[MUD-Dev] RE: UBE/high: Re: W IRED: Kilers have more fun

[Koster]

There's still that extra level of attribution. :(

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Koster, Raph [mailto:rkoster at origin.ea.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 14, 1998 5:36 PM
> To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu'
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] FW: UBE/high: Re: W IRED: Kilers have more fun
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: cat at bga.com [mailto:cat at bga.com] 
> > Sent: Friday, August 14, 1998 3:59 PM
> > To: rkoster at origin.ea.com
> > Subject: Re: UBE/high: [MUD-Dev] Re: W IRED: Kilers have more fun
> > 

> > Raph Koster wrote:
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Marian Griffith [mailto:gryphon at iaehv.nl]
> > > They'll only realize it if the cost of paying for the cop 
> > is covered by
> > > the money saved by not having those people quit. Which is 
> > an equation
> > > that is as yet very very fuzzy. You might save fifty 
> > people, but the cop
> > > cost you 100 people's subscriptions worth.
> > 
> > The tacit assumption here is that the cops are paid.  This is not a
> > requirement, but an option.  Using carefully selected player 
> > volunteers
> > has potential drawbacks, mainly that you can't necessarily count on
> > the same level of quality and reliability of performance.  
> > But the cost
> > equation is a lot more favorable.  (They're not 100% free, 
> because of
> > whatever cost their is in paid staff's time spent managing them.)

Right. But that too is still very very fuzzy. Consider all the problems
AOL had with the classic "Quis custodiet..." dilemma--they ended up
having SO many PR crises caused by their employees being overzealous in
policing... managing volunteers who are miles away and whose identity
you cannot even reliably verify can be a frightening thing to take on
from many angles. Difficult to administrate, very difficult to police,
and high risk of liability for the comapny running the service...

> > I was told by some kid from Furcadia that he was an Ultima 
> Online GM,
> > that he wasn't in Austin and wasn't paid any money, that 
> players were
> > just chosen from the game to do that.  I didn't have any 
> way to verify
> > whether he was telling the truth or not, though.  He also 
> > bragged to me
> > about his non-GM character who he claimed was a highly powerful
> > playerkiller, which seemed a little ironic to me.  :X)

Yah, well. :( He probably meant he was a Counselor or a Seer. Counselors
are "helpmates" but not GMs. They have almost no powers, and basically
all they can do is give advice. Seers are people who have been given
special characters to roleplay to add spice to the game.

> > Well it's a clear case of "oppose the ideas, and not the 
> > person", and I 
> > hope
> > you don't take it personally. 

It just seems like the thread gets... well, not personal, but
acrimonious. And since I've always gotten along just fine with you in
person, I wanted to clear the air.

> > I do admire some of the design goals that you
> > are pursuing and I'm not, and think that someone ought to 
> > be pursuing them. I just think that some of the elements of your
approach 
> > aren't going to work out the way you hope, because of factors you're
not 
> > viewing from the same perspective I am.

I never expect all the elements of my approach to work out. :) Goodness
knows how many haven't worked out in the past! There's still so much to
try out and so much to learn from in this genre, it's a little scary.

> >  Anyway you're still near the top of my list of people I'd like
> > to go out to lunch with since I got back to town, if I weren't so 
> > distracted trying to find some way to earn two nickels to rub
together 
> > these days.  :X)

I am sure we can manage that. :) Anyone else from the list who's gonna
be in Austin? ;)

> > If you're trying to explore a larger, more complex and 
> > interesting problem
> > space and/or solution space, I think there's a point that's 
> > very easy to 
> > miss
> > here.  Which is that there are things you can add to a system that 
> > increase
> > its diversity, and things that can DECREASE the diversity if 
> > you add them.

An excellent point. Certain activities will tend to drown out others.
Stamp-collecting in a mud will probably never be able to match combat.
:) Then again, stamp-collecting probably never was all that viable. But
some of the features/activities are.

