Virtual Politics

 In James Grimmalmann's Virtual Power Politics Grimmelmann proposes that “Every decision made by designers of a virtual world is a political decision. Every debate over the rules and every change to the software is political. When players talk about the rules, they are practicing politics.” Grimmelmann breaks up players into what are essentially different constituencies; people play games for a very wide range of reasons and these players will view changes made to their game differently depending on their motivations for playing. The range of reasons for playing is huge and when designers make changes they end up necessarily altering a certain set of player's game experience. Grimmelmann says, “Players with differing motivations and abilities must agree on a common set of rules that provide a satisfying set of constraints. The rules are the framework within which the game takes place; they are a compromise among the players.” This is all fine and dandy until players begin discovering bugs, exploits and imbalances within the game. At this point the designers must decide what course of action to take, do they remove the bug/exploit/imbalance that players have put time and effort into discovering or do they decide that the bug/exploit/imbalance is merely a “feature” of their game and will remain open to those with the wherewithal to take advantage of it? These decisions put game designers in a very difficult position; forcing them to choose between letting a group of players damage the game experience for everyone or stepping in and changing the game world themselves risking the player's wrath. Weather they choose action or inaction it is ultimately up to the designers to make all the decisions about the game world and “this imbalance in power casts a long shadow across virtual worlds, and frequently arouses concern among observers.”

Game balance is a huge topic and applies to any game ever created where humans interact with other humans in some way. I cannot really talk about it as it applies to LOTRO as I have been playing for such a short time and at such a low level. For this assignment I will talk about my experiences with game design as it applies to StarCraft 2. While StarCraft is not a virtual world, it is a thriving eSport with a very large community. Balance is a huge deal to this community. The difficulties of creating a consumer game that is played at a professional level are massive. The game has three races with totally distinct units, play styles and mechanics that must be equal in terms of strength and difficulty to play at the beginner level through the expert level. Furthermore the three races must be equal in any combination against each other in 1 vs 1 through 4 vs 4. Blizzard has a specific team dedicated to nothing but the balance of StarCraft 2 and this team catches a ton of hate in their pursuit of the noble goal of a fun and balanced game for every player at every level. I agree with Grimmelmann that these decisions are political for players but I do not believe that they are for designers. Designers do not (or should not) care about what class or race is OP or IMBA and they have no attachments to race/class/spec in the same way that gamers do they only want balance.

I have been playing StarCraft since the day it launched and there have been maybe 15 or 20 patches that have made thousands of changes the the game. Most of those changes are quite small things like “Barracks build time increased by 5 seconds” or “Warp Prism health increased by 10%” very, very small changes that reverberate through the metagame eventually. These changes have not really effected the way I play the game in any measurable way. Similarly to the changes made in WoW no patch ever made me want to quit playing because of its impact on me personally. Maybe I would do a little bit more or less damage with my Warlock or my travel time would be a tiny bit shorter or longer but no change in a game has affected me enough that I would throw away the effort and time I had invested. The transparency of the patch process adds to this, knowing exactly what will be done and what has been done gives a feeling of control to the player (at least god is letting me know what he's up to). A well designed and well run game will try to make sure the average player will barely feel changes; when they do feel these changes they can understand them because of the transparency of the process and accept the changes in the context of improving the game for the entire community. I believe that at the end of the day the game designers really do want their players to be happy.

GG

DPS-GAMER