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

[Michael.Willey at abnamro.com]

     ____________________Reply Separator____________________
     Subject:  [MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun
     Author:   mud-dev at kanga.nu ("Koster, Raph" <rkoster at origin.ea.com>)
     Date:          9/2/98 2:23 PM

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Michael.Willey at abnamro.com [mailto:Michael.Willey at abnamro.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 1998 10:04 AM
>> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
>> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun
>> J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com> wrote:
>>>  1) Players are not connected 24/7 and so don't have
>>>available the constant social feedback that defines a
>>>social context as well as "the word on the street".  Tracking
>>>and publishing this sort of data doesn't solve this problem,
>>>but does lessen aspects of it.
>>
>> That's only partially true - Joe Player is not connected
>>24/7, but, given a large enough playerbase, *players* are.
>>The social feedback from the playerbase is not as omnipresent
>>as in RL, but it does exist.  Tracking and publishing *data*
>>may increase it's effects, but creating *opinion* from data
>>should be the job of the player, not the computer.  This
>>seems to me to be the primary failing of "reputation",
>>"alignment", or other behavior tracking systems.
>
>The problem is that once you get enough players on your game
>to accomplish this, you've reached the point where anonymity
>in the crowd is possible again. In other words, "opinion" is
>only generated when the playerbase is *small* enough to
>communicate information to itself effectively.

In my view, that's acceptable - it provides a self-regulation
mechanism to prevent minor or infrequent breaches of conduct
from forever tarnishing a reputation - in the anonymity of
the crowd, it takes a spectacular offense to raise much notice.

>It's been said (dunno where, it was somewhere in reading on
>anthropology) that the ideal community formation size can
>never exceed around 250 individuals. Larger than that and
>it starts to fragment. And as soon as it fragments, having
>"opinion" serve to track bad guys stops working--there's
>always a substantial group of potential victims for him who
>have never heard of him.

This is the point at which we differ - you see a reputation
as a method of controlling the "bad guys".  I see it as a
tool to make NPCs more believable, by using that information
to influence their reactions.  The two uses aren't mutually
exclusive, but improvements to one use of the tool can
degrade it's usefulness in other areas.