gamebunny dev shakedown pt 4

With your host - David Moore

Over the past weeks we've presented you with you parts 1 & 2 & 3 of gamebunny’s ‘Dev Shakedown’ (where we pestered game developers for their opinions on the ever-changing world of massively multiplayer gaming.) Here now is part 4 - The 'Grand Finale'. It's been a fun ride. Thanks for joining us.

This week's developers are: Peter Tyson of Codemasters (Dragon Empires), Andrew Tepper of eGenesis (A Tale in the Desert), Serafina of World Fusion (Atriarch), Jørgen Tharaldsen and Terri 'Ziana' Perkins of Funcom (Anarchy Online), and various team members of There, Inc. (There).

gamebunny:
“According to Nick Yee’s MMO report (Mar. 2002) female massively multiplayer game subscribers only number somewhere between 12 and 16%. What can be done to attract more women to the genre and have you designed or changed your game in any way to attract more female players? ”

Peter Tyson (Dragon Empires):
Everyone who plays an MMOG plays to be entertained. Right now the kind of entertainment you find in MMOGs tends to be male orientated. It sounds a cliché but I think it's true that achievement-obsessive gameplay is something that generally only guys find appealing.

So, what do women want in a game? Well, look at games that women have been shown to love. For example, the Sims. In the Sims women love the complete control over the world that they get. The challenges aren't ones you can fail and have to do again and there isn't much in the way of fighting. This is just about 180 degrees different from most MMOGs. When this changes we'll see more women start to play.

Right now I'd be interested to see how There and Second Life do, both which aim for the female and more casual MMOG market. There's also the old truth that where you find the women you'll also find men will end up too, so if these games do well, they could do very well!

Andrew L. Tepper (A Tale in the Desert):
This is one that's easy to fix. Don't make every game like Dungeons and Dragons. ATITD's ratio is 27% female counting by # of accounts, and 40% female by hours played. (Yes, women play more hours than men.)

Ziana (Anarchy Online):
The percentage of female players in Anarchy Online is higher than numbers shown by Mr. Yee’s study. I have noticed a major increase in female players of our game over the past year. I believe this is because we offer more customization opportunities and our game is more challenging and social than most. What can be done to attract more women to the genre?:

1. More representation from women in the industry. As we get more women who are developers and more women who are at E3 for reasons other than being a booth babe, we lend credibility to the games as an experience for real women and design games that appeal to real women.

2. What females gamers don't want, in my opinion, is a game where the female character is inherently weaker or just meant to be eye candy. I don’t believe that showing only tall buxom blondes in thongs chained to a wall is the way to endear women gamers either. Kings Quest IV, and the Longest Journey were brave enough to offer female Protagonists and it worked quite well. I feel we want games that offer us choices and challenges.

3. While it’s impossible to speak for all women, I feel the vast majority seek a game that challenges them, offers a large variety of social aspects, a good game design and the ability to express themselves as an individual. We don’t want dummied down games or one’s that insult our intelligence and claim to be geared to us. We don’t want to have to take on male attributes to compete in a virtual world. According to several studies, women are more likely to play a computer game and more likely to be online, so MMOGs should be ideal for them. We need to find better ways of getting the word to them on what these games are all about.

4. We must stop hiding the fact that MMOGs are highly social activities. While men actively seek games, women seem to stumble upon them by accident. Women are more likely to play a computer game than a console game, but many are still not aware of these games existence and so they play the parlor type games for social atmosphere. There have been many a romance that blossomed from meeting in an MMOG and even if that isn’t your goal, the opportunity is there to meet wonderful friends of both sexes. These are communities first and foremost. Many women are also not aware that it’s a great family activity. The industry must work to educate the consumers.

Strong female characters both in the storyline, as NPCs and through our Long Term Characters ( LTC’s). Many of our events team are female and they, along with the males have brought in very strong female personalities that have conquered their place in the stories and sagas.

A great deal of opportunities for individualization in our character creation process, through skill building, apartment customization and trade skill options are popular with our female clientele. We also have a huge selection of clothing and one of our more popular clothing was fashioned by a female designer.

