[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[David Kennerly]

From: Paul Schwanz <pschwanz at comcast.net> on Tuesday, August 27, 2002 09:53:

> I don't doubt that building this sort of flexibility into
> communities will require more effort and resources for designing
> and coding the game, but it seems to me that the benefits would
> vastly outweigh the costs.

> Or am I just not seeing the whole picture here?

I'll try to offer a little guidance from a perspective of having
seen the whole picture, from idea to scripting to customer support.
I've had similar ideas and tested them in a couple of graphical
MMORPGs.  The experience changed me.  Before then, I would have
nodded my head, "Yes."  Below, I'm not shaking my head, "No."  I'll
dissect what is vague.  Vague ideas are doomed to the worst kind of
failure, the kind that doesn't even prove if the idea was bad or the
implementation was bad.

> Could not all of the above options be included in the charter/city
> creation interface?

What would be an example charter/city creation interface?  What are
the menus and options?  What are the resulting city algorithms of
each configuration?

> When the city is formed, let the founders decide which
> implementation will be best (with the possibility to change the
> charter at a later date through citizen vote...or not).

> This will then give players the freedom to choose from among a
> number of different possible implementations the approach they
> believe best addresses their own concerns.

_Their own concerns_ have no necessary correlation the game
operator's concerns or the populace's concerns.

> Variation, along with

> the natural, player-choice selection mechanism, will cause the
> most fit implementations to thrive and the least fit
> implementations to wither away.

The terms "natural selection," "player-choice," "mechanism," and
"fit implementations" hold too many tentative assumptions.  These
vague terms delegate the problems without solving any one problem.
Please elaborate by example.

Please give an example of the selection mechanism.  One form of
natural selection would be for the poor leaders to die--not their
characters, the players at home on their computers.  Another form
would be for all players of a failing city to die, like captives on
a sinking ship--not the characters, the players.

What is the exact "player-choice" mechanism?  Is it a marketplace, a
representative democracy, a meritocracy, a socialist democracy?
How?

Is a city chartered like a company?  If so, what is the algorithm?
Who are the "players"?  What makes player-choice selection superior
to expert-choice selection to decide the design of a service
subsystem?

Every online community developer should answer these questions in
hundreds of pages of painstaking detail. But to even casually
discuss the artful design of "natural selection" and "player-choice"
requires ample definition, detail, and example.

> If I don't like the community's implementation, I can find another
> community within the same MMORPG, but if I don't like the global
> implementation, I must look outside of the current MMORPG if I am
> to find the community that fits me.

You may, but do customers work this way?  When a customer has one
bad experience, does he usually give the service another try?  Or
does he usually give another service a try?

Imagine the situation was upsetting, like being player-killed in
Ultima Online, or being abused by a corrupt officer of the village
political system in Dark Ages.

> If you then design so that community growth leads to increased
> opportunities for individual success, won't this create an even
> stronger selection mechanism?

This overlooks the individuals for the group.  The Tragedy of the
Commons appears: Everyone wants community growth a little, but the
ones in political power want political power a lot.  Thus, every
decision is skewed away from community growth and skewed toward
personal power.  Electing a new tyrant won't fix the broken system
that the players chose.

Not all communities want to be big.  In Nexus The Kingdom of the
Winds in 1998, a game designer (me) created twelve advanced social
classes, called subpaths.  These were specialized classes in the D&D
sense, but were also philosophical and had scripted social
structures.  I began with Schwanz's premise that pressure to grow
would be sufficient.  It wasn't.  The leaders adhered to my lofty
ideals and thereby refused admittance to most applicants.

That was my social design mistake.  I scripted, and my successor
(Kevin Saunders) scripted around 10% of the total game's assets for
the privelege of less than 5% of the population.  Unlike the level
treadmill of many MUDs, EverQuest being well-known on MUD-Dev,
wherein top levels receive the best game assets, the showcase was
useless.  One couldn't continue to play and pay to advance, as in a
level treadmill.  One had to achieve human permission.

In another example, Dark Ages (1999) offers religions.  I began to
script methods for reward to the largest or fastest growing
religions.  However, I ran into three problems, so I didn't finish.
One, I didn't have a concrete mechanism; my idea was too vague.
Two, some religions were exclusive and enjoyed being so, which
resembles the problem with the Nexus subpaths.

Three, natural selection was working, but data suggested it was not
for the reasons I intended.  As I collected data, I noticed a trend
that lead to an unencouraging interpretation.  Location, location,
location.  The population of each religion was inversely
proportional to the religion's temple's distance from the new player
village.

I had planned for this.  I intentionally placed the most kind and
gregarious religion closest to the new player village.  And the new
player village is not the only village players may have as a home.

Yet, it seemed that religion size was primarily a function of
something other than the religion's wise decisions.  Therefore,
natural selection would not serve in this case.  The nearest temple,
Glioca, would survive by its proximity, regardless of the quality of
its leadership.

Another misuse of natural selection is to ignore research.  Some
choices should be made ahead of time, because they are optimal.  The
point of natural selection is to arrive at an optimal.

One graphical MMORPG or MUD, Dark Ages (1999, www.darkages.com)
provided nearly Nomic-style natural selection.  The game operator
(me) scripted rules ("Dark Ages Politics in Theory and Practice").
Having done it, I realized several things I should have _not_ left
up to the players to decide.  I adminstered the players and
subsequently made it more fun by making it less player-controlled.

It was not a sandbox to begin with, so to hear tell of a sandbox
makes me shudder.  While anything will work in the hands of angels
(handpicked or not), it is devils that will test your service's
design quality.

David



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev