Bill Roper: The Carrot and the Stick
Bill Roper: The Carrot and the Stick
Bill Roper: The Carrot and the Stick
The ex-Blizzard designer talks at the annual D.I.C.E. summit in Las Vegas about building rewarding game experiences.
By Sal "Sluggo" Accardo | March 6, 2004
Bill Roper may not be a household name across the U.S., but he's well-known to many gamers as the designer who, as a member of Blizzard Entertainment, helped develop immensely popular properties in the Warcraft and Diablo series. At the annual D.I.C.E. game developers' summit in Las Vegas, Roper -- now head of his own new company, called "Flagship" -- addressed the crowd to share some of his thoughts on game design and how to make players feel like they're rewarded for their efforts. Even without the standard PowerPoint slideshow hovering in the background, Roper kept the crowd fully engaged for 45 minutes, telling tales of things that have gone right and wrong in his previous works.
The core of Roper's presentation was "the carrot vs. the stick." Basically, every game has a breaking point where you need to be penalized for something, but where do you draw that balance in your gameplay? Do you penalize players when they don't do things the way you want them to, or do you heap rewards upon them when they do things "right"? Roper summed up his thoughts with a simple motto: "incentivize, not penalize."
Roper started by using the backdrop of Vegas as his first example - mainly, the surrounding floor of slot machines. Slots are easy to use, and when you lose, it's no big deal -- you lose a few nickels or quarters. No one comes back from Vegas complaining about how much they lost at the slots. But when you win ... whoa. Bells ring, change comes tumbling down … and that's just if you make a few bucks back. Win anything substantial, lights go off, and a guy might come out wheeling a cart full of quarters. It's a ton of positive reinforcement and virtually no negative, leaving gamers with an overwhelming pleasing experience, even when they're not doing well.
The Diablo games were used in a similar analogy, and what Roper referred to as the "monster piñata." Even when beating up on smaller monsters, you're constantly being rewarded with loot flying out everywhere. And since it's not real money you're winning, it's important that the booty continually has value; in the case of Diablo II, that meant lots of randomized magic items that provide value even in the first few hours of the game.
An example of Roper's "Monster Pinata"
Roper also used his experience as an EverQuest beta tester to illustrate his own penchant towards using rewards -- as opposed to penalties -- where possible. He described an early EverQuest battle where his character -- still level one -- was duking it out to a standstill with a fearsome rat. After setting his character to automatically keep fighting, he awoke the next morning to find out ... his character was dead. Interestingly, the rat didn't kill him, but he simply died of starvation -- a penalty of disobeying one of EverQuest's rules. In contrast, the upcoming World of Warcraft (which Roper was working on before leaving Blizzard) uses food as more of a bonus -- eating may help you regenerate faster or provide other bonuses, but if it's something you don't want to bother with, you can do so without fear of penalty.
From here, Roper got a good laugh out of the crowd in the midst of a warning: don't accidentally reward players for behavior that you'd normally want to penalize. Using Ultima Online as an example, he noted how rogue players in that game could originally gain the title of "Dark Lord," and wear it proudly. (Roper would occasionally throw his arms in the air and refer to the "DARK LORD!" throughout the remainder of the presentation.) In this case, Roper noted that one of the most effective ways of dealing with this type of player is to ostracize them; in the case of Battle net, players would only be able to join existing games (not start their own) and wouldn't be able to chat with others -- in essence removing their ability to interact.
Switching gears, Roper brought up the current EA sports games to illustrate another effective tool in keeping players rewarded and interested - special challenges and goals. In the latest iterations of EA Sports games, for example, you might unlock special uniforms or stadiums for scoring a certain number of points against a team or for winning with different players and teams. With a varied set of challenges, you can encourage players to try new things instead of beating one strategy into the ground and making the game repetitive. Similarly, many fighting games require you to beat the game with every player before certain things get unlocked, giving players a huge helping of what the game has to offer.
Towards the end of his talk, Roper spent some time on the topic of community building. In one instance, he brought up the Horadric Cube from Diablo II, which allowed players to combine various items and potentially end up with something way cooler. The "recipes" for the Cube weren't made public by Blizzard, so the community went wild experimenting and sharing combinations online. Once some of the combinations were known, players suddenly had a use for items they might otherwise discard.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Roper's talk was how effortlessly he was able to explain his views on game design and how simple and obvious his concepts came across. It was consistently mentioned by attendees as one of the best presentations of the show (though, to be fair, almost all of them were good); if nothing else, makes us a little more anxious to see what Flagship is up to. Little info on their initial product has been released as of yet, but it sounds as if they could be signing on with a publisher soon, so we'll be sure to see what Roper and co. do next.
