Before releasing World of Warcraft, Blizzard attempted to implement a system to somewhat even the playing field between players with different amounts of time to invest. The original idea was that the longer you played, the less experience you would get from killing things. Unsurprisingly, the most vocal players– that is, the ones who play the most– didn’t like this. Blizzard changed it to “rest XP”: you have a certain number of hours during which you get double the normal experience for dismembering defenseless critters.

As documented on Raph Koster’s blog, China has implemented Blizzard’s first pass at the idea. Players under 18 get an experience penalty after they’ve played over three hours in one day. After five hours, they get no XP, and a reminder every fifteen minutes to go outside, already.

This is, quite clearly, a very bad move on the part of the Chinese government. As any good game designer knows, you should steal the best, most recent iteration of someone’s idea. Let me offer the following suggestions, to replace stick with carrot:

• Gold for grades: capitalists know to pay for results, not effort. An A is 100 gold, B is 50, and so on. Bonus side effect: studying becomes the most ethical way to farm for (and then sell) gold.
• Non-subversive XP: while Blizzard gives their players bonus XP just for failing to log in, you could really extend this to encourage restraint from many activities. For every hour you spend not promoting democracy, religion, or even pornography, you gain a monster-kill’s worth of bonus XP.
• Good citizen bonus: if your neighbor’s being subversive (see above), and still gaining their bonus XP, you might be inclined to let it slide– unless, of course, you could get a fancy new epic any time you reported someone who was subsequently convicted or disappeared. (Note that this would work quite well in the U.S. War on Terror as well!) To protect informants, all rewards should be bind on equip, not bind on pickup. “Dude! Your neighbor just got picked up!” “I know. Wow.” “Were you scared? … Say, where’d you get that sweet sword?”

These ideas are all off the top of my head, and subject to refinement. However, I hope I’ve made clear the value of a governmental Department of Game Design not only to China, but to aspiring game regulators worldwide.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.