[Problem Players] What if games didn’t make people angry?

So I talked a bit in the last post about problem behaviour. I haven’t tried to define yet what it is. Before I try to do that,  I want to talk about what triggers problem behaviour – because we assume that people are not like this all the time. (If they are, then they probably are problem players.)

The reasons that players act up or rage out are basically down to: rage/ frustration, boredom, and/ or peer pressure/ local culture. Maybe another way for games to tackle this issue is to address those directly.

 

Gaming and Frustration

Things that (can) cause frustration while gaming:

• Losing in a competitive game
• Team members playing badly
• You playing badly
• Waiting around
• Playing a game you don’t really want to play because you want the rewards
• Being taunted by other players
• Facing a barrier to an in-game goal
• Feeling let down by other players
• Being excluded socially by other players
• Learning new content
• Guild drama
• Having to miss an in game event due to RL
• Playing with people who don’t speak your language
• Playing with people of very different skill levels to yourself
• Playing with other people
• Bugs
• Staying up too late
• Having a bad day (anything else outside the game)

 

Yup, a game that tried to eliminate frustration would lose most of its gaming aspects. It would have no competition, probably no multi-player, minimal challenge, and might start playing calming music at you and telling to relax if the time was getting late. It might still be fun. There are games like Journey that are designed to be as calming for the player as possible – and I love Journey — but it wouldn’t be an MMO as we’d know it. It is debatable how far it would really even be a game, and no game can really stop you from having had a  bad day at work or an argument with your partner.

Some of these areas could be addressed in games, though. You can reduce the frustration of team members playing badly by making team events easier, or making the matching better so you are always playing with or against people of similar skill ratings to yourself. You can stop people staying up late by having the server close down at night. You can reduce the frustration of people feeling excluded by having random group finders (most MMOs these days). You can reduce guild drama by not having guilds. You can reduce the frustration of not understanding people by not allowing players to communicate using free text (Hearthstone, Free Realms (RIP)). Learning new content can be less frustrating by making it more obvious what the player needs to do, or making the new content easier. Different games can and do experiment with these kinds of mechanics.

Not all of those things will make a game more fun for all players. That is the payoff for less frustrating games.

The elephant in the room is the trigger that I have marked in red in the list – it is frustrating to feel forced to do content you don’t enjoy because you feel you need the reward. The reward doesn’t need to be big or important to lure people into this play style. People who feel they need to min-max (for whatever reason – being an elite gamer, playing ‘properly’ etc.) will feel pressured to pick up as many of the rewards as they can.  This has been an ongoing issue with Themepark games. Warcraft for example has made a lot of tweaks to their raiding schemas due to players feeling they need to maximise their loot options. And every tweak reduces options for those players who don’t feel the need to min-max. The players who are mature enough to manage their gaming do suffer for the sake of those who claim they are being forced to run content. HINT: No one is forcing you.

Not all of those things will make a game more fun for all players. That is the payoff for less frustrating games.

On a more futuristic level, games could try to measure when a player is becoming frustrated. Maybe the player’s avatar jumps around more, for example. Maybe some day authenticators will be worn and will have blood pressure or heart rate monitors built in.  Or the game could ask if the player is feeling stressed, or give them a button to press (“press this button if you wish you could slap your opponent”). If so, maybe they could be directed to less stressful content. “Go pick some flowers, deathknightxxx, you need to chill out!” At the cost of removing some player choice, bad behaviour could be reduced. (Would it be a fun game? Who knows?)

Perhaps we don’t need to reduce player choice. Maybe when there is some calmer paced content available, players will choose to do that instead when they don’t feel up for the hassle of grouping. “Yeah right,” you may  think, but actually this is one of the appeals of big MMOs. If you log in and want to do something non-stressful, you can opt for gathering or redesigning the interior of your guild house.

 

Boredom: For the Lulz

Bored players are both the joy and the pain of MMOs. This is because boredom is a trigger for player initiated activity. Some people use it to devise really cool ways to entertain themselves and each other. Plenty of social guilds run really fun events, for example – quiz nights, scavenger hunts, wide ranging RP events, server-wide markets.

Boredom triggers players to sit around talking to each other. When people talk about modern MMOs being less social due to lack of downtime, this is what they mean.

Boredom triggers players to go and explore, or think up new challenges for themselves and each other.

Boredom has probably been the source of most of the best MMO player stories we’ve ever had. And it definitely is the source of most of the good stories you have ever read about sandbox games (in which the player is expected to be bored a lot of the time, that’s part of the appeal, and is why people say you have to make your own fun in these games).

But boredom also means the cat starts to play with the box. It can trigger people to go off and try to mess around with other players, for the lulz. And that means it can trigger problem behaviour also. Granted, in some games, the difference between problem behaviour and productive behaviour is very small – that is where the game culture comes in.

So this leaves a couple of questions.

