[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle writes:

>> Except that I worry about mixing gamers and non-gamers.

> Oh, I don't worry about that at all - it's essential for the kind of
> game I want. What I worry about is the recipe for combining gamers
> and non-gamers ot make the tastiest game, not whether they should be
> ingredients at all.

An interesting thought.  I'll be interested to see if it can be done,
and what form the game will take.  Your idea of changing the rules of
the world along geographic lines is something that I've postulated as
well.  In my case, I was thinking of it primarily as a means of
discovering what players enjoyed most.  Predicating a game world on a
single set of rules seems so all-or-nothing with respect to the
success of the game.

> I certainly will. They don't want a game, they want a book of line
> drawings of animals and some crayons so they can colour them in.

Yup, and that's one kind of entertainment that I want to present.
Players who just visit a tavern so that they can play virtual cards
while wearing leather armor and a sword.  Or who like to practice
diving off the nearby cliffs into the ocean.  They do it just because
they're amused by it.

>> I'm not challenging the players, I'm just entertaining them.  It's
>> somewhere between a movie and the real world in the investment that
>> a player has to make in order to find entertainment.

> Well, as I said before, you could do this and get a stable game but
> it would be ruinous in its requirements for new content.

The need for introducing dynamicism to the game world has become more
and more a focus of my investigations.

>> Ever gone hiking in the back woods and had somebody break out a
>> cell phone and start talking business with somebody?

> Strangely, no, I haven't.

Neither have I :) The point of the example was to suggest the damage
done to context when out-of-context activities are presented.

>> I'm mentioned before that this produces social stratification in
>> the online community.

> And I've mentioned before that it doesn't if you have PD.

Could you repeat the rationale?  Power levels seem to produce social
stratificiation, and reseting a player's character to newbie power
wouldn't seem to affect that structure.

>> And they are going to help me powergame my way back up again.

> If you're a likeable person and if they don't get killed too, they
> may indeed help. On the other hand, they might be moving in
> different circles and only be able to offer limited assistance.

I'm assuming that the social stratification means that there is a
fairly small segment of the population that is at my power level and
that I will naturally tend to find a group of people that I can both
like and play with.  Seems a bit odd to simply play with people that
you don't like much.  That would run counter to the idea that these
are social games.

>> The only way I can see breaking this chain is to make powergaming
>> advancement take so long that the powerful characters will refuse
>> to invest that much time.

> Well another way would be for the game to be adaptable, such that
> powergaming isn't possible. Sure, there may be a forest full of
> wolves that you can clear out in 30 minutes for a ton of points, but
> if you can't guarantee that 8 hours later the wolves will all be
> back then you have to go off and do something else - something you
> may not have done before. A game can automatically "modulate its
> shields" against power gamers by reacting to the effects that
> powergamers have.

Yes, as much as possible, I'd like to transition content that is
normally dynamic to being dynamic in the game context.  I believe that
static content is a huge contributor to the nightmare that is
powergaming.  Regardless of this, the powergamers will figure out some
means of advancing at an accelerated rate.  And their goals will not
be to enjoy the game, but to get back to their original power level.
I'd just as soon excise the extreme form of the process.

>> I'm working up my first time character, experiencing the world.
>> But if I'm travelling with this second time guy, he already knows
>> all the answers and knows what's around the next corner.

> So if you were hiking in the woods, you wouldn't WANT to go with
> someone who had been in the woods before and knew what to expect? 
> Wow!  No wonder so many people get lost on mountainsides and the
> authorities have to send out rescue parties to find them.

Sorry, I was vague in my choice of words:

I'm working up my first time character, experiencing the world.  But
if I'm travelling with a player who has already developed an advanced
character and he's now running his second newbie character, his
character already knows all the answers - despite the fact that the
character shouldn't know them.  In my exchanges with Matt, I talk
about modeling character knowledge.  If that were done, it would tend
to limit the impact of experienced players.  Such players would know
the ins and outs of manipulating the game controls and interpreting
what the game is saying, etc, but their character wouldn't necessarily
know lots due to the transfer of information that comes from the
player.

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

>> Semantics. To me, they are taken away regardless of whether the
>> software does it or another player does it.  To you, it's
>> different.

> So someone comes and sets fire to your house. They've taken it away
> from you. No disagreement there. You set fire to your own
> house. "The world" has taken it away from you. Curse those laws of
> physics!

