Problem #3: Numbers, Complexity, and the Digging of Holes

The last of three big problems that I see PBBGs having to deal with is the problem of numbers and complexity. It's not that board games don't have to deal with lots of variables and complexity too, they do. The introduction of a lot of different elements is what keeps a game from being something easily analyzed and "solved" to the point where it's no longer fun to play. The problem is again one of scale.

Any board game designer has to deal with complexity by saying, "What can my players manage in their head with a few additional play aids I might give them?" Scoring, number of pieces, number of cards, size and complexity of the board are all constrained by what real people can really hold in their hands/calculate/see. But as soon as you get a computer involved the temptation is to throw out all of that. I don't have to have only four kinds of armor, I can have 40! I can have 150 different weapons, all with subtly different values for attack and defense. I can even have each one keep track of how sharp it is. It can get worn down over time...

But then that complexity comes home to roost when it's time to actually playtest that game. How do you adjust a game with four thousand variables without getting your own version of the butterfly effect. One little tweak here makes a huge difference over there, or perhaps even worse, a huge change here has almost no effect because of the unforseen influence of some other things you can't seen working in the background. The more complexity you put in, the richer your game seems. But at the same time you're digging your own grave deeper and deeper.

This is probably the most solvable of the three big problems; just scale back. But scale back to what? Unless you're willing to lock the number of players per game at a fairly small number, what are the effects of a small tweak when it may change things for hundreds or thousands of players? Is it going to completely upset the economy in your game?

Problem #2: Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town

In addition to being the title of a book by Cory Doctorow that I really enjoyed, this is how I describe a problem that I see as one of the worst ones a persistent online game may face. People come, try it, and then leave never to come back. Or they join it to stay but only a couple of days before it is scheduled to end or after all the empires are all built up and the game experience is completely different from players who started the game together.

Board game players don't face this problem nearly as much. Sure, people get called away for emergencies on occasion, but the social convention is that if you're coming to play that you'll stick with it until the end of the game. Board games tend to have fairly short lifespans compared to PBBGs though. With timeframes of weeks or months their games are much more likely to have people quit because of something coming up or losing interest. What happens to those players? Are they a zombie that sits there unresponsive while the player is gone? Do they become a computer controled character when the player is away? Do they fade away as though they never existed?

New players are more easily dealt with. They can be shunted off to a newly opened game in order to keep them from joining too late. Or, if you design an open-ended game then perhaps it won't matter when they join. Most MMORPGs are constrained to their world needing to exist in a kind of weird stasis. Yes you obliterated that dungeon full of bad guys yesterday. Today, it's all put back together so someone else can go do the same thing. You're living in WestWorld and Yul Brenner's gunslinger will be just fine as soon as we repair him.

Problem #1: Party Of Two Or Two Thousand

You know how board games always have something on the side of them that says, "For 2-5 players," or something like that to indicate how many people the game is sized for? It's partially a practical thing, they can't include enough cards or tokens or a board large enough for a group of 30, but it's also a factor in the game itself. It was never tested for 30 people, for that matter it may just not work very well when scaled to 30, 300, or 3000. There are PBBGs out there with 30,000 people on a single server, how do you even design a game like that?

I have no idea. Literally, no idea whether the game I'm working on now will be fun when I throw lots of people at it. It could suck. It will suck, the creator of BattleMaster virtually guarantees it, and you know what? He's probably right.

My current hope is that I've got a good idea for a game and I've taken the same path a lot of games take by giving every player basically the same starting conditions so they're left to their own devices in competing with other players. But is just starting with a level playing field enough? Is there a way other than playtesting and adjusting, playtesting and adjusting to have a better idea of how to make a game interesting when you don't even know how many people are going to play it?

One possibility I've considered is the idea of forcing division into groups upon the players. Creating a game and really balancing it well for say 25 and then as players join they automatically get assigned to a group until it hits the magic size and the game gets going in earnest. So a single server might be running hundreds of games at the same time rather than one game with thousands of players. Short of sites that let you play real board games online (e.g. http://gametableonline.com/) , I've not seen anything like this though and as with all these questions, I'm not very sure how well it would work short of building a complete game and testing it.

