[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:
> UO's original design used exactly that sort of artificial life system. The
> issues we found:
> 
> 1) It was expensive. This may have been due to implementation, of course.
> 2) It was not readily apparent to the players. This is a complicated
> 3) It was a lot harder to balance that it seemed, because of the tendency of
> 4) It had design flaws which exacerbated many of these issues (doh).
> 
> Despite all that, I still believe it to be the way to go.

<soapbox> A-Life systems are only interesting as A-Life systems, because
of all the issues you listed above.  They should have a lot of potential
for allowing interesting and dynamic game worlds, but no one seems to have
ever seen that happen.  At least, in my experience, having seen a few
serious attempts to develop A-Life systems with fully emergent behaviors,
there is not enough bang for the buck.

There is some hope of creating "gnarly" (to borrow a term from Rudy
Rucker) systems.  Systems where creature populations can survive the
destructive appetite of the players.  Isn't that a kind of emergent
behavior?  But if it makes the game too difficult the players will be
unhappy, because they are competing with a system that is immune to their
influence.  
</soapbox>

I have been thinking of a way of using cellular behavior to make monster
AI more efficient.  Some day I'll write up some dense notes and post it.

- B!




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