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In her latest Biting the Hand article, Jessica Mulligan focusses on non-consenting Player versus Player in Online Games. And as she put it: "When I use the word ‘non-consenting’ in this context, it means simply that at least one party to the combat has no choice of whether or not to fight; he/she is involved whether they will or no."
I'm sure every online gamer has been in this situation before and everyone has heard of the online games in development that they've found a way to do it right this time. Yet there are still some developers who think there is a mass market fo non-consenting PvP and Jessica looks at some of the myths surrounding the issue.Myth Three: "Yeah, well, the reason non-consenting PvP is so unpopular is that no one has done it right yet."
This is one of my favorites. I believe I have seen every permutation of PvP possible in the last fifteen years and the only variations that have ever worked in a large commercial setting were of the consenting variety. One might present the argument that an exception was PvP in games on the old online services, such as GEnie, CompuServe and AOL pre-1996. And taken at face value, it certainly looks that way; several such games allowed players to attack each other without warning and that the PvP did draw together the players to punish the killer (see Myth Four below). We did, indeed, see this kind of activity.
Part of it was the emotional attachment to characters and social groups that we see in these games. However, there was a more important limiting factor that is often ignored in this particular debate. That limiting factor was the cost of playing the game, which was anywhere from $3 an hour to $19 an hour, depending on the year, online service and the time of day the play occurred. When a player could easily invest over $5,000 to build up a character over time (and I know of people that used to spend $2,000 per month to play on GEnie), you bet they gather like white corpuscles to destroy the few PKers and griefers who could afford to play. Money was the great equalizer, not design or style.
That emotional attachment to characters has not gone away and designs are still stuck in the hourly mode, in that they require many hours of play to advance. In these days of flat rate monthly fees, however, anyone that can push a lawnmower can afford to play and there are more griefers around. The reaction to this change has been a demand for less non-consenting PvP, not more (see Myth One above), to allow players to choose when and if to risk a prized character.
Yet today’s designers continue to ignore that important trend and to try to convince the gaming public that they, and they alone, have discovered the Rosetta Stone that allows them to decipher how to do non-consenting PvP in a way that everyone will want to take part in. The current flavor of the month is Faction versus Faction and the variations thereof, which is touted as promoting team warfare and, supposedly, team protection. The theory seems to be that if you join a Faction, you’ve automatically consented to the PvP. And there is justification to that argument. |
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Biting at PvP
