Video Games

Tobold posted something interesting today. He was musing on the "core shell model", which he defined as:

"... some core activity of gameplay (which, given how prominent violence is in games, is often a battle), and then a shell around it, which has everything else."

He went on to clarify:

"The shell often has progression elements, like management of experience points and levels, talent or tech trees, and sometimes non-progressions elements like the story." 

Then he explained how it worked in practice:

"A typical player in a typical game of this sort constantly jumps between the core and the shell: Does a battle in the core game, then levels up his character in the shell game, to go back to the core battle with a stronger character."

I'm not sure why Tobold thought the concept required a new name. It seems to me he's describing the phenomenon that was all over the mainstream media a few years back: Gamification.

Gamification is the application of gamelike processes to activities other than games. In Tobold's "core shell model", the whole thing becomes self-reflexive, not to say incestuous, with games themselves being gamified, the "gamelike processes" in question, being drawn primarlily from a specific genre of gaming: the RPG.

Gamification, fittingly, began in games long before breaking out into the wider world. The concept had increasingly been applied within gaming to genres that previously hadn't appeared either to want or need them. Indeed, the supposed manner in which all games were becoming RPGs was quite the controversial topic in gaming circles for a while.

As Tobold rightly implies, it's a battle that's largely been won. Or lost, depending on your point of view. Many, perhaps most, video games being brought to market over the last few years utilize mechanics and structures that would once have been alien to their form: levels, badges, achievements, rewards.

The BBC article linked above takes great pains to trace such devices back to the experiments of BF Skinner, creator of the infamous "Skinner Box" and the system he called "operant conditioning". There was a time when no discussion of MMORPGs was complete without a discourse on Skinner and his eponymous box. It was as common a trope as Pavlov's Dog or  Schroedinger's Cat, and often as badly misunderstood as either of those overused and misapplied metaphors.

These days you barely ever hear it mentioned. The underlying methodology is now so established it's taken for granted. Like every other battleground in the history of video gaming - free to play, pay to win, microtransactions, randomization, games as a service - all territory once defended has eventually been ceded.

Gamification also seems to be a peculiar property of digitalization, another threat mainstream media once reviled  but now appear to have forgotten completely. Going back to Tobold's concept of cores and shells, physical games frequently, indeed usually, have only a core. They tend not to be amenable to Skinner's conditioning except inasmuch as you can structure competitions around winning.

You can, of course, have ranks and levels in a game like Chess. What you can't do, however, is dole those out automatically to anyone who presses the right button. To rank up in chess you have to get better at the core activity, something that's an anathaema to the shell. As for Pay to Win, you can buy all the solid gold, jewel studded, Collectors' Edition chess sets you want but no amount of money spent on pieces or boards will help you win more matches. Unlike Tobold's beloved World of Tanks.

Video games were once far more like their analog counterparts than anything we see today. Pong, Space Invaders, Tetris - all pure core, no shell. I imagine even now there must still be a few new games like that, although I can't bring any to mind. Even the simplest Match 3 comes with titles, levels, badges... who'd play one that didn't?

Is any of this a bad thing? As a lifelong moral relativist I'd have to say it depends.

My natural inclination is to be suspicious of extrinsic reward modifiers to activities that have intrinsic rewards of their own. I often used to suggest, when writing about MMORPGs, that the ideal MMO would have gameplay so compelling, so entertaining, that, were all the leveling and questing and character progression to be stripped away, players would go on playing indefinitely for the sheer pleasure of the mechanics involved.

That has, to a significant extent, been the case for me in some games. There have been numerous times when I stopped progressing my characters or improving their gear, ceased to follow the storyline, eventually abandoned all those "shell" activities, yet still continued to log in and play.

I used to do it in Rift, with the Stillmoor invasions or in Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, all of which I played to excess for the thrills and excitement alone. I was doing it as recently as last night in Guild Wars 2's World v World, where I spent nearly three hours following a Commander for no better reason than that he happened to invite me to his squad while I was doing my dailies and it turned out to be fast, furious fun.

To be worth doing for the sake of doing it, content in an MMORPG doesn't have to be PvP, much though many PvP advocates would like to convince us otherwise. Stillmoor wasn't and neither is GW2's ninety minute meta-event, Dragon's Stand, which I used to do on many a Sunday evening for the sheer hell of it.  Tobold is correct, though, to point out that, generally, this kind of "core" activity does involve combat.

There are plenty of other things you can spend countless hours doing in MMORPGs which don't, of course. The thing about most of those is, they don't really have much to do with "games" in the first place. Whether uncomfortably bolted on or lovingly integrated, building and decorating activities function primarily as kind of crafting hobby within the gamespace, the digital equivalent of knitting or model-making, while collecting is... well, it's collecting, isn't it?

The more I think on it, though, the more essential, the more core, at least some of those "shell" activities seem to be. For an MMORPG, anyway. I'm no longer at all convinced that the goal of great MMORPG design should be a gameplay loop that's so ineffably pure it both encourages and sustains endless, purposeless play. Even were it to be achievable, it sounds disturbingly like wireheading without the wires.

On the other hand, do we really need all our simple pleasures shored up by rewards, scaffolded by achievements, celebrated by badges? Isn't it enough to have fun for fun's sake?

Perhaps that does seem rather a hypocritical question for me to pose right after I've just been praising Rift's reward system for its success in pinging my dopamine receptors. The fact is, though, I played Rift for ninety minutes before starting this post because I enjoyed the questing yesterday and wanted more of it. The rewards are all in the bank, where they'll probably remain.

In the end there's no clear path to perfection or purity and we all know most of these systems exist to separate us from our money. Many have no other function, particularly in the increasingly inapporopriate settings we now find them.

In games that lie solidly within the RPG genre, a hinterland that would include all true MMORPGs, the line between core and shell is much more blurred. As Tobold says, you can have satisfying tank battles without any of the rpg elements. It's hard to imagine how you could take the progression out of a genre predicated upon it being there, although I'm sure someone's trying to come up with a way to do just that even as I type.

Looking back at those apocalyptic predictions from a decade ago, the world doesn't seem to have given in to gamification in quite the way the doom-mongers suggested. I'm not going to earn a citizenship badge for voting in next month's council elections and the new toothbrush I bought this morning is still just a determinedly analog piece of plastic with bristles.

The games themselves, though? Well, maybe that's a different story...