The Theory Of
Here you'll find discussion of all manner of topics relating to the theory of multiplayer games. As I see it, anyway. A note to commentors: if you stray off-topic or if your reply contains ad hominem attacks, your comment will be deleted.

Synopsis: Virtual items are actually just clauses in a vast, constantly-changing service contract with a game company.  Microsoft Excel is used as an illustrating analog.

In order to understand how people can pay real money for virtual items and virtual currencies, you have to remember that all real world money is transacted between real world people.  So when in doubt, look at everything from the standpoint of the real world.  Thinking about a virtual item as a thing that has actual value just walks us down a garden path to confusion.  A virtual spoon is not a spoon because there is no spoon.

So what actually is that virtual spoon?  It is a portion of a service agreement between you and the game company.  It is like a dialog box in Excel.  It's a feature of the product.  If Excel were a free product where Microsoft charged a one-time fee to enable the Search feature, it would be just like any of the MMOs that begin free and then charge for items.  That's because those virtual items are merely product features.  They change the user's experience of operating the product.

Buying a spoon for your character to do battle with simply changes the features of the product that are available to you.  It is presented such that you see a spoon.  In Excel, it is presented such that you see a dialog box.  Either way, there is functionalty and appearance, and you gain access to them by paying money.

The notion of a spoon as a service feature gets a bit confusing when we start talking about trading spoons in the virtual world.  To stay on top of things, let's go back to the Excel analogy.  Imagine that everyone who uses Excel is operating on the same spreadsheet.  It's a huge spreadsheet, some millions of cells in each dimension, so there's room to find a spot for your data.  In that environment, you bought the Search feature, which gives you a Search dialog.  I haven't paid for that, so I can't search.  But per the functionality created by Microsoft, you can let me use your Search dialog.  Regardless of how this is accomplished, you are in some way letting me use a service feature that you originally obtained from Microsoft.

This is the same thing that happens in an MMO when one player gives an item to another player through their characters.  It is simply the use of the product as it is coded.  It permits one player to transfer the right to do certain things to another player.  We think of it as a transfer of virtual spoons, but in fact there is no spoon.  There is only the right to use the MMO as if there was a spoon.

Because you paid money to be able to use the Search feature, it only makes sense that value would be associated with it.  If you were to transfer it to me, then I would have something of real world value.  It makes sense that I would give you something back of real world value.  I might give you something that is related to the software, whether an MMO or Excel, or I might just mail you a check.

We also place value on our time.  If it takes me 10 hours to operate a product to get a certain result, then I will associate 10 hours of effort with that result.  If my time is valuable to me, then I expect to get some value back from someone if I transfer that result to them.  If I've worked for 10 hours to get to a certain spreadsheet built, then if anyone wants that spreadsheet, they have to offer me something that I value.  They might offer me a Search function in return, and I might accept because I never went and paid to have access to the Search function.  And all that is an analogy to someone in an MMO spending time to obtain a certain game item that they then want to sell to another player.

Ultimately, it's just a change of the way that the software can be used, not transfers of items.

Some are wondering why I'm going on about this.  It's important to understand what virtual items are and are not.  When people lose track of reality, they start to do things that no longer make sense.  The case of the Habbo Hotel property thefts tells me that the judicial system hasn't lost its way yet.  The crime there was not the theft of virtual items, but the fact that somebody connived to transfer rights to a product feature from its proper rights-holders to themselves.

As a point of contrast, consider that soulbound items are a modification of the service agreement that I've been discussing.  With the soulbound service agreement, you cannot transfer the service associated with soulbound items to other players.  That is part of your agreement with the game company.  The right to use a soulbound spoon cannot be transferred to another player's account so that they can use it.  The game provider has implicitly stated that that was true as part of the game contract.  The right to use the Search function cannot be turned over to another user in Excel because the Search function is soulbound.

So the next time you break out that spoon to do battle with the uglies, and thrill over the fact that it just proc'd Greasy Mess for the third time in the fight, remember that there is no spoon.  There is only the agreement that when you push certain buttons, something that looks like a spoon gets waved around on the screen, and the Greasy Mess effect will be applied to the opposing avatar.

It's all awfully clinical when you get down to it, but that's where the truth lies.  Down in the nitty gritty details.

Synopsis: By introducing partially-autonomous player characters into a game, the fiction of a game world is better maintained.  Other game features are made possible by such a character setup.  It is acknowledged that the setup could not be introduced into existing games without seriously damaging the existing entertainment in them.  It is also acknowledged that many current players wouldn't care for such a setup.

I've been playing every MMO trial that even remotely has any appeal to me.  Most recently, I fired up trials for a couple games that I have paid to play: Eve Online and World of Warcraft.  The contrast of two such popular games is quite striking.  Perhaps because I was crossing such a large experiential chasm that I actually fell into thinking about roleplaying in World of Warcraft.

I have never been a roleplayer.  Most people's versions of roleplaying are rather too dramatic for me, like a high school playwright run amok.  But because I wanted to try a Paladin (a class that came out after I left), I created an Alliance race character.  A human.  I was running through the starter quests and was eventually routed to Stormwind City.  I thought that Lord of the Rings Online's rendition of Bree was beautiful, but Stormwind City just knocked my socks off.

