[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] What is a game? (again) was:[Excellentcommentary on Vanguard's diplomacy system]

[Caliban Darklock]

On 4/3/07, Raph Koster <rkoster at san.rr.com> wrote:
> Caliban Darklock wrote:
> > Let's say you're playing WoW. You
> > decide "I'm going to run from here to there and back, and see how fast
> > I can do it" - and you do. You don't have to tell anyone what you're
> > doing. Nobody else has the right to say "you can't do that". But it's
> > destructive to the game, because you're not playing the game... you're
> > playing with your own personal toy.
>
> Uh, destructive in what sense?

In the sense that you're playing with your toy on the same field where
others are playing their game. If you're bouncing your basketball as
high as you can, that's fine; you're playing with your toy. If you're
doing that in the middle of the key while other people are playing, it
may be only minimally destructive if other people are playing a game
of HORSE - you need only have a bit of mutual respect, and both your
toy and their game can proceed largely unharmed. But if there's a
full-court game going on, your toy becomes very destructive indeed.
(And the game is undoubtedly disrupting your play.)

Individualised play in a group setting is always in some way
destructive, because that one person's play affects and directs many
other people's play. The destruction can be minimised by isolating it
to a smaller area, but it ALWAYS has the destructive effect of
eliminating a potential player from the game, and any non-player on
the game field is consuming game resources without contributing to the
game.

The responses to this are where the fun is. It's easy enough to just
forbid toys, but you can't enforce this - a toy is just something with
which a player has decided to play, and frequently that something is
other players. If nothing else, you can claim to be having trouble
playing the game because a particular command doesn't work, and then
see how much time you can consume from how many players when they try
to help you. Which is where things start to get really interesting,
because it seems the more restrictive you are in your toy policy, the
more destructive the toys tend to become.