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

[Dr. Cat]

I see we're still getting spin-offs and descendants of the discussion 
spawned by the remarks (I'm paraphrasing from memory, please forgive any 
inaccuracies):

"What about in a game where it wasn't possible to physically strike 
another person?"
"But what if there's a situation where it's necessary to strike someone?"
"I don't think that it is ever necessary to strike another person."

...I wish people would just recognize that it's ludicrous to declare 
either side to be 100% universal.  I tend to doubt that MOO used by 
astronomers has ever seen a situation arise where someone needed to 
strike someone else.  Suggesting that it will be in some way needed by the 
players even in a game with no combat in it and a non-combat-related 
setting is just way out there.  Of course you can say that it's never 
"needed" in any game - if you're making a game about being a Roman 
gladiator, you probably need it in order to accomplish the specific goals 
of that game.  It just isn't needed in EVERY game, as was implied.

But ludicrous as that might sound, there still seem to be people 
defending, if not the precise earlier sentiment, various variants and 
echoes of that original thought.  I just don't get it.  I'm a kangaroo 
amongst ostriches again.

JC Lawrence wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 3 Jul 1998 22:33:25 +0100 (BST) 
> Marian Griffith<gryphon at iaehv.nl> wrote:
> 
> > If I understand you correctly then I have to disagree still.  Combat
> > can not be a justification to allow combat in a game. There may be
> > other and valid reasons to include combat, but conflict solving can
> > not be one for the same reason it is not allowed outside games
> > either.
> 
> Actually it can in a much more simple manner: conflict not as a
> distinct feature, but as a simple mechanical extension of the basic
> structures of the game 
> 
>   The game supports gravity and weight effects.  What happens when you
> drop a boulder on Bubba?  The game supports basic lever-class
> mechanisms.  What happens when you put Bubba's head in a press and
> turn the screw?  The game supports eating?  What happens when you feed 
> Bubba poison?

Dropping a boulder on Bubba?  The game says "You can't push that boulder 
over the cliff right now, it would hurt Bubba."  The boulder falls, and 
the normal path physics would dictate is altered to make it fall next to 
him.  The boulder falls until it just barely comes in contact with 
Bubba's hair, then freezes in place until he gets around to walking out 
from underneath it, at which time it falls to the ground.  The boulder 
turns into foam rubber instantly upon contact with Bubba's head, bounces 
off with a loud cartoony "sproing", and turns into a rock again when it 
hits the ground (or alternately, stays foam rubber forever after.)  The 
boulder shatters into a million tiny pebbles when it hits Bubba, and he 
reaches up and scratches his head wondering where they all came from.

A press...  The screw stops turning any further just before the press 
gets tight enough to cause Bubba any pain or discomfort, no matter how 
much pressure is applied.  The press breaks.  Bubba's head squishes apart 
like a blob of Jello, and then oozes back together into its original 
form, only not in the press any more.  The would-be-Bubba-assailant 
discovers that in this world, every person has Superman-like 
invulnerability, and the press just can't do anything to people.

Poison could be always automatically be vomited back up, turned into 
chocolate inside the stomach of anyone who eats it, always spill onto the 
floor by "accident" just as someone is about to eat it, or it might be a 
world where the laws of physics dictate that poisonous substances always 
turn into big mounds of mint-flavored dental floss whenever they come 
into contact with a fork, knife, spoon, cup, drinking straw, or anyone's 
tongue or teeth.  Of course you could always have food in a game without 
including any poisonous substances, too, I don't think the existence of 
food requires poison to be present in the game.

The presence of boulders, gravity, levers, presses, eating, and of course 
Bubbas in no way "requires" the presence of "ability to harm Bubba".  
That's a totally optional thing, just like eating and gravity and all 
those other things are.

