[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #271 - 30 msgs

[Dr. Cat]

> From: "Richard A. Bartle" <richard at mud.co.uk>
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] New Bartle article
> Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 12:57:34 -0000
 
> The point about permanent death isn't to punish the people who die
> (not that "you can't have what you were expecting to get right now"
> is much of a punishment).
 
> The point about permanent death is to validate the measures by which
> people are judged.

There's a view from one particular angle here of an important
principle of game design.  The "accomplishments" in computer games
feel more satisfying to players if they are "validated" in some way or
other.

The important generalist perspective here is to realize that the forms
of validation that people want are not universal.  Other methods like
a "high score list", getting a lot of in-game money, getting the
praise of one's peers, or finding a girlfriend/boyfriend may be the
preferred form of validation for many people, more than
"accomplishment in spite of potential permadeath".

I would argue, in fact, that the type of gamer that finds games
without permadeath to be unsatisfying is, through a very real group of
people, a small, small minority of the human race.  I was once such a
gamer, my friend Jeff perhaps still is to some extent, but he's a very
hardcore gamer and I think even he's drifting from that.  He would
often avoid using save-game features in single player RPGs to make his
decisions really "matter" more and face "real risks".  But I think a
few times of losing HUGE amounts of time to a mistake or bad luck, and
having to tediously repeat large boring sections of games, has weaned
him of that habit.  I know I use saved-games promiscuously on games
like Heroes of Might and Magic 2, sometimes deliberately trying stuff
I know will fail just to see what will happen, or that only has a
slight chance of success, to see if I get lucky.  I also know I like
games where I've mastered the art of winning against the computer AI,
maybe even using design flaws in it so that I can win fairly easily
and reliably, just so I can have the experience of smugly thinking "I
win again".

Having a game where you can only gain, only make forward progress, and
never lose anything is very unrealistic.  But being a Conan-like dude
who can defeat a dozen orc warriors in armed combat all by himself and
who has a sword that can toss lightning bolts is unrealistic too.  Is
it a fun fantasy?  Hell yeah, in both cases.  Most people would love
to have a real world financial situation where money always came in
faster than you spent it for the rest of their lives.  When this is
simulated in an online world, it appeals to far more people than the
"you can lose a lot or even everything" version would.  Most people
get their validation that the gold/levels/items/etc. "mean something"
from another source, one that wouldn't necessarily feel emotionally
satisfying to the minority of "permadeath cravers" but does good
enough for most people.

I think they run out of that satisfied feeling in the end because the
combat oriented games are inherently trying to feed that same
"climbing the ladder towards Conanism" paradigm that D&D had, and you
can never build more higher rungs at the top faster than the players
up there will start to get bored.  The similarity to the term
"onanism" seems more and more appropriate the more you realize that
the monsters you kill at level 40 are the same algorithms you faced
off against at level 30 with new names and stats slapped onto them,
and the chest of gold coins just has another zero tacked on the end of
it.

If you want to stay in the "boys bashing things with sticks" genre of
games and make the thrill last longer, you have to make it take five
years to get to be level 30 conan, which requires an approach to game
mechanics design and resource economy balancing that most designers
don't seem to be willing or able to take, or to even think of.  Start
from your desired result, and work backwards, hardcoding a system to
work that way.  Is your primary goal for your economy to have no more
than 5% of your characters able to afford and move into the fancy
rooms in Joe-Bob's castle that cost 1000 gold pieces a month in rent?
Program your gold-generating code that places treasures out there to
only generate an amount of gold per month equal to 50 times the number
of characters in the game.  Do you want it to take five years to get
to level 30?  Make a hard-coded component of what's necessary to go up
a level be directly tied to real world calendar time.  Require a
character to wait two months for the simple version, or to vary it a
bit and let some players progress faster at the expense of others,
have a resource needed for levelling that's released into the game
environment at a rate of one per character per two months, and let
them seek/trade/fight over it.

On the other hand, if you want to get out of the niche market of "boys
bashing things with sticks", I think the number one validation
mechanism of human beings in general is "the attention of other
players".  The usual quote I hope to be remembered for after I'm dead,
"Attention is the currency of the future" and all that.  All of our
major validation mechanisms in Furcadia will tend to be based around
attention.  Just opening a place, letting people connect to it and do
a little stuff, they've made attention ALREADY be the main validation
there, just as people in real world social circles do.  It's what
people want most once they've got food, shelter, and maybe sex and
fancy clothes.  Although when you get down to it, sex is a form of
attention, and fancy clothes are a tool for getting attention.  :X)

(Prediction - the combat-mud-focused population of Mud-Dev will spend
far more time and energy talking about what I said are the ways to
improve a combat game than the ways to implement an attention oriented
social game.  Let's watch and see.)

*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* 
   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
*-------------------------------------------**   http://www.furcadia.com
    Furcadia - a graphic mud for PCs!       ||  Let your imagination soar!
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
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