On Endings, ♥♦♣♠, and the Neutral Arbitrer
What's this? A new post from a long-dormant newsletter? Is it possible that The Last Videogame Blog, an industry leviathan with nearly ten subscribers, has stirred from its sleep, and will once again grace our inbox with insufferable discourse?
Sadly, no. Unlike the hiatus this newsletter commemorates a break from, this return from activities has a very strict length: exactly two editions, this being the first.
So, what caused me to rise up from my grave and publish a new issue of my otherwise dead newsletter? Well, two factors that happened to happen in close proximity. The first one was another newsletter: Lucrécia Ludovico Alves' Split/Party, specifically the issue Knowing the Ending, specifically the game she mentions in the beginning. Alves is doing excellent work with her newsletter. I don't mind much if anyone was to describe my work as pretentious, as might be a fair conclusion from anyone who's read an entire paragraph of this newsletter. It is important, however, to remember that the word pretentious means a work that pretends to be something else. What am I pretending to be? Well, Alves' work is a pretty fair response, if I'm being honest. Her work is miles ahead the usual games discourse, being unafraid to skewer the community's darlings along with its pariahs and painfully aware of the realities of living in late capitalism.
The other factor is that I'm on vacation and actually have plenty of time to write a longform essay and pretend to be in dialogue with an analyst that's much smarter than me. (Not that the vacation helped much: I'd intended to send this newsletter on March, but a series of shenanigans meant it was so late I could either send it fashionably late or accept it as an April issue. Alas, I hope no one minds the extra month waiting for a newsletter none expected to come.)
But what, exactly, caught my fancy about Alves' newsletter? Well, in it she discusses the game Coffee & Chaos, by Cobblepath Games. This is a pretty cozy tabletop RPG that intends to take a character from other media and have them in a "coffeeshop AU", that is to say, an alternate, very low stakes story in which they're working on a coffee shop. I'll admit I haven't played the game, so instead of parroting Alves' analysis I'll quote her directly:
(...)[The game works] by having cutlery — three kinds used to solve different problems (knives, spoons and forks) with different approaches and the kind that matters (tea spoons). Players go through their cutlery, and when they run out, to refresh the other cutlery, they take a break with any other number of players. This is where the game does the thing it wants to do. Then you go back to the chore-like game, get rid of the cutlery, use tea spoon… and so on and so on.
A funny thing happens, however. There are no rules beyond this loop. There is no way to end the game or to close the coffee shop for another day. You will run out of cutlery and those precious tea spoons. Catastrophes will keep piling up, things get worse and worse, work becomes more nightmarish and things go worse and worse and you cannot succeed — you can only alleviate the crisis for another moment. And you cannot take breaks, you are forever there.
Of course, nobody plays that. You playing for the tea spoons moments, silly. So, the moment there are no (tea) spoons, the game is obviously over. If you are playing this game, the assumptions of what you are trying to get from it needed to play the game in the first place also assure you will “play it wrong” in this way. Nobody will, realistically, play into the Coffee Shop Abyss of Doom.
This had me thinking a lot about the unspoken rules of games. For instance: one of the main problems of having Dungeons and Dragons as the behemoth in the TTRPG industry is that it's a game that, for many of its development years, didn't know what it wanted to be. Some wanted it to be an epic story generator, in which your heroes rode against all odds but were certain to defeat the terrible evil, while others wanted it to be a crapsack medieval fantasy simulator in which characters could die at any instant; and much of early TTRPG discourse comes from this discrepancy. If the game is an epic narrative creator why do the rules let me die to a level 1 giant rat? And, conversely, if my characters are disposable, why am I supposed to bring pages of backstory to the first session? This is not much different from Coffee & Chaos' lack of defined ending mechanics, except that one supposed there's not a large faction of players who do not merely prefer the Coffee Shop Abyss of Doom but actually never imagined there are people who don't, as well as (and this is a much more important factor) Coffee and Chaos is not such an widely played game that it's effectively synonymous with the hobby.