> There is a BIG difference between someone screwing you up and your
> screwing yourself up. If you consider this a mere point of
> semantics, there is very little point in pursuing this discussion
> further.

We can go the dancing angels approach if you like.

When someone screws me up, is that because of what I did or because of
what they did?

When the game screws me up, is that because of what I did or because
of what the game did?

I'll agree that there is a difference between knowing that an
individual chose to ruin my fun versus knowing that a piece of
software followed its inevitable course of actions and tried to ruin
my fun.

>> It depends on whether they're interested in experiencing the game
>> with a new social group or not.

> I agree. They get the choice.

Given human nature, what percentage will opt to go each route?  For
me, the answer is to return to the known good, which is to get back to
my group of friends.  If they're not my friends, then I'll search out
a new group.  As you say, in some cases it's a welcome relief.

I can just see the player who finds himself stuck with a group that he
doesn't like and - oops - he accidentally falls off a cliff.

>> No character can master all skills, and the goal is to have many
>> skills.

> I'm interested to hear why you don't want characters to be able to
> master all skills. I'm not saying that I think they should be able
> to, but it's just you pulled that line out there and I was wondering
> why you thought it. It doesn't seem to fit into your "let meeee
> entertain you" model.

Entertainment need not be mindless.  If I permit all characters to
possess all skills simultaneously, then I have given them exactly one
set of entertainment.  All characters will accumulate all skills and
all characters will end up being the same.  By saying that only some
subset of skills can be accumulated at any given time, players will
slowly experience the game from a variety of angles.  With character
diversity comes greater complexity of scenarios of interactions
between those characters, which produces dynamics, which provides more
content to the game.

Multiplayer games are about interaction.  I'll claim (and others will
refute) that open-ended multiplayer games need to rely on cooperative
interactions as their primary source of entertainment.  The only time
that competitive interactions are viable is when they are consentual.
Consent can range from PvP switches to simply which game you play.

>> the player model I'm pursuing is one of casual gameplay.  Players
>> regularly stay away from the game for a day or two because they
>> don't feel all that compelled to keep going back.

> The problem you don't really seem to have addressed is that if
> there's no compelling reason for them to come back after a couple of
> days, why would they ever come back?

'Compelling' is the key word.  I don't want a compelling reason, I
just want a good reason.  Do you have a hobby that you return to every
now and again?  The hobby mentality is the one I'm trying to focus on.
The task is enjoyable enough for the hobbyist to engage in it for a
week, set it aside for a month, come back for a day, away for a day or
two, and so on.  Given the diversity of casual entertainment that a
virtual world can offer, it would seem that many virtual hobbies could
be drawing the players back to the game.

Remember that the business goal is to gain and keep players, not get
them to play a lot.  My 'feel good' goal is to provide a healthy form
of entertainment for some people.  I want no addictive elements to my
game.

>> In that model, the loss of ability to play the game is a reminder.

> In that model, the loss of ability to play is a shrug of the
> shoulders and who cares, the game isn't all that great anyway, why
> should I stump up ten bucks a month when I don't really miss it when
> it's gone?

If it doesn't make sense to you, that's fine.  It is a balance point
that I believe will make sense to some people.  Those are the people
that I'd invite to be playing my game.

>>> As I attempted to point out, even destruction of a character isn't
>>> permanent death.  It is for that character.  But is that
>>> significant to anybody?

> Well the ones who scream that they won't play games where it can
> happen obviously attribute it with some significance.

Touche.

>> It permits in-game scenarios to play out in a consistent way, and
>> that's about it.

> Consistency is one of the least important reasons for having PD. The
> statement it makes about achievement is the primary benefit of
> having it.

Yeah, but you want it for the exact reasons that I don't.  It makes
in-game activities more valuable to the players.

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

>> world populated by characters, characters shouldn't know things
>> that they weren't exposed to.

> The game doesn't know they do. From the game's point of view, its
> fiction is maintained.

I'm not creating a game so that the game satisfies its own goals.  I'm
creating a game so that people are entertained.  That entertainment is
damaged when characters know things that they weren't exposed to.
Perhaps I misunderstand your point.

>> Same comments as above.  The player's intent is the essential
>> point.

> I don't believe it is. Players have all kinds of goals when they
> start playing a game, and although these shape how the character
> develops they don't dictate it. The intent may give a direction, but
> it doesn't guarantee a destination. I don't see any critical
> consequences of a player's attempting to reproduce an earlier
> character unless there was some means by which they could guarantee
> getting a very close approximation (yes, this means I'm against
> classes and races in these games).

