[MUD-Dev] Re: Point of View

[John Robert Arras]

On Sun, 22 Sep 2002 listsub at wickedgrey.com wrote:

> I think part of the problem with MMOG "quests" is that most feel
> they must fit into the classical quest mold.  Find the Mystical
> Widget of Foo.  Kill the Great Beast of Bar.  Rescue Some Person
> from the clutches of Someone Else.
 
> I say scrap that.  Part of the problem with using the literature
> model of quests is that having only one outcome is not only
> acceptable, it is _required_ by the medium (unless you count
> choose-your-own-adventures, but IMHO that breaks the "literature"
> qualification ;).

Good. Very good. It isn't about "the story". There is no
"story". The "story" is generated by the world and the players. If
you're trying to tell "your story" then you're not letting your game
and world be all that they can be. The players will figure out that
they're being herded toward doing what the creator wants.

> Give players a world that presents situations and knobs to
> twiddle.  If there are a fair number of PCs in a remote mountain
> mining village, attack the village.  Don't have someone run and
> shout "The goblins are coming!  The goblins are coming!  You, as a
> Hero, must save us!"  Just do it and let the PCs do whatever they
> want.  If they run, they run.  When they hear later the fate of
> the village, they will either mourn the town, be glad they didn't
> get caught in the trap, wish they had stayed and helped, think it
> didn't matter because the town is fine, whatever.  If they stay
> they either become a hero, a slave or a corpse.  If the humans
> lose, then metal prices nearby go up from loss of the mine.

Ok, good.

(This is going to be a storytelling vs. simulation rant. Sorry.)

> It doesn't even have to be simulated -

But it should be. You can do so much more then. Instead of attacking
when players are there, set up populations and have them attack
whenever they feel like it. Maybe players are there, maybe they
aren't. Maybe they do something, maybe they don't. If they aren't
there, then they could find out through news or rumors of some kind
that propogate throughout the world. If you set up general
"population" code, then you have to do it once, and never have to
think about it again. And, if you improve the code, then you get
improvements across the board.

When you're using a computer, you don't have to do everything by
hand every time you want to do something. You can think about what
you're trying to do in a more general and abstract sense and then
solve the general problem. Then you can reuse that solution over and
over without having to do more work. If there's something
interesting that you want the players to experience, why not
abstract the experience so that the players can encounter it in as
many ways as possible without you having to do more work each time.

If you can think of how to simulate it, then you can solve the
general problem, and then when you need have orcs attacking elves
someplace else, you don't have to redo all of the scripts and so
that they work with the other groups of creatures.

I think that game makers should strive to use their computer as a
computer as much as possible, and only use it as a typewriter where
they haven't figured out how to use it as a computer.

An analogy I like to use is the following: If you've taken calculus,
then you may remember those epsilon-delta proofs that you used to
show that functions were continuous. You probably showed that x was
continuous at 3, and x^2 was continuous at 7 and it was a lot of
detailed work every time you did something. Now let's suppose that
you want to show that 342.33*(x^323245)-64345*(x^4)+3 is continuous
at 10^6546. How would you do it? You could grind through the details
using the techniques you used on x and x^2, but you'll soon get
bogged down in pages of detailed calculations where you're likely to
do something wrong.

Another way you can do it is to prove that every polynomial with
real coefficients is continuous at every point of the real line. If
you do that, then you have abstracted the problem and you then have
a single solution that can be used over and over without requiring
more work on your part every time you want to show that some
polynomial is continuous at a certain point. That's the way you want
to think when using computers.

The computer<------->typewriter range is a continuum, and I feel
that it's important to strive toward the computer end of the
range. IMO This is how to move forward. Not by making ever more
detailed worlds where everything is STILL created by hand one piece
at a time, but by figuring out what you want to do, then doing it in
as much generality as possible. After that, you let the computer do
the dirty work.

I know that this subject has been discussed to death on this list,
but if anyone's looking for outside sources, I would recommend
reading a book that's been mentioned before: Hamlet on the Holodeck:
the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet Murray, and also
looking at Chris Crawford's Erasmatron pages:

http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/crawford.html

> That's the kind of game I want to play(make).

Me too. :)

John


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