[MUD-Dev] Are gratification-based (online) societies doomed to being immatu re?

[shren]

On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Derek Licciardi wrote:

[snip]

> I think the "Future of MMOGs" thread discusses the empowerment of
> the players to affect the game world/story and the above post
> seems to do a good job at drawing a parallel between the SWG
> concepts and the future of MMOGs.  It would seem to me that the
> conclusions that this SWG thread arrives at (excepting the above
> post) are purely empirical in nature and describe only what has
> been seen.  As they say in the stock market, "past performance is
> not an indicator of future performance".  To a degree this has to
> be true about MMOG behavioral patterns; it simply can not be the
> end of the MMOG behavioral study.
 
> In my mind there has to be a way to empower the players to create
> stronger societies such that the threshold for accepting loss is
> raised high enough to support higher forms of cultural and
> societal interaction.  We can't have every city war/trade
> war/political war resulting in 50% of participants canceling
> subscriptions because they lost.  If the threads assessment of
> players holds true over time, then it is nearly impossible to
> build communities in game that thrive from politics, tradewars,
> and other emotionally deeper PvP types.  According to the
> assessment of players in the thread, most players would opt out of
> more mature gameplay because someone had to lose by engaging in
> said gameplay.  It also assumes that there can be no fun on a mass
> scale where there are losers.  Are we so afraid of losing
> customers that we need to restrict the range of emotions we invoke
> out of our players through our designs, fearing that any
> non-happy/sterile emotion is beyond the capacity of a paying
> customer to handle and keep paying?  I'm not sure this will hold
> true with the emotionally deeper games of the future; I'm not sure
> anything other than the RPG method of old has been tried to prove
> otherwise.  SWG may be the first to even begin down the path this
> different type of MMOG.  Sure, given the gameplay of today, the
> conclusions in the thread are pretty spot on, but again, its
> empirical and hopefully not a valid indicator of the future for
> these games.

What a lot of players miss is that the medium and the system has a
huge effect on who they are in the online world.  Certain behaviors
are rewarded, and all other behaviors are punished simply by not
being rewarding.

There was a character I played with (know nothing about the player)
when I was in the Skara Brae Rangers named - oh, we'll call him Ed.
Ed was in many ways a cornerstone of the anti-player killer faction
that was SBR.  SBR was unique in a lot of ways because a lot of the
people in it (not me) had a grudge against the people who played the
PKs, wheras most anti-pks saw it as a form of competition.  Oh, and
I've forgotten to state the important fact that we were playing
Ultima Online.

So he guided the guild in a lot of ways, and that's a lot of work.
He put more time into things than I did, and I put quite a bit of
time in.  To sink time into SBR because you dislike pks indicates a
pretty intense dislike of pks.

SBR has gone it's seperate ways now, but I bumped into one of Ed's
posts on a forum one day.  He told a short story where he was
playing Dark Age of Camelot.  Somebody pked him in DAoC, and not
only pked him, but laughed over his corpse.

Ed thought it was funny.  The same 'class' of experience that
encouraged Ed to be a leader in an anti-pk guild in UO was just sort
of vaguely amusing and fun in an odd way in DAoC.

I really think that the game enviornment shaped the way he behaved.
All of the little rules that add up to a rules-set encourage us to
act one way, discouage us to act another, and the little changes add
up to a big difference in the way people act - fundamentally, who
thier characters turn out to be in an online world.  Just like you
can't really analyze a person independantly of thier cultural
enviornment, you can't analyze the way a person acts in a MUD
independantly of each individual MUD.

--
<a href="http://www.shren.net/.nail.html">
The client needs a tool built. He sends you a description of a nail...
</a>

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