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

[Caliban Darklock]

On 4/5/07, Morris Cox <morriscox at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It can be destructive. You can use cheat codes and then find that your
> enjoyment of the game has been cheapened. An action doesn't have to
> affect another person in order to be destructive.

I don't care. I am exclusively interested in how one may productively
distinguish between TOYS and GAMES, and how they interact with one
another. This is a question that may lead to interesting insights that
can improve a game design. Widening the focus is not going to help.

This is a great example. This idea of how to define "toy" and "game"
is, fundamentally, a toy. I've brought it in here to turn it into a
game. Until we reach consensus, it's destructive - we spend more time
arguing about it than we do actually playing. If we never reach
consensus, it will remain a toy - in effect, I'll take my theory and
go home.

But there's a middle ground there where we have differing consensus.
There are some people who think this is a good game to play, and some
people who think it's silly and pointless. If the two groups split off
into separate spaces, the group who likes the game can play, while the
people who think it's silly can play something else.

And this is where subgames get complicated.

There are players on the game field who are very good. And since
they're very good, it's more fun to play the games they're playing. So
many players, perceiving this, will abandon whatever they're playing
to go play whatever this player is playing. And this creates the
potential for a third game that ONLY the very good players get to
play: making other people play the game they want.

This introduces a toy. The very good player may play with the other
players by moving from game A to game B, and watching them migrate
back and forth. There is no consensus. He has decided to do this all
on his own. And in so doing, he has introduced game C - an emergent
game - with its own standards and rules. The people playing game C
probably do not know they are playing a game. They think they're
playing games A and B. What they are actually playing is this player's
toy.

One could hardly argue that this is good for games A and B. One might
argue that game C is more fun, or that the introduction of game C has
actually incorporated games A and B into another game which improves
the overall experience, but games A and B are no longer playable. They
have been damaged or destroyed by the introduction of the toy (which
is, oddly enough, game C). To survive, they must change to incorporate
game C.

And what gets in the way here is the consensus. You have some number
of players who prefer each of the three games, but now that we have
game C, the players who prefer games A and B can't play anymore. They
have to play some new version of it that incorporates game C. And
since game C is fundamentally one player's toy, what happens when he
logs out?

Well, game C ends, and you're left with the broken wreckage of games A and B.

It's not always quite this bad. It's an exercise in futility to throw
up some sort of contrived policy that tries to prevent the player from
creating game C in the first place, anyway. But if the people in game
C perceive that it is a game and begin to apprehend the rules, they
can take the toy away from the player. They can choose to take
possession of game C, and to define their own consensus of how the
rules work.

What doesn't change, however, is the destructive effect on games A and
B. This effect can be masked by claiming that game C is more fun, and
wouldn't have existed if it weren't for that creative and innovative
player who made a toy of it... but it's still an effect. I think there
are ways we can direct that effect, and make it more likely that a
game C will arise to ameliorate the damage caused by the toy.