shoutouts to this tweet for leading me to the word i've always wanted to talk about this::
started writing a pretty long essay about game design and mmos last night but i lost like an hour or so of work on it tonight due to a sudden power outage and it was the boring part i feel sickened imagining writing out again. plus this ended up being a little longer than all the words i lost tonight but i got a lot more done with them. and i'm realizing that despite all the specific examples i was bringing up mmorpgs are kind of just an old form of service games that are everywhere now, and probably saddled with a lot of the same...well, problems.
i have a lot of sympathy for many of the people who work on stuff like this. for years they make decisions that are sensible, correct, what people ask for. they're working to move elements of the game away from being "bad" and turn them into something that's not as bad. and all while working under what to me sounds like a form of ultimate creative death in having to work on the same thing for a fucking decade or whatever and being saddled with unfortunate decisions made at the start of the project when nobody knew what was going to happen.
for mmos i think this is especially visible though, because those are games that put very disparate kinds of people into close proximity, and there are examples of games being hugely refocused due to people engaging with parts of the game the devs hadn't originally expected or planned heavily for.
any game, just like any kind of creative work, is going to ultimately be some combination of what the creators made and what audience does with it, but "live service" games end up in a kind of feedback loop because they get adjusted so much over time. and in terms of what people tend to think of as "game design", the questions of balance and mechanics, what people say is less useful than what they do. which leads to what was kind of the core topic of what i was originally writing: final fantasy 14's developers seem to rate it as a high priority that every job is usable in anything they make, but because it's a cooperative game they don't really have full control over that. instead, they're stuck with a very indirect approach where they try to force players to use a variety of different jobs in a group and make it such that jobs in each of the various "types" aren't too much stronger or weaker than one another.
can't even imagine how many times i've read on the internet that final fantasy xiv's different character choices are much more balanced than wow's. i generally think wow's designers haven't viewed keeping that kind of balance as the same kind of guiding principle, though that doesn't save the game from ultimately being trapped by the same concepts, because xiv drew heavily from wow's design in the first place. the way this manifests in ff has led to larger and larger amounts of design homogenization over time, though, because that's the easiest way to end up working with just the numbers, which can be changed the most easily. from the social standpoint of the game, this is the best choice. and the individual steps that lead along the way aren't usually wrong. it'd be kind of insane to tell the devs they should make more things like the "bad" design of days past. like the guy in burning crusade who cast the warcraft 3 spell "doom" on random characters and they would have to run away to die unavoidably while watching the rest of the group try to finish off the boss.
i do think that in the context of a group event, that's actually kind of fucking awesome. but for the person who gets doomed every time for an entire night it's not awesome. cheering for your guys and watching the tension as they go towards the finish for you has its own worth in terms of a team activity. and games like mafia remain really popular too, which have some of the same effect. but as game design, even setting aside other possible sins of the genre as a whole, it's definitely not "good" to just randomly eliminate individual players for no particular reason.
so designers try not to do that anymore. but as you start to rule out more and more things that are rude, and "doom" is quite an extreme example by that standard, you're inevitably shrinking the space that the game can work in, by quite a lot. the game becomes safer, more polished, more good. in fact, what i'd call it is "gooder". (this is the part i realized when i was high, though that might be obvious.) because i don't want to call it better, even though the result contains a higher amount or degree of "good". but it's not becoming more interesting or surprising or memorable or compelling. just more good.* and that's a reasonable thing to do when you can't make the game into a different game, but i think it's what i've realized gives me a kind of boredom with where genre's been at for a long time. i know some people will dismiss this with rose colored glasses nonsense, and that's fine. but i do kind of think mmos and "game design that would be good in a normal game" are basically mutually incompatible concepts so i think it's pretty fun for them to embrace being stupid.
*if you're an ff14 player reading this and you're thinking something like "what about dragonsong?" i'll just tell you that i watched as people were working on it and thought it was awesome. it does in fact have a very audacious and cool concept that i really wouldn't have thought they were brave enough to do (it is incredibly funny that you can just choose not to change the story over and over) and i am aware the other ultimates have had complex and twisty puzzle elements as well. though this one in particular is the one where i'll be very impressed if they can come up with something that feels as surprising and narratively appropriate again. and maybe i'm wrong and the positive reception to it will make them feel empowered to get a little wilder with that in the future. but it does feel like a fortunate exception to me at the moment.