Bartle doesn’t get MMOs says Tobold, who doesn’t get Bartle
In one of these interesting meta-spats in the blogosphere, Tobold took exception to Richard Bartle‘s statement in an interview to Massively that “I’ve already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft.”
Tobold proceeded to write a withering post about Bartle’s bitterness and irrelevance in modern MMOs which, Tobold believes, the old curmudgeon doesn’t grasp anymore.
Unfortunately, Tobold apparently didn’t actually read the interview in its entirety at first, but instead reblogged and echoed another blogger’s own outrage about the above sentence. Which means that basically he’s quoting Bartle out of context and proceeds to show him:
“Well, as attempt of somebody who has become irrelevant to make it back into the news this succeeded; but now he’ll have some clever explaining away to do, before everybody considers him to be just crazy.”
Leaving aside the series of cheap shots reeking of, well, ageism, the interesting bit at the end of Tobold’s post is quite ironic in the context of the original interview:
“dismissing WAR because it shares features with WoW or other MMORPGs simply stops all evolution. Relying only on people coming up with revolutionary new ideas that found completely new genres would mean we would only get new games once every decade or so. WAR is important because it will attract a large audience, and it will evolve the MMORPG genre in some way. Discussing the evolution and the changes is a lot more important than listing the similarities.”
Now I have a lot of respect for many of Tobold’s opinions, but when you decide to take on someone else’s opinion, it’s probably better to read the source for yourself rather than reblogging just one provocative sentence. Cheap shot for cheap shot, considering Tobold’s self-professed interest in American politics, I’d expect, as a fellow “Old World dweller”, that he’d be a bit more critical of overblown gotcha-style reactions and look at the issues.
And what are the issues? What is Bartle really talking about? He’s talking about game design, and the distance which comes when you start seeing a game with a designer’s eye instead of a player’s:
“What I’m saying is as a game designer, I have terrible problems in experiencing the kind of fun the players have because I’ve gone past it. I understand it. If I didn’t understand it, how could I design for it? If I could only understand it by experiencing it, how could I understand what every single other player who isn’t me would think about it? As a designer, I’m not designing for me. I’m designing for everybody.
Because I’m designing for everybody, I need to understand how everybody likes the games.”
That kind of distance isn’t limited to gaming of course. It’s basically a common trait that for any kind of activity where a participant moves behind the curtain and gets shown the ropes. Watching an illusionist as a simple spectator is entertaining. But once you get taught the art of sleight-of-hand, you no longer watch the show, you analyze how the illusionist’s trick is working.
In gaming, we have (hopefully) public Q&A testing because not only the game devs but the in-house Q&A teams are no longer able to approach a game with a player’s eye, or, as the saying goes, with a fresh mind. As a consultant / professor who co-created the online multiplayer game genre I essentially see Bartle as two steps removed from the player experience, being the one to critique Online World Design as a field in computer science and entertainment instead of doing the designing himself. As he stated in a response to a comment of mine on Broken Toys, he sees his role in the MMO ecosystem as one who wants to provoke thoughts in the designer community, if only to actually have his audience make the willing and informed decision to design differently.
Having become a trainer myself recently, I have experienced and embraced myself the power of the Socratic method, that is, transmitting knowledge through questioning.
What Bartle is saying later in the Massively interview (and which Keen ignorantly dismissed as “After that dumb comment he rambled on for a few paragraphs talking about Age of Conan, mostly with incoherent rhetorical questions“, missing the mark by several more miles than Tobold since he actually did read the Massively interview) shows very clearly where he’s coming from:
“I might have a look at [Age of Conan] from a point of view of seeing what things – the class balances are like, seeing how they’ve implemented the – I really ought to write up a book on how to read a virtual world so that I have a vocabulary in order to explain it to people. But there are a number of things you can do with player versus player, and I want to see the way they’ve done it not because whether it’s cool or not but because of you chose that way. Now, why did you choose that way?
You chose that way because you’ve got a particular vision for your virtual world. Your particular vision for your virtual world is saying something. You made this the center of your virtual world. That tells me something already in advance. What it tells me is you want to compete with the games that don’t have it so that you’re carving your niche. But why did you choose that niche? You chose that niche or a particular reason. How did you implement it? You’re trying to rip off Dark Age of Camelot?“
And here lies the irony because that’s essentially what Tobold concludes his post with: “Discussing the evolution and the changes is a lot more important than listing the similarities.”
That’s exactly what Bartle is about. You provoke thought with, well, provocation. He percieves the information he has on WAR today as not being distinctive enough from WoW to attract him to it. Fair assessment? Probably not. From the sound of it, he certainly hasnt’ played the game yet, so he doesn’t know. On my part, I’ve had very little interest in the WAR hype so far, the only two things I managed to grasp in almost two years are:
- That all the jaded, bitter, “would-quit-WoW-in-a-second-if-something-better-comes-out” players (including those who still dream of the paladin class as it could have been instead of what it is) are investing so much hope in it that they will most probably be disappointed
- That it is generally positioned as WoW in a different setting, with more PvP, with RvR (and collision detection).
I haven’t investigated further and won’t before it releases. But one of the only two perceptions I have of the game is actually dangerously close to Bartle’s provocative statement.
