Supply-Side Content Provision

2005/12/21

"There's not enough content!" How often have developers heard this lament from their most active players?

Let's start with a couple of simple observations:

1. Content (things to do) is a crucial feature for attracting and retaining players.

2. Players will always consume content faster than you can create it (the "content race").

Many of the most consequential game design decisions in MMOGs lately seem to be aimed at trying to invalidate that second observation. How do you keep ahead of your players as they burn through content? What kind of design features help to mitigate content consumption?

This is a supply and demand problem, and as such it can be attacked from one or both of those aspects:

Supply-side:

1. Design a system for autogenerating content.

2. Provide players with ways to allow them to create content for each other.

Demand-side:

1. Regulate access to content.

There may be some exceptions, but based on what they actually do, most MMOG designers these days seem to believe that "regulate access to content" to be the only realistic option. Supply-side approaches, when suggested, are increasingly dismissed as leading to "sandbox"-type games (which presumably won't sell).

I suspect that the prevalence of this attitude is why we continue to see gameplay mechanisms such as the following:

• Levels -- some content can be accessed only by characters within a relatively small range of power
• Experience points (XP) -- actions generate XP which must be accumulated to reach the next level
• "Grinding" -- some content may be (or must be!) repeated to generate XP
• Zones -- level-based content grouped geographically
• Race -- some content can be accessed only by characters of a specific race
• Faction -- some content can be accessed only by characters liked sufficiently by a specific faction 

These mechanisms and others like them do address the "problem" of regulating access to content... but why are designers so intent on framing the larger issue of the content race solely as a demand-side problem? Why not make a serious attempt to design systems to make good content easy to create instead of trying to ration content by regulating player access to it?

One objection to eliminating rationing mechanisms like character levels is that players "need" to feel that their characters are "advancing" somehow. I've heard it said by many people that "without levels, or a skill-based system which is similar, you must still allow the player to feel that his character is developing over time." Why? Says who? Where is there any evidence for this other than "because everyone believes it"?

Character development over time, to me, is just another way to say "XP-based levels." It's just another rationalization for using a comfortable demand-side mechanism to regulate the player's access to content. Yes, it may be a mechanism that has become familiar to players (and harried developers), but is familiarity really going to be what drives MMOG design from now on? There was once a time when none of these mechanisms existed; they had to be imagined and implemented. So why can't we keep trying new approaches to content provision?

OK, maybe they won't prove to be as popular as the now-familiar demand-side mechanisms. But how can we know that unless someone gives these alternatives or others a serious tryout?