The last time I played World of Warcraft, I was driven to develop characters that could be useful to my guild.  So I tended to be rather business-like in my leveling because the characters weren't of any use until they were 60.  So it was time to be efficient.  Get these three quests.  Finish them off all at once.  It saves on running around time.  Reserve guildie help for an hour from now for that chain of quests that doesn't solo well.  And so on.

Part of that business-like attitude was turning off the ambient music and also doing everything in third person.  Not being able to hear or see monsters would just be a pain in my attempts at efficiently rising through the ranks.  While just fooling around with the trial, because I was in no hurry, I left the music on.  When I got to Stormwind City, I also dropped the view down into first person.

I found myself playing tourist.

I was casually walking along in the city, with the residents walking here and there.  Shopkeepers were their usual inactive selves, but just walking into a shop at character eye level changed my attitude about experiencing the game world.  I was using the mouse to look around casually, playing tourist, and it was all very nicely done.  Good job, Blizzard.

One thing that damaged the experience, however, was the driving habits of the other players.  While the city's denizens were calmly walking hither and yon, the player characters were slamming into walls,  warping through space, casting garish spells, sitting in the middle of the road, etc.  It was all fairly chaotic.  It was far better than I have ever seen Orgrimmar, which is built to look chaotic, but I had a bit of a vision while watching the mayhem.

Actuallly, the vision came earlier, when I was shocked to see my character salute a quest-giving NPC after receiving the quest.  The point is that it did it all by itself.  It was a tiny glimpse of something that I think would really help retain the atmosphere of a game environment - semi-autonomous player characters.

I've commented on this on the MUD-Dev mailing list through the years, and playing tourist in Stormwind City gave me a reminder of how close we're getting to being able to tackle this idea of partial autonomy.

It works like this: you give directions to your character and then it carries them out, but only as far as they are consistent with the fiction of the game.  If a game is about roleplaying, then doing crazy illogical things like climbing to the top of the highest building in town and jumping off just to see what kind of a splat you make won't be something that your character will do, no matter how strenuously you insist that it's in keeping with your character's personality.

This can be used for those sorts of things that dungeonmasters and gamemasters used to handle back when everything was done with pen and paper.

Player: "I'm going to approach the demi-god and punch him in the nose"
Dungeonmaster: "No you're not, you're too scared"

This can be applied to combat, where player characters that are crafters have lined up before the gates to defend their city in the face of the coming doom.  Coming Doom appears in the form of a big ugly monster and the crafter army breaks and runs.  Not because the players said to run, but because the characters said to.

That, instead of training the monster away from town because the crafter happens to have a high run speed.  (sigh)

It can be applied to the social context of the game, ensuring that when a lord rides by, everyone, including the player characters, bow in respect.  Or, more to the point, that every Tom, Dick and Harry doesn't run out in front of the Lord to emote insults at him.  It's kinda hard to implement any backstory if none of the people in the kingdom are willing to abide by the rules of that backstory.  Knowing that the guy on the horse is an important person means that players can be thinking about how to get in good with him for various financial and social favors.

It can be applied in other ways as well (spontaneous racial bar fights anyone?  character phobias?), but I already know that any achiever worth his levels isn't going to be too interested in this technique.  It'll just slow down the process of leveling - which would have been anathema to me when I was trying to get my original World of Warcraft characters on a par with the rest of my guild.  I understand the desire to gain levels in a hurry.

A game including this notion of partial autonomy of player characters would be different from the sorts of games that we have today.  I won't try to go into the details, but World of Warcraft's beginning game, where levels are fairly meaningless, and characters just casually do things was very close to being ready to deliver on such a game.  Get the AI improved dramatically to get the NPCs doing interesting things andthen  that same AI can be used to make player characters partly autonomous.  It would produce quite an interesting environment for anyone who enjoys playing in an environment that retains its self-consistency.

And I could go play tourist without worrying about the local drivers.

As far as I'm concerned, an MMO is just a playground.  Why do I think that way?  Largely because I'm middle-aged.  I've had a successful career, had responsibilities, challenges, successes and disappointments.  I've travelled, worked hard, played hard and generally explored what life has to offer.  I'm content.  That's why an MMO is just a playground to me.

I read blogs and forum posts by people who want challenges.  They want permanent death of their characters.  They enjoy the grind.  They want to be able to build an empire and defend it against all comers.  They want equipment to break.  They want unpredictability and risk.  They want consequences of actions.  Penalties.  Things to overcome.

I'm what a hardcore gamer calls a carebear.  I'm a carebear because I've already played hardcore in the real world.  I went through the grind at work.  I got my levels in my career.  I got all the loot I could possibly want.  Gaining virtual stuff through a virtual grind is just plain idiotic to me.

But it's not idiotic to those who haven't been as lucky as I have been.  They are in jobs where they don't feel like they're accomplishing anything.  They don't feel challenged.  There's too little excitement in typing in another report.  And that's just the ones who want a challenge.  Beyond that, there are the socializers, the roleplayers, the explorers and the (gah) killers.  Each of them is coming to these MMOs in an effort to experience something that they're not finding in the real world.

