This would seem to be a simple concept, but in practice, it doesn't seem to be particularly well known. People, as a general rule of thumb, play games in order to relax and take their mind off work. Work, in this case, meaning things one is obligated to do on a regular basis. Granted, this definition is a little broad, but it should work for our purposes. The main point is that obligations are pyschologically opposed to play, and games, therefore, should ideally be free of obligation.

It's easy here, to stretch the meaning of the word obligation (yes, like I'm doing with work, I know) and point out plenty of games where obligations are involved. For instance, I might promise to play Go with my cousin tomorrow. I might make an alliance with someone in Risk, swearing not to attack them until no other opponents are left. I might be playing a videogame where I have only a limitted period of time to finish each level. The first two examples are really just about me being a decent enough person to honor promises I make to friends on the spur of the moment, the game isn't really a part of the equation. The third though might be an issue, depending on the nature of the game. If we're talking about something along the lines of, say, Super Mario Bros. where the time limit is really just there to keep me thinking on my feet as I run from point A to point B, or a similar sort of challenge, that's all well and good. If, on the other hand, we have a game where I have a big huge world to explore and do interesting things in, but taking my time and experiencing all it has to offer will cause my game to end, that does fall under my list of grievances. You're pressuring me to rush through the game, or at least the timed portions, instead of letting me take my time and enjoy things. Fortunately, people generally have the good sense not to do this sort of thing (or at least, rarely, and with time limits so long as to effectively not exist).

The two situations where obligations really enter into the playing of a game tend mainly to be in RPGs, and online games. MMORPGs of course, being the worst of the lot. The main issue when it comes to RPGs (of the paper sort) is that the nature of the genre tends to force a large number of players to gather on a regularly scheduled basis. We can't really get much done in a single session, so nobody wants to put the next one off, and if anyone misses a session, not only are they potentially going to end up lagging behind in experience levels (an issue I've already griped about in an earlier essay), their absence could ruin the whole session for everyone. This incidently is part of the core concept of my little half-game-half-joke RPG the Roleplaying Game. This isn't always enough of an obligation to make RPGs feel like work, but the vast majority of RPG campaigns I've seen disintegrate cite this as the reason.

I personally don't believe that this level of obligation is particularly inherent to the genre mind you. I have just as much fun if not more playing a quick little one-shot game than I do in most sessions of long term campaigns. The only downside is that one-shots don't generally give people a chance to create their own characters. With a simple enough game though, this problem can be overcome. I have, for example, a one-page hand-out for the Tyranny demo I never manage to get scheduled for NonCon that contains all the information players need to create a character (with only their race predetermined), including all the rules relevent to their options. Here's a PDF of it. Granted, Tyranny is a diceless game specifically designed to be played in one-shot sessions, but you can see that a good deal of streamlining can get around the issue of totally pre-made characters. Even long-term games can be set up in a low-pressure manner. Just pick a system where falling behind in experience isn't crippling, and make sure your campaign is set up so that the PCs are a loose association of people, any one of which may or may not be available for a given adventure. For example, everyone lives in a close-knit village. The characters of people who happen to be present are sent off to slay the monster of the week, while the others stay home to protect the children.

Now let's get back to online games. Here, we most certainly see games turning into work, for a wide variety of reasons. Typically, we see the same scheduling issue we do with RPGs, but far more pronounced. Daily RPG sessions are nearly unheard of, but it's generally expected that players of a MMORPG will dedicate several hours a day to it. A one-week vacation can cause you to fall so far behind in levels relative to your friends that playing with them is no longer practical. The whole notion of "guilds" in many games can make this even worse. Not only do we have close-knit groups of people expecting eachother to be available on a regular scheduled basis, typically players will have major duties within their little in-game community, obligating them to dedicate large portions of their playing time to crafting and distributing some type of item, or attending a hastily scheduled, marathon session to accomplish some goal. Failure to comply means getting tossed out of the guild. Personally speaking, I'm always willing to help people out in any situation, but the second it goes from me being a generous person to me having a job I "need" to do, I re-assess my priorities. Playing a game as a second career doesn't make the cut.

