[MUD-Dev] Persistent Worlds

[John Buehler]

J C Lawrence writes:

> > It all depends on the focus of the experience that you're
> > offering.  I like the idea of having just a few systems that are
> > very much in depth and inherently entertaining.
>
> This would seem to be self-conflicting.  Systems that are inherently
> interesting tend to be (I'd actually define this as necessarily, but
> I know of people for whom this isn't true) participatory which
> implies that the participants (players) have the ability to alter
> the system they are participating in, which futher explictity
> implies that they are able to manipulate the sysrtem in manners you
> didn't explicitly design for (think about ecological niches).  The
> only way a system can be non-participatory and remain interesting is
> if it is tourist phenomena: watch the pretty pictures -- and I'm not
> even going to try and estimate the overhead required to maintain
> that level of production quality.

Participation implies alteration, I agree.  That works for me.  To suggest
that alteration means that the system eventually falls apart is something
that I don't understand.  Obviously, making a system, setting expectations,
putting controls and monitors, etc, etc, etc, is all very challenging.  I
don't mean to suggest otherwise.  But I believe that the net result is that
there is significant entertainment value.

A 'system' that I'm thinking of is the classic: blacksmithing.  The actual
construction of a worked piece is involved and entertaining.  Sparks flying
from the hammer, pieces being shaped bit by bit, assistants and fellow
smiths helping with complex tasks, and so on.  The resulting pieces have to
either be sold by commission or on an open market system, which is part of
being a blacksmith.  If you don't want to do the selling part, you conspire
with another character to get them sold.  The selling process should be
similarly entertaining - for those who enjoy selling things.

Can things go wrong with this from a playability standpoint?  Of course.
Will it take time before I can figure out how to make it work?  Yes.  I may
never figure it out.  But I have my goals, and they define what I think is
entertaining and would be entertaining for people that I know.  I'm rather
uninterested in the games that exist today, so I investigate the
construction of games that I would enjoy.

> The problem with this, as UO found, is that the first band to march
> thru that wipes out all the wildlife doesn't suffer the consequences
> (moves on or simply leaves the game for another game) and yet causes
> significant damage to your illusions.

Agreed.  Having that happen would be a problem.  A knee-jerk reaction to
that is that if a band can walk through and wipe out the wildlife, the
wildlife must've been lining up to be butchered.  Wildlife runs away, lives
in large spaces and is tough to track and kill.  Those checks and balances
alone would help limit the effects of such a problem.

> This is not to say that I think that such ecological systems and
> resource economies are not interesting (I find them very
> interesting), but I find your expectations of their effects and
> results flabbergasting given the population sizes (and therefore
> world sizes you are tagetting.  Were you heading for the
> mid-hundreds online at anytime along with a moderately large in-game
> paid admin staff (essentially the fascist RP nazis, tho this time
> enforcing your vision, not RP), then it would work.  Otherwise you
> are expecting a level of complicity from your player base that is
> just, umm, charming but doomed?

They may very well be doomed, although I'm pleased by the appellation
'charming'.  Their 'doom' may be that they are untenable given the current
gameplay environent: player demographics, technical problems with player
anonymity, inability to set expectations among players, labor requirements
to run a world, etc.

Player complicity is an excellent topic, and only emphasizes the challenge
of having children in the game world as first-class participants.  I may
very well ban everyone under 21 and charge $30 a month.  I actually don't
know if such a thing is viable or would have the desired effect, but it's a
thought.

> Having your hammer disappear mid-battle is very annoying.  It
> becomes less annoying if you later discover that it vanished because
> it Thor's hammer and he awoke (elsewhere in the land) and called it
> by name.  What was a severe pain of a sudden becomes a strong
> attractant.

I understand your point, but mine is that the absence of explained cause is
annoyance.  You can present one-off counter examples, but would you ever
offer the example of having one's shoe vanishing without explanation?  It
just happens because that's the way the world works.  No rationalization
through backstory, no evident effect, just a cause.  A bit like the case of
spontaneous generation.  No rationalization, just 'it happens'.  I assert
that it also makes the virtual world just a game world, not a virtual world.
The more an experience contains such things, the less likely a player is to
think in terms of suspension of disbelief about a virtual world.  Instead,
they think in terms of "oh, it's a game - how do I win?"

> This is one of the reasons I put Orc breeders in impossible to
> access locations.  That way the cerverns will *always* be a source
> of Orcs, no matter what efforts are spent on eradicating them.
> Similarly, for say larger basilisks (a basilisk in my world comes in
> roughly at the large hundreds of metric metric tonnes, in the small
> hundreds when infant.  A human comparitively is a cockroach, and is
> paid about as much mind by basilisks as we pay cockroaches in our
> world).  Players are occasionally able to destroy basilisks (they do
> this by taking over their bodies via spirtual possession and then
> suiciding them).  It is possible that by repeatedly doing so they
> could eradicate basilisks from the world.  To prevent this (the
> presence of basilisks is necessary to maintain the players and every
> other life-form as an endangered prey species, a dead basilisk
> merely deconstructs back to an ur-basilisk which is then later
> substantiated when circumstances collide enough to either require or
> generate a new one.

Right, so you've got evident causes and effects, which I consider to be a
good thing.  Dunno about the 'impossible to access' part, but to each his
own.  For example, if they're impossible to access, how'd they get there?

> Players have a nasty tendencies to set their own expectations and
> not to listen much to you at all in doing so.

I think you're assuming that my marketing would be in the mainstream player
channels of existing game magazines and such.  Suppose I restrict my
communication to The Disney Channel or to The Lithuanian Journal or
whatever?  My target audiences are already out there and I just have to find
out how to communicate with them.  'Gamers' are not who I'm after.  They
want to play a game and win it.  I want the experience hounds who'd like to
toy around with exploration, crafting, medieval soap operas and so on.

> > As for being rewarded, the reward is enjoying the experience of
> > the game.  If the game experience of fishing is not enjoyable to
> > people who enjoy fishing (or would, if they had the money and time
> > for it in the real world), then it's probably not a very
> > well-implemented fishing experience.
>
> The phrase, "means to an end" comes to mind.

The phrases "painful support issues" and "disgruntled players" comes to mind
for me.

JB

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