The big question these days in MMORPG's is how can we reach the stage where players will act socialy with eachother and not having those anti-social behaviours like player killing. Nowadays they solve these problems mostly by simply not allowing people from the same team to kill eachother or create places in the world where people can't kill eachother. I find this a poor solution to the problem. The key here to find the answer to this problem and creating a gamedesign where constructive/social behaviour is present is to look at the real world and ask yourself: Why is it that people in the real world don't kill eachother randomly? This is simple, you will get punished when you do so. We have created social rules that say: don't kill, respect your parents. These rules have emerged simply because with this rules, the society as a whole that follows these rules is stronger, more competent as a team than the societies who didn't evolve/followed those rules. So what I tried in my gamedesign is create an environment where societies can emerge, creting social rules and political strucures. These societies will probably compete with eachother. They will know from eachothers existence. Now the society/group that cooperates well, that have social and organizational rules, will be more successfull in my designed world. They will become rapidely more strong (the individuals) (because they will grow more resources) but they will also grow more rapidely in numbers as they create more children. A succesfull society will try to expand probably and that way drive away other societies, not that strong to compete against such an organized community. As such, the moral rules and organizational structures will win the world and minor sotieties with weaker social rules will die. Would this work? Is this the solution? [edited by - Marc De Mesel on May 30, 2002 2:49:34 PM] [edited by - Marc De Mesel on June 4, 2002 7:16:17 AM]

quote: Original post by Marc De Mesel
These rules have emerged simply because with this rules, the society as a whole that follows these rules is stronger, more competent as a team than the societies who didn''t evolve/followed those rules.

A possible solution lies within this statement, I believe. I haven''t thought of it before - but how about a MMORPG that is SO dangerous that you HAVE to work together to have a chance at surviving.
If venturing into the wilds as even the most seasoned veteran would be near-suicidal, wouldn''t that automatically lead to much greater cooperation? It would also eliminate the "lone wolf" style of play, of course, which may be unwanted.

Another of the greater problems is the massive disparity between the abilities of high-level characters and low-level characters. In the REAL world, if you kill a man, all his brother needs is a shotgun to blow your head off, even IF you are Rambo. In most MMORPGs, a low level character couldn''t even kill a high level character if he stood still for thirty minutes.

Increase the danger level -> automatically that increases the penalty for being an antisocial prick. Annoy enough people badly enough, and one of them will aim for your head with a crossbow and nail you to a tree. If that will kill you nearly every time, you''d think twice about PKing.

Madkeith, That''s it!

Indeed, make it like the real world and people will think twice before doing something. Indeed our social behaviour comes forth simply from the fact that we are weak in the real world. 1 shot, knife and it''s finished. I think it is indeed that simple to create constructive social behaviour.

The irony is that they solved this problem almost by taking the opposite decision. Make all people invurnerable. Then you get people running behing you annoying you without you being able to do something.

The Sims Online did a terrible job I think on this level. There it works like that: When your killed you become a ghost. When you return to your home you become back alife. If someone stays on bothering you you can ''ignore'' him which means you won''t see him anymore (but he''ll be there seen by the others!?) This sucks bigtime! (Although no bad word for Will Wright, he is an eye-opener with his open ended gameplay)

Madkeith, check out ''my new gamedesign, What do you think?'' I posted it under my previous name ''Mandarijn''. I just recently posted it. I need opinions from people with healthy reasoning!

WEll, I would love to be original, but in fact, I have to gree with MadKeith.

My experience, though, doenst come from MMORPG, but from FPS.
It''s pretty simple really. Just look at people playing together.
If they are able to respawn without much penalty, people dont really care about anything. They just go for it, again, and again, and again. And if they get bored, they start shooting their teammates, who cares ! See Firearms or TFC for HalfLife.

On the other hand, the more realistic the game, the more people start thinking before they do stupid thing.
HAving to wait until the end of a round, with a black screen, is quite an annoying experience, so when it happens once, you start thinking that maybe if you get organised, you have a better chance at survival. Maybe if you start playing WITH your teammates, you stand less chance of dying, or more funny, your teammates could get shot for you
This is when you see interesting tactics emerging, see Counterstrike. The one thing that annoys me with CS.

One thing I loved was when I first played Operation Flashpoint. This game is SO realistic it was scary. It just totally redefined my habits of play. In this game, when you get shot, you die. If you get seen by your enemies, you die. If you dont stick with your people and start playing lonewolf, you die. You get the idea. I remember my first multiplayer game. I was just scared shitless. So I actually listened to my superior for the tactic we would employ, so that we would stick together and stand a chance : the result was a tremendous experience.

My point is, put players in an aggressive environment, where the conditions force them to cooperate, and more than often, they will. It''s biological. The will to survive is just too powerful.
On the other hand, make death not being so important, and people tend to do illogical things, like running in front of your line of fire while you are shooting, or throw a grenade while YOU are assaulting, this kind of stuff.

