I wonder how many computer design and gaming books have gone out of print and are essentially lost to developers and students today. What elements of twenty year old games and game designs can be brought forward to today’s MMO?

I came across an electronic copy of Chris Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design (1982) today. (Local PDF mirror.)

It would be nice to come across an electronic copy of Role Playing Mastery (Gygax, 1989), although I still have my paper copy sitting in my RPG shelves. Dunnigan’s The Complete Wargames Handbook has been updated since my 1992 paper copy and is thankfully available online. The Book of Adventure Games (volumes I and II, Schuette, 1984 or 1985) is filled with solutions to the ideas and puzzles of adventure game designers, and with the perspective of twenty years, we can begin to deconstruct classics and those games that have been long forgotten.

What needs to be taken from these classics isn’t a single scenario or concrete game design, but ideas of what made these game genres successful, remembered, and emulated today. What elements of the classic text adventure game are portable to MMOs today? (No, I don’t mean the keyboard commands.) Why did classic wargames, played against or with other people, hold a gamer’s attention, and what has the modern RTS or PvP/RvR game abandoned that would be worth resurrecting? How can MMO developers encourage role playing and a feeling of “world” in their games? Does it come down to licensing a hot intellectual property, or is there something else that makes a world believable or immersive to the players?

I’ve got some ideas for how to answer those questions, but I’m most interested to hear what other people have to say.

What elements of the classic text adventure game are portable to MMOs today?
Both the “common” MMO and the classic text adventure game share the goal of achievement. Most MMOs rank achievement by levels and/or gear. However, the classic text adventure game ranked achievement by succeeding at the adventure (solving the puzzle, stopping the nuclear reactor, surviving the game) or by puzzle points (solving all the puzzles, exploring all the rooms, collecting all the treasure). A characteristic of the classic text adventure game that isn’t shared by the MMO is the ability to pause the game, to think about the solution, save where the player is working, or come back later to a world in the saved state. While this is technically possible with single-player instances, it is probably not worth implementing.

Players felt like they could get up and walk away from the text adventure when stumped or when real life required attention. MMOs keep going, even groundhog day MMOs (like almost all the Diku derivatives). Many early MUDs were like text adventures in interface and feel, though they were multiplayer, and not all would or could reset the world.

One thing that MMOs can take away from the adventure game is persistent world state: once dead, things stay dead. The game would quickly run out of things to kill, however, so tricks from various MUDs should be used to give players something with which to interact. In an implementation of an adventure zone I did in the spring and summer of 1993, I created a dark wizard’s tower with a hidden, impossible (by normal players) to enter orc spawning pit. A player could work through all 96 (or so) rooms of the zone and tower and kill all the orcs, but couldn’t extinguish the entire race:

• orcs spawned in the pit would leave through a random exit and into designated rooms in the zone,
• orcs would wander from room to room, sometimes banding together, but usually alone,
• orcs were more likely to stick in certain rooms (deep forest, tower rooms, outside the tower), but could be found anywhere in the zone except for the NPC town,
• orcs were most likely to spawn when breeding females were left alone,
• breeding females were all present outside the spawning pit, in the bottom of the tower basement,
• breeding females were protected by “boss level” orc guards, as was the dark wizard, and
• the total number of orcs was limited: a set of orcs was created and reused, such that spawning an orc actually meant recovering the orc object, replacing it with a corpse object, and then putting it to sleep for a random period of time (modified by the presence of breeding females) before healing it and letting it wander out of the spawning pit.

Compare this to the original design for Ultima Online’s ecology.

Text adventure games were characterized by rooms, which translated (roughly) into EQ’s zones. I’m not advocating a universal return to the text adventure and its interface, but the room/zone metaphor is very useful for designating theme. Even WoW uses zones to contain themes, although the transition to the new zone is usually seamless.

As a final thought, how can puzzles be effectively brought into MMOs when their solutions or strategies will be necessarily shared by many players? Are puzzles customized for each player, or do they need to change character and become mini-games (such as in Puzzle Pirates)? At what level of difficulty are these mini-games to be set? How does the proliferation of player guides to milestone (such as for The Seventh Guest) impact the challenge of the puzzles and the satisfaction of players?

Why did classic wargames, played against or with other people, hold a gamer’s attention, and what has the modern RTS or PvP/RvR game abandoned that would be worth resurrecting?
In the classic wargame, some of which (like Axis and Allies) could go on for days or weeks, players had to do all the hard computing work by themselves. But as Dunnigan says, there are some things that a computer does better than a person and vice versa. Hardest to emulate is the interaction with another player: in single player games, the computer could seem unbeatable or very simple and easy to beat. In multi-player games, strategies like the zerg rush have become popular.

I think what distinguished the pen-and-paper wargame from the computer wargame is the feeling of risk. A player of a modern RTS will feel less risk committing forces early, as a loss is a reset away. A player of a pen-and-paper game will have a lot of set-up labor, in addition to potential loss of face in front of friends, and fear of frustration limiting their actions: it’s not identical to what a real military commander would feel, but may be analogous.

Risk needs to be engendered in MMOs or MMRTS games. Ladders and leader boards only impact achievers who manage to get to the top of the rankings–everyone else is essentially excluded. Coarse grained ranks, likewise, make it difficult to distinguish between a player on the way up and a player on the way down. A player’s reputation needs should be directly impacted by their record of success or failure, and should be visible in multiple axes:

• Overall record,
• Monthly, weekly, or daily record,
• Trending toward success, or trending toward failure, and
• Trending toward challenge, or trending toward cowardice.

How can MMO developers encourage role playing and a feeling of “world” in their games? Does it come down to licensing a hot intellectual property, or is there something else that makes a world believable or immersive to the players?
Many MUDs had a real sense of world. Many more MUDs had a sense of world because of the players who were present and sharing in it.

How does consistency of design and artwork relate to immersiveness? Is new intellectual property viable in the MMO market (as EQ or AC were at the time)? Is the success of EQ’s Norrath world related to the size of the fan base, to the zone architecture, or is there something inherently more attractive about Norrath than Dereth? Which fictional or game world (Middle Earth, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Krynn, Ringworld, Norrath, Dereth, Sosaria, etc.) has the strongest hold on its fans, and why? What can be done to make a world more captivating to game players?