Beyond the provocation, though, what Bartle tries to achieve is to get designers to question their own motives. That a game is going to be built around several arbitrary design decisions is probably a given, but Dr Bartle wants his designer audience to think these through in terms of why they are made, what their consequences are and why these decisions are preferable to discarded alternatives.
As I snidely pointed out earlier in that same Broken Toys thread, there has yet to be a hugely commercially successful MMO based on the visions and design concepts of celebrities like Bartle, Garriott or Koster. But if the sheer gravitas of their personae gets game designers to make conscious decisions to ignore them, I do believe that Bartle, at the very least, will be pleased at a job well done.
PS.
Reblogging is bad, mmmkay?
PPS
Tobold, your line “although some of those comments might have been Richard himself, disguised as “Anonymous”, which would be more understandable” is totally beneath yourself. You’re better than that.
I have to disagree. Remember that Tobold’s first post was written before Bartle started clarifying himself all over the internet. In light of that clarification, it might be fair to say that Zenke mischaracterized Bartle, but both Keen and Tobold were responding to Zenke’s portrayal.
That being said, most people have been critical of Tobold simply because he called Bartle irrelevant and that he looks “foolish” or “crazy”. Intentionally or not, Zenke’s article does make him look foolish and crazy.
As for Bartle being irrelevant, he is irrelevant. He might provide some perspective on “the way things were” versus “the way things are now” but that doesn’t give him any credibility on “the way things should be as we move forward”. Quite honestly, it doesn’t take a degree in MMO history to figure out what’s fun and not fun about a game. On the contrary, this same perspective also puts him in a position where he might be willing to throw the baby out with the bath water because he’s “been there and done that.”
Lastly, his comments, even from a design standpoint – are a bit offbase. It’s interesting that we all think of the MMO genre as a single genre when it’s actually comprised of lots of different genres. Innovation within a single genre is more about evolution than revolution. There is nothing wrong with revolution, but recognize that people who like to play a certain genre may or may not want to play the new genre you created. Quite frankly, the whole way we think about the MMO “genre” needs to change so we stop making comparisons between games which have little resemblance (like Eve to WoW to Second Life).
Remember that Tobold’s first post was written before Bartle started clarifying himself all over the internet.
I took it in as was written: I’m a subscriber to Tobold’s and to Broken Toys, not to Massively (which I usually never read unless a 3rd party points at something interesting) or Keen & Graev. I read Scott’s take on it and thought nothing more of it, and later in the day got Tobold’s first post on the matter in my feed reader. Then I went back to the source – Keen, and finally Massively, where I read the whole interview. And the picture this gave me is Tobold echoing Keen by jumping on one single sentence in an otherwise quite interesting interview.
To me, it came across as the kind of bunk you’d read from a fanboy (which Keen might or might not be for all I know – and care), not from a serious commenter, especially since the rest of what Bartle said was worthy of being read.
He might provide some perspective on “the way things were” versus “the way things are now” but that doesn’t give him any credibility on “the way things should be as we move forward”.
Thing is, he does nothing of the sort – all three of these. He questions design decisions. As a consultant and professor should do.
Quite honestly, it doesn’t take a degree in MMO history to figure out what’s fun and not fun about a game.
Funny you’d say that, because the immense pile of failed MMOs (not to speak about the rest of gaming, or entertainment at large) seems to be a clear indicator of the contrary. In practice, the designers are by the very nature of their trade quite incapable of determining ahead of time of what could be fun to a player.
Take SWG for instance. If you want to market to the massive Star Wars fan base, from a player point of view, it doesn’t really take rocket surgery to figure that the core appeal of the two movie trilogies are Jedi and space battles with tiny crafts blowing up huge space stations. The KOTORs, despite their flaws, are fun to play because you play a Jedi. The X-Wing series are fun because you play the space battles. And you get Koster, definitely one of the more interesting designers to read, who oversees a game which launches without space travel, and set in a timeframe where there are one Jedi and two Sith in the whole entire universe.
What Bartle does (and not just in that one interview) is provoke. It should be viewed as a reminder that despite WoW’s immense success, it’s not clear that Blizzard themselves actually know the recipe of the secret sauce. In the current production cycle, each game is going to come with a certain mix of a couple of “been there done that” elements, along with some new ones for good measure. Predicting whether you actually have the right mix to create, not a WoW competitor but simply a honourable 1-2 million subscriber game is not possible. Considering the budgets and sums in play today, though, agree or disagree with the Bartles, Kosters and Garriotts of the world, but the designers better damn well question every single decision they make before implementing them, and once a working implementation is here, question the whole desicion all over again. That’s part of the polishing process, and facilitating this kind of questioning is what Bartle has been doing for quite some time now.
It’s interesting that we all think of the MMO genre as a single genre when it’s actually comprised of lots of different genres.
Well, Eve, WoW and SL are all massively multiparticipant online worlds, MMOs. And that’s pretty much the only trait they have in common, as you pointed out. There’s probably going to be some refined terminology for the main categories which will eventually emerge once everyone agrees on their acronyms
MMORPG certainly is a subdivision. And once we’re all agreed on what the subdivisions are, we will happily wage two or three decades of religious wars over what product fits into which category.