[MUD-Dev] Re: Marian's Tailor vs. Psychopaths

[ApplePiMan at aol.com]

At 9/24/98 12:42 PM Raph Koster (rkoster at origin.ea.com) altered the 
fabric of reality by uttering:

>This leads to an interesting conclusion for mud design--penalties won't
>solve your playerkiller problem. Helping them gain empathy will.
>
>---end quote
>
>Anyone got a handy-dandy set of tactics for this? :)
>
>Classic ones are general community building ones, but these don't
>necessarily target your troublemaking population. I have an essay on
>community building tools at http://mud.sig.net/raph/gaming/essay6.html
>but none of them seem REALLY aimed at empathy-building.

Maybe I'm just stating the obvious here, but the surest way to promote 
empathy is to make empathetic actions an IC goal, and reward it 
accordingly. I would think that one possible way to do that is to 
implement Status that increases with random acts of kindness. Your Status 
then aids you in negotiations and any socio-political undertakings (in 
simple English, you become a 'big shot' in the community, which 
ultimately can affect your wealth and just about everything else). If 
being nice to someone garners rewards then, like Pavlov's dogs =), your 
players should begin catching on, especially if the rewards are coupled 
with correcsponding punishments (loss of status) for un-empathetic 
actions.

That raises tons of implementation issues, but my skills are as a 
meta-designer, not an implementor. I leave it as an exercise for the list 
to determine the best way to make it work. =)

-Rick Buck.


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Rick Buck, President and CEO  <mailto:rlb at big-i.com>
Beyond Infinity Games, Inc.
3408 S. Rusk St.   |   Amarillo, TX 79109-4830
And you thought the Universe was BIG... (sm)

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