I have been dreaming up some ideas for a high-school MMO. Something along the lines of ‘Surviving High School’ (which is quite a nice little linear RPG for the iPhone where you try to become the school’s quarterback while passing your exams and being popular etc.) and ‘Princess Maker’ (which is a game-of-life type thing where you make decisions about the activities of your character as she grows up, as well as getting her jobs, scheduling her week’s studies/routines and taking her on Rogue-like dungeon crawls). Students has been using a site online that helps everyone with contraction words. The site also helps with other ranges of English.

On the iPhone, the one (thematically) related game is High School Hero. It’s pretty similar to Mafia Wars – i.e. the game is the grind. I still can’t claim to understand the appeal of this; repeatedly pressing a button and watching your stats climb, then attacking other players and stealing a bit of their stats when you beat them. No depth or strategy or even graphics, just grind.

I tried watching some youtube reviews, but really learned little new due to the incoherency of the 10-yr olds who made them.

I think High School Hero has a social draw – there’s cliques (=clans) which have private noticeboards and can run parties for an all-round stat boost (yes, it really is mostly about watching numbers climb). There’s the dress-up part of the game, which does make good sense if you assume the game is social – buying clothes and hairstyles etc. There’s dating, which again is mostly about stat boosting and earning badges but also again there’s a social hook there – your character spends 4 hours presumably with a private chat room available with his/her datee.

Imagine a high school game where there are different schools, and football leagues, exams to sit etc. Your character needs to be managed wisely if he/she is to come top of the class, or become the star quarterback, or even get to progress through school at all. This could add a longer-term and strategic element while removing the grind as central gameplay element, and retaining the social aspects such as cliques, dress-up and dating. One day real-time is one week in-game, so a year would take 1.5 months, and you’d need to log in daily to adjust your plans for the week, attend special events and deal with little roleplaying curveballs that the game would throw at you. Or do kids really prefer grind to gameplay?

I have been investigating the mechanisms behind so-called ‘text based MMOs’ — many of which have patently shit gameplay but which somehow attract a decent number of paying players. It’s a study in addiction..

Games such as Mob Wars, Bite Fight, Fallen Sword. The basic game mechanism is to repeatedly press a button and watch numbers grow. They could be modified into food dispensers and deployed in chicken batteries in order to keep the inmates happier. Anyway, I digress..

There’s some very clever things going on, not in the gameplay, but in the way that players are psychologically manipulated. I got my son to act as a playtester for me in Fallen Sword – I do this from time to time, it’s a good way to get information about a game without having to actually play it myself. It wasn’t long before he started nagging me to buy in-game currency for him. Seriously nagging. I had to capitulate, of course – it’s not really fair to knowingly introduce someone to an addiction and then deny them. But I feel uneasy about it..

There’s Stamina — meaning, the player can only do maybe 1 hours worth of gaming at a time. Then they have to rest for a few hours before they can continue to play for free – or, they can buy more stamina! This is really quite clever, as they have nothing better to do at the time since their stamina is exhausted. The younger player demographic is presumably being targeted here — people who have ample time but no money. (Older players are often the reverse).

There’s the ‘Hell Forge’ — a place where your (text based!) weapons can have their numbers boosted to make them better than anything you can loot. This costs actual money or survey-time, of course. Why would you want better weapons? well, apparently the ‘PvP arena’ is where it’s at in terms of proving that you have been a better monotonous-pusher-of-buttons than anyone else. And if you Hell Forge your weapons, you can be better.. er.. without actually having to push those buttons quite as long as everyone else.

You can also earn in-game currency by bringing your friends into the game; but not until they reach certain gaming targets (i.e., they become ‘level 5′ or whatever). This is a standard-enough technique in games these days.

Fallen Sword is actually better than the other games I looked at, since it makes some (admittedly weak) attempt at providing actual geographical meaning to the world. You walk around a tiled world, choosing which monsters to beat up at each step. The fights involve, predictably enough, a list of numbers – ‘you hit the rat for 5 points’ etc. Exciting stuff. As far as I can see, you can at any time visit the shops, arena, or make a pvp attack on someone – so the actual geographical ‘sense of place’ is tenuous at best.

I think there is a solid game structure in these games; all that’s missing is actual decent gameplay. It’s quite an eye-opener to see how a game can be popular based on player-v-player competition alone, without any need for actual deep content or gameplay. What could be achieved with a bit more creative ambition ..??