Thinking about why
Don’t worry. I’m not gonna get all philosophical on ya’s with why we exist, but why I and others, play web games. I have talked about this several times before on this blog, but I want to reapproach it again.
So I have been playing several games online and they are pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but they are enjoyable. Anyways, there flaws are starting to show, particularly in the multiplayer departments. THESE ARE MULITPLAYER GAMES! You think they would put a lot of effort into actually playing and communicating with others. But like most games, these ones drop the ball.
Now here is a game theory question for ya’s. Do you ‘force’/strongly encourage the player to perform an action, or do you wait until they decide?
Let me elaborate. If you are playing a strategy game online, why attack another player? You steal some resources. But then you are likely to be attacked in return. And you are surely losing resources for attacking/maintaining an army.
But what if you were to give the players a reason to attack the other players. Such as the only way for anyone to get military experience is to do so through attacking, and that experience is needed to develop new, better weapons.
There also needs to be more thought into the point of the game. Too many games I have played where your sole goal is to be the best player in the game, which pretty much equals “whoever spends the most time ingame wins” style gameplay.
Do I have any better idea’s of the top of my head? Not relly, but an example would be give the players several different paths to play and allow them to try and reach the top in their now paths (Military, research, Political, etc). Make these paths balanced some how and make it advantageous for players of different paths to work together.
You’re still striving to be the best, but it’s just cut the gamae population in third and given you a chance to play the way you want to play and would hopefully be worked in such a way that just because you have no life and spend 12 hours a day playing the game doesn’t mean you’re going to be the best.
So, what are you guys think? Encourage/force cooperation, interaction, conflict, or just wait for the players to decide to do something
peachtea said,
August 4, 2008 at 5:13 am
I had gained a lot of inspiration from your blog post. I really agree to most of your points here. Most of the players playing an online game, besides having fun, would have a goal to somewhat reaching the top. I really hate the idea that the only way to reach the top is sticking around the computer 24 hours a day without a life. I love your idea that there should be several path to play and many ways to identify yourself as top.
Most of the current strategy games do have such an idea, like travian and imperial ages, you can have the most population, the best attack, the most defense etc.
In role-playing game, like the FallenSword, you can be the highest level player, the richest player, the best PvP player, the owner of the top guild etc.
Diversity, having many ways to play a game, should be the way to success in browser online game.
Also, I think most people who play multiplayer games are expecting a nice community, therefore providing more ways of interaction between players should be very important. Having the idea of guilds and group attacks would introduce more fun to games.