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Extra Credits on Humane Game Design and STO
leviathan99
Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
Extra Credits did a new video about a month ago about humane game design:
https://youtu.be/GArkyxP8-n0
Summary of James' points:
The world's most profitable games rely on players intrinsically wanting to play the game rather than feeling like they have to.
Game play sessions should have exit points.
Developers should not try to habituate players to schedules.
Guilt should not be a motivator. There shouldn't be a punishment or penalty for not logging in on a given day.
Friendships should not be exploited.
Adrenaline should not be used to substitute for real life empowerment for the player. Your life outside the game should be improved by playing the game.
It is unethical to waste players' time or artificially lengthen an experience because it robs people of more meaningful activities they could spend their time on.
Player joy is more important than capturing player time.
Game developers should feel responsibility if they follow design models which strip a player of their money or interfere with normal human relationships or if gameplay consumes time that could be better spent outside of a game.
I feel like a lot of this directly plays into concerns with how STO is designed. It could be linked to XP rate of progression, to the removal of lohlunat pearls, to the construction of Delta Recruitment as an event. I think James at Extra Credits has strong points and that there are legitimate ethical issues with the design approach used in Star Trek Online.
https://youtu.be/GArkyxP8-n0
Summary of James' points:
The world's most profitable games rely on players intrinsically wanting to play the game rather than feeling like they have to.
Game play sessions should have exit points.
Developers should not try to habituate players to schedules.
Guilt should not be a motivator. There shouldn't be a punishment or penalty for not logging in on a given day.
Friendships should not be exploited.
Adrenaline should not be used to substitute for real life empowerment for the player. Your life outside the game should be improved by playing the game.
It is unethical to waste players' time or artificially lengthen an experience because it robs people of more meaningful activities they could spend their time on.
Player joy is more important than capturing player time.
Game developers should feel responsibility if they follow design models which strip a player of their money or interfere with normal human relationships or if gameplay consumes time that could be better spent outside of a game.
I feel like a lot of this directly plays into concerns with how STO is designed. It could be linked to XP rate of progression, to the removal of lohlunat pearls, to the construction of Delta Recruitment as an event. I think James at Extra Credits has strong points and that there are legitimate ethical issues with the design approach used in Star Trek Online.
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also it can lead to "burnout" once we get tired of grindings, once we get new shiny items and bam, it become obsolute, and repeat more grindings to earn seals and marks.
it get old fast.
Seriously? Is it just because you're paraphrasing them or does this sound odd to me? It sounds like I shouldn't play, say Grand Theft Auto, because it won't improve my life outside the game?
Does that mean I can only play educational games?
Or is this just a meaningless word, because having fun playing game improves my real life anyway?
you make Cryptic sound like a Fascist corrupt government. some people take this way too seriously.
These aren't life and death situations it's a game.
What next? are Cryptic going to enslave third world children to replace the animal testing hamsters powering the servers?
examples:
Your life outside the game should be improved by playing the game.
It is unethical to waste players' time
um... yeah... good luck trying to enforce that as a moral standard.
My character Tsin'xing
You know its gone too far when you start arguing about the ethical and moral ramifications of...
...a computer game
*cough* Concerned mothers of america *cough*
Player joy is more important than the metrics of how long we've been logged in - don't timegate missions just so you can pad your metrics.
It's downright frustrating when you artificially increase the amount of time it takes to do something - timegating and stupidly high XP requirements.
I disagree. I think you are looking at it far too black and white. This is an issue of degrees and fuzziness that can be hard to distinguish without a case by case basis.
STO has some serious offenders here, though. Take fail conditions in the queues. In most MMOs the instance/boss simply resets after a fail, and the team has to try again, usually they get to adjust strategy and talk about what went wrong to fix that, or whether they even can handle it at all. In STO you get kicked out, get a paltry 10 marks, and have a half hour cooldown before you can try again. This is a clear example of bad design that is bad for players that just wastes the players time.
Post 50 Leveling grind is also terrible, especially for those of us that have alts, and isn't even close to the game we started playing, learned to enjoy, and were happy to pay for. The game used to be very friendly to people with alts, yet now it expects us to waste our time on an excessive level grind.
