[MUD-Dev] Acting casual about casual gamers

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2000 08:43:31 -0700 
Brian Green <brian at psychochild.org> wrote:

> (I read Lum the Mad's rant site before writing this.  Seems UO and
> EQ has gotten a few people upset lately.  I'll refrain from
> further comments; I'm sure there's others more qualified to make
> them.)

I'll confess that my normal reaction to Lum is "*boggle*".  

> So, after taking a break from my posts, I'm back with a new topic.
> Today, let's consider the case of the casual gamer.

<sigh>  Caught me again.  Here I've been arguing and proposing the
other side -- when casusal players are the norm and vastly out
number and out weigh every other classification of players --
without ever specifically identifying my changed assumptions.  

Thanks for building the conceptual bridge.

> As an aside, I think that "persistent character" is a poor
> solution.  

This is the other side of the consideration that the worlds are thr
truly persistent items and the players and their characters are
inately transient.  We've been concentrating so hard and so long on
trying to make our constructions real for the players, immersive,
persuading them to invest themselves, to become involved, to grant
our creations mental and social credence etc, that we've come to
foget the fact that the typical player spend more time watching the
exhaust fumes of the car ahead or on the toilet than in our games
(Okay, I read a lot).

This is not to say that we need to devalue our players, to minimise
and deconstruct their effects and import in our worlds, or to render
them effectively as ghosts who can see but not touch,  It is to say
that a broader and deeper viewpoint is needed.  

  Aside: The difference in American vs British approaches becomes
apparent here.  The default American approach to a problem seems to
be characterised by, "Take care of all the big things and the
details will take care of themselves."  Conversely the British
approach tends toward, "Take care of all the details and the big
stuff will follow automatically."

If you start out with the viewpoint that the world persists, it
doesn't go away it only changes, and that players are inherently
transient, your viewpoint moves towards the aggregate behaviour of
players, the deduction of patterns, of statistical motions.  We, and
I in particular, have tended to work everything on the basis of
scenarios wrapped around small numbers of individuals.  That's a
great conceptual tool for problem phrasing and solution.  Its also a 
very constrictive and view narrowing tool.  There are some problems
that are only expressable in terms of mass actions, of groups, of
statistical trends, of emergent group behaviours.  

Flash crowds are only one minor example of this.

By forcing everything to the indivudal centric scenario, I fear I,
we, have missed a lot.

> Games have a hard enough time providing interesting AI for the
> monsters, let alone characters.  Even with a scripting system, you
> have to make a trade-off between simplicity and expressiveness of
> the system.  

Have ___any___ of the FPS managed to come up with an opponent who is 
actually challenging for reasons other than overwhelming armament?

FPS operate in a very narrow field of possible mechanics.  No
talking.  No socialising.  No politics.  No emotional ties and
relationships.  Just move and shoot.  

  Heck when was the last time that an NPC soldier actually laid down
effective covering fire in a game that wasn't just some
semi-patterned bullet/shell spray?  Covering fire has a distinct
definition, and thus a very different set of behaviours than trying
to kill someone.

If we can't do something "interesting" in such a constrained field
-- how are we going to do something interesting given our much
broader field?

> Yet, I think that character persistence can be partially applied
> to ease the problem of the casual gamer.  Many people have
> suggested allowing characters to do typically repetitive
> activities (such as using trade skills) during offline times.
> Although the character is not "in the world", they are still doing
> something productive for the player.  This would allow a warrior
> character to patch up his or her armor using offline time instead
> of online time.  Or, it would allow a merchant to produce and
> procure items during offline times, allowing them to focus on the
> more "fun" social interactions.  Or, another merchant character
> could sell items during offline time, allowing them to focus on
> the more "fun" exploration for new items to sell.


> The ideal tactic then becomes creating a character and waiting
> enough time before using it for it to have gained significant
> power.  We still want people to, you know, play our games, just
> not require it to the obsessive degree we have to today.
> Alternate advancement mechanisms need to be explored.

Translation:  You play an RPG to acquire a character so you can
arrange to be there for the "exciting" points in his life (where the 
definition of "exciting" is "player driven").

We therefore presume that all the non-human player occupied time is
therefore occupied with eating and going to the WC.

> Any game that does not have sufficient messaging options will hurt
> casual game play.  EverQuest, to pick a favorite target, has a
> definitive lack of persistent communication in the game.  If I
> wish to leave a message for someone, I need their ICQ number or
> Email address.  If I'm the type that doesn't like giving out my
> Email address or ICQ number to strangers, then I have a hard time
> keeping track of friends in the game.  If I want to leave a note
> for my guild mates, I have to put a message on a web forum.  The
> time I spend outside the game posting to web forums is time I am
> not spending participating in the game.

I've been quite surprised that nobody has taken the lead shown by
ChibaMOO and others and integrated the web (even very minimally)
into their games.  The early win would be for simple things such as
help files, shortly followed things like by player and
administrative message boards, statistics, calendars, OOC
socialising, and all the other glories of groupware.

> The biggest reason many people stick around a game in the long run
> is for the friends they've made.  Making these friends hard to
> keep in touch with in the context of the game hurts to an
> immeasurable degree.

Conversely, making them actively easier to maintain contact without
outside of your game/services would seem to act as an active
dissuasion for players to "hang about" once their game-interest has
tapered.

Note: This could be viewed as a positive side effect.  Idle and
bored players are often insurrectionist players.  They are more
likely than others to play severely abstracted meta games, to play
games with you, the game designer or admins, as the target, and to
otherwise be disruptive.  In such cases it is easy to consider that
any means to get rid of such before they have a chance to become
painful may be attractive.

> We need to develop a replacement advancment system that does not
> reward obsessive play.  

The standard approach historically has been to limit the advancement
possible withing a given RL time period (usually, per day, and per
week).  This is not an inherently BAD approach, but has some curious
side effects in how and when players play, and their socialisation
during play (compare limited turn based BBS/door games).  In looking
at this area myself, I'd be tempted to go for a very broad game
comprised of a great many possible activities, all attractive and
apparently "rewarding", yet almost all of them turning out to be of
social significance only.

> If the casual gamer cannot find his or her friends, he or she will
> not be playing our game for long.

There's an underlieing law here about identity, determination of
identity, and player awareness both of own and other's identity.
I see anonymity in MUDs is critical (no prizes for guessing where I
come down on the cypherpunk/crytpo/anonymity debate) -- but it needs 
to be a controllable anonymity.  If I'm playing and I don't mind
being found, then I can do that.  If I don't want to be "found", I
should be able to do that as well.  If I specifically don't want to
be "found" by XYZ list of identified others, then I should also be
able to do that.

  Players must be able to repeatedly locate and identify other
players so that they may form and maintain social relationships.
Not being able to find or identify friends is the same as not having
friends, and not having any friends in a multi-player game is not
often considered fun.

BTW, Raph, do you consider the collected laws to be a living
document or to now be compleat?

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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