Casually Hardcore

Two terms that consistently show up when talking about playstyles are "Hardcore" and "Casual." But what do these words mean?

Lewis Pulsipher, in a blog post on Gamasutra, provided a list of examples of how Hardcore gameplay (and gamers) differ from a Casual style. Many of these examples are frequently cited when this Hardcore/Casual split is discussed. "Plays a long time" versus "prefers quick play sessions" is often mentioned, as is preferring challenging (Hardcore) over easy (Casual) games.

Chris Bateman has proposed some interesting definitions as well. For example, Hardcore = "gamer hobbyists" while Casual = "mass market," or Hardcore = "prefers a 'punishing' game" while Casual = "prefers a 'forgiving' game."

For my part, the one word I keep finding myself using in discussing Hardcore/Casual is "investment." The typical Hardcore player (as I see it) invests personally in the gameworld, while the classic Casual player is mostly or fully divested.

The Hardcore gamer is willing and able to talk about the gameworld as though it matters, and doesn't mind being seen as caring about the characters and places and internal rules of the gameworld. By contrast, it's almost always a Casual gamer who declares "it's just a game" and prefers to be perceived as holding it at (emotional) arms-length.

I suspect this notion of "investment" is one of the fundamental motivations that drive the actual behaviors of play that we see. It would explain why different gamers spend more or less playing time per session, and why they prefer deeper and more challenging games or simpler and easier-to-put-down games.

The Very Model of a Good Game Designer

So what makes someone a good game designer?

Is it innate? Or can it be taught? What makes one game designer more effective than another? What the heck is "game design," anyway? What distinguishes it from, say, simulation design or bridge design or graphic design?

Here's my one-line definition of game design: game design is high-level systems design in an entertainment context.

To put it another way, a good game designer is someone who's good at creating core designs for systems intended to entertain people. And if that's true, then by implication the way to become a better game designer is to become better at high-level systems design.

A systems designer surrounds himself with knowledge about systems -- how they work, and how they fail to work. Because people love to create systems, that means studying human systems: economics, philosophy, history, politics, psychology. What enables a government to function, and under what conditions will it cease to function? What are the fundamental motivators of human behavior? Why do we call the notion of supply and demand a "law?" Are there patterns to the emergence, growth, and extinction of civilizations? Unlike most people, the systems designer never gets bored studying these things because all of them help to explain how systems satisfy their intended purpose(s) and how they fail to do so.

The good systems designer also studies science in order to understand the greatest of all creators of systems: nature.

Look at the head of a sunflower, and consider: why do the number of spirals of pips correspond specifically to numbers on the Fibonacci sequence? How do ecosystems maintain equilibrium? How do the strong nuclear force and gravity produce stable dynamic systems in a chaotic universe? I think what relates all these and other natural phenomena is simple to express: when you've got millions and billions of years to experiment, and you're not emotionally attached to any solution, eventually the systems you wind up with are going to be extremely efficient at satisfying their purpose because all the less efficient solutions were discarded.

The good systems designer is thus a student of natural science because nature is all about highly functional systems. They also study human organizational systems precisely because they are far less functional most of the time than natural systems -- human-designed systems provide powerful lessons on what doesn't work.

That's most of what a good game designer needs, I think. But the entertainment context matters, too. So I'd specify that a good game designer is a good systems designer who's played enough different kinds of games to understand "play" at a systemic level.

A couple of the best resources I've encountered on practical systems design are The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and Systemantics by John Gall. Again, the true game designer, as a systems designer, studies all systems. They'll have read hundreds of books to try to glean practical rules of effective systems design. But anyone who thoroughly groks these two works in particular and has played enough games to perceive most of the patterns within the "game" context is probably as ready to be a successful game designer as anyone can be.

Ultimately, then, to find a good game designer, first find someone who understands systems at a deep level and who's familiar with game design patterns.

