test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
How gamification makes Star Trek Online no longer a game
leviathan99
Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
If Cryptic is so concerned about how we play...
How long we play
How often we play
Where we play
When we play
What we do
How often we get rewards
How fast we level
How many times we run a piece of content
... Then I have a proposal for Cryptic:
Just play my account for me if it all matters to you so much.
The sad part is that some of these are things I would do anyway. Last year, I did seasonal content all the time. Heck, last summer I did.
But telling me I HAVE TO for the new seasonal rewards?
That makes me not want to anymore.
That should be pretty logical.
Jane McGonigal (author of "Reality is Broken") defines a game this way, borrowing the definition from Bernard Suits:
Games are unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.
The only unnecessary obstacle or voluntary thing left about STO is whether we login. Everything is about shaping our behavior now and tying every outcome to a required action.
Not that I trust McGonigal's approach or the extremes she takes it to, applying it business culture as a proponent of "gamification", using game design to influence behavior. She focuses way too much on the task design aspect.
Heather Chaplin (game journalist for the New York Times and NPR) offered a nice rebuttal to gamification in a Slate volume:
Jeff Watson of OCAD University said, outlining why gamification is ANTI-game:
Bret Willet knows the score:
External incentive structure DE-motivate:
McGonigal and gamification's proponents have lost the script. They started with a good idea of what constitutes a game but have emphasized work over play, what constitutes "unnecessary", what constitutes "voluntary", what constitutes "intrinsic." They've lost play.
And so it's fitting if STO loses playERS following the approach.
I would argue that it is impossible to employ gamification and still even qualify as a game.
And that, I think, is where we are.
How long we play
How often we play
Where we play
When we play
What we do
How often we get rewards
How fast we level
How many times we run a piece of content
... Then I have a proposal for Cryptic:
Just play my account for me if it all matters to you so much.
The sad part is that some of these are things I would do anyway. Last year, I did seasonal content all the time. Heck, last summer I did.
But telling me I HAVE TO for the new seasonal rewards?
That makes me not want to anymore.
That should be pretty logical.
Jane McGonigal (author of "Reality is Broken") defines a game this way, borrowing the definition from Bernard Suits:
Games are unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.
The only unnecessary obstacle or voluntary thing left about STO is whether we login. Everything is about shaping our behavior now and tying every outcome to a required action.
Not that I trust McGonigal's approach or the extremes she takes it to, applying it business culture as a proponent of "gamification", using game design to influence behavior. She focuses way too much on the task design aspect.
Heather Chaplin (game journalist for the New York Times and NPR) offered a nice rebuttal to gamification in a Slate volume:
In a gamified world, corporations don't have to reward us for our business by offering better service or lower prices. Rather, they can just set up a game structure that makes us feel as if we're being rewarded. McGonigal goes even further. She talks about an "engagement economy that works by motivating and rewarding participants with intrinsic rewards, and not more lucrative compensation." This economy doesn't rely on cashrather, it pays participants with points, peer recognition, and their names on leader boards. It's hard to tell if this is fairy-tale thinking or an evil plot.
Jeff Watson of OCAD University said, outlining why gamification is ANTI-game:
Gamification as formulated by its proponents let's thumbnail it as, "the application of points and badges and other representations onto real-world behaviors under the assumption that doing so will 'incentivize' or motivate certain actions" is anti-human. It's about closing down possibility rather than opening it up. When "successful" (which, to be sure, it often is not), it amounts to a sleazy kind of behavioral control system. Population control is anathema to what games are, or have been, or ever will be.
Bret Willet knows the score:
I cringe every time I hear someone say gamification, which these days is quite a lot. On one hand my discomfort is due to the deception of the term itselfvery rarely do things that are gamified actually resemble games. Margaret Robertson wrote, What were currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Different writers have proposed more honest terms for this process, with pointsification being a fair and accurate depiction and Ian Bogosts term exploitationware being a more pointed view. In fact, they rarely even resemble each other.
The larger but more subtle issue with things that get labeled gamification is the lack of thoughtfulness as to whether building in an extrinsically motivating mechanic like a scoreboard is the right move or not.
However Jesper Juul reminded us, external rewards have actually been shown to decrease motivation to perform more complex tasks. So the problem is that as more and more parts of our lives become gamified, we will be less and less motivated to do things that actually matter. I do understand the appeal; enticing behavior with external rewards offers the illusion (if not the reality) of control; its a trick every parent figures out. But its a problematic strategy that only lasts so long before meltdown.
Scott Nicholson is one person who is thankfully thinking carefully here, and he has developed a framework he calls meaningful gamification, which he defines as the use of game design elements to help users find meaning in non-game contexts. His emphasis on meaningful is crucial to move away from simple points to more intrinsic motivations, or aspects of a task that are worth doing for their own sake.
