[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviors spawnedfrom...]

[Damien Neil]

On 8/12/05, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
> "Damien Neil" <damien.neil at gmail.com> wrote:

> Advancement doesn't always happen on treadmills, and collecting is
> probably one of the most sincere and addictive forms of
> advancement out there. I'd say the collecting aspect is more
> important in Animal Crossing (where furniture comes in themed sets
> and frequently requires absurd conditions to collect) than the
> Sims (few people tend to play the Sims for real - either they
> drown the characters in the swimming pool or leave them in a room
> without doors to die in their own urine, or they use cheat codes
> to access unlimited weatlh and simply design houses, neither of
> which would really constitute a game - as a game, the Sims is
> advancement based).

Yes, that was my point: The way people play The Sims isn't generally
focused around progression.  They do interior decorating, or they
construct oddball families, or they just try to set everything on
fire.  There's a minimal bit of advancement built into the game, but
it's not what people focus on.

And--my original point--the fact that you can "level up" individual
sims doesn't mean that players focus on doing that.  Quite the
contrary.  I feel that the separation of player and character in The
Sims (you *have* a family of sims, but you are not personally a sim)
is responsible for this less achievement-oriented gameplay.

>> Did you play TSO?

> I was given a guided tour of it at an E3 a while ago. When Will
> Wright came into our room naked except for chaps and clown make up
> and started molesting our characters, it became pretty obvious
> real quick what the game would become.

No offense, but I find quick looks like that to be completely
worthless for truly understanding the social landscape of a game.  I
generally have to play a game for at least a month before I start
getting any real grip on how the players interact.


>> I ask because this sounds very similar to, for example, stories
>> about teenaged Japanese girls who turn to prostitution to buy
>> expensive handbags--which may be true, but is a vanishingly rare
>> occurrence and of no use in describing what it's like to be in
>> Japan. However because of the very rareness of the event, it's
>> shows up more in news reports than more mundane aspects of the
>> society.

> You are talking about a serious social issue in big Japanese
> cities called "enjou kosai" - and it wasn't that vanishing or rare
> when I lived there.  In fact, if I were to describe to you the
> female youth culture of Japan (which is currently the defining
> consumer interest there), it would be impossible to not mention
> it. Just like it would be impossible to discuss Japanese men's
> opinion of women without talking about how their pornography is
> almost entirely rape and sexual violence.

No, I'm not talking about enjou kosai.  I was talking about
prostitution, which is a subset of that term.

>> (I also ask because I didn't play TSO, and am entirely dependent
>> on second hand descriptions of it--which I don't entirely trust,
>> for the above reason.)

> Do a search on "sims online" and mafia and you'll find plenty of
> reputable news sources reporting it, as well as the blog of one of
> the guys who ran one and got banned over it. I'm not saying you
> should trust my descriptions, but with Google out there, you never
> again have to rely on second hand descriptions.

Yes, but this is exactly the sort of incident which stands out
enough to be well-reported.  The fact that it is reported says
nothing about the social environment of TSO, other than that this
incident happened within it.

For example: I could write an article talking about a society of
virtual prostitutes within World of Warcraft that, while being
entirely accurate, would not explain that the only influence these
people had on the average player was a a few lines of general-chat
spam.

>> Even assuming the above description of TSO's social ills is
>> entirely correct, I'd be inclined to blame that on a failure to
>> give players adequate social tools.  The technology of a social
>> environment will define interactions within it to a large degree.

> I disagree. I think that the technology can influence it, sure,
> but define it to a large degree? I don't know how well read you
> are on the social aspects of MMORPGs, but no matter what you read,
> you'll see the same issues pop up again and again and again. Read
> about Habitat/Club Caribe and you see players pulling the same
> crap on MUDs (ie "My Tiny Life"), which is then being complained
> about still in blogs about things as recently as World of
> Warcraft.

The social tools available to players haven't evolved since those
early MUDs.  In general, there are hardly any social tools at all.

