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

[Dr. Cat]

> Marian Griffith wrote....
> 
> Actually, what I wondered was why things are so vastly different between
> reality and games.  And what it is in reality that prevents the vast ma-
> jority of people to form rampaging warbands that loot and kill everybody
> and everything.

Ok, let's start out with the biggest one.  In most games, when you die, 
you can either get ressurected or else make a brand new character, and go 
right on trying to enjoy the game in one fashion or another.

In real life, when you die, as far as we know your ability to play this 
"Earth" game is ended, done, kaput, over.  (While there's speculation 
that you get to go play some variant of a game called "Afterlife" 
instead, there's no consensus on this topic, which often provokes intense 
debate.)

This is a huge difference.  Strictly from a risk/reward standpoint, the 
members of rampaging warbands online risk losing whatever you lose when 
you get killed and ressurect or start over with a new character.  Whereas 
risking getting killed in real life is considered by many to mean you are 
risking losing EVERYTHING.

People who think "we're just simulating reality, well a reality where 
magic works and there are dragons, but other than that..." will tend to 
believe you can and should get all your solutions by mirroring real world 
solutions to social issues.  I think they will also end up missing out in 
situations where there's a totally unrealistic, weird, ludicrous, but 
entirely codeable and workable solution that works better.

To really implement the "real world" solution accurately, a first step 
would be to make it so that any given player can only create one 
character, there's no magical ressurection, and if they die they are 
banned from ever playing the game.  I think most mud developers would 
prefer not to do that.  But it might make a very interesting experiment 
for some student to do some day, maybe even write a paper on.

To go further though, you might observer that game-death doesn't cause 
the player to lose anything outside the game, thus they don't have as 
strong a motivation to avoid it as, say, dying in a knife fight in RL.
Their character is gone and they can't play that game any more, but they 
can go play some other game much like it, instead.  Not to mention they 
can still eat, drink, watch movies, read books, etc. etc.  They've really 
only lost a tiny percentage of what they can do in life, so it's still 
much more reasonable-seeming a choice for them to go and start a raiding 
party, or be an assassin, or whatever.

So to get a higher degree or accuracy in your simulation, you could 
conceivably announce to your players that anyone dying in the game will 
be tracked down and shot dead in real life.  This would likely instill a 
very HIGH level of motivation amongst the player base to weigh the 
potential consequences of their actions seriously.  Especially after they 
heard of the first few players being stalked and murdered after their 
character got killed in the game.  However, I think that NO mud 
developers will choose this approach.

This is just a reminder that while there are some similarities in what 
happens in simulations and real life, there will ALWAYS be huge 
differences in the nature of the player's emotional involvement in the 
situations therein and the structure of their motivations and their 
actions there.  Simply the fact of being a simulation is enough to 
guarantee this, even if the simulation is amazingly detailed and 
accurate.  When you're dealing with current levels of technology, where 
simulations are very rough, lacking in detail, and differ from reality in 
enormous numbers of ways, that just adds one MORE reason that there are 
big differences in behaviors and motivations of players.  But there will 
always be some difference.

Consider the Star Trek Holodeck, and the fact that some people will do 
things there that they'd never do in real life.  Attacking and killing 
innocent people, or engaging in a romantic encounter with a near-perfect 
replica of someone they're too shy to approach in real life.  The virtual 
paramour comes with no risk of rejection, no risk of embarassing you by 
anything they might say to your real-life friends, no risk of them being 
dissapointed in anything about you.  And you can shut them down any time 
you need or want to, and turn them back on (so to speak) later at your 
convenience.

Movies started out by putting stage plays on in front of a movie camera 
and recording them.  TV started out by taking popular radio shows, and 
pointing TV cameras at the people so you could see them.  But eventually 
people figured out what the new medium itself was, what its strength 
were, what would "play well" there.

MUDs are still in that early stage, trying to mimic real fights, real 
wars, real environments.  But what if we figured out what the medium is 
in and of itself, where it's different than reality and offers its own 
unique set of possibilities as well as limitations?  What if we figured 
out what a "virtual war" is really like, a virtual environment, and how 
to make it the best virtual thing it could be, rather than the best 
imitation of something it isn't and can't be?  If we learned how to "play 
to the strengths of the medium"?

I'll say it again.  The key secret is that it's all made out of the human 
attention.  Attention is the currency of the future.

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