Even if you add a qualifier like "...in muds that strive to achieve a 
level of realism and consistency with real world phenomena equal to or 
greater than a given threshhold" you would only have an argument that it 
is necessary to have the capability to harm Bubba programmed into the 
game in order to reach that threshhold.  (Presuming the threshhold in 
question is high enough to actually require that.)  This in no way proves 
the original extremist statement, that situations must inevitably arise 
where players will need to USE that capability.  In muds where a given 
capability exists, like the ability to hurt Bubba or the ability to 
magically turn ducks into walruses, it's entirely possible for some of 
those capabilities to never be something that a player NEEDS to use.

Suggesting that such an action (striking someone) is needed even in muds 
where that action isn't even possible to perform goes even further.  I 
wish everyone could just agree that this statement is too extreme to be 
logically supportable and move on.

> Combat is both allowed and used IRL for conflict resolution, its just
> socially frowned upon and discouraged in our narrow western and
> idealised view of society.

"Allowed" doesn't prove necessity.  "Used" doesn't prove necessity.  And 
even if they did, proving necessity in RL does not prove necessity in muds.
It is necessary to eat in RL to avoid dying.  It is not necessary in all 
muds, though it is necessary in some.  The muds where it isn't required 
don't necessarily "fail to be muds" or "fail to be fun" because they 
differ from real life in this way.

The gruesome examples that followed in this posting don't prove anything 
about what is or isn't necessary to have in muds.  They just show that 
real life can by brutal sometimes.

> These things don't happen every day.  That doesn't stop them from
> happening however.  That given, philosophically my approach to
> remedying such "problems" is not to either avoid them or attempt to
> prevent them, but to exacerbate them.  Make the problem so big, and so
> glaringly huge, and so invasive and ever present, that the social
> structures in the game world react accordingly to accomodate.
> 
> Think of it like innoculations.  You handle rampant violence in your
> game by making it worse, not better.

The majority of anti-social actions on muds are performed in order to try 
to get a desired type and/or amount of attention from other people.  The 
fact that you could draw parallels to someone murdering someone else in 
RL may not be as relevant as the fact that you could draw parallels to a 
little boy in a schoolyard grossing out girls with bugs and spiders.

Exacerbating the problem will likely focus MORE attention on the 
perpetrator, giving him and those like him more incentive to commit the 
act in question.  Only if the form of punishment given by the society is 
something the players consider FUN is this likely to be a practical 
approach.  If it's a violent swords and sorcery world, or the wild west, 
you may have a playerbase that doesn't mind having to perform combat to 
punish the wrongdoers, because combat is what they came to the game for 
in the first place.  If you have a mud like Worlds Chat or Alphaworld, 
where you have a lot of people who didn't come from the whole D&D and 
Dikumud kind of background and aren't interested in it, they might find 
the task of beating up criminals to maintain order to be an annoying 
chore that interrupts their fun, or even to be something highly 
distasteful if they personally don't like violence.

Even in the real world, exacerbating problems to force the development of 
"antibodies" isn't the universal solution to all types of problems.  For 
some fires, we do have to set backfires because it's the most practical 
solution.  For other fires, we just put a bunch of water or foam on them 
and we manage to smother them out quite nicely.  For crime and violence 
in particular, we don't use a solution in RL of making the problem affect 
ordinary citizens MORE so they'll all rise up and work to stop it.  These 
days both our government and the most of the business establishments we 
patronize try to make the amount of violence and crime that impacts us as 
minimal as possible.

When you recognize that most anti-social types online are "attention 
energy vampires", an approach of minimizing impact rather than maximizing 
impact makes a lot of sense for virtual environments too.

There is a novel by Allan Dean Foster that suggests another alternative, 
of course.  It was called Quozl, and involved a species of aliens that 
had amazingly violent art, literature, videogames, etc.  And an 
incredibly strong taboo against anything that even came close to violence 
against another real person.  The idea was that they got the urges out of 
their system in fantasies, and thus could work off any urge to actually 
really do anything.

So we could say to the newbie mudder on their first day "Welcome to 
Cyberspace.  Here's your free copy of Quake and your free copy of 
Furcadia.  Remember, if you ever get frustrated by anything that happens 
in Furcadia, just hop over into Quake for a few minutes and blast some 
people's heads off with a rocket launcher.  You'll feel much better."

Hey, it works for me!

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   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
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