>> For example, traditional IRC's handling of moderation, where
>> "ops" privileges are lost whenever one disconnects and must be
>> granted by another op when you reconnect, is conducive to a very
>> different social environment than found in a chat system where
>> moderation privileges persist across sessions.

> I disagree. The only thing that truly matters to an online
> community is the anonymity of a member (ie how long the stigma of
> his actions will remain with his character). Moderators only
> really exist for AFTER the offenses have been committed and as a
> deterant against future offenses (namely by increasing the long
> term affects of such actions), so naturally, the only thing
> relevant to the discussion of such things is under which
> circumstances such things are indeed committed.

Let me give an example from IRC.

Many years ago, when I was in college, I hung out on a certain IRC
channel.  The channel had a population of regulars.  We knew each
other by name (or handle, at least), we got to know each other, the
usual thing.

On an IRC channel, certain people are "ops".  Ops have the ability
to kick other people off the channel, and the ability to appoint new
ops.  When you log off, you lose your ops privilege.  This means
that you need to have a friend reop you when you log back on.

One interesting thing about the IRC kick command is that it doesn't
stick.  You can jump right back into a channel that you've been
kicked off of.

One of the people in this group was a bully.  He enjoyed being in
charge, having power, and being respected.  Whenever he signed on,
someone would give him ops.  From that point on, he'd then be able
to lord it over people--if he didn't like what someone was saying,
he'd kick them off the channel.  They could--and did--rejoin
immediately, of course.  The only purpose the kick served was to
demonstrate his power.

The really interesting thing about this situation is that it could
only continue so long as people continued to give him ops when he
logged on.  I suspect that pretty much nobody actually *wanted* him
to have ops, though.  So why keep giving it to him?  Fear.  If you
*didn't* op him, he'd exact revenge later when someone else did.
The only way you'd be safe is if everybody chose to defy him at the
same time--which wasn't likely to happen.

This is a social setting that is DEFINED by the social tools
available to the people participating in it.  If IRC had had sticky
permissions, where moderator status persisted across sessions, the
environment would have been completely different.  If the kick
command had permanently banned people rather than transiently
removing them, people would have been less inclined to use it to
flex their power.

Designers of computer-mediated communications systems constantly
underestimate the degree to which their design choices will shape
the communities that will use them.

>> You can avoid the need for much moderation by giving players the
>> tools to moderate themselves.

> First, that sentence contradicts itself. Second, players can not,
> on the whole, be trusted to moderate themselves just like our
> government can't be trusted to moderate themselves. That's why
> checks and balances are in the constituation (for now). For
> instance, can you give the players the ability to ban each other?
> It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how that would be abused
> (much like how the first arcade game that took your photo had a
> picture of a butt on the high score list within minutes of hitting
> the test audience).

I should have phrased that differently: Giving players the tools to
moderate themselves will free the designer from the need to do most
of that moderation.

Let me use an analogy: If you put up a web forum, you need to
moderate it.  You can't rely on random strangers to do it for you.
(Or maybe you can, if it's a wiki.  I'm simplifying.)

If, however, you put up a tool which lets people make their own web
forums, you don't need to moderate them.  You just let the owner of
any given forum moderate as they feel fit.

Don't think this applies to games like WoW or EQ?  Consider:

In WoW, you can be a member of a single guild.  A guild mainly
consists of a chat channel and shared buddy list.  If you're in a
small guild, you rely on random pickup groups for a large amount of
your gameplay.  This creates great potential for conflict "he
ninjaed my sword-o-uberness!" and a corresponding need for
moderation.

Imagine if you could be a member of multiple guilds, and if guilds
could be organized into hierarchies.  Guilds are still mainly just a
chat channel and shared buddy list.  I predict that you would
rapidly see the appearance of giant metaguilds built for the sole
purpose of forming decent pickup groups.  People who behave poorly
in groups get kicked out.

Suddenly, life gets better for all the people in those
metaguilds. The people they group with are politer--partially
because the jerks have been kicked out, and partially just because
there are consequences for being a jerk.  (The downside is that you
now have annoyed players who can't or won't join the metaguilds.  I
strongly suspect the result would be a net positive, though.)

                 - Damien
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev