Tag: insight

Today I engaged in an interesting discussion on LinkedIn on RPGs and Immersive Sims. Genre names are useful to identify an audience with its expectations and needs. Often, the market creates a term, not the developer.

The container RPG hosts four main genres: CRPGs, Survival, ARPGs, and Immersive Sims.

There are two dimensions to consider. The first is the dimension of structure versus emergence. We design CRPGs around quests and stories. The Player can feel the push to follow, and see how the story ends.

Immersive sims may have great stories, too, but the way of solving them is not always structured around getting all the pieces.

The second dimension is on motivations to play. What makes these genres popular? I have heard that for CRPGs maps are more important than the characters. I think it was the original creator of Final Fantasy who said that. I agree, in part.

The main driver of fun is the discovery of the World, in CRPGs. The same thing is valid for survival games. When the focus is more on the characters we have action RPGs on one side, and Immersive Sims on another.

The main difference between a game and other forms of entertainment is action and interaction. As I said in the previous post, action is a verb, is to do something. Interaction, instead, means communicate with some system within the game.

It can be a narrative system, it can be a level system. It can also be an exploration system. Interacting with the World of the game means exploring the game. Some game has walking, running, and riding mechanics. Some other game has menus to navigate and figure out what to do and why.

The main reason to explore a game is discovery. Discovery can be very fun when the Players understand subtly one simple secret: you can miss something.

When you read a book you read line by line. When you watch a movie you look at a series of scenes. When you play a game, instead, you decide what to do. And maybe you can miss something out.

That is something in common with social media, nowadays. Which is also why they are partly substituting videogames as entertainment, in my opinion.

I have been in this profession for many years and still one of the best and most used ways of identifying Players and their needs is Bartle’s Taxonomy of Players.

This was created after surveying players of MUDs, multi-user dungeons. Textual multiplayer RPGs that were played on Telnet. The taxonomy is used also for single-player 2D offline platforms. I have to still understand why. The only explanation that I have is that people are lazy. They don’t want to survey their own players.

Having said that, every game designer knows this graph:

                                  ACTING
                  Killers            |                  Achievers
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
          PLAYERS -------------------+------------------- WORLD
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                  Socialisers        |                  Explorers
                                INTERACTING

Then everyone passes to talk about the 4 Player types. There are 2 things very important to consider.

Acting and interacting

The first is the difference between acting and interacting. This is not so immediate. One may think “acting is using a mechanic while interacting is using a feature” for instance. I have heard this thousands of times.

• Acting is to do, to perform. Is a one way verb.
• Interacting is communicate with something. Is a two ways verb, being one of these ways stronger (listening).

If you don’t understand the difference between these two verbs, you will never understand why explorers are not achievers.

Dynamics between the types

Mr. Bartle specified in his paper that there is not a Player who always stay firm in one of the four quadrants. Usually, Players move around according to many factors. We can summarize these factors in the word: autonomy. They decide, mostly for intrinsic reasons, to switch.

When you design a game or a feature it’s important to consider the main reasons to switch and how to make that switch interesting. So that the Player who decides to do that will find always something motivating answering to that decision.

Dynamics are hard to predict when you design a game, but you can use this switch as an opportunity to create better playtest cases.