And then give that person a clear high-level vision document that says "what" but not "how," a list of resource constraints, and all the caffeinated beverages they can drink, and say to that person, "Yeah, I don't know, all the experts say it can't be done...."

Bartle, Keirsey, and Chris Bateman's DGD1 Gamer Demographic Model

Introduction

On the advice of Richard Bartle, I picked up the book 21st-Century Game Design edited by Chris Bateman.

This book, in addition to later chapters on general game design, begins with a section that discusses playstyles. More specifically, it explores a "demographic game design" model (DGD1) of gameplay preferences and suggests how this model relates not only to the original four Bartle Types, but to Myers-Briggs personality types and Keirseian temperaments as well.

After working through the concepts, I believe I've been able to how the DGD1 model of play fits into the Myers-Briggs/Keirsey model of general personality. And if my notion that the Bartle types are an alternative formulation of the playstyle theories and models of Caillois, Lazzaro, and Edwards (among others), then the DGD1 model can be seen to integrate with those explanatory systems as well.

Before I go any further with this, I should note that I'm not forcibly wedging the DGD1 model into my own current articles of faith regarding a sort of One True Model of playstyles. Chris Bateman himself has provided the Myers-Briggs types and Keirseian temperament associations with the four proposed DGD1 playstyles -- in what follows, I am simply providing a visual representation of those claims.

Later on I'll have some comments that might fall into the category of original research; when that happens I'll clearly flag them as such.

The Demographic Game Design (DGD1) Model

Chris Bateman's DGD1 model begins by noting that certain Myers-Briggs types seem to cluster with respect to the behavior of players in games -- certain kinds of people like certain kinds of gameplay.

Based on demographic research, combined with the research of game publishers, Bateman's model starts with Hardcore and Casual players. From there, his model is expanded to recognize the existence of a second axis of play interests between freedom and what he calls "structure," and which he associates with the FP and TJ Myers-Briggs type combinations respectively. Finally, Bateman infers the existence of two additional styles associated with the FJ and TP type combinations.

The result of this data reduction is a model consisting of four playstyles, along with two general modes of play (Hardcore and Casual). Each of the four DGD1 playstyles is associated with four of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types, as well as with combinations of the four general temperaments defined by Keirsey. (Actually, Bateman uses the terms Tactical, Logistical, Strategic, and Diplomatic, each of which is treated by Bateman as an expression of playstyle associated with one of the four Keirsey temperaments.) And the Hardcore and Casual play modes are said to be associated with the Intuitive and Sensing preferences defined by Carl Jung, from whose work the Myers-Briggs types were developed.

In tabular form, the DGD1 model can be rendered as follows:

DGD1 STYLE	MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE	KEIRSEY "PLAYSTYLES"	KEIRSEY TEMPERAMENTS
1. Conqueror	INTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ, ESTJ	Strategic-Logistical	Rational (NT) - Guardian (SJ)
2. Manager	INTP, ENTP, ISTP, ESTP	Strategic-Tactical	Rational (NT) - Artisan (SP)
3. Wanderer	INFP, ENFP, ISFP, ESFP	Diplomatic-Tactical	Idealist (NF) - Artisan (SP)
4. Participant	INFJ, ENFJ, ISFJ, ESFJ	Diplomatic-Logistical	Idealist (NF) - Guardian (SJ)

The DGD1 Model Meets The "Big Model"

Based on these associations, it is possible to construct a diagram showing all of the elements that Bateman defined for his four playstyles as well as for the Hardcore and Casual modes. As I'll explain, the DGD1 elements fit naturally into the diagram of the four Keirseian temperaments as mapped onto the four Bartle types that I've been exploring, which (because I think the models of play developed by Roger Caillois, Nicole Lazzaro, and Ron Edwards are alternative versions of the same larger model of human personality) I've taken to calling the "big model":



The brief description of the DGD1 model, then, is that it neatly provides descriptions for the six possible modes of play formed by the six intersections among the four Keirsey temperaments -- or the four Bartle types and the other associated models of play if you accept my theory that all these models are analogous.

