Gaming and treadmills

Found this through the BBC website. Some interesting opinions on gaming and the use of treadmills, mostly aimed at MMO's but with some relevance to single player games.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/04/23/th ... ent-121731

for (iLevel = 1; iLevel iMaxLevelAllowed; iLevel++)
{
currentMonsters.hitPoints = X * iLevel;
currentMonsters.attackStrength = Y * iLevel;
currentMonsters.graphics = GetMonsterGraphics(iLevel);

currentTreasures.value = Z * iLevel;
}

The above came from a Slashdot thread about LOTRO, and was pointed out to me by John Szeder, who followed up with the question, “Why haven’t more people looked at making games without treadmills?”

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- Games of skill. The treadmill is usually defined as playing a game that requires minimal skill, doing a fairly repetitive task over and over again in order to receive arbitrary rewards and climb higher up a ladder. Effectively, the treadmill is designed to reward devotion; you cannot really fail at it if you just persist in whatever you are doing. Games of skill, such as a player-vs-player game of any sort, are usually not classified this way, because there’s real odds of failure.
- Gameless games, which are presented purely experientially; there’s no rewards, no ladders to climb, and so on.

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I still find Progress Quest to be the most philosophically elegant refutation of the grinding paradigm in RPGs.

I've been playing Guild Wars a lot lately and it's fun to watch people treat it like the WoW variety.

I'm level 20 and all of my max armor is dyed black and I have The Awesome Sword of Flaming Uberness!

Too bad you suck.

WoW is up to 8 million? Jesus.

What's there to say? Koster's analysis is correct. I guess it bodes well for the single player games I favor, since they don't have the challenge and humiliation of PvP games, which the mainstream will always find bitter. Skill in single player games is like untying knots - you just have to care enough to pay attention and pull at loose strings until the game falls apart. Even people that favor a game of skill dislike 99% of the other games of skill available to them, because they'd lose at them.

Undirected "games" are toy-like and depend on novelty rather than the kind of predictable craft you can budget into a game, and are therefore hard to blockbusterize.

The Sims worked the balance between toy and game well, judging by the sales for it.

katzenjammer said:

I still find Progress Quest to be the most philosophically elegant refutation of the grinding paradigm in RPGs.

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My favorite is Statbuilder... oldy but goody!

The old website is gone, but it is still hosted on some freeware sites... see below.

http://www.free-games-fun.com/games/Statbuilder