Imagine that we live in a world wherein everythime you do something 'wrong', there is a godlike creature, seeeing everything, coming down from the sky whenever needed, and punishing you time and time again whithout you having any power over this 'feature'.

Or imagine you a world wherein 'wrong' depends on what side your on. And the wrongness and rightness differs depends on what your interests and the interests of your precious are in that particular situation. Where punishment is done by other people and can constantly be tested and if done well fleed from.

Wouldn't that be more attractive?


[edited by - Marc De Mesel on June 4, 2002 5:55:38 PM]

I''m not big on online gaming but I do a lot of experimentation with AI communities.

Perhaps the answer lies in a game design that features mechanisms for real-world structures.

Players fall into different categories. On two extremes, you have your ruthless newbie killers and your social players. A social player cares about order within the game but not all players see this incentive. If the game is designed around that incentive perhaps all players would have no choice but to take part.

To get a player to care about social order, they have to have something to lose. In the real world, we have homes which are protected by a military which is funded by our taxes. Could a game use this as a model for its design?

Let''s say that the entire game is based around world domination. There is NO way that any one character could dominate it on their own and therefore must form teams. Each player may establish a stronghold (home) which protects the surrounding land from other players, monsters... and even NPC''s. The player has now gained that bit of land, however, other characters with much more power may want that land (resources?). The owner of the land may now pay a protection tax to another player. If that player excepts that land and provides the protection needed, the player agrees to continue paying. If the deal cannot be met, the player must be diplomatic and try finding help among other players.

The entire idea of the game would be to gain the most tax from other players... and use the money as strategically as possible in order to defeat opposition. This adds interaction between the strong and the weak. Unlike other games, they now NEED eachother.

This goes much deeper than what I''ve mentioned here. There has to be resources, economics (we''ve had many unresolved discussions on that in the past), rule system for building... I see this going down many avenues. It''s not simple.

- Jay


"Strictly speaking, there is no need to teach the student, because the student himself is Buddha, even though he may not be aware of it." - Shunryu Suzuki

Get Tranced!

Jay, check this out

http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/press/books/ARTIFSOC.htm

Marc,

I checked out the sugarscape link... this is exactly the type of stuff I''m working on but more game-related. My goal is to create gaming environments that create themselves. It''d be great for replayability =)


Utopico,

My idea I described was off the cuff so you could be right. On the other hand, it''s not such a rigid idea. The tax feature could bring the n00bs and l33ts together but some people may want to fight the system... hell, we KNOW some people will want to fight the system. This is part of the fun. Players may find their own means of banding together and fighting "The Man". If one player gets too many people under him, he''ll overpower everyone monetarily. What he says goes. A lot of players would be against his ideas (like in real life) and part of the fun would be in taking his A$$ down! =) It''d be a revolution. But, this is really nothing more than a brain fart. There''s a lot of room for interaction... and a lot of room for total failure.

Also, keep audience in mind. Are we talking about what sells or what would be a perfect online social online environment. Perhaps the players that get bored of the game are the people we are talking about keeping out. Do we want them to be bored while the social players live it up?


AP,

Star Wars Galaxy looks badass!!! But to be honest, it just sounds like another experience-based MMORPG. The reason I don''t play these games is because I feel they are based on older single-player games rather than being designed from the ground up. And the reason for my taking part in this thread is because we are talking about doing just that. =)

- Jay



"Strictly speaking, there is no need to teach the student, because the student himself is Buddha, even though he may not be aware of it." - Shunryu Suzuki

Get Tranced!

quote:Original post by utopico
When considering a social MMRPG I think one of the huge problems you will face is all those players that are not one of those hardcore games. If you are going to get any positive feedback from social structures you will have to play this game a whole lot. All the players that are not that hardcore will not bother to play the game or even worse they will try to sabotage by doing PK for a while before they quit.

Well to get rid of the newbies starting to kill all over the place implement a system where newbies have not such powers but are also protected against the powerfull. A birthing system/growing system is ideal here. Children do not have the physical power to attack adults but are at the same time protected by there parents.

So the moment they are adults and have some physical power they already have invested some time in there character and has already some relationships build up. When acting like n idiot and killing someone for fun that is loved by others he could be killed by others, lmose his character and start all over again like a child. He will have ruined the reputation of his character (if a tight community atmosphere had yet emerged there, because this takes some time and choas landscapes without any order, or not as much as in other communities might exist too. )

quote:
Another thing is that in the real world the reason for cooperating is mostly not punnishment by doing wrong things, but the joy of beeing together with other ppl. So there would have to be feeling connected to the social interactions in the game. This is very difficult to create with just a visual world. One thing that might help in this matter, might be the possibility to actually talk to ppl. When talking I dont mean chat but actual voice. In this way a more personalized connection will be made and you will get feeling connected to this relation. This ofcourse is probably a bit difficult at the moment because of the need for bandwith, but this will possible in a few years.
I will look forward to a game that will support this possibility.