Bill Roper: The Carrot and the Stick
The ex-Blizzard designer talks at the annual D.I.C.E. summit in Las Vegas about building rewarding game experiences.
By Sal "Sluggo" Accardo | March 6, 2004
Bill Roper may not be a household name across the U.S., but he's well-known to many gamers as the designer who, as a member of Blizzard Entertainment, helped develop immensely popular properties in the Warcraft and Diablo series. At the annual D.I.C.E. game developers' summit in Las Vegas, Roper -- now head of his own new company, called "Flagship" -- addressed the crowd to share some of his thoughts on game design and how to make players feel like they're rewarded for their efforts. Even without the standard PowerPoint slideshow hovering in the background, Roper kept the crowd fully engaged for 45 minutes, telling tales of things that have gone right and wrong in his previous works.
The core of Roper's presentation was "the carrot vs. the stick." Basically, every game has a breaking point where you need to be penalized for something, but where do you draw that balance in your gameplay? Do you penalize players when they don't do things the way you want them to, or do you heap rewards upon them when they do things "right"? Roper summed up his thoughts with a simple motto: "incentivize, not penalize."
Roper started by using the backdrop of Vegas as his first example - mainly, the surrounding floor of slot machines. Slots are easy to use, and when you lose, it's no big deal -- you lose a few nickels or quarters. No one comes back from Vegas complaining about how much they lost at the slots. But when you win ... whoa. Bells ring, change comes tumbling down … and that's just if you make a few bucks back. Win anything substantial, lights go off, and a guy might come out wheeling a cart full of quarters. It's a ton of positive reinforcement and virtually no negative, leaving gamers with an overwhelming pleasing experience, even when they're not doing well.
The Diablo games were used in a similar analogy, and what Roper referred to as the "monster piñata." Even when beating up on smaller monsters, you're constantly being rewarded with loot flying out everywhere. And since it's not real money you're winning, it's important that the booty continually has value; in the case of Diablo II, that meant lots of randomized magic items that provide value even in the first few hours of the game.
An example of Roper's "Monster Pinata"
Roper also used his experience as an EverQuest beta tester to illustrate his own penchant towards using rewards -- as opposed to penalties -- where possible. He described an early EverQuest battle where his character -- still level one -- was duking it out to a standstill with a fearsome rat. After setting his character to automatically keep fighting, he awoke the next morning to find out ... his character was dead. Interestingly, the rat didn't kill him, but he simply died of starvation -- a penalty of disobeying one of EverQuest's rules. In contrast, the upcoming World of Warcraft (which Roper was working on before leaving Blizzard) uses food as more of a bonus -- eating may help you regenerate faster or provide other bonuses, but if it's something you don't want to bother with, you can do so without fear of penalty.
From here, Roper got a good laugh out of the crowd in the midst of a warning: don't accidentally reward players for behavior that you'd normally want to penalize. Using Ultima Online as an example, he noted how rogue players in that game could originally gain the title of "Dark Lord," and wear it proudly. (Roper would occasionally throw his arms in the air and refer to the "DARK LORD!" throughout the remainder of the presentation.) In this case, Roper noted that one of the most effective ways of dealing with this type of player is to ostracize them; in the case of Battle net, players would only be able to join existing games (not start their own) and wouldn't be able to chat with others -- in essence removing their ability to interact.
Switching gears, Roper brought up the current EA sports games to illustrate another effective tool in keeping players rewarded and interested - special challenges and goals. In the latest iterations of EA Sports games, for example, you might unlock special uniforms or stadiums for scoring a certain number of points against a team or for winning with different players and teams. With a varied set of challenges, you can encourage players to try new things instead of beating one strategy into the ground and making the game repetitive. Similarly, many fighting games require you to beat the game with every player before certain things get unlocked, giving players a huge helping of what the game has to offer.
Towards the end of his talk, Roper spent some time on the topic of community building. In one instance, he brought up the Horadric Cube from Diablo II, which allowed players to combine various items and potentially end up with something way cooler. The "recipes" for the Cube weren't made public by Blizzard, so the community went wild experimenting and sharing combinations online. Once some of the combinations were known, players suddenly had a use for items they might otherwise discard.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Roper's talk was how effortlessly he was able to explain his views on game design and how simple and obvious his concepts came across. It was consistently mentioned by attendees as one of the best presentations of the show (though, to be fair, almost all of them were good); if nothing else, makes us a little more anxious to see what Flagship is up to. Little info on their initial product has been released as of yet, but it sounds as if they could be signing on with a publisher soon, so we'll be sure to see what Roper and co. do next.
posted by Swift at
9:34 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home