[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[Dave Rickey]

From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com>
> Matt Mihaly writes:

>> 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.

I beg to differ.  The type of guilds you see in EQ and Camelot are
the same basic structures that emerged spontaneously in the old NWN
and other old-school RPG's, as well as in MUD's, even though those
old-school games had *no* support for guilds.  If you wanted to show
your guild affiliation in your name in NWN, you had to create a
character with cryptic codes in its name and level it up from
scratch.  Guilds were created and operated in the face of benign
neglect or even active hostility by the game designers.

> 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.

Not really.  I can't keep two players from forming a relationship,
even the wall between realms in Camelot leaks like a sieve.  You're
putting the cart before the horse here, the players can form any
social network they care to, regardless of what I do.  However,
social networks are adaptive organisms, they take the structure
appropriate to their environment.  Only now are we starting to get a
grasp on that process, and how to shape the social networks.

> 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.

No, we set the *rewards*, and the constructs adapt to those.  Those
contructs that achieve for their individual members the rewards they
seek will prosper, those that do not will wither away.  Guilds as we
know them in EQ and Camelot are social devices for being able to get
a group on short notice.  Beyond that, they are a means of fielding
a "raid" force to handle those fights that require large numbers of
participants.

There are *no* "natural reasons" to form a social stucture in these
games, and no way to force them to appear or to take a certain form.
Everything in these games is unnatural, and they exist in a larger
context that is equally unnatural.  We're bootstrapping societies
into existence from the void.  Thing is, remember that we started
out thinking we were making *games*, and the players sign on
intending to *play* a game.

--Dave



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