Game Development: Player Design Control

Today I wanted address some of our plans and ideas for including player input while maintaining prudence and suitability.  We firmly believe that player input as a whole is necessary to guiding design decisions; because as much as we are building a game that we love, we want the players to love it too.

However, being of sound mind and prudent judgment, we want to avoid a Boaty McBoatface or TayTweets scenarios where the internet trolls come out in force in order to trivialize populist initiatives such as this.  So, as you might imagine, we will not be giving players complete control of the direction of our game.

We have put a considerable amount of thought into this problem and presently have three major solution archetypes.

1. Structured Voting Application: Something akin to what Game2Gether at Amplitude Studios has done with their voting process, where the developers choose all of the voting choices and the players vote for it.

While this structure has promise and is a sure way to avoid issues, we also want to avoid creating an overly controlling referendum-type issue.

 (To any Russian readers, this is a gag meme and not reflective of reality.)

The structured voting application also fails to tap into the infinite creativity of players and leverage that to make new and innovative mechanics.  While I am confident in our team, there are only four of us and there will be thousands to millions of players.  The likelihood of a player having a brilliant idea is considerably higher than the likelihood of one of us having the same idea.

2. Voting Shares Experience Application: The second archetype that we came up with is a share-based voting system where everyone who has a verified email gets one vote, while people with accrued playtime will get additional votes.  This system could either be structured or unstructured as far as voting options are concerned.  This would allow more experienced and loyal players with seniority to have a greater say in the direction of the game, while still allowing new players to have input.  This system has more flexibility also in that we can reward people for reading the forums or blogging about FATES.  I hate to include Twitch in this list, but there are apparently Twitch chess channels.

3. Up-Down Voting Shares Application: The third paradigm that we considered is a Reddit- or StackOverflow-like system where you get both up-votes and down votes.  This system would be unstructured and allow anyone to input suggested developments, while still allowing for people to knock down silly ideas.   We would use a voting share system with this one also, likely in order to give active, long-time players more say into the direction of the game that they love.

We will probably end up using all three of these voting systems at various times during development, starting with the Structured Voting Application in alpha phases where to ambiguity of on the part of players is high and slowly migrating to an Up-Down Voting Share application when we are fully established and have a player base.

All of this will be subject to testing and development as we move forward though, but these are some of the ideas that we have been tossing around behind the scenes.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.