by Scott Roberts
September 17, 2001

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
— Kurt Vonnegut

In the last few months, I have been pleasantly wiling away my column – spending time discussing what I hope folks have found to be useful commentaries on the various things I’ve observed in my years staffing and playing in online prose games. Relatively tame in their treatment of some of the gross violations of various standards of gaming etiquette and certainly bereft of much in the way of anger, rage, and loathing, my columns have striven to provide the players of online games with a resource of informative commentary rather than a platform from which to air my personal grievances or present my manifestos. Thus I hope you will forgive this next series of columns, in which I will be taking some time out to address the issue of the increasing numbers of soapboxes I’ve been seeing amongst columnists and players alike.

Help Me Get This Breastplate On

The thing I note in columns such as Jessica Mulligan’s "Biting the Hand", as well as pages-long diatribes on Lum the Mad and forums for every major MMORPG out there, is a massive sense of finger-pointing. The allocation of blame for every possible slight, perceived offense, and failure to meet non-existent, highly subjective standards of perfection seems to be everywhere. The formula goes a little bit like this:

"[MMORPG Company] failed to [foresee the volume of bugs/release properly/wait long enough to get the bugs out before they released their game/understand that Profession X was overpowered/insert your favorite pet peeve here], which any idiot could have foreseen if they’d just been smart enough to listen to yours truly and the hordes of online gamers who agree with me. Here’s [insert rhetoric and theory as to how to fix this perceived problem in the future]."

Rarely (if ever) does the critic in question ease up or even attempt to understand the difficulties involved in producing such games or managing their communities. The number of people involved in the implementation, design, programming, balancing, and playtesting of MMORPGs may be somewhat large, but it certainly does not match the numbers (and volume) of people willing to charge at that work at full tilt, with armor on and hackles raised, picking apart every nuance like scavengers fighting for the choicest bits of carrion.

While it is certainly true that anyone who ignores the past is doomed to repeat it, the number of times I’ve seen the argument made that design teams and MMORPG companies as a whole should have had some prescient knowledge of how their particular game’s implementation of a system would turn out in the light of past implementations of /SIMILAR/ systems is nauseating. There are few MMORPGs out there with exactly identical implementations of any one system. In most cases, the different companies /do/ strive to make new systems, or slightly alter existing and familiar systems to try to improve them without breaking the apparently unwritten rule (and phenomenally good idea) that these games should have some standard features for player communication, calls for help from staff, and the like.

Armchair Game Designing

The commentary and diatribes we see are, very rarely, made by anyone with much experience actually working on such games or even in jobs where their work gets viewed by tens of thousands of people daily, all intimately interested in watching them screw it up. Even in those cases where the author of the criticism has some claim to experience in the field – Jessica Mulligan being an example thereof – the attacks are even worse, as if the individual delivering them, by virtue of having experience in the field, is some sort of expert who, if they were spending their time designing games instead of criticizing them, would never, ever in a million years have made the same mistakes that [Target-of-the-Week] has made.

Speaking as a person who has designed and staffed smaller (but in some ways, no less complex) multiplayer online games, I went through that same phase myself: a period where I was utterly convinced of my own infallible opinions on how these games should be run, what players want, and how things work. I would go from online game to online game, pointing out how I would do ABC differently, fully convinced that the people who are doing it now have no idea what they’re doing. There are times, even now, when I find it frustrating that people don’t agree with some of my ideas. For the most part, however, I got over it.

I came to realize that most anyone getting together to make a game works very, very hard to consider and deal with the things they are able to perceive as they’re working on the game. They do their best to provide an artistic and creative vision – a fun and entertaining game where people can play and enjoy themselves. Most of them, these days, have played in games in the past that are the ancestors of what they’re working on now; they want to build on to that community or to realize their vision in a different manner. They do their homework and strive to do their best to build games which meet the needs of players whose complaints they have witnessed on the competition’s games and perhaps made themselves, while at the same time discovering that some things are beyond their ability to fix.

Call me optimistic if you will, but I like to believe that this industry doesn’t just attract people who want to work 8 hours and go home with a fat paycheck. People don’t work to design and staff online games because it’s an easy way to get rich. Some of them /do/ get involved for the opportunity to "play God" in their own little environment, but it’s my experience that these folks tend to be in the minority. Instead, creative folks come together to realize a vision of a game world that people will enjoy. No one designing a game intentionally tries to annoy the players of that game; they work to produce something that will be challenging, fun, and exciting. They wish to entertain and amuse, to contribute to the pursuit of happiness of the people they hope to attract to their game.

The Perils of Self-Importance

Yet, despite this, their critics are harsher than most war crimes tribunals. Every single thing which annoys someone or goes wrong is picked apart and laid bare for the world to see. Often, such assaults on problems are accompanied by someone’s long list of comparisons to things which have gone wrong in the past with other games followed by a plaintive cry that the designers of thus-and-such a game should have been able to foresee them.

To the columnists and players out there who go to such lengths, I would ask you: could you suffer the same sort of intense scrutiny from tens of thousands of people were the fruits of your labor put up for all to view in minute detail? /Do/ the fruits of your labor manage to entertain thousands of people – despite their flaws – for even a tenth of the time that most MMORPGs provide entertainment to their adherents? In short, do you live in a glass house?

In closing, let me add that I will be most interested to see what Lum the Mad himself has to say when (and if) his current project is launched and taken care of. The most celebrated critic of MMORPGs is now intimately involved with community management on one of the new games coming out. Let’s see what he has to say from the other side.

Disclaimer and Upcoming Events

Next week, I’m going to be discussing the matters of profit and moneymaking in MMORPGs and how just because someone wants to make a profit does not make them Satan’s cabana boy. You’ll also see a great deal on my current professional field: working as a Customer Support person for a gaming company.

Until next time, please keep those comments coming!

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