Does that mean that MMOs are virtual worlds?  No.  It means that they are places where we look for wishes to come true.  They are playgrounds where we fantasize about that experience that is lacking in our lives.  Those hardcore players that want to build an empire are roleplayers, just as the PvP hombres are.  They're acting out fantasies that drive away the parts of their lives that they'd rather do without.

As the gaming community ages and gets experience in both gaming and in real life, I think that we're going to find that either the more experienced gamers are going to pack up and leave, or they're going to want just a rather more carebearish experience out of their entertainment.  If virtual achievements don't sate the appetites of those who lack real world achievements, then it may be that players will be forever addicted to searching for that one virtual achievement that will finally make them feel like they've accomplished something.  They'll never be able to "go carebear".

What's lacking in my life is just some old-fashioned silly fun.  That's why I come to MMOs looking for that.  That's why I keep describing systems that lack challenge, grind, accumulations of experience, money, power, equipment and so on.  Those things make people too serious about their gameplay.  The people drawn to those things want to achieve.  During my career, I don't recall a lot of silliness.  We worked because we had goals worth achieving.  You'll note that's exactly what the hardcore players are calling for - goals worth achieving.  That's why they want virtual worlds.  They want the real world, just modified sufficiently so that they can feel like they're Bill Gates or General Patton or James Bond.

MMOs aren't virtual worlds.  They're fun factories, not unlike Disneyland.  It just works out that there are a lot of people who aren't getting enough from the real world and they want the Pirates of the Caribbean to stop all that idiotic singing and to finally attack.

Yo ho ho.

Here's another game idea for you to chew on.

Instead of creating a new character and starting off on a chain of quests that you can accomplish with one hand tied behind your back, how about creating a new character and immediately going off to the nearby dungeon or fortress or battlefield or whatever and joining in a fight?

It's an open raid.  There are no groupings, no official raid leaders, etc.  There is a goal, however.  It can be capture a bridge, or defeat the boss, or rescue the captive, or any other simple goal that everyone playing the game can understand.

How can that be done?  How do we divvy up experience?  Aren't players who are higher level going to come in and just plow through the open raid?  Who gets the drops off the boss monster?

If you must have levels and experience and drops, then do it this way.  The area is locked for anyone not in a given level range.  They just can't get in.  Anyone who can get in gains experience according to their actions.  Damaging monsters, healing friends, disarming monsters, sneaking forward undetected, etc.  It's that old "use 'em to advance 'em" skill and experience model.  How that ties into levels is left as an exercise to the reader.

I wouldn't put item drops in from kills, but I'd hand out cash the same way I'd hand out experience.  After hunting a while, If you want something, you go buy it.

Then there's the raid win condition.  Everyone is working towards achieving the win condition (capturing the bridge, etc).  When that win condition is achieved, the experience that a given character has accumulated get magnified, and special rewards are granted to everyone via that same scale.  So the more healing you do, the more healing reward points you get.  The more damage you deal out, the more damage reward points you get.

Those reward points can be structured in numerous ways.  My preference would be to make them an award of faction points with temples devoted to various goals such as war, medicine, stealth, etc.  Or we could replace temples with NPC guilds, etc.  Once faction points are accumulated, they can be redeemed as favors that the guild or temple will grant the player character.  That might mean items, or it might be skills or anything else that a designer cares to make available through those institutions.

The primary goal of this open raid system is to bring players together towards common goals, just as they are required to do at the highest levels of most games - raids - or in PvP games.  The structure employed is intended to avoid the hassle of forming official groups and to simply have the players wade in with their characters.  The more the merrier, and rewards are granted on the basis of how you contribute.

I prefer to think of this system as a means of letting characters without levels forge through a series of ever-changing landscapes and goals.  However, it works equally well with levels and repeatable content.  These would replace the notion of zones devoted to level ranges.  Instead, there would be a castle that would be cleared out over and over again during the course of the day.  Each reset, the monsters could be varied a little.  Perhaps even the structure of the encounter could change.

At the lowest levels, open raids are simple.  Players charge in and kill everything.  As the levels increase, so does the difficulty of the tactics required.  This continues until the highest levels where the players either know and trust each other well enough to handle challenging situations, or they have formed official guilds of players who stick together to tackle the tougher raids.

My version of a tough raid is one that requires reactions from the players, not just planning for a fixed encounter per World of Warcraft raids.  The monsters may ambush the group at one of a dozen spots.  Or they may have blocked off certain approaches to the end goal.  I definitely want the geometry to change, even if the changes are modest - to forestall people constantly using the same geometry exploits over and over again.  As in my article about Depth, the opponent monsters themselves may change and different groups may use flavors of different tactics against the player characters.  Charges, defensive actions, ambushes, etc.  Those can easily be handled with current pathfinding AI.

Ultimately, I'd just like to be able to get into a game and find myself embroiled in some action with other players.  That's what massively multiplayer games are all about, in my opinion.  Those who prefer to do things on their own even within an MMO should still be able to do that, even within these open raids.