Anarchy Online also offers a varied assortment of organization options to appeal to those who want choices in guild creation and management styles. Women, we have found, tend to be more likely to belong to guilds and in positions of leadership and this is supported by Mr. Yee’s studies as well.

Anarchy Online offers a great mix of social opportunity, intellectual stimulation, and adventure with highly customizable characters in a stunning environment and these things make it appealing to the growing number of women gamers. Choice is the key.

Serafina (Atriarch):
How could we attract more females to the genre? I laugh every time I hear that question. My smartass side immediately kicks in and wants to give a long list of very politically incorrect answers. However, since this is a serious question, I will answer it in a serious manner. Just to clarify, I am female, a game player and game designer.

So, my first question is why? Why do we need to put special attention in attracting more females to the genre? Is there an estrogen shortage? How many female gameplayers are too few? How many are too many? Is the industry aiming for a 50/50 ratio? Should all games try to attract females? Is it wrong to have a male-dominated game? These questions point out that there is an assumption that we should be attracting more females to the genre, but no one says why. I think part of the reason for this assumption is because female gamers are seen as one of the keys to reaching the mass market, and the big companies all want to reach the holy grail of the mass market.

I think it is a mistake to design games based on gender. A fun game will appeal to both genders. I think there is confusion in the fact that there is designing games to attract female players, and then there is marketing games to attract female players. Those are two very different things that are often confused as one in the same.

"Female" is just too diverse of a category to design for. Instead, I would focus the design of a game on different types of play styles rather than gender. I believe the difference in drawing female players to the genre is in how the game is marketed to females, not that the game is "designed for females". When a female player gets to a game, then it will a matter of how well her playstyle is supported that will keep her in the game. She will stay for the same reason a male player would stay... is it fun?

There Team (There):
Boy, this is a question we have thought about from our inception five years ago. So in our consumer research what we discovered was not surprising – a high percentage of women weren’t that interested in the online game content that was being produced. Being ambushed immediately upon entering the world, obsessive focus on goals, harassment – these were all issues women were very vocal about. Women told us they wanted to compete, but they wanted to do it on their terms, and they wanted to make friends and build social networks while they did it. They wanted to be able to express their identity through the way they communicated and the way they looked. They wanted easy ways to be creative. And they also wanted the freedom just to hang out with friends, without any pressure of losing points or begin killed.

So as we built There women had a large impact on the way we thought about social interaction and achievement. We built in the ability to hang out and easily make friends. We made it easy to communicate with IM, text chat and voice. We implemented safety features like the power to ignore harassers and have a private party at your house or event with an invite only feature. We created simple to use tools that allowed members to express their creativity and design their own clothing, buggies and hoverboards. We created the ability to change your body type, hair color, clothing and skin tone. And we created the freedom for women to chose how they would compete and when they wanted to compete.

gamebunny:
“What is your future dream for MMOs? Where do you see MMOs in 10 years and what will they be like? (Voice Communication and Mobile Gaming are a few things that come to mind.) ”

Peter Tyson (Dragon Empires):
Technological innovations are inevitable and voice is one of them. We'll also see the usual larger game worlds with more stuff, although whether there is perhaps a natural limit to the size of game you can make before the cost to make the game becomes prohibitive remains to be seen. I suspect there is a limit and we'll hit it before ten years are out. What I hope we'll see is more work on the interactivity of the worlds we create and an increase in the degree to which players can carve out their own niche within that world doing activities they enjoy and are rewarded for. It is a lot of work to have such open-endedness in games but it is very rewarding for players when it is there.

Andrew L. Tepper (A Tale in the Desert):
I don't see voice as a good idea - it totally breaks the immersion. I see new (non-RPG) genres done as MMOs as the future. There are tons of single player strategy games - why not that as an MMO? (Actually, there's a really cool game called Savage that's doing this.) What about fighting games, or Mario-style platform games, or even unusual games like Pikmin? Those would all be games I'd run out to buy.

Serafina (Atriarch):
In 10 years I see games more immersive, more variety available, more options... more more more and more. I think it will just expand. I think the biggest change will come in the sheer variety of games we will have to choose from as well as a much higher level of immersion. I also see it becoming a mainstream form of entertainment. In fact, I see it becoming the most popular form of entertainment.