1. How to encourage players to start thinking about whether it’s time for them to take a break from the game?
2. How to help boredom trigger good outcomes?

With (1), MMOs often try to keep people as long as possible which means a committed player will be encouraged to stay in the game long after they are actually burned out and bored. It doesn’t have to be this way. They could be more proactive with a call and return approach. To do this, the game needs to give benefits for the players who keep playing but also make it quick and easy for players who have taken a break to catch up and be able to play with their friends again. I think Blizzard has transferred smoothly to this type of model with Warcraft. There seems to be an understanding now that many players will not stay for an entire expansion. But at the same time, the game needs to stay fun for the players who don’t dip in and out. They need to feel their commitment was worthwhile.

Again, it’s a payoff. Making it easier for players to come and go will reduce the number of bored players hanging around, it will also reduce dev income and may make the game less fun for the committed core players. That’s a big risk. We also hope people will be able to decide for themselves when a break is warrented.

With 2, it is all about the in-game culture and the player’s social circle. Most people don’t do things for the lulz without an appreciative audience. And they can’t recruit a group to do it with them if no one is interested. It is also harder to recruit people to the cause if the majority of the players shun that type of activity. In any case, this brings me to … guild culture, game culture, gamer culture – which is a subject for the next post.

[problem players] Pictorial version – problem players or problem behaviours?

 

“Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”
― Winston Churchill

So imagine we have a group of people in the room. One of them is secretly a dalek who actually hates all life and has anger management issues and a disintegration beam. Those people might argue, they may have bad days, but only one of them is going to ever disintegrate people.

That’s one model of problem players – that some people are not like other people and are inevitably going to go dalek. The reason is not important, just that when you put them in that setting, they are going to be a problem. So if you can find and turf out those guys ASAP, the game space instantly becomes less threatening for everyone else. For lulz you could separate them into their own space where they can exterminate each other rather than just turfing them out completely.

 

dogshaming.tumblr.com

Here’s another model: dogs aren’t bad, they are just dogs. And sometimes that means they might do things that annoy other people (or dogs) if they aren’t properly trained.

So if you socialise your dog properly, identify the behaviour you want to stop, and put in some training,  then all will be well. If we want people to stop being abusive online when they lose a PvP match or end up in a PUG with someone who they think is a noob, then we have to teach them this is not acceptable and that bad dogs will be shamed. It is, ultimately, behaviour that players can control if they want to.

 

“In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others” (Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres).” Candide (Voltaire)

An example of using a ban as a teaching mechanism for others.

So let’s try this again with less labelling

I don’t like labelling people as problem players. Or in other words, everyone is someone else’s problem player. But there are legitimately some people who struggle more with playing with others. We don’t need to know the reasons for this – some people are on the autistic spectrum, others have abusive backgrounds, others have been used to a community where smack talk and rage outs are acceptable, others are roleplaying being internet heroes. Maybe it’s patriarchy to blame, or capitalism, or the internet, or testosterone, or the NHS, or young people today, or the parents.

In the ideal world, there would be help and support. In the real world, they get to stomp all over the rest of us while society figures out how to best regulate the internet. And at this point I am equating problem players in MMOs to trolls on the internet. It isn’t the first comparison I am going to make but it does demonstrate how there is a difference between committed, organised trolling and people who just rage out from time to time when they’ve had a bad day at work. And as an added bonus, lots of people rage out when they encounter any kind of rules or regulation that involves them being told off. (I can say this from my experience as a mod on rpg.net).

And as soon as we shift from talking about problem players to problem behaviours, we have a problem which (potentially) could be solved. Make no mistake, solving the problem of online bullying is up there with climate change and water shortages and war in the middle east as one of our generation’s Big Problems.

Unfortunately, bullies don’t want to be ‘solved’ and will spend many happy hours figuring out ways around any mechanisms that are in place, so that they can  make other people’s lives more miserable. Or in other words, Lum is wrong and actually it may be a problem if the cats want to play with the box rather than the cat toy. Why do I say it? Because if some people are determined that their game is really about playing with the other players whether they like it or not, they are ruining the sandbox for others.

For a lot of others though, the behaviours can be channelled and the larger and more successful massive online games are finding ways to do that. I will talk more about Blizzard later this week because I think they and Riot are right up there with the best of any online organisation, public or private sector, in managing the player base. MMOs/ massive games are going to be where these techniques are honed and the ones which work will see use more widely later.

And at the same time, we can argue about how well this behaviour management is working. WoW is still a game in which you may zone into a PUG/ LFR and be abused/ booted while you are a new player and trying to learn the strategies. LoL still has a reputation for similar types of abuse. There are other games which have more pleasant communities and reputations. So the other angle would be – how do we build nicer communities?

Thanks all for the feedback on yesterday’s post! I see some agreement with the general principle that we’d like our online spaces to be less hostile, and some equally valid concern about the mechanics of how this might happen and what kinds of rules could be fairly applied online.