[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[John Buehler]

Dave Rickey writes:
> 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.

The tools needed for constructing a guild were present - certainly
the impetus for composing a guild existed in those games.  But
medieval hierarchies didn't form because there was no need for the
players to construct them.  If there had been a reason for them to
exist, then players would have attempted to construct them.  As you
suggest, this would happen regardless of whether the game actually
coded up that structure in the game.

>> 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.

You're talking about more primitive constructs and how they will
form in the face of the game trying to force a more sophisticated
construct.  Specifically, friendships (or enemies) in the face of
culture wars.  Those friends had a desire to interact, so they did
it.  I'm referring to the lack of value in players organizing a city
watch.  There's no point in doing such a thing because enemies can't
approach a city.  Not even if they wanted to.  I'm not lobbying for
a feature here.  I'm observing that organizational constructs don't
come into being when a game doesn't permit the impetus for the
organization to form.

No invasions?  No armies.  No laws?  No police.  And so on.

>> 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.

The rewards that you bring up are part of the impetus that I'm
talking about.  But organizations solve problems just as they pursue
rewards.  The bottom line here is that games should be supporting
and permitting and encouraging the formation of organizations that
are *entertaining*.

As I've stated many times in the past, I don't believe that
player-run content - including organizations - is a good thing
overall.  As a result, I'd like to see NPCs running these more
complex organizations, with the players operating within them.  So
players get to influence events up and down the organizational
structure, but they don't define it or control it, per se.

Anyway, that's my take on it.  I don't know that I'm disagreeing
with you so much as trying to make a different point.

JB


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