Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Jan. 20, 05)

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Here are today's Dungeons & Dragons Online forum highlights, collected from Dungeons & Dragons Online forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

confessions of a RPG-loathing action gamer

The funny part about this argument is that in a turn based game I hit buttons and plan stratagies as well. So the argument really carries no weight at all. The only difference between turn based and real time is time pressure. And you'd be hard pressed to find a popular RPG which cannot be thought of as just a collection of stats and rules; the stats and rules are simply a framework that allows people to use thier imagination to role play, it's not the role playing itself.

Another funny thing about this argument is that it's not new. There was a time when stratagy gaming was all the rage, and people thought that stratagy games could *only* be done as turn based games; otherwise there would be no stratagy! After Warcraft hit, you couldn't pay people to play turn based games anymore. After about 6 years of non-stop cloning, we've finally started to see games like Advance Wars bring back the turn based model.

DDO and Evangelicals / Fundamentalists

Please o' lord, make DDO a target for evangelical christians; make me the target of thier judgment, so they can cause many an article to be written about our work, causing it to sell far more copies than it ever would without thier help.

Wise cracks asside, didn't the controversy over D&D die in the 80's? Can we start it up again?

Action-oriented combat limits market appeal

Ok, I'm going to chime in on the whole women vs. men gamer thing. In my opinion, historically, games have been based on male traits. Let’s not get all politically correct and pretend that there are no differences between the male and female brain; there are significant differences in the way men and women's brain's form, process information, and what types of situations we are designed to handle best.

Our brains have been developed over millions of years for specific actions; for men, that was hunting, and for women, caring for children (and the myriad of tasks involved). Our ability to track moving objects is far greater than women's. Generally, men are stronger at spatial reasoning, while women are stronger at social reasoning. Men have more strength, but women can tolerate more pain. Men are generally able to focus harder on a single task, while women are able to manage multiple tasks with greater ease. These differences evolved because the brain needed to make tradeoff's between different kinds of thinking; and due to child birth, some natural lines of separation evolved out of the different needs. There are many other areas where we differ, and these differences were a strength for millions of years (and I still think they are today).

The brain rewards us for improving these base mechanisms of thought. Games are, in a sense, a training ground for improving our thought process. When something is not a challenge, it gets boring, while something which is too foreign to our thinking it is too hard and effectively we turn off to it's challenge. Thus, games designed around fast moving objects or spatial reasoning will generally appeal to men more than women. It is much more likely for men to be attracted to these tasks, as they are in the 'comfort learning zone' for us. It's no wonder traditional video games held little interest for women, they were almost all about fast moving objects and spatial reasoning.

Role Playing Games, especially MMPs, contain some elements that appeal to the general women's model of thought. They contain social networks to be navigated, multiple tasks and activities to manage, and a sense of consequence free social experimentation which can be dangerous in the real-world. I personally believe these qualities are what make online RPGs more appealing to women than, say, quake or counter strike.

Some types of learning applies equally to both sex's. Organization, which is the root task of almost any game, is a base level thought process useful to both sexes. Thus it only seems fitting that games which are primarily expressed through this process (ie: Puzzle Games) appeal to both sexes equally. If the skill learned is universal, the game's appeal will be too (unless you specifically style it to one sex or another).

Puzzle games are interesting because they often provide different modes of play. Many will have at least two versions, one which applies time pressure, and one in which time is not a factor but the most complete solution is rewarded. Men usually prefer time pressure, because we are exercising relational thinking (useful for hunting).

Of course, there is nothing stopping one sex from becoming good at any specific task; I generally feel that everyone's brain is able to achieve the same level of performance, if they are willing to put in the effort. But we do have general tendencies towards certain types of thinking, and some of those tendencies are divided along the sex division.

So, if you want to appeal to women, build games which appeal to the tasks their brains tend to wish to improve. Unfortunately for the industry, it’s much easier to make games about fast moving objects and special reasoning than it is to make games about social networking and character empathy. We’ve only started to see the beginning of games appealing to these areas of the brain, so up until now most of the appeal has been around skills which are shared by both sexes.

Action-oriented combat limits market appeal

I'm not classifying them as being less capable; just generally less attracted to games which focus on one type of skill or another. Suttle differences can often shift the balance in unpredictable ways as well. Most of these thoughts are based on proven studies of how the brain works, not my personal social observations on women in gaming. I try to approach things from the angle of how does the average brain process information; and there are proven differences between men and women in this regard. If the industry wants to make games that cater to women, they're going to have to take that perspective into account, instead of trying to turn women into lovers of first person shooters.

If someone thinks it's sexist to say that men and women's brains operate differently, then they should go fight science on that one; it's a proven fact. As a society, we need to come to grips that our differences are what make us strong; not what seperates us. There's nothing sexist about that. And yes, the exception will not be the rule, as with anything; there will emerge an amazing female quake player; the odds are in favor of such things happening. But expecting games based around primarily male biased mental chalenges to be equaly interesting to females is a farse.

Action-oriented combat limits market appeal

Do you have a link to this study by chance? I love this kind of stuff, because it often applies indirectly to some aspect of game design. The differences between the way men and women process information do not always have such a clear and obvious result. We tend to want to label things out in as individual tasks, but even the simplest task is composed of dozen's of different tasks which can be affected by the differences in thought. In this case, the weighing of targets, management of potential targets, and tracking targets (each of which could be broken down into dozens of smaller sub-tasks) seem like prime areas where differences in thought processes could affect the final outcome.

Action-oriented combat limits market appeal

Actually, the last announced sales figures were 600,000 units, which is just over half of what your saying. It will probrably top out at just over a million units sold US, but I don't expect it to have anywhere near the numbers that Diablo, Warcraft, or Starcraft sold.