Games with depth have the quality of being easy to learn and hard to master.  This immediately infers that games with depth require players to demonstrate some skill.  The greater the gap between ease of learning and difficulty of mastery, the greater the depth of the game.  A game that is hard to learn and hard to master doesn't have depth.  It has complexity.  The two are not the same.

Note also that MMOs have multiple forms of entertainment to them, so they can be measured for depth in multiple areas.  It would seem to be rather pointless to claim that a game was deep or shallow in total.  Each form of entertainment in the game should be considered on its own merits.

Classic examples of games that have depth are Go and Chess.  They are easy to learn, but difficult to master.  A child can play Go because all it takes is the ability to place stones on a board.  But to win in Go requires some serious skill.  Chess is a shade harder to learn, but becoming a grandmaster remains a very difficult task.

Classic examples of games that lack depth are Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers.  They are easily learned and easily mastered.

When does mastery of a game become difficult?  When the patterns in the game are non-trivial.  The human mind is built to detect patterns.  We become intellectually skilled when we can examine a situation to discover one pattern, imagine another pattern in our heads, the figure out how to act to change one pattern to the other.

That's terribly abstract, so I'll use a simple example.  A move in Chess consists of looking at the game board and seeing how the pieces are laid out.  You might see the beginnings of a feint of activity on the left side of the board while spotting a quick kill coming in via the opponent's knight in three moves.  That is a pattern.  The pattern that you form in your imagination might be the death of the knight.  You work that out in your head and see the sequence of moves that will increase your chances of taking that knight.

The fact that you can approach the knight in about 100 different ways is part of what makes chess difficult to master.  So the Chess player is always pondering how they're going to accomplish their goal using the rules of the game.

Players don't spend much time pondering how they're going to tackle a given task in an MMO.  There are simply too few options.  The options are primarily focused on optimizing a character's abilities to a particular configuration.  It's like honing the edge on an axe.  When all is said and done, you're going to chop down progressively-larger trees.  There's no how involved, apart from the choice of how you're going to sharpen your axe.  And those choices are quite simple.  Do you want to use a serrated edge or a smooth edge?  Do you want to have a concave or flat grind?  And so on.

If you want depth out of your game systems, you're going to have to turn a critical eye on the techniques that you can use to approach a given goal, whether short-term or long-term.  The most important trait that a game system must possess is the tendency to change.  A static set of conditions in which you make your tactical decisions means that you're always going to make the same decisions.  Chess and Go have the quality of changing the game conditions after every move.  MMO systems tend to lack this quality because they want repeatability and predictability.  They oppose depth.

Depth of combat means that when you come up with a tactic for taking out one set of orcs, it may or may not work the next time you take on another set of orcs.  That's because of tactically-significant changes in the way that you encounter those orcs.  Imagine 100 different tactically-significant variations in orc encounters.  Not eye candy, but tactical differences.  The slipperiness of the terrain.  The location of the sun.  The direction of the wind.  The morale and training of the opposition.  Whether your're uphill or downhill from the opposition.  How much you know about where your opposition is and how many there are.  Whether they have short swords or long swords.  And so on.

(I should mention here that a tactically-significant variation is one where you are obligated to adapt your tactics to the situation.  If you see an opponent with a short sword, you employ your character one way.  If you see an opponent with a long sword, you employ your character another way.  If short swords and long swords are dealt with in an identical way, there's no point in having a distinction.  It's just pointless eye candy, like having pawns in Chess carrying different weapons.  A pawn moves a certain way, and that's all that matters.)

Depth of crafting means that when you know how to make one sword, you may not be able to make the next one in exactly the same way.  That's because of tactically-significant changes in the way that you encounter the next chunk of metal.  The ambient temperature may be different.  The metal may have inclusions of higher and lower quality metals, etc.  The order that you received may emphasize one trait over another in the sword.

Depth of magic means that when you know how to cast one spell, yo umay not be able to cast the next spell for the same effect the next time.  The tactical factors might be much the same as combat.  But if magic is based on ambient pools of magic, you may be closer or farther from a pool.  If magic is component, based, there will be variations in traits of the components.  The mage might improvise the use of an impure, raw source to get an effect that he hadn't planned.  His decisions may be affected by the presence of other spell-casters, whether friend or foe.

Don't get too caught up in the examples that I'm offering.  The point is that players aren't obligated to put much thought into how a certain encounter is going to be tackled.  Especially not after having tackled it once already.  There tends to be a 'correct' way to complete any given encounter, whether it is crafting, magic, questing, combat or anything else, and once found, the whole 'how' business goes out the window.  There is no game at that point, only a process of going through the motions.  Not unlike a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

When a game comes out that has web sites discussing tactics of encounters instead of walk-throughs of encounters, you'll be seeing signs of a game with depth.

Sorry, nobody is actually doing all these things in an upcoming MMO.  I'm just going to talk about how they might converge to produce some fascinating user interfaces.

Surface is a Microsoft application of multi-touch technology where you are seated at a table and the top of that table is a graphical display.  You reach out to touch the table's surface and your finger movements are detectable by the computer.  In addition, you can place objects on the table's surface that have identifying marks on their undersides (such as barcodes) that tell the table what they are.

