[MUD-Dev] Birthday Cake (or Why Large Scale Sometimes Sucks) (long)

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2000 09:32:25 -0400 
Dave Rickey <daver at mythicgames.com> wrote:

> From: J C Lawrence <claw at cp.net> 
>> Crosbie Fitch:

>> "Cyberspace in the 21st Century: Mapping the Future of Massive
>> Multiplayer Games" By Crosbie Fitch

> Either he's seriously out of touch, the article was written 3
> years ago, or he doesn't consider 2000+ per world worthy of
> calling "Massively Multiplayer".  And he not only doesn't address
> the social issues, he doesn't address *any* of the human factors.

He definitely doesn't run deep.  However he raises a couple points I 
find interesting:

>>>  There should be nothing radical or special about multiplayer
>>>  games. Indeed, it is the game that supports only a single
>>>  player which is the oddity.

Well, duh!  But also better stated that I've seen before.

It is very easy, and most multiplayer games show this to an extreme,
to approach multipleyer game design as merely being a collection of
single player games, packged in a multi-player wrapper.  So we get
MUDs with quests which are essentially single-player
mini-adventures.  We get Quake/CTF without any strategy or tactics
support.  We get linear puzzle based games with chat bolted on the
side to make them "multi-player".

What was the last truly multi-player game you played?  What was it
about that game such that being multi-player wasn't just integral to
the system, but that the system itself was unable to exist, let
alone function without it being multi-player?  

What exactly constitutes a multiplayer game?  

It is very easy to consider the single player viewpoint.  We're
quite familiar with it after all.  Do we grok the multi-player
viewpoint fully?

Yeah, I know, it has multiple players.  But that is not a design
guideline.  That is not a metric we can judge or weigh so that we
can move the basics of designing multiplayer games forward to a
point of almost mechanical engineering so that we can spend our real
effort and talent on the qualities.  

Is it more than just requiring collaboration on the part of the
players?  I've been unable to convince myself of this either way.

I assume we know what games are.  We know what the constituent
elements of games are, what defines games, what differentiates
something that is a game froms omething that is not.  I tend to view
this very simply: Games consist of goals, barriers, and freedoms.
Given any combination of those three you have a game, tho not
necessarily a good game.  It is the balance of those factors which
defines whether a game is playable.  Too few barriers and there's no
challenge.  To many freedoms and its confusing.  No or poorly
defined goals and its pointless (even Talkers have goals).  Etc.

  Aside: We've long delinated between GoP games and non-GoP games on
this list.  Its a useful distinction.  It is also a potentially
misleading distinction.  Even IRC can be reduced down to goals,
barriers and freedoms, its just that they're a little less well
stated, and a lot more amorphous than their Quake counterparts.  The
goal of "talk to people about things that interest you" is a little
less definite and harder to instantiate than, "find people and blow
their heads off".

But what about multi-player games?  There's more to it than just
throwing in a couple extra inputs, of defining the goal as
insolvable/unapproachable by single individuals.  What is the
quality that defines a game as being multi-player?  

My best approach to this so far is that multiplayer games not only
require collaboration on the part of the players, but also to some
extent require the players to operate at both the individual level
(goals, puposes, etc for that single player and his team), and a
meta level (consideration of game-wide mechanics and effects).  It
*appears* to me that it is that last, the (often failed or partial)
attempt to mentally embrace the game entire and not just your
internal section of it that marks the truly multi-player game.

>>>  You see, on the other side of the looking glass it is the
>>>  worlds that are the true constants, and the players that are
>>>  ephemeral.

Well, of course.  That is until you start to evaluate your game
world design starting from that principle and considering only the
points that align with it.  I see tinges of this being done in UO,
and AC (less in EQ).  It gets to be pretty strong in some MOOs and
is vanishingly rare most every elsewhere.  After all, we're
interested in the players, so we look at them a lot and consider
their viewpoints and preferences heavily.  The rest is after all
just a machine that we built, and not usually considered as an
entity in its own right.

But, if you put the world definition, the world persistance, the
world constancy first, and then always view players as transient
ghosts, minor pertubations in your system, many problems of
resiliency, of the collaboration mechanics, of persuading the player
that this is in fact "real" become simpler.  At that point it is the
world that is 'real", not the players, so your story is more
consistent and attempts to persuade less.

If you take the problems of social resiliency, of say the 10,000
Quake player assault and how to withstand the problem of the
barbarians at the gate without fascist enforcement, and instead view
your social systems as being world entities and the players that
instantiate them as being ephemeral, again, a few things get
simpler.  You can knock back some of the problems to just basic
systems design.

>>>  All multiplayer games based on networked computers will adopt
>>>  an approach that is either about communicating input, or
>>>  communicating the game model.

Just nicely said.  Correctly assigns emphasis.  W're communicating
player input, or we're communicating game model.  That's really all
we are doing when you get right down to it.  Its chat, or game
definition.

And finally he referenced Kent Watson's Bamboo, which leads to all
sorts of interesting places (eg on using watchers versus callbacks
and the architectural constraints of each approach).  

>>> His "DIOS" concept isn't all that new, but it also isn't likely,
>>> not in the terms he's thinking of.

True.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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