[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Wed, 06 Jun 2001 18:38:11 -0400, Travis Casey
<efindel at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Anyone gambling and *expecting* to win is a fool.  The games' odds
> are in favor of the house, not of the players -- they have to be,
> if the house is to make a profit.

And likewise, as any casino owner will tell you, if the house is to
make a profit -- people need to WIN. That's the incentive for all
the *other* people to *keep* playing. If no people win, no people
play. The ideal situation for a casino is to keep the AMOUNT of
winnings low, and the APPEARANCE of winnings high.

> You're also assuming that a player cannot "afford to lose" their
> character.  It's true that many players are strongly averse to
> losing their character and having to start over.  There are other
> players, however, who simply view it as a part of the challenge of
> the game.

But it has out-of-game consequences. When I play a game and lose a
character, I don't care at all -- unless it's a multiplayer
game. Then I've lost not only my character, but my reputation with
other players.  If it was a good reputation, that's bad for me,
because my new character won't be recognised and provided with the
appropriate respect. If it was a bad reputation, that's bad for
THEM, because my new character won't be recognised and given a wide
enough berth for safety.

This may be offset almost completely with a PERMANENT character
identification, separate from the character's name. Science fiction
games have a perfect out in the form of captain/ship distinctions;
while the ISS Hawkstar may be destroyed, Captain Darklock can
commission the ISS Greywind and go right back out there. Then when
people see Captain Darklock in a new ship, they'll say "what
happened" instead of "who are you". Games in which you control a
single distinct individual are rather more difficult to do this
with... perhaps the "Man, Myth, and Magic" reincarnation concept
might be adapted. (I'm partial to the particular foibles of certain
games: "Ultimate Universe", "Man, Myth, and Magic", "Starflight II",
"Shadowrun", and "Vampire: the Masquerade" pretty much sum up my
concept of the games which could -- if combined -- spew forth the
single greatest game in the world. If you made the end product
similar enough to AD&D, of course.)

> If you want another example of "playing to lose", consider older
> arcade video games, like Missile Command, Galaga, Pac-Man, etc.
> No matter how good you are, you cannot play the game forever
> without losing your "character" in the game.  Yet people enjoyed
> (and still do enjoy) playing those games anyways.

False analogy.

In these games, your character is the same at the end of the game as
he was at the beginning. There is no investment in the character --
only in the score. Your character also has *several* lives (cities
in "Missile Command"), and the game only ends when they are
exhausted. Successful gameplay adds more lives, and gameplay is a
single skill which is easily learned. Furthermore, the ONLY way you
could lose a life would be if YOU made a mistake.

In contrast, permadeath in MUDs means you have one and only one
chance to invest a great deal of time and effort in developing a
character through multiple difficult-to-learn skills and systems,
and that character can be trashed forever by a single bad result
from a random number generator. I can't even count the number of
times I've wandered from a 10-15 level area in a MUD to a 30-50
level area without the slightest indication of it, immediately
encountering an aggro mob which stomps the character into the
dirt. With immediate resurrection and standard Diku-style corpse
retrieval, this is a nuisance which may be rectified by jumping on a
comm channel and asking for help (which fosters community). With
permadeath, this becomes an irredeemable and unforgivable situation.

Permadeath, in short, has several problems which need to be
addressed.  But they CAN be addressed:

  - All character capabilities must be provided immediately. The
  chance of success may be very low, but all capabilities must
  nevertheless exist.

  - Learning the game must be easily done in less than a day's
  play. This allows the player to concentrate on THE GAME, not THE
  SYSTEM.

  - All randomness must be removed if at all possible. Consistency
  is more important than risk.

  - All transitions in difficulty must be clearly marked and only
  made by deliberate and informed player actions.

Alternately, you could guarantee that the player will die and have
to restart several times daily on the average. Doom and Quake worked
quite well with that concept; life was cheap, and its loss was
negligible.

> You have won something -- the ability to say that you were good
> enough to get to where you could kill the dragon.

Then why do it? Why not just look at the dragon, say "I could kill
the dragon", and keep walking? In the old NES game "Dragon Warrior",
I would wander around until I got to the maximum level and then
start over. I only went to slay the dragonlord twice: once to fight
him, and once to join him. Both endgame resolutions were boring and
stupid, so I never bothered afterward. If you're not going to reward
me for success in a given action, but you'll still punish me for
failure, there's absolutely no reason to take that action. In fact,
there's an awfully good reason NOT to take it.

It's basic human psychology. People are more afraid of failure and
embarrassment than anything else -- even real-world death. If your
game world does not provide a reward for success, the penalty for
failure will make playing your game undesirable.

> Just as in Galaga, the only thing I ever "won" by playing was the
> ability to say that I was good enough to get to X points.

And that was your contract with the game: I will play for a short
while and get points. In a MUD, your contract is somewhat different:
I will play for a long time, spend untold hours studying the game
world, attain membership in one or more communities, and amass a
large quantity of items, gold, skills, and abilities. If you die in
a game of Galaga, you lose a quarter and ten minutes. If you die
permanently on a pay-for-play MUD, you lose something more like
sixty bucks and 120 hours (assuming an average of two hours play
each day for two months at $30 a month).

Before the obvious analogy of local PC adventure games is brought
up, allow me to point out that such a game would be immediately
drawn and quartered by the media and the public alike if you
couldn't SAVE YOUR GAME. In a multiplayer environment, saved games
are effectively impossible, so such a comparison is flawed from the
start.

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