[MUD-Dev] Reputation systems: a possible path for investigation

[david.l.smith at mail-x-change.com]

On Sunday, August 10, 2003, J C Lawrence said

> Reputation systems are usually thought of as interesting ways for
> the game system to define and provide predetermined and
> service-qualified hinting and decision making keys to players
> about other players (PK, trade, trust etc).

Actually, as a developer, I was originally more interested in a
reputation system that would let me add a noosphere {The article
mentioned "http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/masum/" by
Hassan Masum uses this notion, and it fits much better than my
previous thinking. In a simulated environment, a part of the state
of that simulation is the body of experience in the system: things
that "everyone knows". That this includes much more than "faction a
reaction bonus towards faction b" isn't well conveyed by most
systems that I've seen). While the per-faction reputation tracking
systems that today boil down to the one-dimensional relationship of
"reaction bonus" are better than nothing, a more free-form (or
rather, higher dimensionality of comparison without much more code)
approach could make for some interesting emergent characteristics
from the state of the noosphere.

For instance:

  -- All non-player characters in the simulation form opinions using
  the description of things which "disturb" them (to borrow from
  NWN's scripting notion of "disturb"). The opinion expresses
  values, positive, or negative along a dimension .The descriptions
  could, for instance, be tagged at build-time with "noticeable"
  characteristics. These could get built into an opinion by the
  character when it's disturbed (examples "I hate losing hp", "I
  like gaining hp", "I really hate getting hit by shiny glowing
  bastard sword").

  -- When non-player characters interact with each other (in a
  flagged area together for a given time) they could exchange some
  randomly chosen set of opinions (go go gossping mobiles "oh my
  god, did you hear? Vnum 0x5A7F73 has the hots for That pretty
  little hexen 0x64625FF").

  -- With some framework to cross correlate context data (that with
  is big, I agree), it would be fairly straightforward to let the
  system run itself with very easy contextual input from the
  designers.  Additionally, if the ability to cross correlate is
  very good, scanning player character in-character channels for
  opinions would be an amazing addition.

  -- Admittedly, designing a system with a fixed, and therefore
  straightforward to correlate, but arbitrarily dimensioned
  noosphere should be possible (Hey, if everyone expressed their
  opinions in a known form, and there was a known vocabulary for
  that form, at least parsing them out and deriving things from
  them, complex as they may become, should be... something to which
  a solution could be found--I couldn't bring myself to type easy,
  or straightforward in there). And it would likely have huge
  ramifications to the depth of immersion that the system
  develops. Something as simple as the following line of thought is
  what I'm thinking about.

  -- All low level characters have gear that sports a bunch of
  common tags "cheap", "flashy", "new", etc. Coincidently, low level
  characters often prey on a given non-player character in a given
  area (killing rabbits outside town is a common pastime). So the
  population of rabbits learns to be wary of those wearing that
  gear. Or they become afraid of humans altogether.

  -- But a system flexible enough to assume only "a common
  vocabulary and grammar" for opinions, that wouldn't barf the first
  time someone drops a few bytes of leet speak into a role-play
  channel, Wow.

  -- If you wanted to finish the circle, tie it into your player
  character's experience, depending on the era, allow them to buy a
  newspaper, or "chat up the barkeep" to get a little slice of the
  hot gossip in the system nooosphere. Might be nice to know that
  the local keep thinks that the guy you're doing business with is
  shady, might be worth your silver to learn that he's rumored to
  have killed three good men. Then again, maybe you're fine going
  off in his party with him, never can tell really...

But for me, the man behind the bar, he usually knows.
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev