[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 2nd March, 2001, John Buehler wrote:

>> The trick is to make people who leave your game go off to play
>> another one of your games rather than someone else's.

> the single game world that you have should be providing multiple
> experiences.  This provides players with a very low barrier-to-entry
> in changing the game that they play.

I agree, but I don't see how this would prevent an guild leaving for a
new game if they decided to go en masse.

> If we rely on player skill in order to enjoy the game experience,
> then why would I go to the game world?

Because you can take far more risks in a game world than in the real
world. Because you can't use your skills in the real world. Because
you're trying your skills in a different environment in the game
world.  Because you're using your skills in different ways in a game
world.

> You seem to be trying to find a midpoint between the actual doing in
> the real world with the real risks and rewards of the real world
> versus EverQuest, where there is no risk and no real reward.

Not exactly a midpoint, more of a range.

> In my parlance, you are pursuing a more hardcore gamer and I am
> pursuing a more casual one.

In my parlance, I am pursuing a gamer (with this particular PD
approach) and you are pursuing a non-gamer. The difference is, my
approach also lets me pursue non-gamers, because they don't have to do
the PD thing if they don't have to, whereas your approach doesn't.

>>>  Personally, I don't want to be overtaxed in my manual dexterity,
>>>  nor my brainpower.

>>  In that case, you should choose a role in the game where that's
>>  not going to be an issue.

> Um, that's why I bought a *game*.  As I said, I tax myself mentally
> and physically in the real world when I want to tax myself.

So you're saying you bought a game because you didn't want to tax
yourself; I'm saying that if you play a game and don't want to tax
yourself, don't do the things you find taxing. What's wrong with that? 
Are you suggesting that there should be nothing in a game that's
taxing, in case you want to do it?

> I don't think I get your point at all.  Having someone in a hurry go
> rushing past me doesn't enhance my experience.

And how does it degrade your experience?

> In EverQuest, being killed and flung far from the point of combat
> only means that I will run back to the point of combat before I do
> pretty much anything.

(Strictly speaking you could remove the words "killed and" from that
sentence).

Well yes, of course you will - that's EverQuest for you! I wasn't
arguing for duplicating EQ's approach, though. If you die PD, there's
only so long that you can rack up points while in a rage. Once you're
over it, you can return to your normal pace.

> Not by nature, but by circumstance they can become powergamers

I agree, but the question is whether PD turns people into powergamers
or not. You seem to think it does almost by definition, but I
don't. Normal people don't powergame for more than an hour or so at
most after being PDed.

> The 'chore' that I'm refering to is recovery of gains that have been
> taken away.

Taken away? Only with PvP PKing. With PD from other sources, the gains
have almost invariably been lost, not taken away.

But that's not how it happens anyway following PD. Players don't work
back up an identical character - they probably couldn't do so even if
they tried. They may intend to, but that's not how it happens.

If you walked from one building in the middle of town to another
building some distance away, then the next time you tried it you
wouldn't have the same journey. You'd see different things, your feet
would touch different parts of the pavement, you'd encounter different
people. You might take a short cut you've worked out since your
previous walk, or you could even decide to go to a different building
altogether. Sure, you can make the end result pretty exact, but when
it comes to characters in games, how you got there is just as
important as where "there" is.

> Player response to such things seems to be to just work through to
> get them back again.  And you suggested earlier that players should
> be able to recover such gains in less time than their first time
> around.

Yes, they should. But they don't have to do it the same way.

> Yes, I've noticed this 'evil' pattern thing too.  Kids all want to
> be bandit kings or thieves.  My big concern here is that they might
> be in a world that doesn't structure things such that being a bandit
> or thief isn't very rewarding.

I share that concern. Even if the long term effect of being "evil" in
a game is failure, it only takes a few high-profile examples of
success to tempt a generation of newbies to try it out.

> I want to develop a mechanism where the player's view of the game
> world depends on the development of the character's skills.  As a
> quick, rough example, consider the character who acquires the
> 'thief' skill.  The player who is running that character will be
> able to more easily detect 'wealth' on other characters.  That is
> the thief's perception of the world.

That makes sense to me. If your character is blind, you (as a player)
don't receive any messages from the game conveying visual
information. If your character is a herbalist, that smell will be
reported as being "thyme" rather than "pungent".

Is this kind of thing contentious or something?

> 'Power up'?  You don't.  This is something that I'm almost
> unthinkingly in opposition to now.  I don't want one character
> having personal power in the sense that they can control other
> characters

No, but you do want characters having abilities that other characters
don't have. If these abilities are abundant or superior, that would be
a way for the player to feel higher in the pecking order than a player
who had fewer of them at inferior levels.