I know it does offer some possible advantages because you can actually have certain people fill certain roles. There will be only three people who can be doctors, two police officers, 12 zombies, etc. The roles are set and they play them out till the end of the game. Cooperative games are all the rage in the board game world right now and often they work on this very principal (e.g. Battlestar Galactica). I'm so-and-so and here's what I can do. I have in-game abilities that maybe nobody else in the game has and vice versa. You can even have traitors who are working against the group but nobody knows who they are or perhaps even if there are any.

But then, what do you do when one of them leaves? In my mind that's the next big problem with online games and I'll talk about it in my next post Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town.

PBBGs vs. MMORPGs vs. Board Games

Yeah, I said board games. Here's what I think about all of these things, how they are alike and how they are very very different.

Let's say you read this recent GigaOM posting about The Top 10 Money-Making MMOs of 2008 (you may have to see a brief ad before the article, if so you'll live). Looking at that list you should notice how all the top games are basically very similar in one respect, they're all about an avatar. Players create an in-game avatar that represents them and that persona exists in some virtual world somewhere. They move through it basically in real time, they interact with other people avatar to avatar, and they act on the virtual world and it acts on them. They are, as the RPG in MMORPG suggests, "role-playing games". Just like Dungeons and Dragons shares characteristics with Traveller, GURPS, and Champions, these games all seem kind of similar.

Which is great when that's what you want. But last time I checked, there's room on the candy isle for Almond Joy, Nerds, and Sugar Babies. I think not only can you be different, I think you have to be. While these games are raking in the cash, they're also investing it as well. How many people do you think worked on the last World of Warcraft expansion I wonder? How many people for 3D models, for textures, sound effects, music, voice work, marketing, etc.? Dozens? A hundred? More?

If you're like me, you don't have millions or even thousands to invest into building a game so PBBGs offer another possibility. You can build a game all by yourself or with a very small team that people can come play. And the best part of embracing the constraints that browser-based games have is that you can cleverly turn some of them into advantages.

• No, you can't have a rich 3D world, but you can have a game where the player doesn't have to download some client just to play and Linux or Mac user's aren't excluded because you haven't gotten around to building a client for them yet.
• Most of the top MMORPGs reward the players who are willing and able to work them like they are working a job. There are people clocking in 40 hours a week or more into the game of their choice. At the same time there are lots of people who would like to find a game they can play, but they can only afford a few minutes a day to do it and they don't like being made to feel like a stooge because they didn't put in enough hours this week. They're looking for something that doesn't require insane time commitments or $15/month in cost to play briefly every day. Many PBBGs specifically limit the player's playtime to 30 minutes or less per day via action points or ticks or some other mechanism. That acts as an equalizer and can be very appealing for someone who wants to play, but not live, in a game.
  
• Lastly, and I think this is one of the most important differences is that you can explore gameplay types that none of the big boys are even considering. Before anybody is tackling a big new MMORPG they're surveying all the popular ones, they're seriously considering buying a franchise in a popular property like The Lord of the Rings, Warhammer, Conan, or Strawberry Shortcake. And with all the popular ones being a little virtual world around the player's avatar, none of them are about to stray far away from that box. But you can look into all new kinds of gameplay. The kinds we are seeing today with designer board games. What about auction mechanics? Cooperative gameplay? Players who are simultaneously playing the game on a strategic and tactical level? Card driven mechanics mixed with area control and tile laying? Go look at the variety in the hot games on BoardGameGeek right now. They're literally all over the place in terms of gameplay, on different scales with completely different game mechanics. PBBGs can do all of those very same things and they can do them on a scale that no cardboard and dice game could ever achieve because it's limited by the realities of real people around a real game have.

Open up your mind a little and think about how your game can be different from other PBBGs and very very different from the big MMORPGs. Now, with all that said, in an upcoming post I'll lay out what I think are the three big unsolved problems are that PBBGs have that board games don't have.