[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method

[Mike Sellers]

At 10:12 AM 7/30/98 -0700, Orion Henry wrote:
>	As always I say  set thing up in such a way to mimic the real
>world... In a multiplayer, build-and-conquer environment things are fun
>as long as there is competition... the fun stops as soon as there is a=20
>mega powerful player or group of players that control everything...=20

That assumes a zero-sum game: I win you lose.  This doesn't happen in the
real world because people have different goals.  A long, long time ago I
designed a board game (you remember board games :-) ) that allowed some,
none, or all of the players to win, because the players could choose
different game-goals, and even switch goals during the game.  You could
pursue military, political, religious, or mercantile goals, each of which
helped and hindered others to some degree, but were largely independent of
them.  I wanted to put in goal combinations, but never got around to it. =20

>If it were set up such that a small, weak group of players could=20
>easily hide in the vast game-space and that sabotage and gorilla
>tactics were something that a superpower could never totally guard=20
>against, then the competition could continue once a team had=20
>become obsurdly powerful ( ala Empire vs. Rebellion in Starwars )

This is sort of like an Imperium-like approach (the old GDW game).  In
effect, every local optimum (set of victory conditions, whether explicitly
defined or de facto) has its weakness: if you control the Empire as in Star
Wars, a religious (say) resistance will build up to fight you.  No position
is ever secure or absolute; no local optima is ever a global optimum.  That
in itself seems to me to be an important design principle, except in
situations where you _want_ a finale of complete domination (note too that
such situations appeal far more to core gamers than to the population
overall). =20


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