Visual Recognition Pt.2

11Sep08

The recent release of Spore reminded me of the original very interesting demonstration by Will Wright at the GDC three years ago.

The core of his talk was about ownership, something which I think is vastly underplayed in most games. The ability to make your character your own, make it unique and recognizable, and play the game your way.

Giving someone a powerful character is not nearly as much fun as giving them the tools to create a powerful character that suits them. When they win it is now not simply superior skill, but they can also revel in the effectiveness of their chosen design.

There is also the social aspect. You want people to remember you and recognize you elsewhere. You want to look like you eat babies for breakfast and puppies for dinner. There is no point to being a bad ass uber gamer if nobody knows about it.

If you have played WoW you may have seen this in action: The clamour of newbies when a level 70 in pimped gear parks up in a low level town on his epic mount. Awe, and respect. Ridiculous when you consider the guy with mount could well be a complete asshat, but it doesn’t matter to the newbies.

It’s that kind of awe that inspires people to play. Seeing what they are capable of achieving, wanting to be one of the big dogs. This brings up two important points:

• Your form of visual recognition (be it armor or capes or hugemongous weapons) has to be hard to get. It has to take skill, teamwork and practice. If it is a case of simply grinding gold to save up then it will lose a significant amount of value to players.

• You can’t allow the population to become saturated with the high end forms of recognition, or it will lose its unique quality and therefore its value. For example you can have awards to a fixed top percentage of players, or the first guild to achieve x goal, or you could just keep adding new ones – but people will eventually get tired of the grind.

Once you have your methods of recognition in place there is another step further you can go. Out-of-game recognition. This ties your in-game community with your forum community. It encourages the respect of more experienced players, proves great talking points, and with a degree less anonymity players will be less likely to pick fights.

It also puts additional meaning back into the game. Now that everyone can easily view your gear and achievments it’s important to make sure you don’t look like you are slacking. You don’t want to be out argued on the finer points of raiding KZ just because someone appears to have progressed further than you.

It inspires healthy competition, and competition is the number one source of growth. With Warhammer taking such an early lead I hope other games follow suit.

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Tags: Epic Gear, Visual Recognition, World of Warcraft, WoW