As I said yesterday, I am particularly interested in how to get more players deeply involved in a game’s community. In addition to the stuff yesterday, integrating discussion and gameplay can be a powerful tool for drawing players in. Depending on what an individual player is interested in, developers can do different things to involve them:

• Your min-maxer type really wants hard numbers. If you don’t give them hard numbers, they’ll try to make their own, do it wrong, and then blame you. You don’t have to give out all the numbers, but the more you do, the happier they’ll be. Oh, and if you can’t give out numbers because your systems are too complicated and fragile, players are going to assume it’s because you hate them.
• The achievement/explorer type of player really wants to be able to show off what they do. If you don’t give them an official way of doing this, some of them will hack your client and create an automated web service that keeps track of their badges. The ones who DON’T want to hack your client will just be sad and eventually quit.
• The creative/roleplaying type of player wants to perform or create for an audience. Do your best to make this fan content available from inside the game, or at least from the official site. If you want to make them happy, give them wide intellectual property rights and don’t sue them.
• The entrepreneur/economist type really likes markets. Do your best to expose as much market information as possible to the outside world. Just providing a dedicated forum for market news might be enough, but setting up RSS feeds for price info is probably worth the effort.
• Players who are most focused on the social aspects of your game want comprehensive in-game communication systems. Cross-shard chat, chat channels, and group-oriented chat are all great ideas. Some sort of in-game message board functionality is a godsend for encouraging guilds and the like. Make this all accessible from outside the game, if you can.
• Your more casual player is going to want easy access to game guidance. Unless you can perfectly anticipate all needed information (No. You can’t), casual players need access to player-created help and guides. I recommend setting up an official wiki for this purpose. Wikis are substantially better at collecting and organizing game information than ephemeral board postings or static web pages, and keeping it official allows you some policy control. Take a look at the Kingdom of Loathing wiki for a great example. With the help of a wiki, casual players can interact with the hardcore without having to put in the time investment.

Any given player will belong to several of these groups, so improving any of them will make your players more involved and more likely to STAY involved. If you can keep deep discussion as integrated and simple as possible, you can draw in more players without alienating the purely casual player. If you can keep this balance, and have a fun game to boot, it will be successful for years to come.

As I rambled about yesterday, I think the long-term success of an MMO has more to do with interest in talking about it than in actually playing it. But, what determines the ease and interest in talking about a game? How well does a game like City of Heroes do this, and how could it do better? Here’s a loosely-related group of suggestions for encouraging scintillating conversation:

• When being discussed by a Wider audience, a good name is essential. I think City of Heroes is an extremely good name, as is World of Warcraft. Saga of Ryzom? Not so much. Make sure to pick a name with a memorable and unique acronym. stupid Company of Heroes
• You need a thematic or gameplay hook that can easily identify a game within a crowded field. “It’s just like World of Warcraft, but the graphics are better and it involves Hammers” is not a valid thematic hook, sorry.
• If you can, have an army of fanboys willing to buy any game you make. This one helps a lot.
• For discussion by any audience, your gameplay needs to be easily describable. If the experience is too rapid or disjointed to form a smooth narrative, it will be hard to write about. This is a problem for City of Heroes. The time scale of gameplay was designed for optimal fun, but it’s faster than the natural time scale for narrative. On the other hand, a game like Eve Online that runs at the same basic time scale as real life is much easier to translate into compelling narrative.
• It also helps if the game system mechanics are based in common principles. If you generate combat results in a completely novel way, all of your players and outsiders will attempt to interpret the results in terms of a common system, fail to do so, and conclude that you implemented it wrong. I’m not saying you need to clone an existing MMO, but your primary game mechanics should relate to SOMETHING standard. As an example, Enhancements in CoH aren’t really like anything from existing MMO’s or superhero games, so they’re confusing for veterans and notices alike.
• For Deeper discussions, a conscious decision needs to be made regarding how important it should be to the overall game experience. If it’s too important, players who aren’t willing to get deeply involved will become bored and leave. If you go out of your way to make it unnecessary, a smaller percentage of your players will become deeply involved in your game. City of Heroes is purposefully designed so players should be able to reach max level without ever touching the forums, while a game like Eve encourages all of it’s players to become masters.
• There’s another thing developers can do to encourage deeper discussion: get involved. This is an extremely tricky area that is complicated by all sorts of legal and business issues, but most developers have realized the benefit of this. As general advice, some people should be encouraged to engage with the players, and others shouldn’t be allowed anywhere NEAR an internet forum. There’s the occasional gaffe and misunderstanding, but I like to think that the developers who post on CoH’s forums do a good job of keeping involved (ie, not me).

I’ve got a bit more to say about encouraging players to become deeply involved in a game’s community, but that’s for another post.

I read a short article yesterday about some new research from the University of Rochester. The article is a short fluff piece, but the summary is that accomplishment, exploration, and connection with other players are more important for keeping players involved than ephemeral fun is. This is not particularly novel to anyone who has thought seriously about MMO’s, because they rely on ephemeral fun far less than your typical game. Fun has a huge effect on short-term enjoyment, but to keep players for month after month it’s just not as important. The other thing about MMO’s is that connection with other players doesn’t have to take place within the context of game play. To a potentially larger extent than playing, just TALKING about a game is what keeps players happy, involved, and paying the developer’s bills.

There are two basic contexts within which discussion about a game takes place. The first I’ll call Wide, and is so named because a wide group of people can effectively engage in the discussion. At the most basic level, this includes the marketing speak that is used push product on consumers, as well as word of mouth recommendations. If your game is easy to describe in one or two sentences and has an interesting “hook”, you will draw in players initially. This isn’t enough to pull in jaded MMORPG junkies and ex-players, but more sophisticated discussion can. If your game is both interesting and discussable, recountings of anecdotes and comparisons of game systems will take place on forums and blogs across the net. As I mentioned in an earlier post, controversy is a great driver of this type of discussion. If your game can be talked about in a compelling way, you’ll steal players from the competition and get lapsed players to return. You might even get some mainstream media attention, who knows.

The other context, which I’ll call Deep, requires a much deeper level of knowledge to participate. If you’re not familiar with the details of a particular game, it tends to be deathly boring. Because of the investment required and the intimidating nature of obsessive forum-goers, many players won’t take the plunge into this level of discussion. However, the players who do get this involved in ongoing discussion about a game have a good chance of staying for a long time. Arguing the merits of different character builds, performing a monologue in character, or participating in in-game events all help to draw different types of people in to this conversation. The more players who participate in this level of discussion, no matter what specific area they participate in, the larger your core of players is, and the longer your game will last.

Now that two levels of discussion about a game have been identified, how do developers encourage and foster that discussion? I’m going to talk a bit more about that over the next few days, but both obvious and non-obvious factors affect these conversations. The areas of discussion that a developer decides to focus on go a long way towards determining the character of a game’s community. And, the character of a community is a major factor in the life cycle and overall success of an online game.