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

[Miroslav Silovic]

Caliban Darklock wrote:
> There are three possibilities of any given activity in the game.
>
> 1. It has zero effect on the game.
> 2. It has positive effect on the game.
> 3. It has negative effect on the game.
>
> Let's consider the use of a toy by a player.
>
> Case 1 is readily discarded because the player is on the game field,
> occupying some portion of the finite space available, and for which
> demand exceeds supply.
>
> Case 2 is readily discarded because the network effect of a player
> playing the game exceeds the effect of individual activity. When you
> account for the lack of this network effect, you cannot end up with a
> net positive.
>
> By the process of elimination, you have case 3 - a negative effect.
>
> There are three premises underlying this.
>
> 1. Demand for game space exceeds supply. (Implies players consume
> space.)
> 2. The network effect of players playing the game together is
> necessarily positive.
> 3. That network effect necessarily exceeds any individual effect.
>
> You may certainly attack any of the above premises as untrue, but I
> think the only one really susceptible to such an attack is premise 3.
>
>   

Premise 1 is easily attacked: MMOGs are by definition big - that's the
part of what "massive" means. Space taken by any individual player is
negligible compared to the overall world size.

Premise 2 and 3 actually counter-argument your conclusions. Players that
introduce "toys" are still part of the network effect (whether they want
it or not). A well-designed game can allow them to blend in. This is how
you add colour to your world without extra effort from designers. Note
that some games do have exploitable holes that allow players to spoil
other players' fun; but this doesn't mean that -all- game have.

> There's an additional possibility: when a toy is introduced to the
> game, it may be assimilated as part of the game. However, this
> destroys the game you had before, replacing it with a new one. Nomic
> aside, arbitrary introduction of a new ruleset is rarely a positive
> development - it might have something to do with entropy.

Um, this is again not true. Introducing new rules is part of the network
effects mentioned above. It can be positive or negative, and part of the
difficulty of a good game design is making the positive effects
overwhelm the negative ones. The whole point of open world is that its
designers allow it to evolve. They relinquish part of the control over
their own game in exchange for depth.

> But they don't really offer it. Fundamentally, the terms of service
> always include what amounts to an agreement that if you don't adhere
> closely enough to the consensus of what the game is, you don't get to
> play anymore. They call it "disruption". If enough people get mad
> about what you're doing, you get the boot.
>   

Disruption is not about playing the game outside the consensus, it's
about invading other players private boundaries. In your premises listed
above, it's about going around premise 1 in order to force yourself on
other players.

However, I believe that most of the disruptive behaviour can be designed
out - with notable exception of acceptable language rules. But you get
those in real life, too.

Just see Guild Wars as an example of no-disruption-by-design system. Bad
things still happen there, but they're relatively rare. OTOH, there are
plenty of examples of really entertaining player additions that were
eventually endorsed by designers (such as using ectoplasm as substitute
currency, player-organised RPG guilds, solo-farming extremely difficult
area as challenge, player-ran scavenger hunts and other award contests).

> My assertion is that whether a stick is a toy depends on what I do
> with it. It isn't the object that matters, it's the action. I can play
> fetch with any number of things; a stick, a ball, a stuffed animal,
> whatever. And in a virtual world, the toy with which I choose to play
> - while it may certainly look and act like an object in the game world
> - DOES NOT EXIST. It's just data on a server. I'm playing with an
> idea, just as I might play with mathematical concepts, and the lack of
> a material object doesn't in any way diminish my enjoyment of it.
>   

Frankly, I don't think you introduced a concise, useful definition of
"toy" into this discussion yet. I don't mean description, but proper
definition (although I might've missed it from a previous post).

>> Gameplay is not changed, only exposed.
>>     
>
> This is because the player has not actually created any content -
> merely rearranged it. Back to Crawford:
>   

Rearrangement requires design effort and upload of information from the
player's client. Therefore it does add content.

> "A properly designed game precludes this possibility; it is closed
> because the rules cover all contingencies encountered in the game."
>   

This is arbitrary statement. Properly designed game doesn't have to be
closed. In fact, I contend that a properly designed game works well with
being open.

> We're dealing more and more with games that not only permit but
> *pursue* emergent gameplay opportunities. This is a Good Thing, but
> along with it comes the boogeyman of not really knowing what your game
> is or how it's played. This makes it very difficult to close the
> system.
>   

I agree with the first part - it is a good thing. But since I don't see
any necessity for the closed system, there is no boogeyman. What I see
as a design challenge is forming a *stable* system. In other words, it's
perfectly good for the game to evolve over time; it's only a problem if
certain game parameters have a potential for runaway growth. For
example, in another thread, Ralph was discussing buffbot problem on SWG.
In this case, the individual player power had a potential to grow way
beyond what designers thought possible. But this sort of things can be
patched and I agree with him that this is a polish bug, not a
fundamental flaw. This also had nothing to do with introduction of
"toys", it was simply an exploitable bug in the rules; in other words,
it killed the system stability, and didn't damage the game by evolving
it.

   Miro