To say this another way, I believe the DGD1 model maps with extremely high fidelity onto my own four-quadrant "big model" that associates the four-quadrant original Bartle types with the four-quadrant general temperament model of David Keirsey (although my version of the four-quadrant temperament model is modified from Keirsey's version). In particular, I find it highly supportive of the suggested mapping of DGD1 onto the "big model" that the bottommost line on my diagram, which corresponds with the TJ Myers-Briggs type combination, is explicitly called "structure" by Bateman -- and that is precisely how I refer to that end of the vertical axis on my four-quadrant model. Similarly, the other end of that axis I refer to as "freedom," and Bateman seems to think of it in the same way, thus the DGD1 player "Wanderer" player type most closely associated with that FP type combination.

In a broader sense, the value of the DGD1 model (beyond any specific utility it can be shown to have in and of itself) is that it provides a direct response to one of the most common criticisms of the Bartle types model, which is that "no one is ever just one 'type' of player."

Without going into the details of why that charge is somewhat true and yet misleading (I favor a theory that most of us have one primary preference, two secondary preferences, and one avoided preference), the DGD1 model fills in the gaps between Bartle types. A player who knows that their preferred style of play is balanced between exploration and achievement, who was told they "didn't fit" the Bartle model, can now understand themselves to be representative of the Conqueror playstyle as described by the interstitial DGD1 model. Rather than invalidating the Bartle types, the DGD1 model helps to refine that model.

How the Hardcore/Casual Preferences Fit Into the "Big Model"

One final note regarding the DGD1 model (and this is where I get into my own interpretation of Chris Bateman's work, rather just giving an enhanced representation of what he provided in 21st-Century Game Design) concerns the Hardcore and Casual modes of play.

One of the most important distinctions in temperament theory is the difference between the preference for Intuition or Sensing. This preference describes whether a person prefers to check inside themselves (Intuition) or outside in the world (Sensing) for what really matters. So if the other elements of the DGD1 model are valid, then the assignment of the "Hardcore" players to the purely Intuition-oriented preference and "Casual" players to the purely Sensing-oriented preference can actually be read as relatively pure cases of Intuition-expressed gameplay or Sensing-expressed gameplay.

To test this, let's first consider the Casual gamer. These gamers, with their Sensing preference for what the world says, are likely to have world-oriented interests -- not only will their gameplay tend to be in shorter bursts because they have less time for games (because they're busy doing world-oriented things), when the conventions of society say that "playing games" is childish, Sensing persons are likely to accept that convention. Not surprisingly, then, Casual gamers take a casual attitude toward playing games out of concern that someone might discover their childish pleasure. Dipping only casually into games provides Sensing-oriented players with plausible deniability; they can claim that they never invested any real time or care in the game. Of all types, this is the one most likely to declare with utter conviction, "It's just a game."

By contrast, "investment" is precisely the word that best characterizes the Hardcore gamer. Where the Casual gamer is willing to "play in" a gameworld, the Hardcore gamer is eager to "live in" the gameworld. Where the Casual gamer objects to complex rules because it means they have to put in more time to learn the dynamics of game systems, the Hardcore gamer rejoices in complex game systems because they are interesting and feel more like a living environment. However, while Hardcore players may be willing to accept minor changes to the world of the game, they are much more likely to object strongly to major changes in the gameworld. Hardcore players put down roots; they come to understand a gameworld as a kind of home and invest in it as a familiar place... so if that sense of place is uprooted, the Hardcore player will never forgive those responsible, while the Casual player can shrug and move on to the next game.

