How Education Applies to Game Design: Brute Force and an Educational MMO

Over at Psychochild's blog (Which is great, when posts are actually made, so go check it out) there was this post about solving the “brute force” problem. Which obviously interests me or I wouldn't be about to waste my usual torrent of words on the subject. But, basically, the idea is that players have become used to using brute force to solve any obstacles in games. Not just in video games but also in pen and paper gaming as the originator of the idea over at the Tales of the Rampant Coyote points out.

Players have to kill every last critter, open every last chest, and break down every last door in an attempt to suck every last bit of experience – in more ways than one – out of any given level or area or map or whatsoever the sandbox might be shaped like. And, well, the way they generally go about it is as simply and directly as they possibly can – hack and slash and burn, if you will. But, well, this leaves most games with no sense of mystery, no sense of awe and wonder at the magnificent unexplored and unattainable. It's definitely a design flaw in the modern MMO which encourages this kind of playstyle, if nothing else, to its detriment (I think. I mean, what do I know, I'm not a game designer just someone who likes to play good games.). And they create a vicious feedback cycle where brute force solutions lead to players getting better at brute force problems.

Because, let's face it, for all the thought and attention that goes into making MMOs and playing MMOs and figuring out optimal moves and favorable conditions to play, these games are incredibly brainless. They can be reduced to mathematical models and stripped of any sense of individuality and personal creativity (I know, because, well, I've done it or at least tried to take a good stab at it, so to speak. Anything for an edge and, after all, I don't trust machines to calculate DPS for me – at least not the ones in-game.) that, for me anyway, make games worth playing. I mean sure I like to win but what I really like about games is playing them. And what I don't like to feel like when I'm playing games is that I'm just another bag of meat banging away on a keyboard. Most MMOs are monkey work.

A phrase which, if you'll forgive me for the digression, comes from a story about a friend of mine. You see, when we were at university I had this one friend who was quite a character in his own right. We roomed together for a time and the guy was, well, almost as insane as I am (Which is, you know, saying something.) which is probably why we got along so well. Anyhow, this friend had a job at one of the many libraries around campus. Universities are dotted with them usually and there's plenty of jobs for those students who, like we were, are looking for a little bit of extra cash. These are generally make-work jobs, really, the most unskilled of unskilled labor but they're jobs that need doing and they put a bit of cash in the pockets of people willing to help out the university so it's a winning situation all around. Libraries, as it turns out, are actually pretty cool places to be in college. Forget the boring accumulated wisdom of the ages lining the shelves. I know we did. There's plenty of nooks and crannies and out-of-the-way places for people to slip into. And, well, not to put to fine a point on it but out of their clothes. Throw in plenty of seating and areas for people to lounge around in while they try and read and, well, people show up in droves. Great places to go to study, to hang out, and to date.

The place my friend worked at was the largest and most popular library on campus. It was called the Stacks and I could fill a book or two with the stories of just what I heard was found amongst the shelves of that place – late at night or in quiet places where no one thought anyone was watching. And that's what my friend's job was – to walk up and down the library's shelves and put back any book that had been checked out and returned. They call it reshelving and, as you'd imagine, it's a constant task in a library of any size. And more than a bit monotonous – the opportunities for people watching notwithstanding. Me, I didn't work there, but I did hang out at the Stacks quite a bit. And, of course, my friend and I found every excuse to chill out together whether there was supposed to be working or not. Now, my friend wasn't the only person who worked in the Stacks and there was a cast of other workers who carted books up and down the floors and back to their proper places. One of them came to be a friend of mine in his own right. He was a philosophy major and if you've ever met any you know they're a rare and strange breed. Guy was a kook, in so many words, and we whiled away many an hour talking about nothing in particular and everything in general. Debates raged about topics I can't quite remember and positions were staked that I can't quite bring myself to care about at this point. I'm sure it sounds pretty serious because I'm in a contemplative mood at the moment and that makes me come off all stuffy. Trust me, when I'm having fun I'm just as serious about having a good time. Really, we were just clowning around. Trying to top each other with one crazy idea or outrageous joke after another. The halls of the Stacks would ring with our laughter. And we got more than one sharp glare from people who were overly concerned with the wrong kind of studies (You know the type. Care more about their GPA than their BAC. With their noses firmly buried in their books they miss the real classrooms all around them. Of course, try telling that to your professors and see where it gets you.). Good times, I'm saying.