However, my assistant is frantically whispering in my ear that this newsletter is about digital games, and we should bring it around to them. Well, it's also supposed to be monthly, isn't it? PLAY A RIMSHOT. But digital games bring a very different perspective into this subject. A digital game only does what it's been programmed to do; it cannot stop because the vibe is off or because it feels the experience should end there. It has no concept of satisfactory endings or cliffhangers, unless these have been programmed - actually, even if they have been programmed, since it knows only what it code says. A digital version of Coffee & Chaos, played as written, would indeed go on forever - or until you quit the application.
Of course, when computers push against our desires, human users are very good at pushing back. I remember an article I read long ago - I have no hope of finding it now, since it's been about twenty years, so my chances fo finding it again would be slim even if Google still worked - in which a man talked about some superhero-themed MMO in which no one played with the actual game mechanics, everyone just chatted. The man decided to create a character using a broken combat build and attack other players in this world. He described his actions as a social scientist studying how people who had decided not to play a game would react to it being actually played, but he very obviously was just a 4chan level troll who wanted to harass people playing the game in a way he didn't like. The story ends as you'd expect - with the author banned and shocked at how other people are dumb - but this shows how online games can be warped in a way physical games can't. No amount of pointing at a rulebook will convince a D&D DM to obey a rule they don't want to obey. (They even put a rule about it in the book!) But, conversely, a digital game can only do what it's programmed to do. We can carve out a path out of it - like the people in the superhero MMO who used the chat feature to create their little chatroom, maybe in character, maybe not - but the digital object can't and won't respond to that. It'll respond much better to an interloper who speaks to its original purpose.
This actually reminds me of Richard Bartle, who was analysing MMO archetypes all the way back in 1990, when they were still called MUDs and didn't look very different from this email. Bartle theorized that there were basically four types of players, each represented by a card suit:
Achievers, or "Diamonds" ♦, are players most interested in becoming the best at whatever metric the game measures. They want to have the most points, be the wealthiest, become the president, whatever the game quantifies as victory.
Explorers, or "Spades" ♠, are players most interested in discovering the game mechanics. They want to know what's under the game's hood. Nowadays they're probably the ones writing all those wikis.
Socializers, or "Hearts" ♥, see the game as a social space. They often prefer to talk about it than to actually participate in it - although the game does provide common ground and a lot of juicy gossip.
Killers, or "Clubs" ♣, are most interested in proving their mastery over other players, either at the skills the game purpoits to test or using other ways to bypass them entirely.
I find this analysis to be quite brilliant and still very useful to this day. I admit I'm not an MMO man myself, but any game that fosters an online community is likely to see archetypes similar to those bloom naturally. But later on, there's a section of the article that doesn't get talked about much even among those who did pay attention to Bartle's analysys: it's where he imagines what equilibrium a game will tend towards depending on its population. Bartle suggests three possible endings for an MMO:
A lack of gamelike elements reduces the population of Achievers and Explorers. Killers follow suit, either for the same reason or due to a lack of interesting prey. Only socializers remain. The game becomes a glorified chatroom.
A lack of interesting new developments reduce the population of Explorers (who have nothing new to discover) and Socializers (who have nothing new to talk about). Achievers and Killers remain in equilibrium, the former grinding for points, while the second take joy in challenging them.
All populations remain stable, and the game works as the designers imagined. The perfect MMO.
(There's a fourth equilibrium, an MMO with no players whatsoever, but it's clearly just an abstraction - even if there are many real games currently in that category, it obviously followed from another failure state).
Going back to the superhero MMO in the article I barely remember, it's clear that it had fallen into the first equilibrium. This can be seen as a failure from a game design point of view, but for the community it's simply how it shook out. (Bartle takes pain to explain how rare and unlikely it is that a game will spontaneously fall into the 'perfect MMO' equilibrium, although he is talking generally about hobbyst-run BBC channels as opposed to commercial enterprizes.) And yet, again, the game itself - the digital program - doesn't know how the game is being used. The vastly numerically superior socializer faction cannot change the way the game works (even less so on a commercial enterprize!) and thus the author's perverse view that he is in the right because he's "playing by the rules" isn't that far from the truth: he was playing the rules of the game as programmed, and it's not programmed to aknowledge the community.
However, the story, as I recall, ends with our solo killer being banned, so it seems the community does have some sway on the machine. But don't be tricked into thinking this will always be the state of affairs. Because another equilibrium mentioned by Bartle reminds me of one of the most played games in the modern days: Grand Theft Auto Online. (What, you think I'd pull this newsletter out of the grave and not mention my hate-crush? Take a shot.)