One complicating factor here is that according to Myers-Briggs research, about 70% of the general population prefer Sensing. While this also supports the observation that the marketplace of Casual gamers is considerably larger than that of Hardcore gamers, this also means that the number of each kind of gamer is likely to be well-represented in online forums dedicated to particular games. This frequently leads to intense debates between Hardcore gamers who assume that their style of play will be respected by the game's designers and who expect the game to make intellectual and emotional sense, and Casual gamers who are equally certain that, because there are many more of them, the game's designers must cater to their interests which revolve around pure rules-based play: "it's just a game." Again, though, these arguments so often observed in game forums can be taken as supporting evidence for the existence of a Sensing/Intuition split among gamer attitudes that manifests as Casual or Hardcore expectations respectively.

Wait... Achievers Are Casual Gamers?

Having pointed out the apparent goodness of fit of the Hardcore/Casual divide with the Intuition/Sensing preference, there's one apparently glaring contradiction here: how can anyone say that an Achiever -- who usually has a strong preference for Sensing over Intuition -- is in any way a "Casual" gamer? Aren't these the people who will play a game for hours, weeks, months, until they've beaten it? Isn't that a form of investment?

I would say that it is... but it's not Hardcore investment in the gameworld, it's "beat the game" investment in generic competitive activity. In much the same way that Sensing-preferring individuals are more likely to enjoy playing team sports for the competitive challenge, while those who prefer Intuition -- if they enjoy sports at all -- are more likely to enjoy challenges that test their mettle as individuals. For example, while an Intuitive is more likely to enjoy climbing a mountain to enjoy the view from the summit, the Sensor is more likely to view the climb either as a race to see who can reach the top the fastest, or to see who can climb the most mountains.

In a gameplay context, this means that the Achiever who spends many hours every week playing the same game is not doing it in a Hardcore way because he feels a need to savor the experience internally -- he's doing it to beat the game, at which point (as a Casual gamer who doesn't invest in a game as a place) he's done with it. "Beating the game" may come in several forms for the Killers/Manipulators and Achievers on the Casual end of the spectrum. It may be literally reaching the end of a story-based game, or the end-game of a persistent-world game such as a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It may also be expressed through smaller competitive challenges, such as being the first player to obtain a particular rare item or to collect a certain number of such items; it may be to collect more of some item than any other player (such as currency); it may be to have the top entry on a leaderboard; it may be to "kill" new player characters until doing so no longer offers a sufficient adrenaline rush. In all these and similar cases, however, once the Casually competitive player's dominance has been accepted -- once the game of choice has been "won" -- the Casual player begins to lose interest and (unlike the Hardcore gamer) will rapidly disengage with that game, often without a backward glance.

Conclusion

In summary, then, while it bears repeating that no model of human behavior can ever be considered perfect, the real question is only whether a given model provides sufficient explanatory and predictive power to allow game designers to communicate usefully about what gamers in the aggregate want and why. Under that measure, I believe the combination of the Bartle/Lazzaro/Edwards+Keirsey model I've suggested with the DGD1 model of Chris Bateman produces an overall model of gamer preferences that does offer good explanatory and predictive power. The model adequately explains why different kinds of gamers consistently demonstrate specific kinds of preferences for certain gameplay forms. Although less evidence exists to support this conclusion, I believe this model can also reliably predict which large groups of gamers (not necessarily individual gamers) are likely to be attracted to particular gameplay forms.

Bearing always in mind that no model is perfect (and thus that perfect explanation or prediction are not reasonable standards against which to hold any model of gameplay preferences), this one seems sufficiently effective to me to warrant continued exploration. But as Richard Bartle says, if some other model can be shown to have better explanatory and predictive power, then I'll enthusiastically set this one aside in favor of the new model. What matters is not that I'm personally "right," but that all of us who are interested in making better games (and making games better) have the best possible tools at hand for that task. If someone can come up with a better model of gamer preferences, we all win.

Until then... this one seems to work.

An Alternative to Aggro

I'm on record as opposing the mindless cloning of the "aggro" mechanic into new MMORPGs.

The expense of real-time collision detection was why the aggro hack was invented. Without it, NPCs could simply walk through burly front-line player characters in order to get at the chewy nougat center of the weaker characters behind them. So "aggro" was created as a quick and dirty gameplay mechanic that would allow front-line players to get NPCs to focus on them. It solved a problem by adding active gameplay content -- what could go wrong?

