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Apr 14, 2005

Comments

1.

Nathan > First, how much responsibility can / should a game world expect of its players?

Starting from the other end, we might how little a game can get away with. After Nozick one might ask what the conditions of the ultra-minimal ludic state are. For there to even be a game at least some of the players must enter into a common ludic state (in which they take on the myth and values of the game and trust that others will do so also) at least some of the time. Without this there is no game.

At the other end I think that the sky is the limit. If we look at sports there are one such as climbing, and to a slightly lesser extent contact sports such as boxing and football where players lives are in each other’s hands – as is demonstrated when things go wrong. Hence our capacity for taking on responsibility in a ludic context seems unbounded.

In the case of virtual worlds I’m not sure that these have an upper limit either, as we have seen in cases of violence and murder the economic and social value that people are seeing the in virtual context are just like those in the non-virtual.

So the question of how high the bar can be in terms of the necessary degree of responsibly amongst two or more people is something that I see increasing as time goes on and virtual world based social practise normalise and diffuse – a tendency toward the liminoid (I think).

Right now, high end content seems to need the long term effort of the organising force of guild leaders which is quite a high demand.

I feel the need to raise ATITD as an example here. The very point of that game is to great a social structure, each level of the game requires greater interdependence on others – it would be interesting to see the social network building principles of ATITD applied to a more popular combat based genre.

2.

Nathan > Second, what sorts of mechanisms might help? Is it, for example, too much to explicitly penalize players if they don't uphold some "contract-on-play" How?

In the general sense I think that the use of differential sanctions for ‘cheating’ is fine and I like the way that the tendency of MMO seems to be to, at least try, to be more fine grained about this. But I don’t think that the stick works any where near as well as the virtual carrot in respect of building the types of commitment that you are talking about.

The best way to do this I think is (a) to have common goals that require a range of players (b) to structure game play so that people are put into and rewarded for trust building.

Again, sorry to harp on about it, but this is exactly what ATITD does from mentoring through to marriage, law creation and the larger megalopolis type tasks. All other MMOs do it to some degree but I’m not sure that they force and reward the same kind of social binding except in terms of really requiring and partly facilitating guild structures.

3.

ren>

Right now, high end content seems to need the long term effort of the organising force of guild leaders which is quite a high demand.

I think the contrast you are drawing here is to a system of self-organizing players viz unlocking high-end content:

A. Running a large guild is a great deal of work by the few for the benefit of the many.

B. A system that is able to distribute that workload among the many for the benefit of the many would seem a better model.

So it would seem.

Would you then still need guild leaders? Or can this be handled entirely all "automation" (in some abstract sense: tools, AI, ...).


In the general sense I think that the use of differential sanctions for ‘cheating’ is fine and I like the way that the tendency of MMO seems to be to, at least try, to be more fine grained about this. But I don’t think that the stick works any where near as well as the virtual carrot in respect of building the types of commitment that you are talking about.

I don't quite see the lack of commitment as a "cheating" issue. Non-cohesive teams can still operate and have fun within a game world (at least those who find it fun and choose to continue to participate). As you mention they can unlock less content (PvE) or just plain get whacked by the better team that comes along (PvP).

The problem seems to be one of "collapsing to the lowest common denominator." Players either physically separate themselves or they may develop norms which seek to level the playing field by turning some of the trickier options into socially unacceptable ones.


4.

I'd agree with everything Ren has said so far.

A good example that comes to *my* mind is Achaea. There, the players themselves hold the keys to a lot of the doors that others need to pass through. That particular layout doesn't agree with me very well, but as for a system of putting responsibility of government into the hands of the player community it works quite well.

My dislike of the system is a matter of taste; I want a lot more autonomy, and that isn't the purpose of the layout. I enjoy working with groups and being part of organizations, but I don't like feeling that I owe something to someone or that I'm begging for handouts. I would guess that while players can be trusted with large amounts of control over the game environment, if that control becomes great enough then many people will resent it and be turned away.

A game where anyone, player or designer, puts very specific constraints on the way that it can be played is going to appeal to a smaller number of people, perhaps smaller than the designer intends. In conjunction with this, players have a tendency to encourage people to be "like them", meaning they will tend to use whatever control they have to encourage/enforce/coerce play that is like their own play.

The countless times I've had people tell me "Oh, you're that class, so you need this equipment and these skills" all carried the desire to make another player "better" in the way that they thought of players as being good. To use Achaea again as an example, the guilds require specific to very specific learning in skills, and some require specific equipment as well, all of which is fashioned from their own ideas of what it means to be "good".

Anyway, to sum the idea up, I think that letting players have control over certain parts of gameplay or a certain amount of the gameplay is a bad idea, as it turns away players who won't have fun with a more narrowly defined style of play.

5.


players have a tendency to encourage people to be "like them", meaning they will tend to use whatever control they have to encourage/enforce/coerce play that is like their own play.

This strikes me as a great point. The larger Q I wonder though, is, why do the different styles of play have to be "rivalrous"? The extreme solution is to partition the different factions ("instance" 'em). But to me that seems unsatisfactory, as in the case for virtual worlds, it undermines the sense of "worldness", and in the case of "multiplayer game" it undermines the meaning of "a common game."

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