Another interesting thing is the fact that lack of danger basically kills the heroism.
When I play, say, Firearms, no one cares that I am rushing on my own to play humanbomb against the machineguns of the enemy, my teammates know I am just gonna respawn.
On the other hand, when I played Operation Flashpoint and my whole patrol got decimated around me, and I then had to play hide and seek in the forest with enemy patrols for more than half an hour, desperately trying to reach a rescue zone, I felt like I was really living something that I would be talking about for the rest of my life : a real adventure, if you will.

Well, I guess I just agree with you guys

Oh, and look up Rousseau and the Social Contract for a more formal/philosophical approach. It just confirms your idea, but it''s quite interesting nonetheless.


Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !

Yea, I get to be the first one to disagree.

quote: Original post by ahw
My experience, though, doenst come from MMORPG, but from FPS.
It's pretty simple really.

Ahem, MMORPG and FPS are complete un-related to one another with the exception of Shadowbane.

quote: This is simple, you will get punished when you do so. We have created social rules that say: don't kill, respect your parents.

We're talking about a game here, not the real social world. If a player gets punished he will simply quit paying the monthly fee and stop playing the game. You can't force a person to get punished if they aren't willing to accept the punishment of the game.

quote: So what I tried in my gamedesign is create an environment where societies can emerge, creting social rules and political strucures.

Social structure is 2nd nature in human behavior. It is like an automated process that does not require anything even an artifical environment.

quote: These societies will probably compete with eachother.

They WILL.

quote: As such, the moral rules and organizational structures will win the world and minor sotieties with weaker social rules will die.

And everytime a weaker, minor society dies, a small number of your game subscribers goes with it and quit the game.

quote: Would this work? Is this the solution?

Never a solution, only choose the best possible outlook. (I wish I can remember the exact Yoda quote...)

Raph Koster's site http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/

Btw, this isn't "Rewarding constructive/social behaviour in massively multiplayer games", it's actually punish destructive/social behaviour. Sorry if I'm a little harsh.


[edited by - mooglez on May 29, 2002 6:26:51 PM]

http://www.gamasutra.com/education/theses/20020410/smith_01.htm
Master's Thesis: The Architechtures of Trust: Supporting Cooperation in the Computer-Supported Community by Jonas Heide Smith, University of Copenhagen

I don't know if it's any good to you.

[edited by - bartkusa on May 29, 2002 7:36:21 PM]

Mooglez, thanks for the reply. I''m happy you disagree.

The mayor point you make is that you are convinced that when people get punished in-game they will simply leave your game, right away.

Okay, suppose you get born in this world. You have a mom and dad and 2 brothers jumping around. Now, you discover that you can pick up a baseball bad and you discover that you can hit with it. The first thing you do ofcourse is hit your brother. You hit him on the head and he falls unconsiousness. Dad has seen this, comes to you and hits you to, you fall to the ground and have for a few seconds a blurry screen that slowly takes up your normal view again. Now you can get up again.

This was a punishment from your father. Would you leave the game now? No, your probably not as this was a quite exciting experience.

Now, if you enter the game and you have a faher that always beats you with the baseball bat. You always fall down and is incredibly anoying and you can''t do anything about it as he is stronger and nowone helps you out. Would you quite the game? Probably you would if you don''t see any possibility to get away from that terror your father is doing to you.

But would you quite the game completely? You could always try to get born somewhere else. The game allows you so. I think you probably would try it somewhere else. Chances are minor that you hit on such an annoying player behaviour again and again and again because, and this is the job of the gamedesigner and the esence of creating constructive/social behaviour, because players in the worldrules are made as such that people are rewarded when cooperating together.

People will be stronger when working together, physicaly as they team up, but they will also gather more food, as they work together and not steal or destroy eachothers crops. They have more profit when they let the crops grow for some time without touching it. There will be less deaths, more children and the group, community as a hole will grow much faster and be much stronger than an unorganized group with no social rules that are respected.

So, you will get to know what societys are well structured, are good organized (aal done by the players themselves), you will be able to read about the different societies, talk about it with other players and that way choose a community to get born where you know annoying behaviour, like that father with his baseball bat are not tolerated. 5this means that if a father does that and the group sees it they will start to talk about it and maybe get the leader in command to handle him, maybe just punish or maybe the group decides to attack him and kill him.

So, as a player you will get a chance to escape annoying behaviour. People who get punished won''t escape the game, they will in the contrary be attracted by this world because it allows them to experiment with people, thanks to these social rules everything gets so exciting because now breaking the rules has a meaning.

I should have explined the rewarding rules that I implemented into the gamerules beter. I indeed layed the accent on the punishment factor of the group to an individual when he does something wrong. But it is very tight knit.