A teaser video of Surface shows how users can set a camera down on the table and the table will detect that and wirelessly download the pictures from the camera.  It then shows the pictures splashed around the camera on the table.  The users can reach out and manipulate the pictures.  It's all rather slick.

Multi-touch technology is an intuitive extension of basic touch-screen technology.  Instead of using a single finger or stylus to indicate a single spot on the screen - like a mouse-click - multi-touch permits users to use as many as all 10 fingers (more, if you've got 'em).  Jeff Han did a great demo of multi-touch at TED not too long ago.  It shows him resizing and sorting photographs, fooling with a weird lava lamp style screensaver, and interacting with a mapping application.  It's all very intuitive.  Well worth watching if you haven't seen it yet.

Stereo displays are accomplished in a variety of ways, but their end result is being able to show 3D images.  Ideally, showing 3D video.  The system that I'm thinking of is the one that uses shuttered stereo glasses.  The idea is that the glasses only let one eye see at a time, and it quickly switches back and forth between them.  When the left eye can see, the screen displays what the left eye would see.  When the right eye can see, the screen displays what the right eye would see.  IMAX 3D uses this technique.

Voice is already employed by MMOs in systems such as TeamSpeak and Ventrilo.  Many of you have far more experience with it than I do.

Now apply all of this to an MMO.  The technique works perfectly well for any game, but this is an MMO site, so we talk about MMOs.

You are sitting at a table, wearing shuttered glasses.  You look down at the surface of the table and see - in 3D - your character and the environment around it.  Ideally, what you are seeing is consistent with the idea that the table is actually a window into the virtual environment of the MMO and you are looking down at the environment.  When you first play, you fight the temptation to reach through the tabletop to pick up your character.

Now that we have the display, we want to play.  For starters, we want to avoid using a physical keyboard and mouse, so everything goes through the multi-touch interface of the tabletop.  If you want to chat with other players, you use voice.  If you must enter text, a virtual keyboard can be used (see the Jeff Han video).

The 2D version of this has already been built as a prototype by Phillips.  Here's a demo of their Entertaible.  The only thing lacking with that system is the 3D element.

With an MMO structured along those lines, the style of gameplay would undoubtedly change.  Instead of driving a character around like a car, the player would probably indicate a destination for the character.  How about defensive strategies?  Suppose you want your character to defend in a certain direction?  You just make a motion on the screen to indicate that you want your character to defend, then draw the arc specifying the space to defend.  Perhaps you want to make sure that your character stays in a certain area.  You indicate that you want it to stay, then drag your finger around the area you want it to stay.

How about crafting?  Wouldn't you like to zoom the screen in on that sword you're crafting and actually tap the screen where you want the hammer blows to fall?  See the heating of the metal in the fire as your NPC assistant pumps the bellows?  You pull the metal from the fire with a gesture when the color of the metal reaches the right shade of orange or yellow.  Then you can only work it until it cools too much.

As you might guess, this permits greater potential for player skill to be expressed in in-game tasks.

Casting spells and combat systems certainly invite such a treatment.  Suppose that casting a spell was an issue of player skill.  You have to make the correct gesture, and it might be rather intricate.  Get it wrong and you might get a degraded effect.  Or none at all.  The same with combat.  A gesture for the tactics that you want your character to use, punctuated by directives for changing priority targets, movement, disengaging, reengaging, and so on.  I wouldn't go with a move-by-move system, but if that's your preference, feel free to try to design such a system.

The key point here is that multi-touch is essentially analog in its input instead of the digital input of a key being in the up or down position.  The mouse lets us do basic analog input, but it's klunky at best.  Developers have tried gesture interfaces through the mouse many times, but they don't catch on.  The mouse is just not precise or natural enough.  Mult-touch lets us input complex instructions in a very natural and intuitive way.  Admittedly, it would be cumbersome or impossible for those with limits on their manual dexterity.  However, if the system could be trained, it might prove more than tractable.

The ergonomics of this system are very nice, though it does have some problems.

1. Your hands and attention never leave the display or controls.  Instead of managing mouse, keyboard and screen, your attention remains fixed on the screen.  There is no 'home position' on the keyboard to constantly return to when mousing is finished.  No looking down at the keyboard to find that elusive key that you need to press.

2. The controls of the game can be as custom as the game likes.  Instead of putting all functions on dozens of key combinations and mouse button presses, the controls can be of any shape and permit all sorts of analog interactions.  Screen toggles, gauges, sliders, springs, and myriad other mechanisms can all be brought to life right under the fingers of the user.

3. Although available today, voice input is badly needed as the standard means of socializing.  Voice uses the audio side-band, leaving our fingers and eyes to focus on the action.  Voice is catching on, but many people still don't care to hear real voices, particularly in a fantasy MMO.  I'm assuming that, in time, we'll all either get comfortable with hearing real voices or we'll get technology that will pleasantly mask our voices.

4. The big ergonomic problem with the system is leaning over a table.  The reason that we sit upright at computers is for our backs.  It's bad news to be leaning over a table for hours at a time, day in and day out.  But it's equally bad to be reaching up to touch a vertical screen as the means of doing all interactions.  It may be that either an angled tabletop will be needed (like a drafting table), or some clever technique will be introduced that lets us look straight ahead while the display is flat and our hands can rest on it.  It may only require a mirror at a 45 degree angle.

