Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

In our current massively multiplayer online gaming space, emotions are often subdued, only emerging when players achieve victory in an intensely difficult raid or facing certain death in a Leeroy Jenkins-sque group wipe. However, they do exist in these games, and this was the topic discussed in Nicole Lazzaro’s presentation on the “Four Most Important Emotions of Game Design” where she presented the key “emotions” necessary to create an award-winning, revenue-generating game. As the president of XEODesign, Inc., Lazzaro has over seventeen years working in the player experience field, and her lecture was both enlightening and raised some red flags about the current gameplay development in upcoming MMOGs.

Lazzaro stated in her lecture that if a game can achieve “three out of the four emotional states at the same time”, the developers have an award winning game. By developing the Player Experience (PX), games can achieve emotional states without relying on the “relief” moments of beating a level or the “story” moments involved with a cut-scene.

Nicole Lazzaro, President of XEODesign, Inc.

While Lazzaro does want more emotions in games, she’s wary about taking the interactivity away from the gamer. Cut-scenes and theatrical visions are not her idea of “emotional” gameplay development, and she’s more focused on designing games that are original and fun-to-play. Some of her most pertinent examples were videos of Wii players, where the players interact with each other and the game as well. Throughout the rest of this article, we’ll discuss the four “emotions” she covered in her lecture and what MMO developers could or should do to integrate these emotions into their titles.

Hard Fun

In Lazzaro’s presentation, Hard Fun was what described the sort of gameplay that is inherent to most MMOs; the cycle of boredom, frustration, and relief when getting through a particularly difficult section of a level or an encounter. MMO gamers are probably the most notorious enjoyers of Hard Fun, especially anyone who has encountered a massive grind necessary to achieve a new level.

Lazzaro actually used an MMO – World of Warcraft – as an example of Hard Fun, showing a video where a player finally beats a high level raid and throws her hands up in the air in exhilaration. That is the sort of response Hard Fun elicits.

However, MMO developers often skimp on some of the actual “meat” of Hard Fun: the opportunities for challenge, strategy, and problem solving. Most of the challenge is actually working out the need for players of different time zones to get online or dealing with one character that isn’t pulling his weight, rather than actual in-game elements.

Easy Fun

Emotions involved with Easy Fun are often those that involve player curiosity and intrigue. Exploring a level or developing an underhanded tactic to take down a coporation are some examples of easy fun. MMOs tend to have some easy fun, but often curiosity and intrigue are not as rewarding for the players as their Hard Fun or Altered States emotions are.

Easy Fun, as far as gamer emotions go, is often expressed with a  contented feeling of delving into a world you’ve never experienced before. Many gamers encounter this emotion when they finish a level and finally have the freedom to explore the whole of their boundaries.

Incentivizing exploration and intrigue is something that many developers are looking into these days. For example, EVE Online actually encourages players to be underhanded in their schemes, hoping that political intrigue makes players want to delve into the seedier side of their environment. Lord of the Rings Online also encourages exploration, giving players titles after they explore a certain amount of the game world. A vast majority of older MMOs, however, do not include these rewards or incentives in their gameplay.

Altered States (Serious Fun)

When players try to achieve armor or weapons of this caliber, they often are experiencing Altered State emotions.

According to Lazzaro, Altered State (or Serious Fun) emotions are when “players treasure the enjoyment from their internal experiences in reaction to the visceral, behavior, cognitive, and social properties. These players play for internal sensations such as Excitement or Relief from their thoughts and feelings.” In layman’s terms, this is when a player enters a world with a specific goal or emotion in mind.

For example, an Altered State might be when a gamer enters World of Warcraft to blow off steam after work, or if a player plays a few more rounds in the Arena because he needs to be able to keep his team alive when he’s playing. These are Altered State emotions.

There are very few games that don’t have some level of Serious Fun in them, but MMOs are often great sources of Altered States, because there is a level of social complexity in an MMO that isn’t prevalent in all genres of games. When a player sees another character with an amazing looking sword, they enter into an Altered State, because they may want to get that sword and be on the same sort of pedestal that they put that other character on.

However, MMOs can also advance in this field by making their games less about the “work” of getting through the game. A player may want to be in an Altered State, but he is forced to grind through sections of the game that might not even be Hard or Easy Fun.

The People Factor (People Fun)

Last but far from least, Lazzaro discussed the People Factor (or People Fun). When players compete, socialize, roleplay, and harass each other, that is people fun. Anytime a player feels an emotion towards a player, whether that’s a heated rivalry or friendly compassion, they’re engaged in a People Fun emotion.

MMOs, in general, have a degree of People Fun almost automatically built in to them. With chat channels, guilds, and groups, people are almost intrinsically drawn to each other in the folds of MMORPGs.

However, MMOs should continue to work on creating easy ways for people to interact beyond simple typing. Voice-over IPs – like Vivox – or other means of communication (emotes, message boards, etc.) should continue to expand so players have the opportunity to form communities both large and small. Some MMOs, as they developed their solo-play experience, really took the community away from the MMO, making these worlds a much more sterile atmosphere. MMOs should always keep the community in the forefront of their minds, so they can keep creating People Fun.

Concluding Remarks

In her final remarks, Lazzaro wanted to emphasize the need for all games, not just MMOs, to begin looking for original ideas and means to develop them. Her two favorite examples – the Wii and the Sims – are ideas that derive some old gameplay experiences from the games of the past, but they do a lot of fresh things as well. People are looking for new ideas, and if a developer can create a new game while including the four emotional states, they have a winner.

MMOs should take this into consideration as well, as a majority of the gameplay in MMOs features the four emotional states, but rarely in conjunction with one another. If MMO developers can blend the four together at the same time, they’ll have something more entertaining than what is currently on the market.

Make sure you check out the rest of our OGDC '07 coverage!