So, while going about their duty of putting books back in place the reshelvers were also supposed to make sure the shelves were looking their best. For whatever reason the librarians had gotten it into their heads that all the books should be neatly arranged on the shelves and not just strewn all over the place. So, if one of the filthy students who'd get their hands all over the precious books were to, say, put a book back on the shelves and push it all the way to the back, the employees were supposed to come along and pull the books out so their spines aligned with the front edge of the shelves. That way the books looked nice and uniformly lined up no matter what size they were. This is, as I said, tedious and routine work that doesn't take a lot of imagination to perform (Which is good because it left my friends' imaginations free to wander.) so one day the philosophy major turns to me and my friend and say, “You know, they could train monkeys to do this job.” My friend and I nodded sagely. The mechanical nature of the job being prime material for our diversions. But the budding philosopher went on, “All they'd have to do is place M&Ms behind all the books like so. The monkeys would come along and shelve the books right to get at the M&Ms” (Which doesn't make sense at all to me now that I think about it but I'm going to blame that on my poor memory because at the time whatever he said was feasible.) “That would work, for a time, until one day a monkey realizes they could get the candy like this.” And with one sweep of his hand, he shoved an entire row of books off the shelves and onto the floor. My friend and I errupted in gales of laughter at the look on the face of a passerby as much as at our other friend. We quickly started hooting and ooking monkey noises at each other and somehow or other the phrase “monkey work” entered our vocabularies. And to this day I use it to describe any activity that's done repetitively and mechanically for a small reward – and one where you don't have to do it the way you've been taught. Because sooner or later when you have someone doing monkey work they're going to wise up and start taking the books off the shelves.

Well, Psychochild asked his readers and commentors to sweep the books off the shelves and come up with a possible solution. As phrased the challenge was “Consider, what can we do to get people not to brute force games?” Now, as I said, I'm no game designer and this is a problem that I can't really solve. I'm not sure anyone can – not at this point – because players have become so acclimated to a climate where the path of least resistance is to just bull through any problems. And since it's a feeling of accomplishment that leads players to play these sorts of games if one game doesn't reward them for such activities another one will and anyone who tries to get too far away from the “level clearing” zeitgeist will get corrected right out of the marketplace of ideas. Anyway, if the smart people who comment on that blog can't crack the problem then it's not like I'm going to. What I can do, though, is wonder about what a game that doesn't reward brute force solutions would look like. I play games, after all, so the way I relate to these sorts of challenges is to imagine what kind of game I'd be playing if the “problem” was solved. Then I can work backwards and figure out where the design branched off and managed to find a solution I never would by simply trying to think my way through it. Not that it's my first impulse when something isn't working is to give it a good, solid whack or anything but, hey, sometimes it works. And sometimes the bassackwards approach works, too.

Here, not so much (As I said this, I think, is one of those intractable problems.) as my thought-experiment of a game is incredibly nebulous. It's going to have to be very different from the average MMO or, really, any of the sort of RPG those games are based on (I mean, there are RPGs that revolve around puzzles and the like but, then, I'd think that eliminating any sort of brute force solution there is pointless because you'd just be narrowing the ways people have of figuring out the potential solution. And, well, I hate it when designers tell me how to play their games. I'd much rather figure it out on my own.). Because it would almost have to completely eliminate the mechanic of earning XP from combat. Or getting better at killing things by killing things, in other words. And that strips the genre to its very core. And it's there that I was stumped because I couldn't figure out just how you'd make a game like that and make it fun enough to play. Which, after all, to me would be the point of the exercise. Eliminating the brute force solution is easy enough – you just have to throw out a lot of deeply held conventions - but actually solving the problem means doing that and coming up with a game people want to play when you're done (What is it about these designers and hardcore mode anyway?). And without better players I just couldn't see a way of doing that.