Crafting is also here with all the pointless timegating, and especially the useless mods. Having two minute crafting jobs seems fine, yet what am I doing for those two minutes most of the time? Probably nothing at all. It is too short to go deal with something else in most cases, and I can't set up a queue there to use those things I craft in the next project, so I have no choice but to wait for it to complete so I can use those components in a longer job that lets me do other things.
The removal of the dilithium stores also plays into the player unfriendly issue with crafting, not to mention the fact we still can't craft kit modules.
Also the way they like to change things around here can be very unfriendly to players. Consider the change not long ago that removed the mark turn in dilithium from bonus dilithium events. Rather than TRIBBLE over everyone who was expecting this same bonus as usual, and the fact that we were originally intended to and encouraged to use such a mechanic, they could have announced the change, but not implemented it until AFTER said event. If they had said "Okay we want to change this, dilithium from mark turn ins won't be getting a bonus from now on, so this is your LAST CHANCE to get that bonus you were expecting, this event!" It would not have gone over so badly.
Dailies in general are a player unfriendly thing that exist only to encourage you to log in every day. If instead a game offered that equivalent bonus up to a cap on a weekly or monthly basis, it would be far better for players who can't log in every day or don't want to do the same thing every day, yet if they don't, they fall behind in many cases.
STO does do some things well, though. Take the event ships and the alt discount. This is very good for players. Account bound equipment, while they really need to include more, especially reputation gear, this is a good thing for players. The reputation sponsorship is also a good thing.
The concept of humane game design is to respect your players and the way they play and their time and money, not to try and squeeze it out of them and make changes based on bad metrics.
in STO, the strong reliance on the 'Token Economy' and 'Variable Ratio Reinforcement', as per BF Skinner, is indicative of a system designed specifically to target the creation and/or perpetuation of addictive behavior, and the proof in the pudding here.. even when we are forced to play in a very specific pattern, or risk almost punitive action with a reduction in progress, and even though the game is riddled with bugs and stability issues, we are still logging in for more and still spending money. are we really seen as nothing more than a revenue stream to be exploited?
As for "real-world empowerment" - if I had that, I wouldn't be seeking agency by playing a freaking video game, would I? You don't see, say, the president of the US spending a lot of time playing STO or DDO or anything. Hell, far as I know he doesn't even play Candy Crush!
Those "ethical issues" were there ... -- I'm tempted to say "right after we went F2P" , but in truth a lot longer .
The whole "going F2P" was an ethical farce, from the "we're not going F2P guys, so don't abandon us and keep paying those sub's !!!" (OK, the second part I made up because it is true, but the first part was actually said by Stormshade right in the middle of their as-yet unannounced work on F2P) .
And then you got the whole way we went F2P, with EVERYTHING getting sacrificed for the goal, so much so that we even had one brave pro-Cryptic podcaster calling for a boycott ... .
And then we got to the first real content after the Year of Hell / going F2P (the Deferi ground zone) , and it was so badly time gated that you could only do stuff there once every 4 hours (as their very first item on their otherwise empty rotating calendar) .
So really , where were Cryptic's ethics back then ?
I mean, Cryptic told us ... stuff, so we'd keep'em afloat during the YoH .
Before that, hey told us stuff so to keep the PVPers & Klingons hoping .
Now they tell us stuff to pads the Metrics .
Are we "in the know" to see which lie and which half-life is more justified ?
All we do know ... , all we sense is that were not being told the actual reasons for many of the changes that have happened to the game .
... all we can do is use our senses and our logic , and sometimes even those fail us in the face of the Babushka doll that Cryptic represent ...
I would be very surprised if our own developers were entirely comfortable with the idea that companies exist solely to make profit. (In fact, the idea itself along with the idea that shareholders own companies only really became mainstream in the 1970s, in large part due to activists who flooded academia with grants pushing their perspective in areas of business and law, until they redefined the basic realities of business.)
In general, a lot of game developers working for publicly traded companies have a LOT of cognitive dissonance, dissonance which they vent off through work like Jane McGonigal's work where you see game developers try to argue that games like WoW DO (or CAN) improve real life, enhancing agency, value, productivity, effectively claiming that there is no downside to game design.
I don't think that's really true though because game developers created or at least attracted the fringes of a movement like Gamergate. That's psychological externality of game design exhibit A.