I'm all for dumping the fixed structure of games along the lines of
classes and races.  But I don't believe in *everything* being dynamic.
If there is a training master named Boffo, he might move around, but
he remains in the world.  So if a player knows that Boffo trains a
certain skill, all he has to do is find Boffo.  That might be more
involved than if Boffo stands at location X,Y in the world all the
time, but he knows that Boffo is the man.

The critical consequences that I see are that the player gets
singleminded about locating Boffo.  He's less open to entertainment
around him because he's got a mental image of where he wants to be in
terms of accomplishment.  I may be overstating the point, but it seems
clear to me that some players really lock onto goals and refuse to let
go of them.  Changing the balance of value-of-entertainment versus
value-of-goal would definitely seem to impact the process.

Your assertion that permanent character death also alters this process
remains a point of confusion for me.  If gaining (and keeping) a
powerful character is such a massive accomplishment, then I would
assume that everyone would be charging ahead to figure out how to
reach that goal.

>> In the case of the map, I want the character's mental map to be
>> more reliable and capable than the player's mental map.

> Or the map they downloaded off the web?

That map doesn't have per-character push-pins and it doesn't give the
cross-section of information that the player wants to see based on his
character's skills.  The character with tracking skills can see game
trails on his map, while the character with strategy skills can see
the map another way.  The character with geology skills sees other
elements of the map.  These things can eventually all be recorded, but
I'll continue to try to figure out how to get the character's map more
valuable to the player than the web map.  Consider the ability to
point to a location on the character's mental map and the character
can just go there without further instructions.  Without that mental
map, the player has to drive the character into unknown areas.

>> In a dynamic world, this will be more viable than in a static one.
>> In a dynamic world, the character's perception skills and knowledge
>> will permit the player to more readily interact with the world.  In
>> a static world, once something is known, everyone knows it and
>> there's little value to having the character know it.

> OK, I understand what you're saying, and yes, making the world so
> fluid that players can't ever rely on their earlier knowledge is a
> possibility. However, I believe that for many players this will be
> VERY disconcerting, and I also believe (as usual) that this could
> eat up content at phenomenal rate.

I thought you were after something similar.  Can you explain why you
believe that this approach will eat up content at a phenomenal rate?
The changing permutations of the existing game content is what is
supposed to provide that 'new' content.  Remember that I'm trying to
provide entertainment.  That doesn't mean killing things or destroying
things.  THAT is a great way to chew up content.  New exploration
experiences can be handled through automated content creation and a
large world - problems that I'm working on software solutions for.  I
have a terrain generator for a planet the size of the moon, a cave
system generator and now the beginnings of a castle generator.  I look
forward to the day when I do the 'population generator' that produces
a bunch of NPCs who run the towns and such.  Or maybe just the
'wildlife generator' that produces populations of animals and gets
them to move about in interesting ways.

>> Regardless, I don't enjoy it when other people get whacked because
>> I don't enjoy it when I get whacked.

> Not even if they sort of deserved it?

I'm not worried about that case.  I'm worried about the case of people
who don't deserve it, but get whacked anyway.  I identify with them
because I fall into that category.

>> Identifying with other people, be it through their success or their
>> misfortune, seems to be a trait that distinguishes between those
>> who enjoy PvP and those who do not.

> I don't see how you reached that conclusion at all.

I've overstated my point again.  Those who enjoy non-consentual PvP
seem to have this trait.  I enjoy the occasional PvP so long as it is
consentual and all nobody is really risking much of anything.  I like
competition, but I don't like winning and losing.  I've found that I
can often win - if I'm willing to push that little edge bit, get a
little nastier, apply myself a bit more to defeating my opponent.
It's not my cup of tea.

>> I can see the rut phenomenon developing, but I wouldn't go so far
>> as to say that permanent character death is a good thing because it
>> ends that growingly intolerable experience.

> I wouldn't say it was just plain good, but I'd say it could be that
> PD is a cloud that sometimes has a silver lining.

Okay, that I'll buy.

>> But to get THAT, we have to figure out how to keep a large world
>> large.  That is, no teleportation, etc, to shrink it back down
>> again.

> Again, I couldn't agree more. Teleportation over long distances does
> not make for great game worlds.

Have you ever thought of assembling a full design statement of your
world?  I'm getting more and more to the point where I think everyone
who posts here needs to make such a document available before opening
their mouths here :)

JB

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