[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 26 Jun 1998 16:30:48 -0500 (CDT) 
Cat <cat at bga.com> wrote:

> Raph Koster wrote:

> I feel like the question of how these issues play out in an
> environment with no combat coded into the system is glossed over or
> ignored on this list.  

This is mostly due to the fact that combat and aggression is not
dependant on having to have weapons support, or even the direct
ability to do each other damage.  If the game world (but not other
players) is capable of rendering damage to a player character, then
combat has merely been removed to manipulating the game world to do
your damage for you.  Stories and ingenuity in this area abound.

You don't need weapons to have combat.  "Hey little newbie!  Come look
at the big red dragon!  Doesn't he have big teeth?  <run away
quickly>".  Okay, you don't have a direct combat concept in your game
world?  Consider the LambdaMOO rape case -- definitely a combative
form, and in a world which has no real concept for either combat or
combative damage.

Lets take a simpler example from RL.  There is currently something of
a feud brewing with a nextdoor neighbor.  It is a petty small thing,
but also a thing that is having fairly sizeable effects in basic life.
As a form of combat, almost ritualised, our neighbor has taken to
doing laundry every night at 23:00hrs.  The problem is that the
exhaust vent for her laundry blows almost directly into our bedroom
window (houses are close together) and she uses a very heavily
perfumed soap.  It is sufficient that it is difficult to breathe in
the bedroom if we leave the window open.  Prior to the feud she never
did laundry at night, and now continues to despite several requests.
It is combat, of a rather indirect sort.

Sellers recently referenced another form on UOL: people are building
forges and other constructions immediately in front of the doorways to
other's houses resulting in it being impossible to enter or exit the
house.  While the code fix is fairly obvious, it remains a combative
form.

> There was some earlier mention of the notion that in games without
> combat, verbal harrassment, banishing from certain areas in
> response, etc. serve as the functional equivalent of combat.  So I
> presume it's implied that the situation and the way it plays out are
> "pretty much the same" in that context.

No.  If you can't cause the combative assault directly with your
character the game merely removes to figuring out how to get the game
world to do it for you.

> I think that the difficulties of accomplishing the kinds of goals
> mentioned are less in the non-combat games.  A few of the problems
> are bigger, a lot of the problems are smaller, so overall it's a
> more suitable environment.  I agree that people are not totally
> ready for self-governance anywhere, including in the real world.
> But to me that says maybe three things, none of them bad.  1) So a
> game like that would be about LEARNING to do that better, rather
> than coming in and doing something everybody knows how to do great
> from day one.  2) Since it's needed in the real world, there is even
> more value in creating an online space that can help people learn
> it.  3) If a small minority of people have good understanding,
> skills and/or motivation regarding the effective governance of the
> community, it just means that you'll end up with more hierarchal
> sorts of governments, rather than flatter models - just like the
> vast majority of forms of government tried in the real world.

<nod>

> I spent last night witnessing & participating in the defense of
> Furcadia's largest-yet player founded community, Sanctuary, against
> a fellow who set out to deliberately disrupt it.  

Details please!

> I do think it's interesting to note that the founder & leader of
> Sanctuary is a woman who runs a day care center.  There's a lot of
> carryover of those skills and experience to the work she chooses to
> do on Furcadia - particularly with our especially young
> demographics.  It also suggests another point in favor of the theory
> that non-violent muds have a better chance at effective self
> governance...  This woman would never play a combat oriented game
> like most of the stuff out there.  Not only would it not be
> appealing, in her case she probably couldn't even handle it.  Even a
> little posed violence on Furcadia can be very upsetting to her.
> It's fairly obvious that you're going to attract different types of
> people to highly violent games than you do to mildly violent ones,
> and different sorts of people again to non-violent ones.  I'll offer
> the opinion here that the more combat-oriented games are inherently
> going to attract higher concentrations of the types of people that
> are the LEAST conducive to developing effective self-government.
> Whereas a less combat-oriented game has a better chance to attract a
> player base that is more representative of the average human being,
> rather than the most ungovernable extremes.  Or, depending on the
> style and focus of the game, in some cases you could get a
> playership that is MORE conducive to good self-government than a
> random samplying of average human beings would be.

Agreed.  A more interesting question is whether the lessons and rules
learned from the more constrained games can be carried over to the
more free-form.

To analogise crudely, predators make uneasy bed fellows, and herd
species are very comfortable with each other by their nature.  The
question is whether the comforting aspect of herd life extrapolate
well to predators (cf wolf packs, dolphin pods, ant and wasp
colonies).  The characterisation of one side as predators and the
other as sheep analogues is simplistic, but I suspect valid.

> I'm afraid there's no combat coded into this distributed mud though.
> Unless you count the fact that you can slap your pet when it's bad
> to teach it to behave better.  Slap it too much though and it runs
> away from home.  :X)

Sure there is combat: upsetting email.  Combat is between people, not
bytes.  Inter-player combat merely has the characters proxying for the
humans.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...