You may not think anyone says that Grand Theft Auto is healthy and beneficial and you may choose to see it (and WoW and STO) as junkfood. I think designers frequently have a far more utopian perspective than you do there, however.
I'd recommend watching the Videos on Free 2 Play and Microtransactions too, they describe how companies should run F2P games and Microtransactions, and as a player if STO were run the way mentioned in those videos I'd gladly support Cryptic with my wallet.
As it stands now, STO is at risk of becoming a toxic Pay-2-win spiral of microtransactions where players MUST pay just to maintain competetiveness with other players...
I've already passed the point where I'd leave this game to go elsewhere... but alas, this is the only Star Trek game worth playing online right now.
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster
I haven't played every MMO, but the ones I have played you try, try again. Anarchy Online, from what I remember, if a world boss spawns, you can go and try to kill it at your leisure (if someone else doesn't do it first). Some of them had to be spawned and had timers to them where they despawn after a while but until that point you can try and kill them repeatedly. It was usually a fairly generous timer, though. For other bosses a raid might wipe and have to push through hordes of respawning trash but they can still get to the boss and try again.
Other more recent MMOs like SWTOR, the Secret World, Rift, the instanced bosses reset. You try again until you win or quit. And for RIFT and SWTOR, you can always just requeue. TSW has some annoying lockout timers on the nightmare dungeons, but while you're in the dungeon you can try and try again as long as you want.
The other lockouts I remember typically come from completions, not fails.
I would say STO should at least be compared to the more recent MMOs in this regard, as it uses systems that many modern MMOs are using like instancing and PUG queues.
Sorry, but this is all complete nonsense.
It is not the responsibility of the developer, it is the responsibility of the gamer. If you don't have the discipline to limit your time or money on a video game then that is your own fault.
but first major point: destinguish between the game and the community. in wow for example most pressure comes from the community. not from the game itself.
second major point: i think if a player has the choice of spending money or waiting, its not really addictive. if you feel addiction, its YOUR impatience you are addicted to.
im spending less money/year on STO than in wow via subscription, cause i can WAIT or "play" for the items instead of wanting them now like a little toddler.
i think if someone is really feeling that way and thinkin about a GAME this way, i defenetely respect it, BUT its YOUR addiction you are unveiling, not anything that programmed in the game.
humans can become addicted to all kind of stuff.
BUT THAT DOESNT MEAN THE STUFF IS EVIL. it means the Human is to weak and should take a thought or two before choosing "stuff" whatever it is.
theres actually pretty few real stuff out there that defenetely is "designed" to trigger addiction. (im speaking about things that trigger physical addiction, most things trigger addiction psychically!)
this game is not a drug that was designed for, its just "peeking" at
impatience and greed.
its still YOUR GREED and YOUR IMPATIENCE.
if you cannot cope with it, DONT DO IT.
many people can drink alcohol without feeling any addiction, so why prohibit alcohol just because a few cant CONTROL THEMSELVES.
__
STOP BLAMING OTHERS for your own human weaknesses.
this game is by far the most open and forgiving game ive ever seen. its clearly not pinpointing any weaknesses at all.
i mean really you can play pve missions on adv with white mk xii gear ... so no real need for epic or mk xiv so i still dont understand it. i never felt the "need" to buy anything.
Someone's got to keep WOPR distracted so it doesn't finish getting the nuke codes.
STO is one of the most (if not the most?) "humane" F2P games I've ever played. That's kinda why (besides the Trek, of course) I stick around.
Who's "stripping" money from players? Content is free. New ships are the major revenue stream.
I'll add my thoughts to the pile of F2P player entitlements: "Players should feel responsibility to contribute financially to the ongoing development and other operations of the games they enjoy playing. Just like shipping manufacturing jobs overseas obscures the 'real' costs of business, F2P games allow players to believe that making games is cheap and that their fun is an entitlement."
Hmmm, but then the developers wouldn't have any responsibility towards them now would they? That's unethical on the part of the prison, rather than the game developers or publishers.
I laughed a bit when I read your post.
Then, just to verify, I listened to the first few seconds of the video.
Yup. Same same slightly higher pitched, slightly sped up voice over that you can enjoy in many other high quality videos, that also feature no meaningful content.
For even more giggles, check out that guys website and see what business he's in.
Why, those dastardly, cash grabbing fiends!
They would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those pesky kids...