External incentive structure DE-motivate:
Schell a.o. overlook that external rewards are also known to be strong demotivators. A famous 1973 experiment (Undermining childrens intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less...
As you can see, this is completely at odds with the argument that Schell is making. I cant claim to be an expert on the psychology here, but it does seem that external rewards may have a kind of reversal effect: If you dislike the activity, external rewards make it more attractive, but if you like the activity, external rewards make it less attractive.
McGonigal and gamification's proponents have lost the script. They started with a good idea of what constitutes a game but have emphasized work over play, what constitutes "unnecessary", what constitutes "voluntary", what constitutes "intrinsic." They've lost play.
And so it's fitting if STO loses playERS following the approach.
I would argue that it is impossible to employ gamification and still even qualify as a game.
And that, I think, is where we are.
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
Then would it be fair to say that 10 months ago you participated in what has become known as the "grindversary" -- where you no longer were awarded a gift , but instead you were "asked" to padd some metric of justification for the employment of Denise Crosby ?!
See , from a monetary / performance POV , it could be said that each "success" (or gamble) is used to finance / justify the next one .
The fact that the fans were busy bickering about the grinaversary and you could slip in more content removals (that were acknowledged only much later by fans as a nerf) -- well that's just icing on the metrics .
Truth to be told your list of supposed metrics above made me wonder if the following one exists :
"how long does the "average spending costumer" have to be in game until he/she opens up their purse ? "
^^ From that standpoint , would the non-needed new timegates make more sense ?
Or are we still looking at "don't allow them to buy their way out of it , they must play the game" (and inflate some other metric that way ...) .
See , it's one thing to juggle and manipulate the meaning of the numbers that they get , but quite another to guess at the reasons for pulling those numbers in the first place .
The former is about wanting to know what they are doing , the latter (and more interesting to me) is the why's to their actions ... , particularly now when such a seemingly methodical man such as D'Angelo is at the helm .
Time will only tell!
After this year's developments in STO, especially since the launch of DR I can't help but feel about this topic in the same way.
Same with Elite Dangerous, it's not made with a view to metrics, it's made with a view to what the players can do ingame. More options = more players making the universe feel alive.
Star Citizen hasn't even got it's Persistent Universe up yet and it's already shown that the less you limit the players choices (more ships, more ideas on how to play, moving away from just a Space Flight Combat Sim to a "Universe Sim") has brought in thousands more people who wouldn't have got in otherwise.
That's just 3 of the space based MMO's out there...
OP thanks for that really interesting, informative and accurate post.
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci
Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac
Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
Have you really played EVE as a new player lately because honestly, that is not how I'd characterize EVE or it's playerbase.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I've been playing lead guitar, solo, ever since the whole thing began with nerfing STF in season 7.
Where people gladly sold out because they couldn't get over themselves being allowed to buy the ground sets, rather than pay attention to the bigger picture and care for the overall health of the game.
And so it went until the whole game was deleted, nerfed and ruined.
Where were you 2 years ago
These are natural questions for a GAME DEVELOPER. If you have a beef with their role in the creation of this medium, well actually entertainment products aren't for you. Authors, directors, musicians, they all take analogous roles in the creation of their poduct. They decide what's shown, what's told, at what pace, towards what end, and so on and so forth and you won't find a single game out there where a dev hasn't decided how fast players level, what rewards they get, or what their expected playtime should be.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
If a chef brought you your food and then stood next to you, dictating how long you should chew each mouthful and stopping you every 5 minutes so you can do some clerical work, would you not be annoyed?
Free Tibet!
Specious analogy. The chef prepares your food according to his/her recipe. You can ask for changes but he's/she's the one that ultimately decides the fine details. Its the same situation here (roughly speaking, the number of people consuming a single dish is of course quite different and that fact doesn't exactly work in your favor either.)
Here, we have the course of STO. We can decide what we play, for how long we play, and what we play for. Cryptic is NOT standing over anyone deciding that they should log into CCA and follow that up with a grind through the Voth Battlezone. If you feel compelled to order the duck/Breen Carrier then you'll have to live with the decided cost of the meal and the dev's view of how that should be generally prepared.
To argue otherwise is non-sensical. It blithely ignores the structure and mechanics of this video game, and of how humans interrelate in general (though I won't suggest that's because you/the OP don't in fact understand human behavior or game mechanics sufficiently to make a simple statement about them, only that you want to misrepresent them for the sake of an arbitrary argument that allows you to maintain a certain attitude with respect to the devs.)
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
I would not be complaining if I could run ToI on my own schedule.
