previously, offline training areas can be extremely helpful for players to practice with-
out the shame of being crushed by human opponents repeatedly while they try to get up
to speed. Instead of always rewarding players for killing other players, Dani Bunten
Berry suggested that a mentoring system may be appropriate, where more veteran
players are appropriately rewarded for watching over the newer players. Indeed,
Asheron’s Callimplemented just such a system through allegiances, which worked
quite well in giving players a large incentive to help each other, particularly newbies.
Keeping features to a minimum and controls as simple as possible will also help.
The more complex and hard to understand the controls are, the longer it will take some-
one to get used to them, and then the further ahead the experienced players will be
from the novices. The air combat flight simulators are a perfect example of too complex
controls creating a hard-core-only gaming community. Having simpler controls but
combining them with a deep range of actions and tactics helps keep the barrier to entry
reasonably low while providing the experienced players with raw materials with which
to experiment. Finally, if your game design supports something more complex than “I
win, everyone else loses” gameplay, the game will be a lot more inviting to new players.
Massively multi-player games have become particularly good at this, allowing all play-
ers to go on all the quests and supporting players succeeding in a variety of equally
satisfying ways. Many death-match games show the ranking of players at the end of the
match instead of just reporting the winner. This way, though it may be a while before a
newbie moves to first place, he can see himself crawl out of sixteenth place and up to
higher ranks over time. To players, there is less shame if they come in fifth out of eight
than if all they know is that they failed to win.
Socialization ...............................
One of the primary reasons that players engage in multi-player games is to socialize
with other players. This is true both in computer games as well as non-computer
games. Anyone who has played board games with his family can attest to the fact that
one person is always suggesting they play a game while some others will go along just
to have something social to do, not because they are particularly captivated by the
gameplay itself. Indeed, when I first started playingDungeons & DragonsI was not very
interested in the game at all (indeed, I would have much rather playedChampions). But
Dungeons & Dragonswas what my friends wanted to play, and rather than stay home
and do nothing I joined in. I only came to appreciate the gameplay after playing with
them for some time. Similarly, I knew people in college who became so wrapped up in a
given MUD that friends of theirs would start playing the MUD just so they could social-
ize with them again. Certainly a large number of people playing massively multi-player
games such asEverQuesttoday primarily do so in order to socialize. This also explains
why these games have attracted a larger female fan base than, say, first-person shoot-
ers: the commonly held wisdom is that women enjoy socializing more than men. At the
very least, females are looking for a social experience a little more involving than a
game that revolves around kill-or-be-killed mechanics.
With a board game or a non-computer role-playing game, the players’ ability to
socialize mostly comes free. Nevertheless, a game like chess is far less social than a
game that requires players to cooperate or backstab each other. In a multi-player com-
puter game with all the players playing around one screen, such asMario Kartor a
248 Chapter 13: Multi-Player