What went wrong was that the concept of the "fighter" was transmogrified into the tank role. Once that decision was made, it seemed perfectly natural to convert mages into damage-dealers and clerics into healers with crowd-control and buff/debuff support abilities.

And then other developers copied this mechanic for their games. They even "improved" on it to the point that aggro management has come to dominate not only character class/ability designs, it's now the default model for the combat play experience. A PvE fight in one of today's MMORPGs is not about smart tactical use of the local gameworld environment; it's about using character skills (like /taunt) that were explicitly created to "manage aggro."

So how does implementing this system in every new MMORPG make sense now that the technical limitations that led to that mechanic no longer exist? I believe it doesn't. With today's technology, proper collision detection and, more importantly, better combat AI can be implemented. The aggro mechanic survives now only through cargo cult game design, copying it because other developers have copies it, then rationalizing that decision by pointing to gamers who -- because they've been offered nothing else -- now believe and assert (loudly) that it's mandatory.

It's not. It's a convention, nothing more.

All that said, opposing something is easy. If I'm against aggro, what am I for? If I favor getting rid of it, what should replace it?

Until now I haven't really taken the time to suggest an alternative, which I think is a necessary element of constructive criticism. So this essay is an attempt to draft such an alternative. I don't think it's a complete solution, and I know it's not perfect. It's just one possible starting point.

AGGRO MANAGEMENT IS NOT COMBAT

"Aggro," for those new to this issue, is a combat AI mechanic used in most online games (MMORPGs in particular) to allow non-player characters (NPCs) to decide which player character to attack.

Aggro (defined as "hate" on Wikipedia) works basically like this: when an NPC needs to choose which character should be attacked next from a group of player characters, it consults an internal list of "aggression" values. For each player character in the group, the attacking NPC calculates an aggression value based on various qualities of and/or actions by that PC. It then aims its next attack at the PC with the highest aggression value. That player character is then said to have "aggro'ed" the attacking NPC.

The natural outgrowth of this aggro concept is that players will want to be able to do things to "manage" the aggro of attacking NPCs. The "tank" role comes first, because it's obvious that if players can control who gets aggro'ed, they'll want that aggro to stick to the character with the best defenses, leaving weaker characters unharmed and free to do other things like apply damage to the NPC or heal the tank. Group combat, then, gets defined in terms of role-based aggro management -- carefully choosing and timing actions to do as much harm to the enemy or as much help to one's group as possible without shifting aggro away from the tank PC.

My question is: when did people start confusing "managing aggro" with having an interesting tactical combat experience?

What in the world does "managing aggro" have to do with letting a group of players make intelligent and cooperative use of a rich set of environmental phenomena to achieve tactical superiority? How does the artificial and arbitrary gameplay of "aggro management" make any use whatsoever of the IP, the setting, on which a MMORPG is based? How is "performing actions intended to control the internal aggro calculation of an NPC" anything like "combat?"

If people think they like the aggro game, that's fine. People are free to like what they like. But the fact that some people like one particular solution to a game design question does not imply that it's the only possible solution. As gamers, we should be expecting game developers to look for more enjoyable solutions to game design questions, to try to create new and better solutions, not to merely clone mechanics that might work for some other gameworld. Importing the "aggro" mechanic from ground-based fantasy combat games into new games -- including even science fiction games -- presents the appearance of laziness.

So instead of aggro, I'd like to propose an alternative approach to NPC combat decision-making, which for lack of a better name I'm calling "cultural tactics."

CULTURAL TACTICS

Cultural tactics assumes the existence of a story. When there's a background story providing opportunities for narrative development, that story can and should be used to inform the behaviors of intelligent NPCs.

