[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[Ron Gabbard]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
> 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!

If a game has infinite resources, equal access to resources by all,
and is PvP-, it is almost impossible to stop the formation of
templates.

This is one of the main problems I have with the US trying to export
democracy all over the world.  Democracy requires an educated
constituency.  Yet, you go to regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, Arab
States, or Southern Asia and you have illiteracy rates of 40 to 50%
and radio/television penetration of 10-20%.
http://www.literacyonline.org/explorer/regsworld.html The
populations are extremely different due to environment and resources
than the 'developed' countries.  Thus, you end up with monarchies
and tribal organizations in many countries where the population
and/or infrastructure just isn't sophisticated enough to efficiently
support a democracy.  Then add the problem of trying to implement a
relatively new system of government into a culture that is thousands
of years old and there are serious issues.

Personal opinion, too much is just 'given away' in games.  The five
minutes that players spend in character creation represents years
and years of the avatar's early life.  Each 'click' that bumps the
avatar's Intelligence or Strength or whatever represents a
tremendous amount of training and activity.  In the fantasy genre,
long-lived races are considered 'wiser' than the short-lived races.
This makes sense as experience is a dear teacher and long-lived
races have more time to have more experiences and to pass down those
experiences from generation to generation.  However, within the
context of games, we've removed the 'long-lived' factor and have
just inferred the increased wisdom on the race.  In short, we've
taken all the environmental and cultural factors and have made them
genetic... even to the point of removing language barriers which is
a HUGE factor in the formation of communities.  The result is a very
'achievement-oriented' game prone to being made into templates as
the 'roleplay' life of a character varies little from race to race.

Within the context of communities, much of the same activity has
taken place.  Player organizations are typically operating in an
identical environment and culture with access to identical
resources.  It makes sense that template forms of governance would
form... there is little competitive advantage for doing otherwise
nor is there any real competition in the first place.

Cheers,

Ron



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