Multi-Player (Game Design: Theory and Practice)

Game Design:Theory and Practice (Book's Summary:Part 11)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

10. Multi-Player

Though the AI agents take the place of the other players to play a non-computer game, in many ways it is truly the designer who takes the place of the other players.
Multi-player games are as old as game themselves, with single-player games such as solitaire being in the extreme minority of available choices.

10.1 Motivations

Many developers see the most immediate advantage of multi-player games as the ability to replace AI opponents with real humans in order to provide much deeper and more unpredictable adversaries. This increases the amount of challenge a game can provide, and allows a game to stay compelling for a much longer period of time.

An even more significant advantage to having human opponents is the ability for the players to socialize.

The presence of real players for opponents brings with it a tremendous change in the players’ perceived importance of playing the game; instead of just winning or losing the game in private, through their social component multi-player games make each win and loss a public affair and thus significantly more meaningful.

Thus, multi-player games provide for players a challenge, a social experience, the potential for bragging rights, a significant emotional payoff, and a deeply interactive experience. When working on multi-player games, it is important for game designers to keep these strengths in mind and make sure their designs play up these qualities that players are looking for.

However it is important to remember that a multi-player component is not always an improvement for a given game: some titles are ideally suited to being single-player, just as other games can only work as multi-player experiences.

10.2 The Forms

There are two groups of multi-player games, games that are played by a number of gamers all in the same location and huddled around the same computer or console, and games that are played on-line by multiple players who are in significantly different location.

10.2.1 Single System Multi-Player Games

These games originally took the form of multiple players controlling their game-world surrogates in a shared view of the game environment. Games like that are limited in that both players have to be constrained to relatively the same portion of the game-world so that they can both stay visible.

A solution for the problem of constraining two or more players to the same location came with the advent of split-screen gaming, where each player has a section of the monitor devoted to displaying the portion of the game-world that is relevant to them at any given time. The display game could be set to dynamically switch to non-split-screen when both players happen to be in the same location in the game-world.

The split-screen feature is not detrimental to a game such as Mario Kart, but can often weaken the experience in a game like Halo, whose death-match gameplay is modeled after online, blind-play competition. Split-screen simply makes it a different type of game.
Despite the potential disadvantages in terms of blind-play, multi-player games that take place around one system have a tremendous advantage in terms of the social interactions they engender.

10.2.2 On-line Multi-Player Games

Networked games provide a significantly more immersive player experience for the very reason that the other players are invisible to each other.

Having players at separate systems means they will be able to have proper blind-play but will be significantly hindered in their ability to interact with each other while playing the game, no matter what the game designer does to facilitate socialization. All these types of games can be fun in if, from the start, the designer is fully cognizant of the strengths and weakness of the type of multi-player game he is building and designs the game to work optimally within that paradigm.

Massively multi-player persistent games (MMPs) such as Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot have become increasingly popular in recent years, though the MUDs (multi-user dungeons/domains) that inspired them have existed for nearly three decades.

Indeed, playing MMPs can be such a lifestyle choice that many couples will play together, with women tending to enjoy them more than other games. These games are much more open-ended in their design, emphasizing multiple paths to success and allowing players to spend their time how they choose. Players can go on quests, get a job and build up a home, or just spend all their time socializing with the other people they meet there. For it to be successful in the long term, the game must provide an interesting enough game that facilitates socialization in conjunction with other rewards.

The success of Xbox Live has made including a multi-player mode de rigueur in console games, at least where such gameplay makes sense.

10.3 Design Considerations

The pacing of multi-player games needs to be more varied than it is in single-player games, for the simple reason that in a multi-player game, players cannot pause the game, since the other players would need to simultaneously pause as well.

Also, most players want to know how much time they need to play your game, since all but the most hard-core have a variety of things to do with their lives other than playing games.

If possible, you want your game design to allow players to feel that they still have something of a shot at success even when they are losing. Games that allow one player to get extremely far ahead of the other players but still require a long and tedious end-game for that player to complete win will encourage the losing player to drop out, essentially forfeiting.

Positive feedback systems can push the player who is ahead in the competition farther ahead, while negative feedback will keep the competition close. Mario Kart, with its front-mounted guns, has a good implementation of negative feedback that helps keep the races closer and thereby more exciting.

Players sometimes will drop out of your game regardless of how much you try to discourage them. Indeed, due to the somewhat chaotic nature of the internet, some players may get dropped from the game in the middle through no choice of their own. Your game will need to handle these dropouts in an elegant way such that the remaining players can continue playing if at all possible, with the now-missing players having essentially forfeited their slots. You may wish to allow them to reclaim their spots in the game if they reconnect quickly enough, to forgive unavoidable Internet flakiness. If having players drop out in the middle is not handled well by your game, you are almost surely doomed to frustrating the players who want to keep playing.

Allowing players to customize their avatar in the game-world is also key to making players feel that they are actually putting themselves into the game.

If your game design does not allow for a flexible enough space for players to develop unique tactics to counter other players’ moves, all but the newbies will quickly lose interest in your game.

10.3.1 Playing to Strengths

For years, single-player games have been built around the limitations of what an AI could and could not do.

In the section 8 of this summary, “Artificial Intelligence,” it’s talked about how an artificial intelligence can be considered to pass the Turing test if players mistake it for a human. For multi-player games, the goal should be somewhat different: players could never mistake their adversaries for anything but other humans.

