Are online rankings N-Gage Arena's worst enemy?
Exciting, isn't it?
Every title on the new N-Gage platform has some sort of support for the N-Gage Arena, Nokia's online gaming network. But it's almost always rankings, where your score is posted to an online league table. There are a few competitive multiplayer titles such as Pro Series Golf and Reset Generation, but there's no massively multiplayer, no co-operative multiplayer and nothing freeform or expressive.
Concentrating so hard on high score tables is a very bad idea for many reasons, all involving a lack of fun:
1. Casual gamers get driven away by hardcore players
In the golden days of arcade machines, when titles like Space Invaders and Pac-Man were played all round the world, the high score table made some sense: it was whoever was best at the game in your local video arcade, pub, restaurant, workplace etc. There would be a small pool of game fans who would compete against each other on a sort of time-shifted basis, and watching your three letter initials rise up or down the machine's scoreboard was a lot of fun. (It was also a natural extension of traditional pub games which had been played among communities for centuries, such as darts and skittles.)
However, scale that up to the entire world and it becomes no fun at all. The obsessive play-all-the-time types that might number just one or two in your local community are suddenly an army of hundreds or even thousands. There is no hope of the average player getting anywhere near the top rankings of a game under those circumstances, so they're likely to just give up on it completely.
And all that assumes that people play fair. Which brings us onto the second point...
2. Hardcore gamers get driven away by cheats
Just as modern competitive sport suffers from doping, online game rankings suffer from hackers. They find some easy way to give themselves a massive score, and all those people who played hard and fair find themselves pushed down the tables. Even the most hardcore score-obsessed gamer is not going to bother with rankings if they're full of cheats.
Judging from discussions going on all over the Arena Forums, cheating in online games seems to be easiest of all on rankings, and it only takes a tiny percentage of players to cheat in order to ruin the entire rankings system. An ongoing official ONE tournament is now facing severe problems because of cheating, and at stake are physical prizes including mobile phones worth hundreds of euros each. Winning a virtual prize through cheating is bad, but winning a real life prize is worse.
3. Everyone else gets driven away by columns of meaningless numbers
Even if rankings worked properly, a lot of people simply couldn't care less about them. Mobile phones are supposed to provide a unique opportunity to bring new people into gaming because so many people buy them for other reasons, but how many of these potential new gamers will be impressed by league tables?
Rankings are meaningless to people who aren't competitive, there ought to be some form of interactivity which doesn't revolve entirely around beating someone else.
4. Some games just don't suit rankings
In a possibly genius-like move, the N-Gage adventure game Dirk Dagger appears to have a unique rankings system: the most recent person who completed the game receives the highest score. There's no competition between players in the rankings, perhaps to make the point that adventure games simply aren't suited to competitive gaming. (Though ironically there seem to be some errant scores perched at the top though, could it be foul play?)
If a game doesn't involve proving yourself, if it's more concerned with self-expression or watching a story unfold, then it shouldn't have numerical rankings shoehorned into it. Something more imaginative should be substituted which is appropriate to the genre.
Okay smarty-pants, what SHOULD they do instead of rankings?
Rankings aren't bad in themselves. If they can be done with a minimum of cheating there are many people who will enjoy them, and they definitely have a place on Arena for those who want them. The real problem is the immense weight placed upon them, they seem to dominate the online mode of every N-Gage game, and even have their own section in the N-Gage application's Gaming History.
To some extent this is very understandable, league tables are the easiest form of online gaming to set up and run, and they're also the cheapest if people are worried about network data charges. However, data charges are no longer the terrifying beast they used to be, network charges are much lower (often flat rate) and lots of phones avoid them altogether through Wi-Fi.
Nokia's built its modern reputation by inventing ways for people to communicate. Thanks to that work, phone users can talk to each other, see each other, share content with each other, bounce ideas off each other, interact with each other, even when they're on the other side of the globe. Why can't this broad range of interactivity be present in N-Gage?
Online gaming on a Nokia platform ought to be more rooted in the company's communications heritage. To some extent we've had a taste of that with Reset Generation, but even RG is ultimately based around league tables and beating people. Whatever happened to connecting people?