All the games right now, use the same basic model with incremental moves forward. Within the next 10 years, we will see a few leaps that will jumpstart a new paradigm in virtual worlds.

On a side note, I'm not a big fan of voice communication. I don't think voice communication is all it is cracked up to be. One of the beauties of the internet is anonymity and the ability to ignore. It is difficult to do that with voice. I don't think players want to give that up quite yet. It is a release from the stress of real life... at least for the truly massive worlds. Voice communication puts a level of real-life stress back into games.

There Team (There):
My dream is a computer on every desktop, in every cell phone, and in every set-top box, connected to a shared virtual space where people work, live, and play. Like a phone was ubiquitous to our generation as a way to communicate, massively multiplayer environments will be the only way our kids will play and communicate.

Look at the way college kids communicate through technology today. 5 IM windows open, in a chat room, cell phone in the ear, text chat on the cell phone - but what’s missing is what we have in real life which are things to do while we communicate. MMO"S provide an environment to communicate and to play - and have shared experiences.

And technology of course will be more powerful, meaning that the experiences in MMO’s will be that much more real and immersive. Will we have a Metaverse in 10 years? It’s possible.

gamebunny:
(Bonus question for extra credit)
“What was the first massively multiplayer game you played and what did you love and/or hate about it?”

Peter Tyson (Dragon Empires):
I've played text muds, but I wouldn't call them massively multiplayer.. so the first real MMOG I played was probably Ultima Online. I loved how there seemed so much stuff to do that sometimes you could log in and have to decide which fun thing you were going to do that day. It was also great fun battling PKs (although I often didn't think so at the time) and I have many fond memories of that great world.

Andrew L. Tepper (A Tale in the Desert):
It was a commercial MUD - I don't remember the name. At first I was awed by the possibilities. It really felt like I could do anything there - like a giant Infocom story that never ends. Then I discovered how shallow it actually was - the skeleton that I killed would always return ten minutes later, the armor could always be replaced by the same NPC shopkeeper that never sleeps. I was so disappointed.

ATITD is a graphical game of course, but in a way it's sort of everything I always knew a MUD could be. NPCs were out. Deep content, with nuances that may take months to really master was in. The game would *END*. You could really, truly screw up your character by making poor choices, and you could do things that would have a visible, drastic effect on the game world. These were the big goals, and I think on those, we've largely succeeded.

Ziana (Anarchy Online):
The first for me, that was considered a game rather than a virtual community, was Realms of Despair, a SMAUG mud that still runs to this day at www.game.org. I loved the people and the challenging game play and still pop in to check on it on when I can though I could not return to the text world after experiencing the wonders of the graphical mmog world.

There Team (There):
Well, I've played many, including EQ, Ultima, Asheron's Call, TSO, etc... But the first game I ever played that could be classified as Online Multiplayer (not completely massive - max @ 50 people!) was an ASCII text infocomm-like space adventure game called "Federation" that was offered through the original GEnie BBS service that I accessed from my 1 mb Amiga 500 over a 2400 baud modem!

I had played single player text quest adventure games, but this was a totally new experience and I got hooked. I started out as a simple peasant without a spaceship and spent endless hours online with other people all over the country, trading intergalactic goods, romancing and battling with other galactic adventurers, and eventually actually becoming the "Duke" of my own planet. Some of the same themes of ownership, cooperation, building friendships and building a virtual career and life for myself were as powerful then as today - some of the same things we are creating in There.

When the game eventually moved to AOL (GEnie vanished), it became part of the pay-per-minute that was then AOL, and I kept it up for some time. I made some real online friends even then back in 1990 and it was the start of a life-long fascination with online community. After that, Ultima Online was a massive step for me as a participant, because it really started to make the experience real for me.

Serafina (Atriarch):
My first 3D mmog was Meridian 59. It was my first glimpse into what I knew immediately would be the future of entertainment. It inspired me to begin work on a new game world.

Miss anything? Read part 1 , part 2 & part 3 of gamebunny's Developer Shakedown.

My thanks go out to everyone for taking part! For further info on the games listed above you can check the links below: