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

[John Buehler]

Caliban Darklock writes:

> On 4/12/07, John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> >
> > You will continue to try to herd the
> > players into a mainstream behavior and they will continue to try to work
> > around any restrictions you place on them.
> 
> A wise developer (I think it was Cliffy B) once told me, "Don't try to
> model behavior. Model the system until the behavior you want falls out
> of it."
> 
> I think this is precisely what we need to be doing with games. Don't
> try to make the player do what you want. Just build an environment
> where the player himself wants to do it.

Now you've got a developer saying "Don't try to get any behavior at all from your players.  It's a non-issue."

Let the players find like-minded peers.  Let them enter an instance of your environment and do their own thing.  From a business standpoint, it just doesn't matter what they do, so long as they do it in YOUR environment.  From there, it becomes an issue of freedom of action by player characters.

I'm reminded of a classic problem with shared virtual environments: we don't hand out matches when the buildings are made of wood.  In a shared virtual environment, we don't permit the players to make a permanent change to the environment.  It's a shared environment.  What one player changes, another player may want unchanged.  Yet another case of conflicting agendas.  By letting like-minded players play together, games can hand out matches, shovels and chainsaws freely.  They will be used by the like-minded players to advance their shared ethic of entertainment.

This opens vast tracts of design territory currently taboo to shared environments - including killing NPCs.

JB