Edward Castronova has posted that work on Arden, his students’ Shakespeare-themed world, will cease, and they will start looking ahead to the next game. He discusses some of the reasoning for this in his post, and I had a talk with him about when I was in Indiana last month. One persistent problem they had was answering the question: what do you actually DO all day?

‘What do you do all day’ is a surprisingly persistent problem, whenever the design powers-that-be considers exploring either new genres or gameplay paradigms. The answer that most MMOs have come to, combat and quests, is the chosen answer for a lot of good reasons, but it’s not the only solution. Still, it merits examination of why combat succeeds, and what any other activity needs to do to surplant it.

To me, one of the core tenets which has to be examined is repeatability. One reason why combat persists is because it is a highly repeatable activity – we can ask players to do it over and over again, changing a handful of parameters to keep things interesting. Other games that are highly repeatable include Tetris and Civilization. Guitar Hero is heavily repeatable, because it has room for advancement and improvement on every song. Myst is an example of one that is not – once you find the key that opens the crystal lock, the puzzle is stale, with little room for further improvement or applying newly acquired skills to a different problem. From the description of Arden I heard, their focus on NPCs quoting Shakespeare is probably a little closer to the latter.

As another example, consider Star Trek. At its face, its a great license for an MMO – geek friendly with broad mass market appeal. But there’s a gotcha – while there exists both ground combat as well as capital ship combat, both events are seen as a last resort. The Star Trek license is really one about politics and diplomacy. So the question is, what do players do all day? Do you create a combat engine, and push the players towards that? Or do you stay true to the license and push for the politics and diplomacy? And if so, what do you do to ensure that the experience remains repeatable?

Westerns are another example. Fantasy games have the benefit of a smooth ramp of monster difficulty: giant rats -> wargs -> centaurs -> dragons. However, a western theme has…. guys with black hats. Maybe indians, if you can handle the PC backlash. What’s a more advanced challenge – a guy with a bigger hat? Clearly, to do the western game, even just reaching for combat is going to result in a roadblock. Repeatability requires some level of variety to make your eyes go out.

So here’s a fun exercise: what’s the most repeatable game you’ve ever played? Could it become a core MMO gameplay loop?

Original comment thread is here.