The One Rule

[Hoofhurr]

I always have to think about this in terms of competitive gaming, of any sort. I think your premise is flawed in some way. It seems to me that the number of players, the size of the field and the goals of the game are all critically linked. In most games the size of the field, the number of players and the goals are static and physically limited. You can adapt the game to the number of players you have but it changes the game in fundamental ways. Have you ever tried to play full court 2v2 basketball? Have you ever tried to play full-field soccer with 6 people? It's quickly tiring and quite silly. The dimensions of the field and the physical goals are generally static. Yeah you can switch to a game of half-court basketball or simply kick the soccer ball around with 6 people but I'd argue that you've then changed the scale of the game to such a degree that the tactics and strategy have changed fundamentally.


What about the reverse? Ever played a game of basketball with 40 people? Why does that suggestion never come up? You could flood the lane with 20 defenders forcing the other team to just take jump shots or you could expand the boundaries to include 8 adjoining courts with 8 hoops. All these modifications change the nature and the balance of the game imo. Competitive games become decidedly uncompetitive when one team can employ a set of tactics that the other team doesn't have access to by virtue of not having enough players.

Now you could argue that virtual worlds are more flexible in this regard. And they are. Nevertheless, it's much easier and I would argue necessary to design a game where the field and goals are static. Why necessary?

The reason is psychological. The number of players, the static field and the physical goals act as the metric by which we mentally calibrate our selves for success or failure. If someone moved the hoop higher as soon as we got close to dunking the ball and kept moving it higher and higher never letting us dunk it then we would never taste success. Have you ever played on a court with short hoops? It's fun to pretend you can dunk the ball but in your mind you know it's not a real dunk and therefore the success of slamming the ball down the hoop is really diminished.

In the same way you could bring 20 of your friends to the court and build a human pyramid, climb to the top of the pyramid and throw the ball down the hoop but again that's not a dunk in the visceral, satisfactory sense of a Mike Jordan jumping from the foul line type of dunk.

Would these changes make the game more accessible to players? Undoubtedly. All these modifications however destroy the mental calibration of success and failure among and between players or competitors imo. Virtual games have the capability to keep the field static, the goals static, and allow the number of players to change and to change the relative power of those characters to the field/goals.

You could keep Ogre_01 at 100 hitpoints and design it for 5 people who do 5 damage a second or you could force 100 players to do 0.1 damage per second fighting that same ogre. I don't think that's a satisfactory solution either.

I, for one, would not trade the satisfaction of achieving a goal for accessibility to that goal. I'll just find another game to play. If I have 4 friends let's go play 2v2. If I have 40 friends let's go play sloshball. If I'm by myself I'll play minesweeper or Half-Life2.

When you conform to the game you know that everyone else playing that game plays by the same rules and a defined measure of success. If you change the game to fit the players or broaden the goals so much that the number of players is irrelevant then no two people can compare their gaming experience. If you can't compare your performance to the next guy where is the competition?

The future of gaming accessibility is having a means of quickly finding friendly players and quickly finding one of a number of games for the number of people you have; not making one game appropriate for a broad range of players. Adult lives, personal preferences and a global internet create a play matrix that's simply too fractured to be sustained by a single game.