[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:
> On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, John Buehler wrote:

>> Direct support for structures means far more than just coding up
>> constructs that say 'such and such a structure now exists'.  It
>> means having all the stuff in the game that causes players to
>> want to organize into those structures.  Asheron's Call is a
>> perfect example of both creating a structure by supporting it
>> with reasons and creating a structure which had little reason
>> behind it.

> That's not my experience, if I understand correctly what you're
> saying. For instance, we instituted a generic grouping system for
> players that has absolutely no supported effects on the game
> world. (http://www.achaea.com/clans.htm) If they're used for
> something, it's entirely because the players got creative and
> decided to use these groups (we call them clans) for something,
> and yet they're very popular. I just got a request the other day,
> in fact, to raise the limit on the number of clans you can belong
> to past 10 (the current limit).

Some motivations are internal and needn't be supplied by the game.
We all know that a big draw for the games is the social element.
All sorts of phenomena relating to social dynamics kick in
automatically, and simply association to a group is one that needs
no impetus behind it other than letting players communicate.  That's
my theory, anyway.  For more complex organizations, if you want to
trigger their existence such that a large percentage of your players
will form or join, additional impetus is needed.

"Lord of the Flies" was a pretty good study of how two groups can
form out of essentially nothing more than personalities.
Personalities of young boys, who don't have particularly complex
motivations in their lives.  Take a bunch of adults with more
complex motivations and you've got groups forming for all sorts of
different reasons.  I'm pleased to hear that Achaea permits
membership in multiple clans, by the way.  Would that the big
graphical games did the same.

But they're only groups.  Alliances between groups will form partly
for reasons of internal motivation and partly for reasons that the
game itself introduces.  For example, in political wranglings, the
House of Blue Coats might form up with the Clan of the Stag simply
because they have lots of social ties between them.  Certainly some
of the alliances that I was exposed to in Dark Age of Camelot fell
into that category.  We realized that we tended to do the same stuff
the same way, so we'd form an alliance of our groups.  External
motivations (game-supplied motivations) kicked in for other
alliances, such as being able to organize enough people for a relic
fort defense.  Those motivations caused players to form alliances -
with contractual obligations - in order to be able to field a large
enough force to deal with the problem of relic fort defense.

The point I'm trying to make is that democratic systems came into
being for a reason.  Monarchies, feudal systems, clan systems,
you-name-it systems - they all existed for a reason other than the
citizens just thought it would be fun to do.  The reasons behind
their existence are based in the environment that the citizens found
themselves, as well as the type of citizens that made up the
population.  For example, Democracy works in some cultures and not
in others.  Try pushing a monarchy into America now and watch it
fail miserably.  I doubt there's an impetus that would motivate
Americans to go for a monarchy.  If we want to have more complex
organizational systems than just clans, the appropriate impetus is
going to have to be injected by the game designers.  That, or the
game designers are going to have to find the right kind of people
who like to organize those more complex structures for no reason
other than internal motivations - i.e.  they like to do it.  To my
thinking, that's a niche group of players, but they do exist.

My comment about the 'appropriate' impetus is key.  Each game design
is an experiment in social engineering, and we're all learning as we
go.  But if we want a particular structure to come into being, we'll
have to motivate the players to want to rely on that structure -
wherever their internal motivations are insufficient.  If we're
willing to, we can try to use NPC organizations to create a skeletal
framework on which the players can pattern.  In other words, the
players can be given 'good ideas' through the use of NPCs that are
already organized in certain ways.  If done correctly, players will
pattern after it.  Done incorrectly (which is always easier to do),
players will just complain about it.

JB


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