If people would not benefit to work together as a group and organize them well as a society than constructive social behaviour would not be present on a community level as it is now the fact in all the mmorpg''s.

If you have more profit when going alone on a quest than going with two as then you''ll have to share the profit. Than you''ll probably go alone.

People are not motivated to organize themselves into a community and set social rules because those games simply don''t work like that. People walk through eachother going for quests. Being with a group can be pleasant but it is not necessary to survive. People are not motivated to create political strucures because what would they serve for?




I hope this clarifies it a bit,

First, I heartily recommend Raph Koster''s site as posted above, especially the Laws of Online Gaming section. It contains much wisdom gleaned from numerous people who''ve been writing multi-player online games long before ''MMORPG'' was a gleam in some acronym-lover''s eye.

I believe punishments are going to be a necessary part of these games, but they need to be only applied to the real ''offenders'' rather than being your standard mechanism to enforce cooperation. Instead, you need some incentives.

- Remove all clans/guilds/other player organisations. These encourage competition, secrecy, envy, and so on. Just make sure you have appropriate support structures to replace them.

- Increase the number of beneficial abilities that work on another character or characters, perhaps exclusively. For example, a ''group heal'' spell is great if it costs the same amount no matter how big your group is. The bigger the group, the more useful the spell.

- Remove disincentives for cooperation. For example, make the treasure / experience / glory / whatever proportional to the size of the group that collected it, rather than sharing it out among them. Similarly, ensure that certain members of any partnership or group are not penalised by your system. For example, in many games a cleric who stands and heals the warriors will get less exp than the warriors will.

- Create ''superordinate goals''. In psychology, this is a term used for setting tasks that 2 opposing groups can relate to, with the intention of showing those groups that they have something in common, thus making them more friendly to each other. In a game this might range from something as simple as quests that require 2 or more people to complete them, to grand situations requiring hundreds of players to work together to defeat some great threat. Basically, give them a common cause.

[ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost | Asking Questions | Organising code files ]

Hi Kylotan, I think your last advize is the best one: 'create subordinate goals' but I still have the feeling that my main point that I'm trying to make has not yet been understood yet.

What I'm saying here is that, it is not a hardcoded rule by the gamedesigner that should punish asocial behaviour but it are the players themselves that should punish asocial behaviour. This is a very important difference.

It sounds like you are all in for hardcoded punishent from the gamesystems for asocial behaviour, am I correct here?


There's another point I made that I feel is not been understood yet eather: That those organizational structures emerge among the players too and are not hardcoded by the gamedesigner.

The challenge is to create an environment with the proper worldrules so that players start to organize themselves and create those political structures. Or where simply leaders can be leaders, can be supported by other people.

What you need for this is not a lot, you need an environment where players have the possibility to do something to eachother (a physical simulation will do)so that people can be hurt, you need some resource management(a reason to compete and organize), and that's pretty it.

So because of this environment players will themselves organize and will themselves enforce constructive social behaviour.

This is all very logical but I have not yet seen a multiplayer game that works like this.


Kylotan, those last 3 rules are good advise, especially the last one. So there should be a way in your world for groups, communities to get to now something about other communities, get identities, like the nations here on earth, and give them the possibility to fight/compete with eachother. Because of this you will get those communities indeed.


Your first rule however I do not really understand:

"Remove all clans/guilds/other player organisations. These encourage competition, secrecy, envy, and so on. Just make sure you have appropriate support structures to replace them."


It is just thanks to the existence of competition that cooperation exists. But I do understand I think what you mean, you just gave the wrong reasons.

It is not because of the existence of clans and guilds that you get asocial behaviour, it is because of the absence of a bigger organizational structure that unites those guilds and clans into a bigger community. If you would give them a motivation to organize themselves into bigger communities than those 10member clans tahn you'll get thoses social rules that are now shared by those 10, you will get them shared by for example, take a simulation off a tribal community society: 100 members.






[edited by - MarcDM on February 16, 2004 10:02:38 AM]

Bartcusa, thanks for the link! That thesis was excelent and above all inspiring!

To all ya constructive/social system designers, thanks to this thesis here they are, the 3 points you have to make shure are present in your design in order to create a framework where constructive social behaviour will probably emerge:


-Repeated interaction: Only when the shadow of the future influences an encounter does the logic of the Priseners Dilemma (which says that it is always wiser to chose for the most safe option and betray your partner so that you can go free or have mior punishment) change in favour of cooperation. Consequently,the players must be aware (or think) that the probability of
future interaction is sufficiently large and important so that if
someone is convincingly and publicly labelled as a defector his future interactions will suffer.

-Interaction history: Information on previous interaction must be available. (Gosip serves this purpose well)

-Persistent, distinct identities: In order for the above to be possible players must be able to recognize one another. For humans and animals, this typically means devoting a section of the brain to facial recognition.


[edited by - Marc De Mesel on May 30, 2002 4:52:34 PM]