[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:
> On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, John Buehler wrote:

>> There may also be a concern that if the classes or city types are
>> not explored in detail to establish their viability that the game
>> might devolve to a single class (e.g. tank mage) or a single city
>> administration type.  That would fly in the face of any marketing
>> that might suggests that "varied player communities would
>> develop, providing a range of entertainment choices".

> You don't even need to support different types of political
> structures in your code to allow this to happen. Hell, try
> STOPPING it from happening!

I'd say that political structures do, in fact, need to be directly
supported.  Perhaps not in smaller games with more intimate
atmospheres and more enthusiastic players, but certainly in the
rather more impersonal and casual-player-based MMORPGs.  The only
structures that ever evolved in the graphical games that I've seen
are the ones that the games directly supported.  Asheron's Call had
monarchies because they were directly supported.  EverQuest and Dark
Age of Camelot had guilds because they were directly supported.

Note that 'directly supporting' something means more than just
providing coding that acknowledges the existence of certain
structures (e.g. guilds), but also the ability to let those
structures operate.  There's not much point in creating a guild if
being a member of a guild has no value.  Guilds - or any other
social structure - has to have a purpose behind it.  Said another
way, a social structure should be permitted to come into existence
for natural reasons.  Because current games seem to limit themselves
to player purposes that the game creators put in by design, players
don't have other purposes to encourage them to organize other
structures.  Relationships between players are designed by the game
developers, which is something that irks me no end.

Certainly players will come up with every possible political
construct possible within the confines of whatever the game
designers have created.  But in the end, the game designers set the
limits.

JB


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