[MUD-Dev] Player Justice

[Matt Mihaly]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Koster, Raph wrote:

> I should clarify--there was no way built into the design to
> overrun the local government BY FORCE; you could do it via moving
> in and then voting out the current government. However, players
> were extremely vocal in demanding the ability to decide who should
> be allowed to move into their towns, which they wanted to use as a
> method to prevent immigration that might destabilize their
> government. Governmental changes via population influx were
> perceived as a form of griefing. Spectral threats of roving
> relocators moving into town after town voting themselves in and
> then ruining the place were raised by those interested in the
> politics game.

These are somewhat similar issues to our games. We don't have a
problem with roving relocators (there are somewhat potentially
significant barriers to switching cities) but I think we'd handle
that by administrative fiat: If you're going to go into politics
just to ruin the organization, we'll replace you ourselves. Our
viewpoint is that players don't own the cities: They are caretakers
of them for future generations.

> At this point, I think enough concessions have been made to the
> existing governments that it would be impossible to remove one if
> they didn't want to be removed. A good argument can be made that
> given the size of groups we're talking about here, we're not
> really in a social position to have democratic action working
> correctly--most player governments are led by force of will by a
> single highly dedicated individual. Having the "game of politics"
> when there's really only one qualified player per government (and
> replacing them would cause disintegration of the government) isn't
> really viable.

I think this is probably a result of letting players found
cities. For example, despite much smaller populations, our games
have managed to avoid this to some extent. There is definitely a
'game of politics', and I think it arises partly because we've
placed strict limits on the # of cities in the games. Players cannot
start their own, and instead are placed in cities that have a
historical (in-game) context, with an existing culture, existing
player citizens, and so on. Given that the supply of cities is small
(there are six in Achaea) people definitely do compete for
leadership, sometimes in dramatic ways.

--matt
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