I would not be complaining if I could run any of the activities I choose a certain number of times in order to unlock an item.
I would not be complaining if all of the activities paid out in the same way so that we had to make a choice about which items to buy.
Instead, I am faced with this:
I must be online at a certain time.
I must start the activity as soon as it appears.
I must be fully engaged in the entire activity for the entire time it runs, or I get no credit for doing it at all. (Get distracted once for 60 seconds and it's game over).
Not only must I run the activity a set number of times in order to unlock the ability to purchase the item I want, I must also run other activities in order to have a good chance of getting the right set of holiday ornaments -- otherwise, even if I participated in the activity I'm still out of luck.
And I have to do this on EACH of my characters, if I want the item for more than one character. And this is time taken away from other content that I must play in order to get other rewards (Reputation, Starship Mastery, Level/Specialization Points, etc.)
By rigidly structuring the reward system in this way, they have destroyed casual participation in the game; instead of doing the things I enjoy doing when I want to do them and replaced that with doing the things they want me to do when they want me to do them.
There's only so much of that one can take before it stops being fun, especially when it interferes with other activities.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
The apologist mentality always leaves me feeling nauseated.
Does Cryptic have to come round to your house and charge you $50 every time you want to use the bathroom before you drop your blinkered following of the company line?
Free Tibet!
Now that's a business strategy I can see gaining some traction, I like it.
instead of playing how you want to play you are forced to jump through hoops.
Reputation grind is my biggest bug bear 20h downtime for certain stages. Sorry cryptic but I would prefer to FARM all the items in a few sittings and junk them all at one go instead you got timers saying when you can and cant play.
Crafting is just aweful bolted on gated content again your limited by your dilithium which is also limited by how much you can farm a day.
If you want to do advanced missions your gated after each one OK fair enough if you do three normally the timer has dropped off the first one but what if you just want to do a specific mission till you master it.
It should have been clear to someone at cryptic that when they released Darkness Rising the player base CHOSE to grind up on a single patrol mission so they could enjoy the new content in a single sitting. Instead they gutted the exp to make the whole experience less than enjoyable and put in god awful patrol missions which wasn't even enough EXp to progress to the next mission in the arc normally 2 or 3 days of solid playing then you progressed enough to do a 30 minute mission and god knows what you did in the last mission its been days since you last did it.
Think about it this way: what if STO has turned into a game of "improve metrics" by playing around with spreadsheet numbers and mechanics? "If you do X, what happens to that number? Oh that didn't work... try fiddling with Y and see if that does things better?"
Devs aren't working on making a game for customers; rather we've become the game for the devs.
I'm just quoting this to emphasize it, because I believe it portrays my feelings perfectly as well.
I don't mind putting some time to obtain whatever it is I may want in a game, it's to be expected in any MMORPG. But when the developer insists on me doing that time on their terms, via their methods and in a way they want me to, it just stops being fun. Even if it's interesnting, the sheer audacity in the attempt to "control" the way I play/enjoy a game in order to padd corporate metrics just gives out a very very bad vibe to me. Especially relating a 'winter wonderland' event, which is suposed to be a laid back, fun and joyfull distraction from the actual gameplay for a month or two.
The fact that I'm asked to do repetitive content that can be failed, on their scedule, multiple times just to get the right to buy things from a 'winter store' is just so asinine that I'm simply at a loss for words.
Exactly. It's not that action or even effort dictates reward. Last year's grind didn't bug me as much because it was basically logging in for 25 days and then I was free to decide what to do once I finished one activity. It's a matter of scale and degree.
Play IS about voluntary choice, about options in dealing with obstacles. If you give me five ways to do something over different times, different time windows, different methods, that's a game.
If everything is laid out in detail, why can't Cryptic just bot my account while I'm offline and I just send them a check for a new ship once a month? That seems to be what they want.
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
There I agree, Interplay's Trek games were phenomenal, although I can't see them getting any major licenses these days. Spectrum Holobyte's one Trek game was good, but I don't think they exist anymore.
Of all the companies that I think could do justice to the license, the one that shines out is Telltale. Whether or not you like the Game of Thrones or Borderlands IPs, Telltale did a phenomenal job staying true to the source material, and could probably do the same with Trek if they put their minds to it.
Yeah I had heard about that one [edit, or, based on the date, another browser MMO based in fluidic space] several times in the last couple of years - last I heard it was cancelled for the umpteenth time. I wonder if it'll be any good....
Yeah, as you were responding I was googling. I guess by the shotgun approach, one of these days we will end up with something better.
not sure I want to know.... some thing in the back of my head thinks it'd have paid season updates.
My character Tsin'xing