This is done by assigning cultural qualities to every non-player aggressor (NPA), such a non-player character or a tank or a spaceship. All individual NPAs will be defined as belonging to a primary culture. While some individual variation may be possible, those cultural qualities will tend to determine the choices that an individual NPA makes in any situation. Those choices may be about combat actions, or they may be about diplomatic actions or anything else the NPA is able to do. All possible forms of interaction with player characters would be produced by a goal-generating system whose rules would take as inputs the cultural attributes of the decision-making NPA, unique (probably randomized) attributes of the NPA, relevant aspects of the local environment (including perceptions of player character resources), and a desired goal state.

What's important to see here is what's not listed as an input to this decision-making system: player character actions. Getting good combat behavior out of an NPA actor does not require allowing players to directly manipulate that decision-making process. It might benefit from it in extended interactions, such as strategic-level conflict, but the typical short tactical fight does not require NPAs to use player actions as decision-making inputs.

As for offering that capability because it provides gameplay (e.g., aggro management), that's true, it does... but when that gameplay takes over, completely shifting the attention of players from interacting with elements of the gameworld to the manipulation of arbitrary rules that have nothing whatsoever to do with combat, then if that mechanic isn't required, it does not need to be implemented.

Cultural tactics would allow NPAs to have an appropriate and interesting degree of autonomy. Instead of being the pawns of players in gameplay that distracts from the gameworld, NPAs whose actions are based on attributes of the story-based culture to which they belong would choose combat targets in a way that tells us something interesting about who they are.

In a space game, for example, an NPA from a mindlessly aggressive culture might simply target the nearest ship. (Maneuvering into and out of an NPA enemy's range would thus be a viable combat tactic for groups of player characters up against ships commanded by members of such cultures.) An NPA honor culture might always try to target and destroy the strongest (however that's defined) player ship; a ship commanded by an NPA from a victory-at-any-cost culture might seek to destroy the weakest ships first.

A nasty pirate might go after the ship that appears to have the most/best weapons. A daring privateer could be culturally inclined to attack the ship that might carry the most interesting advanced technology. Members of a cybernetically enhanced culture that shares a hive-mind (you know who you are!) might simply attack randomly -- they're big enough not to care what the typical opponent looks like -- or they might look for whichever ship acted like the leader in order to disable the target group's command hierarchy.

LIFE AFTER AGGRO

The point behind all these examples is to show that aggro is irrelevant. Aggro is not necessary for non-player aggressors to be able to make interesting choices about whom to target. And getting rid of aggro serves the useful function of eliminating the bizarre focus of players on withholding their gameplay actions in order to avoid being noticed by a vastly stronger NPA foe, who then hammers their characters into pulp most instantly.

Without being forced to play the Aggro Management Game, players are free to engage in actual combat-relevant tactical decision-making: should I try to maneuver to my target's rear facing, or would it be better to try an alpha strike now? Can I use the particles in the nearby nebula in some interesting way? Is there something cool I can do with one of my weapons right now instead of having to hold my fire because it might make an NPA mad at me?

In summary, if the aggro mechanic works for other games, fine, but it is not required for every game. It can be discarded with no loss, and with considerable gain, since not having to withhold one's combat actions for fear of attracting damage-dealing attention allows more players to participate more frequently in the fun.

It also means they don't have to have all of their actions squeezed into the subset considered appropriate by some developer for a particular and narrowly-defined combat role like "tank" or "crowd control." That permits players much more freedom to play the combat game in the way that's most enjoyable to them.

Roles are still possible; the beauty of getting rid of aggro is that those roles can then be defined in ways that make more sense for the setting of a particular MMORPG. And even without aggro, NPAs are fully capable of selecting their targets in fun and meaningful ways.

If all that is accepted, then yes, I find it disappointing that MMORPG designers continue to clone the aggro mechanic for their games. If they really believe it's necessary, that's a shame. If they don't, it's a wasted opportunity to do something better. Either way, the concept of "aggro" is long overdue for retirement.

