[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Paul Schwanz wrote:
> Matt Mihaly wrote:
>> On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Paul Schwanz wrote:
 
>>> For example, I recently participated in a discussion regarding
>>> eminent domain laws in player-owned cities in an MMORPG
>>> currently in development.  This is the first time I've seen ED
>>> debated, but in many ways, I feel like I've participated in the
>>> same exact discussion on many, many occasions.

>> We deal with a lot of ED issues. I know a number of other text
>> MUDs do too.
 
> Hehe.  I've never played Achaea, but I would have bet that it and
> probably other text MUDs had covered much of this ground...which
> was why I only indicted current MMORPGs and those that are in
> development.
 
> I know this list has hashed over whether or not MMORPGs are
> significantly different to MUDs.  As I recall, most of the
> differences discussed had to do with scale.  Do you think the way
> you handle player-run cities in Achaea would scale well to an
> MMORPG?  Personally, I don't see any reason it wouldn't.

Well, I purposefully refer to what you call an MMORPG as a graphical
MUD, because, well, that's what it is. The best quote I've heard on
the differences came on this list, from our own Raph Koster, who
said, "They're the same animal as long as you allow for the
differences between a miniature poodle and a great dane." (He may
have used different dog names, but I don't think it matters.)

I think that everything we do with politics can scale almost
infinitely, except for one thing. Each city chooses a particular God
as the patron of that city. That God is a volunteer who is
roleplaying. I don't think the cities NEED gods necessarily, but
what a human being roleplaying a God as patron does provide is a
sense of restraint. We've never really had any significant problems
with political leaders blatantly abusing their power (of course,
blatant abuse can be subjectively defined, but in my view, we've
never had big problems), and this MAY be attributable to the fact
that there is an admin personally watching over each city who is
going to be quite pissy if you start treating your office like a
toy.

The other things that Gods do for cities, and for the game
generally, is provide inspiration for roleplaying. I suspect that
just having a 'God of Darkness' as your city patron, for instance,
is going to nudge the player-population of that city towards a
different type of culture than having, say, a 'God of Righteousness'
as the city patron.

So I think it probably would scale quite well, but would need some
tweaking to get rid of the human-playing-a-God role. Managing the
number of Gods that would be required in a large game would be
daunting to say the least.

--matt


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