Someone just shot you in "Halo 3." What was he just thinking?
You got yourself hypnotized staring at the monitor playing "Unreal Tournament." What kept you going for hours on end?
Paul Wedgwood of Splash Damage has been a top player -- and now maker -- of online PC shooters for almost a decade. I spoke to him recently for an MTVNews.com piece we ran this morning about his team's new PC class-based multiplayer online first-person shooter, "Enemy Territory: Quake Wars."
Turns out he is full of insights about what makes online players tick. He and I talked about the selfishness of online players and the shame of getting killed in a game like "Quake," among other things.
I found the conversation fascinating and wanted to share some of his insights, many of which don't appear in the News article. It really got me thinking about what makes players of online shooters -- myself included -- tick:
Regarding what keeps an online multiplayer gamer playing: "We understand that players are fundamentally selfishly motivated, so what we do is we give them rewards in the form of unlockables, cool weapon upgrades, attribute modifiers... but we use those rewards to encourage them to make your game more fun."
On what those players want out of their multiplayer game experience: "On the one hand there's just this wish to have more fun and on the second side of things -- which is almost as important in online multiplayer combat -- is status. The player doesn't just want to know they are having loads and loads of fun. They want to be recognized in having succeeded while they are having loads and loads of fun."
On the problem with what most online games count: "At the end of a contemporary multiplayer combat games, you have a scoreboard and it's almost always sorted by frags. And that seems to be the only thing games give people kudos for: how many people did they kill. 'Enemy Territory Quake Wars' isn't really about killing the enemy. In fact, in 90 percent of the cases, you're actually only incapacitating them and won't kill them at all. It's not that violence is something that is necessarily good or bad, it's just that that isn't the goal of the game. The goal of the game is to coordinate with your team to achieve the objective. What we do at the end of the game is rather than have a scoreboard that ranks how many kills, frags or damage you've done, we have 20, I think, different awards for the best people in their role [best medic, most kills]. There's the opportunity to get on that board for what you've done for the team and you have a much higher probability for getting called out for if you coordinated with your team."
On what it feels like to get killed in an online FPS, and how a class-based game changes the emotional dynamics: "There is a lot of shame in dying when coming up against somebody two or three times ... when you play hardcore multiplayer games like the original "Quake Arena" and stuff like that. If you got on the server and got beaten and beaten and beaten, you felt really, really bad about that. The great thing about being an engineer [in a class-based game like "ETQW"] and repairing a defense turret or being a medic, trying to revive somebody in the middle of the road, is that, if you get shot and incapacitated while it happens, you don't feel like the player who shot you was necessarily a better player. You feel like you're just a casualty of circumstances. ... I used to have that, 'Ohhh he's kicked my ass again and again and again' every time I came up against the player. And he was making me feel bad that he was superior to me. 'ETQW' has that element of gameplay amongst those players but it isn't the key to the game."
Well... is that how you think of the people and experiences you encounter playing online shooters?
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