5. A possible issue with shuttered 3D displays is that display rates are cut in half.  To get 60 frames per second requires a 120Hz monitor.  I know they exist, but I don't know if graphics cards can display 3D environments at 120 frames per second.

Clearly many people see the possibilities here, and companies are developing the technology.  One reason for bringing this up here is so that you will be aware of the potential (get out the vote!).  Another reason is to point out that games will change as a result of the new interaction techniques.  Things that are difficult to express through the keyboard and mouse today may become trivial when we can effortlessly point to a place in the virtual world and then use a gesture to tell the game what we want to do.

There can be quick and slow variations of gestures.  Single finger and multiple finger gestures.  There can even be game pieces that we can place on the table that we position and move in order to indicate various other things to the game (I can well imagine the game developers wanting to get their greedy little hands on the merchandising possibilities of that).  Applying all these technologies to games will clearly change the games themselves.  The transition to the use of player skill for casual tasks is only one of the more obvious possibilities.  Me, I'd love to be able to virtually skin an animal or fletch an arrow using my own skill instead of pushing a button and waiting for my character to use its 'skill'.

My guess is that within 10 years we'll see this technology applied to MMOs.  It is my fervent hope that when it happens we will be off the leveling treadmill.

Not many of you will understand this, but I offer it for the ones who will.

Whenever something is created for consumption by other people, the author of that creation is obligated to anticipate how people will react to it.  A novel is only successful if the people reading it are somehow intrigued by the writing, the characters, the events, the story and so on.  A successful movie must have a compelling script, story, editing, photography, acting, etc.  The success might be niche, appealing only to those who seek sex and violence, romance, science fiction or other escapism - or the success might be universal because the content of the book or movie might strike a chord at some fundamental level with the population.

The level grind is niche.  It is a kind of escapism that feeds on our desire to achieve something.  To feel a sense of clear progress when all the world around us is unfocused and scrambled, going nowhere and everwhere in a non-stop marketing frenzy.  We will enjoy it as we enjoy an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie.  It's something to tickle our desire for escapism, but a diet of action movies tends to dull the senses, just as the level grind does.

The connection with other people is fundamental.  This is why MMOs exist at all.  We want to interact with each other.  More correctly, we want to exist in relation to others.  The fact that MMOs are multiplayer is the first bit of fundamental insight that makes MMOs as popular as they are.  There are many single player role-playing games out there, but it is the interaction with other people that makes MMOs such a success.

How do we know when something is niche or fundamental to the entertainment that we're trying to present?  That is determined by the people that will be enjoying the entertainment.  Because MMOs are all about lots of people interacting, creating entertainment for that genre requires understanding not only people, but how people interact.

If you want to become a good systems designer for MMOs, you must understand how people interact.  The more broadly you understand that, the greater chance you have at creating a successful MMO system.

For example, if you create a system where killing a monster causes the player character that gets the killing shot to die in an explosion, you have to anticipate how people will react to that.  Their reactions won't be uniform.  You will get a bell-curve kind of distribution of reactions.  There will be people who have extreme reactions to it, but the bulk of people will react in a certain basic way.  You need to know how the bulk will react and how the extremists will react as well.  Then you need to figure out what's going to happen to the rest of your systems as a result of their reactions.

Players might never attack that particular monster.  Why?  At that point, it becomes a question of your understanding of people.  Will they not attack it because they don't want to get the killing blow?  What about groups that like risk and find it funny to see who will get blown up by the kill?  If your systems have a significant penalty for death, will that deter their enthusiasm for the 'fun' of that interaction?  Do players have pets?  Can they send the pet in for the killing blow?  Will they do that if their pet is an animal that they have to train from birth?  Will they do it when they can summon one up for 10% of their mana?  Is their mana easily restored or does it take a long time to generate?  What is inspiring players to get into combat in the first place?  How does that alter the balance of the system?

This sort of thinking goes on forever.  Can the system do this versus that?  How will people react if a certain condition is true?  More importantly, how will people react if what they expect and hope to happen doesn't happen?  That's important because there are things that you can do as a designer that will undermine any ability to offer entertainment to your customers.  Betraying the trust of customers can be lethal for an entertainment venue.  MMOs have done it, and they have paid dearly for it.  Ultima Online might have been as big as World of Warcraft ten years ago if they hadn't had free-for-all PvP.  The authors of Ultima Online missed some fundamental issues about how people behave in a virtual environment.

At the beginning of the article I made a snide comment about people not understanding this article.  That was a bit of psychology.  How many people do you think chose to read through more of the article than they normaly might just because that first line was there?  That's the sort of thing that goes into system design.  The snide comment is, however, fundamentally manipulative and is not good design practice.  Some who are reading this paragraph of the article will feel betrayed and may not read any farther in this article, let alone any other articles of mine.  To them, I apologize for the subterfuge.

[I should probably also add that some readers will read that first line, take affront and write something unpleasant in the comments.  Let's see how I do on that prediction.]