Another, more fundemental aspect of this problem, and one I personally find far more upsetting, has to do with what happens in the game when I'm not playing. There's a certain game I discussed quite a bit when talking about Player Driven Economies which at the time, I was quite enthralled with. I have since stopped playing it because, simply put, they started severely punishing me for not playing enough. If the term doesn't ring a bell, you might to read my explanation of Supercash from said essay, because I'm going to be using it frequently from here out.

This, simply put, is one of the stupidest things the operators of an online game can do. On the surface, it seems all well and good. You make money off me playing the game, ergo, you want to make sure I keep playing it. The thing of it is though, you aren't actually making money off me playing the game. You're either making money off me paying a monthly fee, or periodically buying wads of Supercash. Me actually playing the game drains the bandwidth of your servers, incurring the very costs you need those subscription fees/Supercash purchases to offset. The ideal situation for you would be if I kept paying, and never actually played the game.

Instead, many games punish this behavior. The main way they do this is to delete inactive accounts. Granted, this is something you have to do on occassion. I can't see character accounts eating up a noteworthy quantity of disk space, but if the person who made Bilbo the halfling quit 5 seconds later, and 2 years down the line, someone else wants the name, yeah, you want to delete the old character. What it ultimately boils down to is this. If there's any chance of the earlier player returning, how upset will they be having to start a new character, and how much do you care? If someone barely touched the game and/or hasn't been around in years, odds are they're never coming back, and if they are, things have changed so much they'd basically be starting over regardless. Meanwhile, if someone has spent months building up their character, and pumped $100 into your game, you're really shooting yourself in the foot by telling them they have to start over if they take a break.

The example I hinted at earlier not only developed a far too itchy account deletion trigger finger (wiping a character worth something like $100 in Supercash/real money, and a sizeable chunk of in-game cash and EXP when I was knocked offline for just one month), it also developed a rather nasty habit to increase the flow of supercash into the game. Deteriorating luxury items. It's all well and good in my book if you want to make legitimately useful items purchased with Supercash eventually break down. For instance, a VIP pass that lets me access an in-game casino, or a vehicle that doubles my movement speed, things like that. These should degrade based on how much usage I get out of them, not by real world time passage. The vehicle breaks down after X distance travelled, etc. When you go by actual real time days, I'm not going to bother making the purchase unless I know I'm going to be playing the heck out of the game. This again brings us to that whole bandwidth drain issue, and I'm rearranging my life for a game's sake. Even worse, is applying this to luxury goods. Things which have no impact whatsoever on gameplay. If I spend Supercash, worth real money, on a hat, which does absolutely nothing at all for my character besides look neat when I'm wearing it, that hat should not disintegrate 3 days later. Implementing such a system assumes that players are going to be dedicating a significant portion of their real life income to replacing useless decorations. Anyone who has enough dedication to an online game that they can afford to do that isn't going to be the sort of person who cares how they look. All you're doing is discouraging people who might have bought a hat for the heck of it from doing so, because they know it won't last.

Here's the working variation. Every month, release a new style of hat, taking the old one out of stores. People into fashion will keep dropping down cash to expand their wardrobe, some people might buy in bulk, planning to sell them to new players down the road. With or without bulk purchases, the rare luxuries are going to be a huge boon to your economy, and people who aren't really up for playing the game will at least pop in now and then to check the item of the month. They're giving you cash without playing now, which, as mentioned earlier, is ideal for you.

This notion however skims closer to another potential obligation you want to avoid. Forcing people to play at particular times. Any time a game features any sort of one day special event, or a monster that only appears at midnight on wednesdays, you are punishing people for not restructuring their whole lives to play your game. People don't like that, and will potentially leave if what they're missing out on is something they care about.

On a final note here, I find it quite ironic that the online games which best seem to understand this concept are the ones that benefit least from that knowledge. Donation driven browser based games like Kingdom of Loathing. Technically, KoL has a Supercash system in place, complete with the item of the month notion mentioned above. Really though, KoL is set up in a way that greatly discourages me from spending too much time on it. I get roughly 40 actions per day, then I can't play any more.I can get in-game bonuses by sacrificing daily actions while they're in effect. If I fail to use all my actions, they roll over to the next day (with a limit on how many I can horde of 200). Worst case scenerio, if I can't play for a month, all I miss out on is time I could have spent playing, and even then, I get a reimbursement on 4 days worth of that or so, and it's not like there's a competetive aspect of the game I'm falling behind on. No pressure, ergo, fun.