Utopico

In ''the architecture of trust''(http://www.gamasutra.com/education/theses/20020410/smith_01.htm) Jonas Smith talkes about this ability to here eachother voices and what an impact it has on your amount of trust you now lay in that person. It is huge! So, indeed voice is very important here. And I think it should be already possible to implement this, a world wherein people can voicetalk to eachother. Well let''s wait and see how Star Wars Galaxies does it.

quote:Original post by coderx75
Marc,

I checked out the sugarscape link... this is exactly the type of stuff I''m working on but more game-related. My goal is to create gaming environments that create themselves. It''d be great for replayability =)

Jay, What exactly do you mean by gaming environments that create themselves? Are yiou heading for a completely artificial living environment with ''seemingly intelligent'' npc''s doing all kind of stuff? And do you see in this artificial societies a lot of playability?

I don''t know, there are some guys bussy building a quite impressive ai world now, the name of the game is ''Republic''. I think creating such an ai world is a lot of work and basically ads no play value to the player yet, just some sightseeing.

At the other hand I think for creating environments, societies, living cities the knowledge you gain from people who have tried to create artificial societies is important. But my main goal is to create a virtual society existing of real people, I even excluded all ai life, there is none in mine.

The most important concept I learned from it is ''emergence''. Or how societies grow from all the humans, having there selfish rules, interacting with eachother.

quote:
Star Wars Galaxy looks badass!!! But to be honest, it just sounds like another experience-based MMORPG. The reason I don''t play these games is because I feel they are based on older single-player games rather than being designed from the ground up. And the reason for my taking part in this thread is because we are talking about doing just that. =)

I totally agree here with Jay, Star Wars Galaxies has way too much in comen with the mmorpg''s we know. The foundations are the same which are:
-You can adventure and gain points (do some things that the gamedesigners have scripted for you, killing certain npc''s, etc..)
-There are safe areas where people simply can''t kill eachother. Not because of social rules enforced by the players but the system simply does not allow it.
-They work again with a statistics where you can gain points to have certain skills.

This all is crap, it''s not a real society. It''s just a bunch of adventurers trying to gain as many points to climb up the ladder of success laid out by the gamedesigners. There is no need for people skills, social skills in order to be succesfull. A loner can go through this world whitout having much to interact and still become successfull.

This is bad and it shouldn''t be. Maybe it''s because of the limited technology, voice speeking might not be advanced enough yet, I don''t know.
I respect the creative director Raph Koster very much, his site has a tremendous amount of information on online games but he is definetely using proven/workable gaming techniice in Star Wars Galaxies that are indeed very close to the foundations of UO, Everquest and such.

I want something alse. I want a world where adventures emerge from the players. A worlddesigner should only design the worldrules/physics/conditions/setting of the world but not creating the adventures themselves.

I feel compelled to respond to this thread because I believe the answer has more to do with all of the ideas posted here and not just one of them.

In order to have healthy online communities in an MMORPG, you first have to accept a few things.

1) You're never going to erradicate the "griefer". We can't do this in the real world so why can we do it online with significantly less realistic simulation and no real identity tracking.

2) Competition and Cooperation can both be used to foster a healthy environment for exciting gameplay. Eliminate one or the other and you actually hurt the game.

3) As the developer, you're more than likely not going to be able to control the society in your game. Developing tools that allow you to motivate the society in a particular desired direction becomes paramount, but never gaurantees utopia. A real world example of this is the US tax system. Government uses this to motivate our behaviours on a daily basis. Its why Alan Greenspan has the power he does. I digress...

It seems to me that facilitating a healthy society in an MMORPG is about balancing all of the gameplay factors with all of the social factors. Punishment needs to be strict enough that it hurts when it occurs. Punishment also needs to be permanent in some cases or at least player controlled.(ie duration/severity) Societies need a formal way to organize and track organization. Organizations must never be completely self sufficient. Building resources should only be available to certain player run cities forcing trade to occur. Competition needs to be healthy enough to keep everyone engaged.(trade, wars, hunting, ...) Cooperation has to offer a strategic advantage to solving one or more gameplay styles. Player power has to remain relatively even with respect to loss of life. There can be no newbies harmlessly attacking veterans, yet there needs to be enough power in veterans to defend themselves against an organized newbie group looking to grief.

The real world is a web of behavioral dependencies without a beginning and an end. Our challenge is to simulate this environement and I believe the communities you desire will arise. Current games have too narrow of a focus on a single gameplay mechanic, Combat. Because of this the culture of the societies are "war-like" at best and one should not expect the result to be any different than they are today. As the communities that these games look to cater to broaden in scope, so to will the communities that populate these games. Give me a game with real trade, meaningful politics, crushing war, deadly combat, and player ownership in the plot and you will have the communities that this thread talks about.

I ramble enough.
Kressilac
www.agesofathiria.com

ps The only major problem we have is trying to design this while still allowing our company to be profitable after release. IT requires a shift in thinking and an unwavering faith in the human social behaviours. If you present the right tools, the society that forms around them (remember this is out of your control) will be optimal.


[edited by - Kressilac on June 3, 2002 10:54:44 AM]