When all is said and done, system designers don't need to focus on graphics, sounds and numbers.  They need to focus on psychology, sociology, history and philosophy.  You can be sure that Will Wright is a student of those areas of knowledge.  It is why he comes up with games like The Sims and Spore.  He is addressing fundamental motivations that we all have, and he is addressing them through entertainment.

So look hard at your system designs.  Think about why they will fail.  To do that, you need to run as many different types of people through your system, and you need to do it in your head while the system is still on paper.  If you understand the basic motivations of men and women, adults and children, conservatives and liberals, religious and atheists, tall and short, black and white, and myriad more dichotomies beyond that, then you are well on your way to becoming a fine systems designer.

Disney calls them Imagineers.

If I recall correctly, the last time I was in Norrath was back in the summer of 2000.  I had originally started playing in March of 1999, took a break after a year, and then went back briefly.  I ultimately gave up on EverQuest because of the extreme grind and the "Super Chicken GM Event" as I refer to it.  Some of you may remember it.  Kolonel Kluck anyone?

Seven years later, here I am trying every free trial on an MMO that I can find, just to see what the state of the art is in gaming.  I won't play another level grinder, so nothing has called to me.  The closest I've gotten to being entertained by an MMO was Eve Online.  But because that's primarily about PvP and involves rather serious play, I decided that it shared too much with level grinders.  And by the way, I think that Lord of the Rings Online is just a beautiful game.  If only I could wander around in their version of Bree for real.

The latest free trial that I encountered was EverQuest.  Not the new one.  The original one.  The one I had picked up in March of 1999.  Although I cut my teeth on Ultima Online, I didn't stick with it.  EverQuest was where I set down roots.

Returning to EverQuest was very nostalgic.  Including the installation, which was slow, annoying and at times confusing.  Just like in the old days.  Gigabytes of downloading, much of it music that I ended up turning off.

The real fun came when I was able to load up my original character and trot him around Norrath.  A level 45 half-elf ranger.  One of about eight billion half-elf rangers in all of EverQuest.  Mind you, he looked a bit different seven years later.  Attempted face-lifts of various equipment (as well as his face, truth be told) had changed him, but he didn't reallly look a day older than when he took his first steps back in Surefall Glade.

The ranger started out where I had left him all those years ago, in Firiona Vie, which was a new zone back then.  Now it's deserted.  I didn't remember anything about it and ran around that wonderful featureless EverQuest landscape until I stumbled over a new feature in the game - maps.  They're simple line drawings, but they work.  I was able to get over to the dock area so that I could hop a boat back to the old world.

Unfortunately, I encountered the guards there.  They 'con' indifferent, but their indifference cost me about 10% of my progress to level 46.  Oh the happy memories of being stripped of hard-won experience.  And the joy of corpse runs.  Fortunately, my bind point turned out to be on the dock and I died in the water, so it was a quick and easy run of about 100 feet.  I might have forgotten to get killed and missed out on that particular bit of nostalgia.

Next, hop a boat.  Well, wait for one.  Hum da dee.  Waiting for the boat.  Boat's gonna get here any time now.  This is a dock.  Gotta be a boat.  No boat in sight.  There's no boat coming.  Where's the flippin' boat?

Hey, I'm a ranger.  I have levitate and run speed spells (remember the calls for SoW buffs?).  I'll just head south and zone manually.  That didn't work.  I ran into the zone boundary and just stopped.  So, back to the dock.  Hey, lookie here.  There's a little gnome with a name of Translocator Drabilt.  You know, that sounds a lot like a travel service kind of NPC.  Sure enough, it was the replacement for the boats.  They just didn't bother getting rid of the docks.

When all was said and done, I arrived back at the docks of Butcherblock Mountains.  This was why I had returned to EverQuest.  To see the low-quality, cheesy, glitchy graphics of EverQuest of old.  It was honey on my tongue, and music to my ears (even though I turned that particular annoyance off).  The textures are crude.  My ranger ran as if he badly needed to locate a rest room.  His jump animation was embarrassing in the extreme and he never put away his cutlery.  But the ranger had returned.  All hail the returning hero.

Nobody said a thing.  The zone was empty.  It was hugely nostalgic for me to walk along the silly little trails of the various zones and see this or that blocky little building, or a named NPC who had given me so much grief in the past.  But nobody was around.  I visited Butcherblock Mountains, Greater Faydark, Crushbone, Mistmoore, Lesser Faydark, Steamfont Mountains, the zones around Qeynos and Freeport, even Highpass Hold.  In all that time, I could locate perhaps a dozen people.  I spoke to the only two people who were actually playing their characters in sight of me in my travels.  More on this later.

The memories were many, of course.  The newness of everything was just incredible fun for me because it was my first serious MMO.  Killing those danged bandits up in the hills.  My first lightstone from a wisp.  The joy of finally breaking through Crushbone to kill Emperor Crush and the ambassador.  Trying to get that stupid chainmail shirt off the Emperor (which I happened to loot on my nostalgia tour).  Chasing aviaks around that weird eyrie.  Grinding beetles, rats and snakes outside of Qeynos.  And, of course, the piece de resistance, camping Highpass.

