As anyone who is close to me knows, I play a game called "EverQuest". EverQuest (or "EQ") is an addictive role-playing game -- sufficiently addictive that there is at least one "EverQuest Widows" group run by people whose partners, loved ones, and so forth have lost interest in them and switched to playing a rather silly, tedious game.
OK, so I call it a "silly, tedious game" and yet I play it? Well most games are silly, that's the point. If you've ever seen a perfectly happy couple or group of friends arguing over a hand of Bridge you'll know what I mean. But tedium in a voluntary past-time seems to me to be strange.
It seems to me that the creators of EverQuest have stumbled onto a "magic balance" of entertainment, challenge, tedium, and repetition that sucks people in. I'm not sure that if the game were, say, more entertaining, less challenging, less tedious, and less repetitious it would be more successful or less. I'd like to think it would be more successful but I'm not sure.
One of the critical factors of EverQuest's success is the camaraderie of players. One of the reasons for this camaraderie is the brutally annoying, repetitious, opaque nature of the game. For example, all of the "cities" in the game are laid out insanely, have no sign-posts, and are split into "zones" which are tedious to cross (and one can stumble into accidentally). Consequently, most players' first experience of the game is becoming helplessly lost in their home city with nothing but an almost sadistically worthless map and nothing to do. To deal with this one needs help. One tends to become friends with people one helps or is helped by. This is your entry into the EverQuest "online community".
Next, everything in the game takes time. A lot of time. So, for example, you might want some rags to wear and a slightly better weapon. This will take you hours if not days. For example, to make one piece of leather armor (of which you may want ten pieces) you need a skin from an animal. Not every animal has a skin, apparently, so you'll need to kill a LOT of animals. It's dangerous killing the animals. This will take you a LOT of time and the assistance of your friends. So by the time you're done you've probably played for tens of hours with a small circle of friends, set up consistent times to get online and hook up, and are starting to feel obligations to show up, return favours, and so forth. You're hooked.
In order to create a game a typical player will play for 20-40h, most game designers put in a LOT of content. For the 20-40h you play their game there will probably be at least 10h of original, seen-for-the-first-time, content. To create this content, a group of writers and artists will have slaved away for six to eighteen months.
Now, to give your small circle of friends their 20-40h of entertainment, collecting pelts, making armor, recovering their corpses, and so forth, the content developers of EverQuest have had to do what appears to me to be very little work. On the down-side you've probably only seen 5 minutes (if time is a sensible measure) of original content.
Is it good that EQ is able to "entertain" so much for so little effort. Where is the "entertainment" coming from? Is it entertainment when it starts to seem boring, repetitive, and stupid?
It seems to me that most of EQ's entertainment comes from the players, but that their contributions aren't being leveraged at all, while the contributions of the designers of the game (5 minutes worth of original content entertains people for 20-40h) is leveraged hugely.
I think that the game that displaces EQ from the top of the online heap will be the first game that figures out how to better leverage the creativity of players without spiraling out of control.
I look forward to playing it.
