CTIN 482 Assignment 4

This week’s reading for CTIN 482 designing online multiplayer game environments is an interesting one. It uses MUD as a test bed to analyze the player type and social dynamics in the online games. Although this article is done years ago, it still applies to today's online game, especially MMO game.

In the article, it divides players into four stereotypes on 2 dimension map:

The four types are pretty self-explanatory. However, it is really hard to say some one like myself to be one of the stereotypes. Most of us are some where on the graph. But more important, our location on the graph will change based on the game experience.

I’ll use World of Warcraft as an example:

The first time I played this game, I was very curious about this immense game world. How do I play this game? What will happen if I do this? What does it look like behind that little hill? During this period, I’m somewhere between the achiever and explorer.

After I hit level 10 I realized that I can’t get to see the entire picture in one day. So I went bed and planed to level up little by little. Between level 10 to level 30, I was a pure achiever, finished all the quests and leveled up my crafting skills.

At level 30 I began to feel bored with the repetitive grinding and questing. The nice thing about the design of World of Warcraft is every time you feel bored about questing alone there will be a group quest. The game forces people gather together to deal with the quest. And I started making friends list of the people that I trust. Very soon, the game play experience migrates to a socialiser.

Although there were some PVP happening, I was not very into killing until level 40. Plus all the battlegrounds Blizzard added in recently, players who are into killing can enjoy it at any level.

When I reached 60 as the current level cap, I started to manage my game flow, shuffle between the four modes to keep myself motivated. The game itself offers plenty of content for all these four stereotypes, and keeps adding new content, which is one of the reason that keeps me playing it after two years.

A good online game can satisfy players’ needs in all these roles.

Posted by Jenova at September 18, 2005 7:27 PM