[MUD-Dev] Acting casual about casual gamers

[John Buehler]

Madrona Tree
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2000 4:23 PM

>I am concerned by the idea of gaining things while you're offline.

  The gain would be geared towards long-term activities.  The element
of time is largely eliminated from these games in order to give the
players a more intense gameplay experience.  Thus, we have teleport
abilities (travel time) and instant construction (production time),
among others.  I'm interested in offline travel and offline
construction.  However, these offline activities would be inhibited
when the task involved is new.  The more that the given task has been
completed, the less requirement that the player be in attendance.

  For example, the fifth time the character travels from one city to
another, it might be able to get halfway between the cities
while offline.  The 10th time, the character might make it all the
way.  The 11th time, it might make it 90% of the way.  In each
offline case, the path taken would have to be well-known to the
character (it doesn't use AI to figure out how to get there).

  If an offline attempt is interrupted by another character, there
is a chance that the offline character (the 'NPC Me') will resume
the task.  I can imagine some acts being more traumatic or
distracting than others.  Stopping to interact with a friend is
not necessarily traumatic or distracting.  Being cut in half by
an enemy is distracting.

>If you apply it so that everyone gains the same amount of Whatever, whether
>they are online or not, the achievers will feel cheated because they Did so
>much more than the Casuals, yet are receiving the same reward... and the
>Casuals will be cheated out of the experience that the Achievers actually
>got to be there for.

  Right.  I'm not after letting somebody build a castle while the player
is offline.  But being able to lay a course of stones 10' long might be
the sort of thing that a character can do on its own - once it has done
enough 10' courses of stone.  In other words, you have to earn offline
accomplishments.  We could also say that offline activities are not at
full 'quality'.  Travel is slower, manufactured goods of poorer quality,
etc.  I think it's manageable.

>I like the Burst Hour idea, where the first hour in 24 the player gains a
>lot of Whatever, and the hours after that the player gains very little...
>and if s/he plays, it is for fun rather than achieving goals.

  I also believe in limited gain during a realtime period for the player,
but I have the notion that there is only so much skill gain that can be
accumulated in, say, a 12-hour period.  This permits players to decide
at what point in their play time that they want to go and perform
advancement.  The Burst Hour notion suggests that everyone should log
out near a location where they can do their skill gain the next time they
log in.

>Take the clicks (or button-mashing) away, and use what instead?

  Counter-example.  What if I made combat such that when I saw a
character, I clicked the mouse to indicate that I was attacking and
one of us dropped dead?  Not too interesting.  For the combat
enthusiasts (most of the current player base), the game has become
one where a variety of factors get involved in combat engagements.

  If I'm doing blacksmithing, perhaps I have to manage the temperature
of the fire, the amount and quality of wood or coal, the location of
the metal in the fire, the amount of air being pumped by the bellows,
whether to fold the metal or not, whether to quench it in water or
oil, or not at all.  The goal is not to place the skill of making
blacksmithed goods into the hands of the player (we want the
character skill to be the deciding factor), but instead to let the
player decide what the result of the process should be.  And the
player can also adapt and adjust to changes in the 'combat' between
him and the process of making the item he's after.  Flaws pop up and
he has to deal with them.  The fire is getting too hot, so he has to
do something about that as well.  This is where the player skill DOES
get involved, just as player skill is a factor in combat, but not the
deciding factor.  Just as we don't want combat to be Quake-like, with
the winner decided by speed of mouse-clicking, we don't want the
blacksmithing task to be decided by player knowledge of metallurgy.

  The player would spend his time watching graphical depictions of
each thing that the character does.  Pumping of bellows, quenching of
metal, hammering, shaping, the whole nine yards.  This requires as
much of an investment in design, coding and artwork as combat or
magic in general.  Unfortunately, no game company will make this
kind of investment until they learn how to do their job more
efficiently - or simply have extraordinarily deep pockets.  My hope
is for the former (efficiency).

  One other comment is that so long as game systems keep getting
rewritten for each new game, we'll never have any momentum built
up so that things like secondary markets can form.  Secondary
markets will do things like build game systems, monster AI, etc.
Without an 'operating system' or 'platform' for games, we'll
remain in the stone age.  And no, I don't mean the hardware
platform.  I mean something along the lines of an operating system
or Microsoft's NGWS initiative.  Standards and services.

>The existance of teleportation in a world also often exists to aid the
>community.  Joe goes on a trek to see how many licks it takes to get to the
>center of the world, but then his friend Jerry logs on and sees that
>something is happening in their community that requires joe's attendance.
>Joe uses his ever-handy "Home" spell and arrives hours faster than if he
>turned around and ran.  Without teleportation (if your map is large,
>anyway), people become wary of adventuring too far away from their
homesite,
>if community is important to them... which is realistic, but not fun.

  I have it in my head that the game worlds are designed such that
they require casual travel over long distances, meaning that the
instant elsewhere mechanisms are required.  So I'm claiming that
there's a chicken and egg problem here.  If we remove teleportation,
I wonder how the game world has to be structured in response.  I'm
willing to believe that the game world changes its structure a bit
and that new play styles will come into being.  For one thing, those
who choose to go exploring will be doing something that not
everyone will choose.  The world stops being homogeneous and becomes
a bit more like true pockets of civilization.  People aren't jetting
in and out all the time.  There will be a greater sense of community
because of the fact that you'll tend to keep running into the same
people day after day.  If you get tired of that, you have to make the
conscious decision to go elsewhere, and that is a real trip, with
real dangers.  Mostly the danger of the unknown.

>> I have hopes that there
>> are techniques yet to be discovered that will inhibit spoiler
>> sites and their ability to ruin the fun of the explorers out
>> there.
>
>Randomization being a most obvious one.  If the experience is different for
>me than for you, it makes it more difficult for spoiler sites to get it
>'right' ... because there would be no right.  That, and people look at
>spoiler sites when they don't have any idea how to do something in the
>game... so perhaps 'hint npcs' (maybe you have to pay them some money for
>telling you a 'rumor' -- like cops pay informants) would be nice too.

  I understand you point about randomization and I certainly
agree with the spirit of a changing world.  I'm a big fan of
using simulation techniques in order to get that.  But can we
do that with geography?  I don't want spoiler sites popping
up for geography, because they are the bane of the explorer.
I wonder if sheer volume of information - size of a world - is
one answer to that particular problem.

  On the topic of players getting stuck, I would hope that
proper application design would eliminate a lot of this.  If
the choices of the player are so artificial that they can't
figure it out, then there's a problem with the game.  With the
simulation technique applied intelligently, there IS no right
choice at a given point.  You do whatever catches your fancy.
There is no 'winning'.





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