A disappointment about the nostalgia trip was that some of the zones and monsters had had their artwork updated.  I was so looking forward to seeing those foolish orcs waiting to jump down on me at Highpass.  But alas, the zone and the orcs had been redesigned.  Crushbone still had the original setup, including all the old camps that we fought so hard to get all those years ago, but those redesigned orcs were in place there too.

Freeport had been redesigned, but at least the boat worked, which was a considerable improvement over my first attempt when they originally implemented them.  Steamfont mountains had also gotten softened and cleaned up.  Robbed of more memories.

It doesn't come out here, but I was really getting misty-eyed over my little tour through Norrath.  I had spent a good year with newfound online friends, grinding away through countless monsters, sharing the trials and tribulations of hours of killing and being killed, corpse retrievals, crafting items for guildies and having items crafted for me as well.  My first crafted Trueshot bow.  Being chased out of Everfrost by ice giants.  Seeing my first dragon.  And many, many more experiences besides.

These days, of course, MMOs are a dime a dozen.  I've played many of them, and they all have their pros and cons.  But EverQuest was the game that so many of us played and where we learned about the genre.  It was our gaming coming of age, and you only get to do that once.

The saddest part of the entire experience was the empty zones.  In 1999, those old zones were packed with people slicing and dicing every monster in sight.  We were camping, kill stealing and doing everything we could to get that next in-demand piece of equipment.  It was a leveling orgy.

Now it's a ghost town.  I could practically see the scraps of paper blowing past with the breeze, the zones no longer of interest to anyone but us old timers who want our little trip down memory lane.  It's like driving past that great park where everyone in the neighborhood used to play, only to find that now it's covered over with weeds and nobody uses it anymore.

We had  a lot of fun all those years ago.  I wish that I could again play an MMO - for the first time.

Star systems become valleys ringed by mountains.  Star bases become towns.  Star gates become mountain passes.  Asteroid belts and ice fields become farmland, water supplies, mines and forests.  Corporations are guilds.

The interesting part comes in when we consider what to do with spaceships.  They aren't like armor and equipment because they do things automatically.  Guns and missiles shoot, shield boosters boost, repair modules repair, and so on.  Also, they can get destroyed while the player character can sneak away.

Ships become NPCs.

Player characters accumulate skills in the ordering of NPCs.  A player character might specialize in the ordering of NPC mages, bowmen or warriors.  Backup skills might involve commanding NPCs that heal or repair equipment on the spot.  If you don't have the skills for managing a certain type of NPC, you can't take that NPC type out into the field.  The more capable the NPC, the more skill it takes to command them.

The building of components for ships becomes the building of equipment for NPCs.  The building of ships becomes the collection of NPCs.  Raw materials are needed to build ships and components, and raw materials would be needed to support the collection of NPCs.  So just like a realtime strategy game, the player character has to use NPCs to collect the materials for more NPCs and their equipment.

In PvE combat, a player character's NPCs battle the environmental NPCs.  Per Eve Online, the player side is much tougher than the environmental side.

In PvP combat, the two sides slug it out for dominion over various valleys throughout the empire.  Controlling a valley means controlling its resources, and that lets players build up their NPC corps.  Skills determine how many NPCs they can command at one time, but the resources determine how many NPCs they have in reserve.

Some NPCs are extremely nasty.  They take so many resources to enlist that no single person could hope to both collect the resources and then control that NPC.  Imagine a mature dragon or some such beast.  To enlist a dragon requires a huge raft of resources, and it also takes a very skilled player character to make sure the dragon does what it's told.  Off to battle, and the dragon steps on the slower enemy NPCs, but may have some trouble with the smaller, faster enemy NPCs.  (Yes, this matches the general balance in Eve Online).

In this fantasy treatment of Eve Online there are no levels, no classes.  Players spend their time using collector NPCs to directly gather resources or using combat NPCs to kill off monsters on quests offered by the king's bureaucracy in order to get the monster resources and rewards from the king's emissaries.  Once player characters have enough resources, they can enlist NPCs of various capabilities and mixes according to their player character's cumulative skills.  Or just add to their guild's reserve force of NPCs.  And then they can jump into the battle for domination of all valleys and their resources.  Or they can devote their efforts to continuing to go on quests.

To ensure that only specific NPC combinations are permitted (permutations of ship equipment are limited), a player character might have to enlist a foreman NPC that ultimately limits what the player character can and cannot do with the NPCs that actually do the dirty work.

For those not familiar with Eve Online, there is a vast central tract of valleys (star systems) that are ruled by the king (the empire).  The king's guards (the empire police) ensure that peace is enforced.  So that's where everyone starts in order to build up a little bit of wealth and familiarity with the systems before joining a guild (corporation) and starting to slug it out with the other guilds.

The guilds base themselves in outlying valleys, and can control as many valleys and build as many towns as the valleys that they control will support.  The NPCs don't do anything without a player character commanding them through his foreman NPC, so it's not like one player can be running multiple valleys.

That's a take on transporting the game system of Eve Online to the fantasy realm.  I'm not a big fan of PvP, and the limitations inherent in Eve Online's systems resulted in boredom for me after about 2 months.  However, for those interested in a game without levels or classes (per se), this fantasy treatment of Eve Online suggests how things can be rebalanced to keep game play entertaining.