So, anyway, I was at a loss and I resigned myself to not being up to the challenge, shelved the idea, and moved on with my life. And, then, when I was playing Bookworm Adventures an idea struck me. This, by the way, is how I know Bookworm Adventures is a good game – it makes me think. This is also how I know ()Auto Assault is a bad game, for me anyway, it stops me from thinking. I feel like a hamster on a wheel when I'm playing Auto Assault. Even though I'm doing the same leveling and grinding for items I'm doing in Bookworm Adventures. It's just done seamlessly in Bookworm Adventures so I don't notice it and that frees my conscious mind up to dwell on other things. Because the game's so simple and I don't notice the hinges on the doorframes, so to speak, I'm much more able to just play it and enjoy myself. But in Auto Assault I'm concentrating too much on the mechanics of what I'm doing rather than the actual end result.

Still, I'm not here to talk about Auto Assault again, so while I was running through Bookworm Adventures again it hit me: If I want better players then the thing to do is to teach players to be better. Build it into the very game's structure that they shouldn't be looking for the easy solution but any number of them. After all, in Bookworm Adventures which is basically a Scrabble RPG, you could brute force your way past enemies by spelling small words over and over again. But when I play that game I'm not trying to get past the enemy, I'm trying to build the biggest and best word I can – which, incidentally, will get me past my current monster faster.

I've made my own game up within the rules of the existing game and it actually helps me to play the game better – and the game actually rewards me for playing that way. Now I'm not certain that this is a common occurrence among Bookworm Adventure players but I imagine that among a certain subset that it attracts it would be. That is, figuring out a way to use all of your 16 letter tiles and, once you can manage that, use them in new and interesting ways. I mean, anyone can spell “mast”, say, but when I bust out with “internationalism”? That's a special feeling. And it's looking past that obvious answer to a bigger and better one that's half the fun for me. The flashy effects and fancy sounds just reinforce that sense of achievement I feel when I can put together words that not everyone can. And the best part is that playing the game will be teaching players – if they want to play that way. After long enough they'll have a better vocabulary and the wider lexicon that lets me pull off insane letter combos the way better players of fighting games can throw down a combination of moves or simply sit back and throw.

So, I realized that my imaginary game (Which is different than ClotH, by the way. That's really just a platform for some fierce PvP action and it hews pretty close to the traditional MMO. So it's pretty much all about brute force solutions.) would have to be a learning experience. I'm still not entirely sure how you make a game with that goal outsell World of Warcraft or even come close. But, imagine, if you will, an Educational MMO. The same way that Bookworm Adventures is an Educational RPG.

It might be a bit basic, it might be a bit simple on the face of it, but such a game would be built to be basic and simple. Because it couldn't take it for granted that it was dealing with sophisticated players (And, well enough done, sophisticated players would play anyways. It's not like I have any pressing need to learn how to spell or anything – 90 wpm with an impressively low error rate last time I checked, thank you very much, to the point where I even turn off the auto-correcting features on my word processors because they just slow me down and make me conscious of my errors rather than just keeping in the groove of typing – but I still play Bookworm Adventures. And the game's still the most fun I've played in months. Just far from the most complex or expensive.) it would have to build from the ground up. And because it would be a game devoted to teaching, then it would be a game where it builds in encouragement for players to try new things and experiment. Create their own games that go beyond the basic answers to their problems. And although - since it's going to have to be marketed to nervous parents – it probably won't contain much killing of anything that doesn't mean it's going to eliminate brute force solutions. Players will still try to bull their way through roadblocks. But rather than changing the importance of the brute force option by decreasing the rewards one gains from it the game would be creating a situation where all solutions are valid. Sometimes brute force would be best, sometimes not, and the overall effect would be to give players multiple options at every turn with a neutral value attached to any one solution. The game wouldn't care, in so many words, how exactly the problems were solved, just that lessons were being taught through the solving of those problems. And by building on and reinforcing those lessons, players would be rewarded for playing along.

Now, how exactly you go about that is beyond me. But I've seen the kind of game you get when you do – in my head, at least – and, you know, I kinda like it. I don't exactly have children at the moment but, as someone who plays games and feels I've benefited from the experience you can rest assured that I've encouraged any small beings around me into playing themselves. I know I'm not the only one – several parents I'm aware of let their children play these MMOs – and as people like me who've been raised on video games in general and RPGs in specific get older and the genre itself matures, I'll bet we see some attempts at games like that sooner or later. If we're lucky we might get some good ones. And the lessons they teach just might be ones that can be used in other games. Games that just might solve the brute force problem that I can't.