Go to the subreddits for GTA Online and it's dominated by the kind of player who'll have perfected the art of idling the game in order to gain the most in-game money. They'll do the most boring activities for hours every day because their spreadsheet shows it's the most profitable, and they know how to get them done with minimum fuzz. They call themselves grinders, but they're certainly the same as Bartle's Achievers.
There's another kind of player that the grinders hate. That's the player that will swoop down on one of the game's incredibly overpowered vehicles, such as the rocket-equipped hoverbike, and kill players indiscrimately. They are called griefers by the community. But are they, perhaps, Bartle's Killers?
This is a difficult question to answer. Bartle's original text didn't seem to differenciate much between a killer and a griefer, that is to say, a player who seeks to be the best within the framework of the game's rules and one who seeks to ruin other players' experience of the game, even - or perhaps especially - if they have to make use of bugs and exploits. As gamers, the difference seems clear, but how can you separate, academically, a player of an MMO that spread a contagious negative condition for fun and a player of, say, Magic: The Gathering that uses an obscure rules tidbit that allows them to win instantly? (Oh, yeah, I mentioned Magic as well, my other hate-crush. Take another shot.)
But this question is even more difficult to answer for a more pointed reason. The thing that grinders hate the most about griefers is when they interrupt their moneymaking methods by attacking them. However, if you are playing GTA and someone is doing a mission, you're not just allowed to attack them: you're encouraged to do so. Text on screen tells you to stop that player for a reward. In fact, while grinders prefer to use tricks to stop other players from attacking them, it's very clear that the intended way for those missions to be played is by having other players as your enemies.
Maybe I own the lone killer from the superhero MMO an apology? The dream world of the socializers is a chatroom without any game aspects, but the dream world of the grinders is a wasteland without any other players - except maybe other grinders on their errands. (Grinders don't interrupt other grinders - the rewards for stopping another player's missions are a pittance compared to the successful conclusion of one's own missions.) They are more than happy to play the same repetitive missions for ever. They're both twisting the game's very design goals for their own.
There is, of course, an element that schews the equilibrium even more: the Shark Cards. In GTA you can pay real-world money on 'Shark Cards' that you can exchange for in-game money and therefore obliviate grinding. Once you realize that the actual purpose of the game isn't to provide a vivid or interesting game world but to hook players for cash, the reasons for its equilibrium become more apparent.
(There are several tiers of cards, all named after sea animals, with the most expensive one being called the Whale card. In the gaming community, this word is very strongly associated with predatory, microtransaction-laden games, where it's used to refer to players that spend very large amounts of money and therefore keep the company in business and also pay for the large amount of players who pay nothing or pay only a decent amount of money. It's a very Rockstar joke to call the card that, and surprisingly ballsy to openly insult your playerbase. I don't think whatever executive was in charge figured out that joke.)
In a deviation from Bartle's achievers, GTAO's grinders don't care much about being the best; they chase the large 'score' for themselves, to have money to buy the cars and properties that are constantly being added to the game. This internal drive, neatly, also obliviates the need for Socializers, who are all scared away by the proeminence of Killers (as well as the pitiful chat mechanics). But achievers also provide spetacular advertising for spending real world money. For killers, they present a delicious target, one who'll struggle just enough to make the kill enjoyable but inevitable and who is sure to curse their killer's name. This means that the killer had better spend real money, since there's no way he's spending all that time doing quests. And for the regular user, grinders are a poster child for the hardship and boredom necessary to make it 'honestly' in the game. Do you really want to work a second job on the fake world to be able to have fun? Why not just use the money from your actual job?
And this brings us to the final thumb in the scale of MMOs: capitalism. (Yeah, take another shot.) It's easy to see Bartle's equilibriums as failed states in trying to pursue the perfect MMO. But I doubt the community that played the superhero game thought it was bad that it was a glorified chatroom, and I doubt Rockstar thinks it's bad that their massively successful game is pulling money from people who've spend money to play it.
Join me for next month's newsletter when I review city-building game Urbek and make sure to add some images to the newsletter.