The Business: Know Your Customer Or Fail

Josh Strife Hayes talks about solo players, MMORPGs, and psychology.

While everyone that is working, or want to work on, a MMORPG should see this so should any other game designer regardless of medium.

"Really?"

Yes, really.

The conversation about MMOs comes down to people misunderstanding the medium, including those that design and publish these games.

This is not an unusual issue, as we in the tabletop sphere know first-hand. What is remarkable is that the speed of discourse has already produced useful and net-beneficial changes to games in the medium to conform to reality and therefore account for the psychological profiles of the users.

Most people just want to play as entertainment. They don't want anything that feels like the pressure they expeirence on the job. Group play introduces those pressures. Group play introduces those pressures because no one wants to waste precious entertainment time not being entertained. Neither failure nor frustration is entertaining.

While the drive to min-max to peak performance is driven by the top cohort, the reason those mix-max performance guides filter down into the general population is because they make the game a Solved Problem and most people--when shown a solution to an issue--have no problems just using the proffered solution and making that the norm.

Yes, Josh has cut videos about this--"gamers will min-max the fun out of anything"--but this misunderstands the psychology also.

What is consistent about gamers is that they as a class grok probability and (a) want to eliminate failure and (b) get paid.

This is why even the most casual-friend MMOs have multiple fan channels putting out video guides to encounters, multiple guides on playable options (class optimization, etc.), and either the majority of content is brain-dead easy (and yet people still fuck it up) or the majority of players are vicious shits to each other because it's not and that retard is actively getting in the way of securing the bag because he's a fuckup that can't play right.

If you do not understand the psychological profile of your target audience, you can't sell shit to them.

If you do, and you master that profile, you can sell snow to Eskimos and sand to Saudis.

Now apply this to your medium.

What is your target's profile? You have no idea, do you?

If you have no idea, then it is very easy to mistarget and sell to people that don't want what you're selling and start demanding that you change it to suite them.

This is what happened to tabletop RPGs, but it happened so slowly and to a group of people without awareness of what they were doing in business terms that it is no surprise that decades later mythology is taken as fact despite evidence to the contrary.

First the #OSR and now the #BROSR are revealing what the target audience of tabletop RPGs actually is and starting to put down a psychological profile; they disagree on details, but in the main they agree that this profile is not what has been presumed by the Boomers running too many operations. (The Death Cultists certainly do; they aren't trying to turn the IPs they own into Bugman subscriptions for mere filthy lucre- they know their audience.)

What is this profile?

There's overlap with the MMORPG gamer--no surprise there--with one signicant difference: the desire for making permanent change in the state of play. Summarized, "What's done is done." Monsters stay dead, dungeons stay cleared, unique items stay unique, etc. because the player-character's actions force the setting to change as a direct consequence of those actions- which is not the case in MMOs out of first technical and then social necessity.

In short, tabletop RPG gamers want to be somebody and they want what they do to matter in manners that--if this was reality--people would be writing and talking about for years and generations to come.

This differs from MMOs in that the key driver there is meta-game recognition, not in-game impact. "I want to be the best at PVP!" vs. "I want to build a world-conquering empire!"

The tell is in the key complaint: "There's nothing to do!" vs. "There's nothing to be done!" The former is a complaint of boredom because nothing worthy of status and acclaim, or directly contributing to same, is available. The latter is a complaint of frustration regarding a lack of meaningful opportunity to realize ambition.

This difference is why some games retain their power even when suppressed (pre-3E editions of D&D, e.g.), some thrive despite not being favored by the dominant party (ACKS), some succeed despite deep flaws (e.g. Exalted), and some fall flat despite being pushed by the biggest player (D&D 4E, et. al.)

As more people start to accept that they misunderstand their customer and change their products and business to conform to reality, expect things to change and change fast.

And expect to see the limit of the Network Effect's power.