One of the recurring ideas in the great permadeath debate (now slashdotted, for her pleasure) is the notion that permadeath might be saved only for certain extremely high-powered encounters (in fact, this idea is central to the Corpnews post that started this whole mess).
One of the things that ideas like this need to work around is that game players learn by doing. They tend not to read manuals, they tend not to listen to NPCs, they tend to want to try things and see what happens. And why not? People learn by reading in books, learn by observing in movies, and learn by doing in games. That interactivity is the cornerstone of the gaming experience, and it’s part of what draws people to our medium over others.
People who play video games, if told by an NPC that a particularly gruesome death awaits them if they go near the foozle, don’t react the way normal people do in real life. Instead, they’ll go test out the foozle, to see if he’s really worthy of all the bluster the NPC townskeeper is spouting out.
One of the hallmarks of a good game is that you can make bad choices, and have to deal with the consequences of those decisions. This can make games remarkably good teaching tools. In Grand Theft Auto, you have the freedom to kill a cop if you want to, but doing so will unleash the fury of the city on you. In Civilization, you can drop a nuke, but you’re left with full-blown war and an uninhabitable landscape. Players want to try out the negative side effects, are often delighted by them, and then revert to a save point.
In his book, Raph Koster talks about learning not just as part of the gaming experience, but as the central component for what is fun. “Fun” is, in essence, learning how a game works, and applying those lessons to escalating challenges. When you stop learning, or your patterns no longer work, the game ceases to be fun. Case in point: my frustration with God of War in the final boss fight. They changed weapons on me and took away all my powers. Suddenly, my previous 10-20 hours worth of learning was useless.
And this, more than anything else, is why death penalties have been getting lighter in MMOs over time. Yes, it’s more tense and more tactical and edge-of-your-seat when any death could be your last. But it also KILLS Learning by Doing, and you know what? Doing incredibly suicidal, stupid things is FUN. Learning the consequences for such stupidity is also fun. This is especially true in an MMO, where you have an audience for bellyflopping into the pool. If the penalties of death are too harsh, though, your players will self-censor their own game experience, go to a part of the world with less inherent risk, and proceed to complain about how boring your game is.
In a freeform environment, players have the ability to raise and lower their own difficulty level based on where they choose to adventure. MMOs that embrace learning by doing will consider it’s goal to get players to try dangerous and risky things, with the theory that that is when the game will really shine. MMOs that don’t grok this will talk about how hardcore they are, and then be shocked when their population all chooses the Lowest Common Denominator gameplay.
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