Crafting minigames is one of them whackamole ideas that pops up incessantly in various player communities, and it wasn’t a total surprise to see it show up on Mud-Dev recently. I was somewhat surprised to see the idea didn’t make much of an appearance in this week’s crafting thread. There are those who believe firmly that the act of crafting is boring, and games like Puzzle Pirates and A Tale In The Desert have experimented with alternate ways to make the process more interesting.
So let’s play Devil’s Advocate. One thing that definitely rings true while reading comments to the previous thread is that crafting is ultimately a social game — a game of gathering resources, advertising wares and haggling prices. If you want to improve crafting, making it easier or more interesting to do all of the above will have more impact, and bring more of a sense that you’re really a merchant, than making the actual act of crafting more complicated.
While toiling away as an armorcrafter in SWG, I noticed something peculiar about crafting: on one hand, this generation of crafting systems requires people who prefer to play alone – creating the goods in SWG took a considerable amount of time and focus. On the flip side, you also need to be a social animal in order to get your resources and make your sales. This is a tricky line to walk, and requires a bit of balance, and the sorts of people that gravitate towards this role will be fairly unique – the anti-social social butterfly. In social network theory terms, they’re guys with fewer strong leaks, but a bajillion weak links. They’re social hubs, often the backbone of the MMO communities that form in games that aren’t guilds.
Imagine that crafting a longsword required you to play a game of Tetris. Suddenly, the good craftsmen aren’t the social hubs, they’re the people who are good at puzzle games. This is a very different set of motivations, and a very different set of skills. Your good craftsmen become puzzle fighter powergamers. Your social crafters, who might lack these skills, find themselves at an disadvantage.
Of course, the minigame could be dumbed down so these social players could more easily succeed. This would be a mistake – instead of an interesting gameplay addition, you now have a hoop to jump through. For example, while playing Thief: Deadly Shadows, I groan every time I hit a door to lockpick. The minigame there requires little skill or imagination, it’s just a relatively random bit of mouse-wiggling that simply serves to annoy and occupy time. In other words, a hoop. One thing about hoops is that they invite bots.
What I would have preferred as an armorsmith was a shorter, more concise crafting system (i.e. something shorter than a 6-step wizard), so I could spend less time actually making stuff and more time doing the social stuff. I think the next generation of good crafting will focus on improved ways to do the social stuff, such as better tools for restocking, organizing and advertising. It’s easy as a designer to say that all activities should be interesting. It’s a bit harder to figure out when you need to reduce the involvement of a game activity so players can interact with what’s truly interesting in an online world – other players.
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