MMP offering. Instead of a pyramid, build a game structure like a collapsible camping cup ”many interlocking layers , nearly equal in size, needing each other to work.

• Shelter your young ” Perhaps the most powerful development tool the multiplayer game has is rites of passage, yet only rarely does this medium employ them. Don't tack on training to your game. Make raising your players part of the game. One major difference between shame in multiplayer games and in real life is that, in the former, it can happen inexplicably and without warning. This, more than any other single factor, drives promising new players away from multiplayer games ”forever.

• Don't be afraid of alienating the hard- core gamer ” Online gaming is a social activity; standalone gaming is not ”it's just that simple. Thus, you can eliminate the solo player role entirely and be pleased that you've turned the lone wolves away. Just make sure you design your grouping schemes in a manner that feels natural to players and not forced on them. The tagline of one of the remarkable failures in the online medium was: "The Game That Plays You." People don't want to be played .

• Devise a game design where achievement allows and encourages many different sorts of people to make themselves useful in many different ways ” Do that, without falling back to the database-driven, cumulative character scheme, and player and community development will follow. Do that and you'll conquer the world.