CONCLUSION

I'm under no illusion at this point that the producers/designers of any MMORPG under development will read this and think, "Say, you know, he has a point -- right, everybody stop what you're doing; we're going to re-do combat even if it means shipping four months later than planned!" I assume that the aggro mechanic and its tank/DPS/support handmaidens will be the default choice for the core combat model of every new MMORPG for years to come.

The point of proposing and explaining this alternative is therefore not to try to change the minds of big-studio game designers who clone MMORPG conventions as a risk-reduction technique, but to suggest to the newcomers that there's room for innovation here. By all means, look closely at the aggro management model of combat, analyze it, consider its first-order features and second-order effects within the context of your other game design choices, and use it if it makes sense for you... but also feel free to go with something else if aggro management doesn't feel right for your game.

Big-budget games that try to play it safe don't always succeed. So why not take a few carefully-considered risks and try something different, such as deep-sixing aggro in favor of a combat model that's actually related to combat? It's not like your odds of success will be much worse than those of the play-it-safe developer. :)

In fact, given the wealth of conventional MMORPGs available currently, this might be exactly the right time to break away from the pack in a few key areas of design.

Why not start with aggro?

The Archetypal Origins of MMORPG Group-Combat Roles

In thinking about designing character classes in a MMORPG around the group-combat roles of tank/DPS/support, one of the things that's been lost is the relationship of these roles to distinct playstyles.

Each of these "holy trinity" roles is based on one of the basic functional classes of the original Dungeons & Dragons: fighter, mage, and cleric (healer) respectively. But we've forgotten that all of these roles were distilled from archetypes in fantasy fiction and heroic myths... and those archetypes were used to dramatize real differences between how people see the world.

So I'd like to take a look back at D&D to show how its classes, on which the roles and classes of most modern MMORPGs are based, are actually derived from mythical archetypes which recognize that people have distinctively different worldviews. And I'll then show how that understanding of gameplay roles as archetypes points the way toward designing better gameplay around those roles.

Back to the Past

The effectiveness of each of D&D's four basic types was determined in large part by one character attribute -- a different attribute for each type. I contend that this attribute was in fact a gameplay-driven abstraction of an archetypal pattern of behavior of characters in fantasy literature, which was based on heroic mythology, which in turn was a way of highlighting the behavioral styles of real people and their distinctively different ways of understanding and living in the world.

The correspondences between the four fundamental character classes and their controlling attributes are as follows:

Fighter	--	Strength
Mage	--	Intelligence
Cleric	--	Wisdom
Thief	--	Dexterity

(Constitution and Charisma were the two other primary attributes of characters in D&D, but they were not used as defining/controlling attributes for any class.)

It's easy to see how representing each of these four attributes with a number leads immediately to gameplay. But it's important to also see that each of these four attributes is an abstraction of a different personality style, and that part of the fun of playing a character whose abilities are determined by their "class" is playing with the stereotypical (but fundamentally realistic) patterns of behavior we all recognize in those styles.

A Question of Style

Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Dexterity each signify a different way of understanding -- and thus interacting with -- the world.

Strength represents the preference for attacking problems head-on, for directly pitting force against force. The archetypal Fighter prefers to keep things simple -- follow the rules, do your job, be compensated fairly, enjoy the rewards of success.

Intelligence is the hallmark of the Mage, whose prefers to solve problems by understanding them and applying the correct tool in the correct way to their resolution. Knowledge and understanding, represented in fantasy literature by mastery of the arcane arts, are the mage's preferred way of approaching the world.

Wisdom is the Cleric's goal. Wisdom, perhaps best understood as intuitively living in harmony with the world, wants all the beings in that world to live in harmony with their nature and with the overarching principles of rightness. The ability to heal others in both body and soul is a natural interest of this archetype.

Dexterity in any situation is the distinguishing feature of characters representing the Thief. Not only does this permit them to use tools with surpassing skill, it also defines a particular kind of worldview in which plans and rules are unnecessary. They're not nearly as much fun as making things up as you go and counting on your nimbleness and adaptability to get you out of any trouble.

