[MUD-Dev] RE: Realistic Ecological Models, Differentiating Areas by Difficulty, and Socialization

[shren]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Damion Schubert wrote:

> I've tried to get these concepts to work multiple times, and where
> I usually end up is that, in order to make a dynamic ecology work
> and be fun, I have to remove a lot of the realism from it.  And
> that realism is, for many ecology proponents, the whole point.

Realism makes for poor games.  Why, I've walked this earth for years
and never gotten attacked.  Nice for reality, not so nice for a
game.  If I were paying for this I'd be griping about the spawn
rate.

What I want is more complex systems.  Fixed spawning is an ecology.
The monsters grow out of the ground at points.  The issue is that
it's a dull, dead-end ecology, where nothing the players actually do
matters.

The oppisite, which I guess I'll call free spawning, is:

  1) There are a fixed amount of monsters in the world.

  2) Slain monsters respawn out of living monsters.

  3) Monsters form groups and wander outwards seeking lower
  population density.

Now, everything the players do matter.  Every slain monster causes a
population shift.  The monster population center of the world will
be kicked around like a soccer ball as players hunt the best waves
of monsters like surfers look for the best waves.

Neither system, in my mind, is ideal.  What I'm wanting after is
deep play.  That's why I find myself looking at cellular automata of
different types and trying to see how the technology and methods
there can be adapted.  My foe is predictability.  In both of the
simple examples above, the monsters are predictable.

On the other hand, look at a conway's life simulation.  By and
large, if you have a simulation with many thousands of blocks, and
you run it from start to some fixed time in the future, then you'll
get the same result each time.  Few if any could tell you what that
result is going to look like.  If you take just one block out,
though, odds are the final result is going to change completely.
That's complexity at work - that's what I want.  I want to see the
world turn out different as a result of the player's actions, or
even minor changes in the monster composition.  I seek complexity
over realism.

--
http://www.shren.net

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