[MUD-Dev] Community?

[Erik Bethke]

250?  9-11? 10,000?  Counter-strike?

Community?

These are all slippery ideas.

What is community?  What are the relationships we maintain on a
daily basis?  Online/Offline.

How does it matter that I game with 20 people or I counter strike
with millions - in a semantic sense.  JC mentioned that there are
strong papers and references that can pin point this discussion
down, but I don't know what the point is.

Before argueing more and more about whether or not community breaks
down at 250 or 10,000 or even what we mean by community (in order to
better define this point) - we should get back to what the question
is in the first place.

And I think I lost it.

The question is something about how future MMO game design interacts
with user counts and whether or not instancing is a "valid" strategy
going forward or whether or not everyone needs to be in the same
world for the MMO to truly earn its name.  Right?  Is that the
question?

We have a problem in that bluntly speaking the graphics technology
now exceeds our ability to feed the demon.  Seemless worlds that are
beautifully detailed to the degree that technology allows is now
past the budgets of almost all - if not all players now.

Instancing allows for a greater concentration of assets in a smaller
space to crank up the quality level of the content (among other
advantages).  Perhaps it would be better if we thought less rigidly
between the choices of instance vs. seemless and thought more about
actual gameplay.

I for one am tired of the level grind.  I am somewhat hopeful about
WoW, but it seems like the big guys are stuck in a rut about having
a character glide on a 2D plan and clicking on various bunny rabbits
until the die.  Sometimes the bunnies wear costumes - wow.  Now A
Tale in the Desert is new and different and many of the risk-taking
indies are doing something new, but I think the discussion on
instancing vs.  non-instancing is just a small part of the question
we must answer in order to advance games.

But I will get sucked in, as a geek I like seemless, as a guy
running a project instanced seems like a much better bang for the
buck.  I think with middleware I am believing that the ugliness
behind seemless can be taken care of.  But we still have the problem
of content creation for these vast worlds.

We need new work in world building tools.  Algorithmic stuff mixed
in with hand placed stuff.  Something like editors for each level of
scale from 1000 km to 10 km to 1 km to 100 meters to meters to
inside of buildings.  Different, integrated tools for each of these
levels with smart, fuzzy editiors that know something about erosion
and fractals and such.

And we need a heck of a lot better AI.  Mark Terrano and Chris
Crawford have written excellent papers on simple conversation for
NPCs - no one has bothered.

Not even computer science stuff.  We just need people to actually
try.

All we have is dumb bunnies to whack.

-Erik
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