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.
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