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

[Sean Howard]

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

> 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.

First of all, I still think using the degree to which someone is
advancement orientated is extremely misleading and useless. It's too
easy to argue one that something like finding drapes to match the
curtains could be advancement. And lots of people like something
like Diablo II for a lot of reasons, but the game enforced
advancement to a heavy degree (even if that's not actually why you
like it - it's why my wife likes it, but it's not why I dislike it).

As for the metaplayer, don't confuse the mental processes that go on
while playing a game. When you are playing a game from third person,
like Super Mario Bros, you are still NOT Mario. Even first person
fails to engage a player more or less than playing an RTS. When you
control a hundred little Protoss units, you can still be quite
achievement-orientated. There is no difference there. A reader is
still a reader, regardless of whether the story is told in first,
second, or third person - and a player is still just a player. It
has a different voice, but it has relatively little impact
otherwise.

>>> 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.

Quick looks work fine for me. I can tell you plenty about a game
from a screenshot. As for the social landscape, I just said that
Will Wright himself came in an molested us wearing clown make-up and
chaps - and nothing else. That was the social landscape. I could
write considerably more on the topic (teenagers searching for their
independence tend to be dicks online due to neccessary social
boundary testing, finding independence stage now reaches
mid-twenties for most people, Sims Online probably turned off most
non-gamers in the same way that twenty minutes at the Something
Awful forums would turn off most people off from forums, how the
large scale of SO makes it impossible to censor ugly behavior) - but
just take that story and multiply it by a thousand. That's the
social landscape of the game.

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

That's because there's nothing else to add, I'd wager. I mean SWG
had the ability to /cityban people from the player cities. It was
taken out shortly after because people were abusing it. It's like
they tell you when writing a server for a MMORPG - don't trust the
client. It will cheat if it can, so put all the logic on the
server. Players can't be trusted to moderate themselves,
period. Even with some help from the admins (ie promoting guides and
helpers from the playerbase), they can still be abusive, unhelpful,
or even sue you because they think you hired them and didn't pay
them.

The social tools belong to the admins. The problem is, they rarely
bother to put any emphasis on them. If you watch how WoW moderates
its players, it'd bring a tear to your eye.

> 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.

> (story of IRC snipped for brevity).

You just explained right there what the problem and the solution
was. It's the size of the community. You think that kicking a bully
was what made it work? It was the fact that you guys knew each other
because there were only a few regulars. If there were thousands of
you, it would be a VERY different story. Not to mention a rather
confusing chatroom.

> This is a social setting that is DEFINED by the social tools
> available to the people participating in it.

It is DEFINED by the people participating in it. Tools are just
tools.  How, when, and if they are used is DEFINED by the people.

> 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.

If you believe this, I've got some swampland to sell you.

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

I think the underestimate the power of the community to overrule
anything they design.

> 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.

The designer should never be the moderator in the first place. This
isn't always possible, but for a large scale MMORPG, hiring an army
of moderators isn't out of the question. I've been there. I've done
both. If you are designing something, the BEST thing you can do for
yourself is stay the hell away from the community that sprouts out
of it.

> 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.

Yeah, because they can moderate it in its entirety. If they want to
run around acting like morons like the Something Awful or Penny
Arcade forums, that's fine. If they want a tightly controlled
communication of ideas with heavy rules and moderation, that's fine
too. The problem, and I speak at length from experience, is when the
people from one forum starts to interact with the people from the
other.

In a MMORPG, you've got thousands of people trying to live in the
same world. Letting each mini-community set up their own standards
seems like a good idea in theory, but letting these cliques judge
each other by their own standards is an invitation to war. There
needs to be an overriding moderation that dictates the basic
standards by which these groups interact.

> 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.

If you read the webcomics Penny Arcade or PvP, you'll see that there
already are metaguilds - they have more members than one, or even
half a dozen, guilds could find. And the members are at war with
each other and are, in general, have dominated those particular
servers to the detriment to the other players on them.

- Sean Howard
http://gamebastard.blogspot.com
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