An online game with players located miles away from each other and who are most likely real-world strangers will probably never recreate the in-person multi-player experience. Nevertheless, the more successful online games include components that force players to socialize as part of the game mechanics, and thereby make the social interplay in the game that much richer.

Though the potential for players to cooperate should be a key part of almost any multi-player game, getting players to actually do it is another problem entirely. One way to improve the chances that players cooperate with each other is to establish a significant advantage over those who do not work together with others. If the cooperative option is too complex and does not provide significant benefits, chances are that most players will choose to just do it all themselves.

A perilous side effect can arise due to those benefits earned by players working together: more casual players will get crushed by the enemy teams, and thus those players may never live long enough to enjoy most of the things in the game.

10.3.1 Protect Newbies

Newbies are the most vulnerable players, and game designers should do everything possible to protect them long enough until they become familiar with the game’s mechanics and tactics.

As a rule of thumb from game development, there is some fixed percentage of players who love to prey on new players who do not stand a chance against them. Although there never can be a perfect solution for the problem that arises with this statistic, some techniques are used in order to minimize this trouble, some of those include allowing player-killers attack only player-killers and setting up safe and training zones. Dani Bunten Berry also suggested that a mentoring system would be appropriate to deal with this problem. Such a system would reward veteran players for watching over new players.

Minimizing features and simplifying game controls will also help new players a lot. By combining simple controls with a deep range of actions and tactics, most people who want to play the game will be able to, without taking the challenge of tactics generation from the seasoned players.

Finally, if your game design supports something more complex than “I win, everyone else loses” gameplay, the game will be a lot more inviting to new players. Many death-match games show the ranking of players at the end of the match instead of just reporting winner. Therefore, to players, there is less shame if they come in fifth out of eight than if all they know is that they failed to win.

10.3.2 Socialization

One of the primary reasons that players engage in multi-player games is to socialize with other players. This is true both in computer games as well as non-computer games. This explains why MUDs have attracted a larger female fan base than first person shooters, for example. The commonly held wisdom says that women enjoy socializing more than men.

For an online game, the designer will need to go out of his way to facilitate player socialization. The first step is providing an interface with which players can chat among themselves.

Of course, chatting via keyboard is significantly inferior to the expressive potential of actual human speech, with the obvious advantage that players can talk while continuing to play the game.

10.4 Development Issues

The first thing the development team should do when deciding about the initial aspects of a given game, is determine if it will be a single-player game or a multi-player game. If these issues are not handled at the initial phase of the project, the consequences can be really bitter… If the team wants to keep the game supporting the new game style, a lot of code may need to be reworked, and some considerable amount of game mechanics may also demand to be rearranged in order to suit the new traits.

Some games that were initially single-player-only games, and that during the middle of the project, have added a multi-player mode ended up with game mechanics that are significantly different for each of these modes. That’s unfortunate, because usually the players who are experiencing the single-player game, and enjoying it, want to find the same traits, related to the game mechanics, also when playing the game in the multi-player mode.

If the team decides earlier, on what type of game they want to work, and if they settle for a multi-player game, a lot advantage can be taken from this, assuming the networking code is working. These advantages come from the fact that the game mechanics can be tested by a group of people very soon in the development process. And once the game mechanics are a known quantity, appending a fun single-player experience based on these predetermined game mechanics can be much simpler.

In some ways, designing a good multi-player game is all about realizing what players will attempt to do after playing your game for a while and how you can better support that with deep mechanics. The longer you have players playing your game, the more you can balance the play experience.

10.4.1 Playtesting and User Feedback

Anticipating what players will try to do in a single-play game is a hard job and doing that for a multi-player game seems to be impossible. Hence, we can conclude that playtesting can be much more important for multi-player games than it can be for single-player games.

Sometimes, testers can be tempted to not report all the bugs that they may find and exploit them for their own benefit.

When your game is unleashed on the masses, issues will come that you have failed to anticipate. These problems are addressed through the use of patches that may come out shortly after the game is released. In the world of massively multi-player persistent games, the duty of maintaining the game is even more important. The players of these games typically pay a monthly subscription fee, so they expect the game mechanics to be adjusted when necessary, a steady stream of new content, and customer service to fix their problems.

Richard Garriot encourage developers to ship games “feature thin” and then add features to the game that players have shown interest or even demanded.

Adjusting the game after it has shipped implicates that the developers will need to do their best to understand the current state of the game and what players are enjoying about it and what they’re not.

We must be aware when assessing direct feedback from players since the players providing the feedback may not represent the average person playing your game. We also must be cautious when listening to much to the participants of the open beta test because if we spent too much time listening to them, we might as well derail the project.

To gather and evaluate information from players, many companies who launch online games usually hire community managers.

It is a good idea to use player metrics to uncover player exploits. If you find that 90 percent of players are using a particular type of object, that may be a sign that it would good if you could create more of these objects. Nevertheless, if you detect that a relative great amount of players aren’t using a particular object or feature, it would be worth of your time to discover why is this happening. If you detect that a specific feature isn’t as needed as you thought before, then it may be a good idea to cut off the feature from the game.

10.4 A World of Their Own

It’s irrefutable that multi-player games, through their inclusion of multiple intelligent players, offer a combination of emergence, novelty, and unpredictability that no single-player games can provide, regardless of how much artificial intelligence improves. Also, we must remember that multi-player gamers are looking mostly for a fun, social experience, not an immersive journey with a great and deeply narrative.