[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 19 Jun 2001 11:01:14 -0700 
Timothy O'Neill Dang <tdang at email.arizona.edu> wrote:

> JC Lawrence sez:

>> Perhaps the easiest way is by making the player populations
>> inherently nomadic.  Everything moves.  Perhaps players live in
>> tent cities and the cities are forced to move regularly by other
>> game conditions.

> I think something like this could possibly provide a nice balance
> for the players, still under the assumption that there's a person
> or algorithm generating interesting new territory fast enough. The
> trick to this is to have a fairly broad area of "scrolling
> map". Then the players can self-segregate. The hard-core explorers
> can be out on the fringes of the new land, dealing with the
> unpredictability. Others can hang back in the territories which
> have already been explored.

The basic problems with nomadic systems are two fold:

  1) Content generation: You have to build a far larger world so
  that you can leave most of it empty/fallow to move back into
  later.

  2) You are deliberately wasting the basic resource that players
  have and invest on and in your game: Knowledge of the game.
  Everybody wants to be an expert.  Nomadic systems encourage
  games/worlds which conspire against the player to ensure
  that nobody is actually an expert (let along competent?).  Players
  won't like this.  This is not to say that they'll like the loss of
  repeatability any better as its the the same thing rephrased.

There's a wonderful SF short story, whose name and author fail me at
the moment, which deals with the trials of a linguist visiting a new
planet and trying to get a handle on the language used there.  To
his dismay he finally discovers that there is no actual language
used by the people of the planet, not in any singular or reasonably
constant sense.  Instead the language it entirely contextual both
per the current physical environment and the recent histories of
those talking.  Every individual constantly creates his own ad hoc
language, and of course, is somehow understood by everyone else
doing the same thing.  Evolution run wild.  

Nomadism tends to that model.  This doesn't mean that it can't be
saved and used, but there are costs along the way.

Odd thoughts:

  If you go the route of mechanically enforcing the nomadic
  wandering you bugger the players.  Don't move and you get left
  behind as the world moves on (this can be positioned as an
  advantage, but I doubt it will be viewed as one by players).  This
  rapidly results in your players being segregated by both time and
  space, which really means that you've had no other effect than
  forcefully spreading your players out and making it even more
  difficult for them to get together.  Additionally you've just
  positioned the players as being the unwilling and yet forced
  effect of the world motion.  You can dress it up as to their
  having control and influence, but its a sham.  The world
  containing what they care about abd center on moves and
  leaves them behind and there's nothing they can do about it.

  Players already have enough of a problem with getting together and
  cooperating without us deliberately making it more difficult.

  Another approach is to try and make players "want" to move.  

    "If you stay here Tiamat will come sit on you!"

  Observation suggests that players will reactively tend instead to
  stay exactly where they and endlessly die trying to not move, and
  then having satisfied their RDA of suicide, then move on to
  another game.  Intransigent little buggers.

    "Your game resources, like targets and economy particles are
    nomadic.  If you don't follow them you'll have to go further and
    further to find them.  Its easier to follow."

  This makes the rate of camp motion almost sedate.  It has to be so
  that it is cheaper to move camp than suffer the commute time to
  the valued resources.  Sedate motion minimises the problem of
  players being left behind by making it just a lightly longer walk
  in any given case (and the trail can be simply followed).

  In essence a guided tourist ride where you amble along and the
  sites and interests of the world will come up to you while you sit
  in your Disney maglev train..

  The art of getting lost.

  Players have an alarming tendency to want to sit and watch their
  butts spread.  Or to be able to go away and come back and find
  everything just as they left it.  Its part of predictability and
  the demand that the game not be preceived to be stealing from
  them.  This is tightly related to prior discussions on object
  decay except that instead of talking about direct object removal
  we're also talking about physically realised knowledge decay --
  they are no longer able to assume much about a location once they
  leave it.

  Hurm.  Which is kinda fun really.

<ponder>

"Cities in Flight" and the spindizzy drive.

You've got canned cities which you can mock up however you wish, and
you then move the cities about periodically plugging them into
interesting worlds as appropriate.  Nomadism with all the benefits
of a barcalounger.  Those who get left behind either getting eaten
by the suddenly rapacious locals (permadeath in the DB sense), or are
rescued by another visiting city.

Cute.  There are all sorts of interesting mechanics you could plug
in under there.

--
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows
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