However, most of the actual players in the world are not Achievers (or at least not exclusively) and do not want to endure a game, but to enjoy it. Blizzard figured this out, which is why WOW is such a success. Lesser successes have been games like City of Heroes, which also was designed to just be fun (it gets repetitive, but I don’t think you can really consider the game to be “work”).

Vanguard’s design team, though, thought of WOW as a “kiddie” game, and they thought that the “real” gamers wanted to do work… wanted to endure, instead of enjoy. So they designed for that… and it flopped because even most of the old EQ vets found out from WOW, COH, and LOTRO, that you don’t have to endure a game… you can just enjoy it.

Basically, WOW and COH (which came out the same year) let the cat out of the bag — they showed that an MMO did not have to be “work.” And once they demonstrated that, there really was no going back… all future MMOs are going to have to be more fun than work, or they will suffer Vanguard’s fate.

I have to admit I’m amazed that Vanguard designer couldn’t see what was wrong with what he said, but then I guess there’s a reason that game failed so spectacularly. I saw a lot of folks refer to how much they were looking forward to playing it, and then as soon as it came out they all tried it and almost immediately dumped it. I think part of the key is in what he said about refusing to believe he’d done such a poor design that something needed a complete overhaul—he didn’t want to believe or admit he might not have done a perfect job. To do a really good job, you need to be willing to self-edit as well as listen to others’ suggestions, which means admitting your work can be improved. It isn’t easy, but it’s necessary.

I do think that a lot of writers and game designers either forget to take their audience into account much at all (a la Vanguard) or take some “ideal” reader/player into account and fail to forget there’s a wider audience. I also think you’re right about many folks getting their grand vision into their heads and not being able to see past that.

Aaron: One of the things I always said with regard to tabletop adventures was that “absolutes are plot holes in disguise.” By this I mean that absolutes disguise assumptions the writer has made about what the players will or won’t do, try, or think, and in the context of an RPG this is a potential plot hole. Such an absolute might be, “the party can only enter the castle through the servants’ entrance.” Well, what if they come up with a clever way to enter it from some other direction? That “only,” that absolute, disguises the assumption that the players won’t come up with such a clever idea, which in a game is a plot hole. Instead the writer is better off providing reasons why they think the party will only enter in that way, what that restriction accomplishes, and how to get things back on course if the players figure out a way around it.

Assumptions are definitely a tricky thing. Sometimes they cause a writer to leave out vital information, but as you said, sometimes they allow different interpretations of events, which can be good. I think for the most part it’s best if the writer has some idea of where their writing might be open to interpretation, and they make that a conscious choice.

I think you are right about believable text not getting reported as much by testers. Beta testers, for example, tend to get encouraged to report “bugs,” and you don’t usually classify an unbelievable bit of text as a bug. Besides which, most beta testers are chosen out of a pool of eager game players, not necessarily folks with any kind of design or writing experience.

In a fiction-writing course I took in college, much of the review process centered around discovering the various disconnects between the author’s perception of the story and the audience’s perception. The problem was often that the author was unaware of his or her own assumptions and failed to get all of the necessary information to the reader. But it was also common for the writer and reader to have different views on what is possible or likely, and what makes sense.

In that setting, because the editors focused on one story at a time and were taught specifically about the problem of believability, they raised the issue when it presented itself in a story. But MMO testers have generally not been taught about it, and the game’s text is just one of countless components (and, arguably, not given much importance by a good portion of players). It seems that a tester, upon encountering a problem of believability, would be less likely to raise the issue. I suppose that’s really just a hunch.

I think you’ve got the more basic point quite right — whether it’s the GM who forgot gaming is fun, or the author who forgot to make his novel “readable,” one is always headed for trouble when one forgets the audience. What tends to happen is people get so caught up in their “vision” of their own creative work, that they forget that they mean it to be enjoyed and experienced by others.

That particular post that I made, by the way, was in direct response to a Vanguard: Saga of Heroes designer, who quite literally said that the crafting system was meant to aggravate the players, not to be fun. They made it that way on purpose, in other words… and several of us reading the thread (but amazingly few, compared to the # of responses) immediately had a flag go up and said, “Wait a second… you made it annoying on purpose??.

This seemed to be one of these cases where the designer didn’t even realize why what he had said raised the hackles on some of us, too… which is kind of sad. But I think this happens in MMORPGs because so many of the “designers” come from a computer coding background, rather than a game design background, and they really do not understand the fundamental elements of game design.

And most of all, as your Malady of Kings example also illustrates, they don’t seem to understand their audience (the players) at all.

C

This also reminds me of those GMs who ask after ways to “punish” those players who play in ways they don’t approve of. I think that’s another aspect of failing to take your audience into account. If, as Chessack says, you assume you should never do anything in an MMORPG to anger your players because the point of a game is to have fun, then it similarly stands to reason that when playing a tabletop game you shouldn’t try to deliberately anger your players. (IMO, there’s always a better way to solve a problem anyway.)

I love GMs who figure out which aspects of a game bore or frustrate their players and figure out ways to gloss over those. That’s definitely an example of taking your audience into account and improving playability.