I guess the question now is this: certain feature sets have now been
shown to have great appeal in virtual environments--combat, crafting,
building and homesteading, questing, managing shops, etc. Yet some of
them come into great conflict with others. Can we manage to offer an
environment that allows all of them, or are we forced to design
environments that leave out some of the items on that list because the
conflicts are irreconcilable? (Maybe we could call this "The Dr Cat
Stamp Collector Dilemma"... we ALL need laws and theorems of our own on
this list!)

[snip the granny example]

You state in your example that the real concerns will be hacking and
harassment. These I see as things that are "virtual violence." Here's my
thinking on it--if we can find ways for users of a space to be able to
add to tracking mechanisms for other people, ways of invoking the
automatic VirtualWalMart policing code that aren't unfair and also don't
require human Walmart employees monitoring everything all the time, then
we are working towards solving the problems of hacking and harassment
just as much as said system would work towards helping solve
playerkilling. That's not that different a system from the reputation
system in UO right now.

Someday we're going to see that punk kid in that VirtualWalMart packing
some cute little hacking tool that (who knows?) is iconized as a sword
or something on the display. And ya know, one of the virus-detecters on
my screen is already iconized as a shield. The activity is
violence--let's not quibble over the iconization. That instance would be
aggression far worse than a playerkill in a game. It might have real
consequences in terms of financial loss (credit card # extraction? who
knows?).

> > I think I remember reading a design essay about Ultima Online,
saying that
> > it had roughly recreated the course of social and cultural evolution
that 
> > occurred in the real world from 500 AD to 1000 AD, over a six month 
> > period. 

A fan said that to me, and it caught my imagination. I don't really
agree with it, but it makes for a cute metaphor... :)

> >  That's a neat thought, and it's certainly a big time savings - a 
> > thousand to one ratio! Still, I couldn't help but think, on reading
it...  
> > Why start at 500 AD? Don't we know enough from having done all that
before
> > to be able to start a virtual society at the point mankind had
reached in
> > 1500, 1800, or 1900?  Maybe even 1990?  Well, 1990 would be pretty
hard - 
> > we don't understand how 1990 works clearly enough in the real world,
and a 
> > virtual world is likely to start further back because it's required
to do 
> > some things differently because of the different nature of the
place.  
> > I'd still hope we could do better than 500 AD
> > for a starting point.  (Civilization and Age of Empires style games 
> > notwithstanding.)

Well, there's a question. How much of the audience for what is, in the
end, a retail, mass market computer game, wants to do anything quite so
civilized? I know for a fact that many of the players are taken aback at
having to confront problems like oh, zoning, militia morale, and
warehousing costs for retail goods in a computer game. UO is after all a
medieval fantasy game and people WANT to kill dragons, and each other,
in it. If it weren't for that market niche, I would quite probably be
doing something very different with it. Best I can do is push at the
boundaries of the expectations for what it is.

> > The fact that you can't reduce "possibility of being screwed 
> > over" to zero doesn't make this an insoluble problem.  Indeed, if
you 
> > take measures that reduce either the frequency OR the severity of
incidents 
> > of people being screwed over, you can reduce the cost of policing
enormously.
> > This can be done not only by making it harder to screw people over,
> > but also by making it less appealing to the tastes of those who love
> > to screw people over, and/or by providing other activities 
> > that tend to appeal to that type of person without screwing anyone
over 
> > (or at least, not anyone who didn't choose to take such a risk in
order to 
> > get a chance to nail someone themselves.)

Back to the Stamp Collector Question again, though...

> > As for the stakes, they will continue to grow.  I'm sure 
> > we'll someday
> > have over a billion people online, and at that point the 
> > value of having
> > things like a safe, clean, friendly Disney Online 
> > environment will be
> > so high that companies like them will throw pretty hefty amount of
> > cash at figuring out ways to keep it safe.

No question. I am talking about feasible now... there's no doubt in my
mind that someday the controlled environments, the Furcadias, will be
the MAJORITY of the virtual spaces.

> > I hope they'll throw some of it at me.  :X)

So do I, you deserve it. Share, please. ;) (Ah, for the days when EA
payed royalties...)

-Raph