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Hero's Journey - David Whatley Interview - Oct. 2005
Posted October 21st, 2005 by Ethec
Heroic Measures
A "Hero's Journey" Interview with Simutronics' David Whatley
by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle
David Whatley, President and CEO of Simutronics, Inc. was kind enough to answer a few questions about its upcoming fantasy MMO Hero's Journey. I avoided the questions that others have already asked; MMORPG.com has an excellent series of interviews on the various game mechanics Simutronics is using in HJ. Instead, I was curious about what kind of mindset it takes to develop a fantasy MMO in today's cutthroat MMO industry. Do you follow the trends and do what the big boys are doing, or strike out on your own? How does an MMO intentionally create a player community?
In the end, "frustration that entertains" might be the truest words anyone ever spoke about a good Massively Multiplayer Online game, and Whatley gives us a glimpse into the ways that developers find that golden mean.
TenTonHammer.Com: You've mentioned that the Simutronics team has done a lot of research on what players want. Is it possible for players to be their own worst enemy when it comes to mellowing out frustrations and difficulty until a game becomes nothing more than a glorified chat room? How does a developer balance players' wishes with what's good for players in terms of presenting a challenging, compelling game experience?
David Whatley: Correct, and highly perceptive…. The role of the MMO game developer is to entertain, but precisely because it is a game the entertainment value derives largely from overcoming obstacles and conflict. And, thus, it is the designers role to be the source of these obstacles and conflict. The difficulty in this is that the MMO game company is both providing a service to a customer, and frustrating the customer’s attempts to do what they ultimately want at the same time. Yet if the company simply gave the customer what they wanted, there would be no point to the product in the first place.
This conundrum is old hat for us. Remember, we’ve been doing this for over 18 years now, since before the Internet was anything more than a toy for a handful of researchers. Even back in the days of GEnie and CompuServe, the issue of how to “give the customer what they want” while being required not to by the laws that govern what makes things fun was ever present. It has not changed one bit in all this time, except it is now a problem pondered by a lot more people.
So how do you do it? First, you have to distinguish between the market place drivers and the player drivers. Our research is all about the market place: what features are MMO gamers really lusting after? Which things do they just think they enjoy (for lack of anything better) but would cause them to rush to us in a heartbeat if we gave them what they were really yearning for? What features are simply unimportant? That sort of thing. The study we recently did was extremely illuminating, but not surprising (at least for those of us who’ve been doing this for a long time).
The other side of the coin is how to handle the players who are currently patrons of your game. Here you have to be very careful because the feedback you get from customers is often extremely skewed. Like politics, you players fall into camps of extremism (our class is vastly underpowered!) and of course you have the vast silent majority that just enjoys what you give them or leaves without much fuss. The squeaky wheel gets the attention, and that is dangerous! The big risk for MMO designers is both not listening to their customers and (strange as it sounds) listening to them too much (remember, the loud ones are not always the representative sample).
The risk for MMO game designers is making changes to their game that seem to be what people want, but really isn’t. And the only way to combat this is through experience. Judging by the time-scale of our history, most MMO designers are still cutting their teeth on the problem. But from our perspective we’ve been living this for so long, that this issue is more like that old nemesis you’ve grown to love.