By closely keying each of the abilities associated with a class to the archetypal features of the character attribute that defines that class, D&D accomplished two things.

First, it made roleplaying easy and fun. In a purely utilitarian sense, having characters with distinctively different kinds of abilities made the whole group better able to deal with different kinds of problems that could be encountered in the gameworld. But perhaps more importantly for a roleplaying game, when you played a mage character, the abilities of that class encouraged you and helped you to play that character in a way that "felt" like pretending to be an exemplar of that kind of personality style. Recognizing the distinct personal style that was represented by the class helped one to enjoy playing a character of that class.

Where We Are Now

That brings us back to today. In the decades-long process of transitioning from Strength/Intelligence/Wisdom/Dexterity to Fighter/Mage/Cleric/Thief, and thence to tank/DPS/support, we've lost several important things.

Most obvious is the loss of the Thief class, which represents the Rogue archetype. While letting players express this kind of "loose cannon" archetypal behavior through their character abilities might appear to be problematic in a PvP setting, eliminating it means losing access to both the fun of playing this risk-taking kind of character as well as dexterity-focused problem-solving techniques that can get your group out of a jam when nothing else will. What would Star Wars have been without Han Solo?

There is a more important loss, however, which is the understanding that these roles were once archetypal. Without that understanding, the implementations of these roles no longer link as strongly to the mythic archetypes. They can still be fun in a surface-level, number-crunching, mechanical kind of way -- tank attracts aggro, mage does damage, support class provides healing and crowd-control. But the deep joy of playing a "role" in the artistic, literary sense of expressing the behavior patterns of an archetypal pattern represented over several millennia of human mythology, is gone.

Into the Future

MMORPG developers can retrieve some of this fun by recognizing the human archetypes on which roles and classes are based, and by consciously designing the character abilities and gameplay content of their gameworld to once again express those archetypal styles of understanding and interacting with the world.

Tank/Fighter types and the game content associated with that style can be focused on the direct application of force, on collecting loot and badges, on simple leveling, and generally on the enjoyment of knowing the basic rules of play and following them for profit.

DPS/Mage characters and the content created for them can be developed to apply knowledge and perception to solving problems. The character's level of capability should be affected by how much the character knows about the gameworld and how well they're able to integrate that knowledge to respond to novel situations.

Support/Cleric characters and their content can be designed to highlight the importance to this archetype of wisdom in resolving problems of body and soul. Beyond healing and crowd control, this role could be much more interesting to play with the restoration of the understanding that it's based on an archetypal representation of the personality style that cares about other people.

And bring back the Rogue role! :)

Conclusion

The mythological bases of the tank/DPS/support roles prominent in today's MMORPGs appear to have been forgotten by their designers. While this is fine for a purely mechanical, numbers-based, follow-the-arbitrary-rules kind of game, it should be understood that the price tag for this approach to MMORPG design is high: players lose the joy of expressing their in-game actions as heroically distinctive characters. It's just about doing a job.

Archetypes link player behaviors to the heroic myths and legends of human history. The archetypes (along, of course, with the game's setting) should drive the abilities created, rather than abilities being generated without thought for consistency with playstyles. Recognizable patterns of behavior and diversity of problem-solving modes are directly connected to perceiving differences among playstyles as reflections of archetypal preferences. When roles aren't understood as reflecting distinctive playstyles, the abilities created for those roles feel generic; they're not as much fun.

Abilities should instead be designed to help players express archetypal behaviors. By returning to the roots of character ability design, in which the things that characters can be good at are structured around the fundamentally distinct attributes of legendary heroes, MMORPG designers can restore to players the pleasure of heroic play beyond mere number-crunching.

And once character abilities are focused on playstyles, the roles derived from those abilities will feel vastly more satisfying. The better that game designers can tap into those fundamental heroic archetypes, which haven't changed since the days of Homer's Iliad, the better their game will resonate with gamers looking for a heroic experience.