> I'm not going for *some* reminder.  I'm after a specific kind of
> reminder that registers on the player in a specific way.

The mechanism you propose doesn't sound like a reminder to me, it
sounds like a punishment. Was that the point?

> Your comments in this thread have suggested that you are certainly
> pursuing a different kind of game.  Unless you have plans of somehow
> managing a segregation of experiences for your players that permits
> casual players to coexist with more hardcore use-my-skills kinds of
> players.

Not a disjoint segregation, no; there would be a significant area of
intersection, where players could share the world but have experiences
of their own choosing.

> As I attempted to point out, even destruction of a character isn't
> permanent death.

It is for that character.

> Only complete game ejection is permanent death.

That would be death (in game terms) for the player, but in game terms
the player doesn't exist, only the character. It goes completely
against the fiction of most games to have a non-closed world. Now you
could have a game where it made sense in the game fiction for a player
to be chucked off if their character died, but you'd have to set it up
like that from the start.

In terms of a game world populated by characters, permanent death
means character death, not player blocking.

> Your comment about elimination of a given name from the game world
> is a barrier, but not a complete one.  I use the character name
> Tormanth in games (that I like), and if killed off, I'd then use
> Tormantth, Tormmanth, etc.

And you'd still say that you were playing the same character as
before?  But you're not!

> the player can reconstruct the essence of the character - its
> personality, which always survives because it lies with the player.

The player can attempt to, yes, but it won't be the same character.
It would be like an identical twin, kept in cryogenic suspension and
brought out when the other twin died. You could try to bring up the
identical twin the same way, but the environment has changed and you
have changed since the previous twin was brought up. They could be
similar, but similar enough to have the same essence?

> Unless we want to pursue real player death :)

Only in extreme circumstances...

> Achievement is the only viable form of entertainment?

No, but it delivers or enables other forms of entertainment to
non-achievers, which is why it's important in multiplayer games.

> The most popular entertainment in existence is passive.

Sex is passive?!

> I see no reason to believe that achievement need be an integral part
> of an entertaining game experience.

I would agree with that entirely if it didn't have the word "game" in
it.

> I want a character to be developing a mental map of the world as it
> experiences it.

What if the player already has a mental map from having played the
game before? Would you insist on the character learning everything as
if it knew nothing (which is the purer solution) or allow the player
to use their mental map (which isn't so pure).

Example: every time the thief goes near the market, he sees a set of
dangerous warding spells on a nearby doorway. He isn't going to know
what's behind the door until he has the power to remove the wards. The
player, though, used to run a wizard. He knows that the wards aren't
as dangerous as they look, and that behind the gate is a wise old man
who will teach you how to make dangerous-looking wards. So rather than
waiting until his thief has the skill to recognise the wards to be
safe, the player just sends the thief through the door, sets off a
couple of minor dizziness spells or something, and now has free rein
of the area beyond.

It's OK saying that you want a game where characters have knowledge,
but how (or should?) you remove the knowledge that the players have?

>> No, but the destruction of OTHER people's characters can be. It's
>> just not a great deal of fun when it's you it happens to.

> Um, that strikes me as a little bit nutty.  It's no fun for me to
> get whacked, but it's fun to do it to other people, who probably
> feel the same way that I do?

I didn't say youhad to do it to other people, just that they had it
done to them. I wouldn't necessarily get fun from pushing someone into
a pond, but I might get fun if I watched them bend down and a goat ran
up and butted them in. No-one would watch any of those home video
shows on TV if they didn't like laughing at the misfortune of others.

> Certainly a player can follow a different path, but there was a
> reason that he was in the original path in the first place.

Yes, but if you can't get off a path then that doesn't mean the reason
necessarily applies later on.

> In my world, I want to permit characters to morph over time to fit
> the exact spot that the player wanted.  So there are no mistakes of
> choosing the wrong class or the wrong race.

I just wrote a section of a proposal for a new game that says almost
exactly that (only using about 20 times the words!). I'm in
wholehearted agreement with you there.

> You are playing the game as you intended to.  If you wanted to
> change your mind, you change your mind and you change your
> character.

But it's not that easy. The longer a character "lives", the harder it
becomes to change it (emotionally). You keep the character for
sentimental reasons, you may want to change it but you can't bring
yourself to do it.  You can end up in a rut, wanting to get out but
unable to do so. In that kind of situation, PD is a form of release.

Of course, if you're not in that situation then you won't necessarily
thank the designer if you die <grin> .

> Discarding the exact character that you were after makes no sense to
> me.

It's what you wanted, but is it what you want now?


Richard

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