[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Rewards

[cruise]

Thus spake Sean Howard...
> You bribe a player to get him to do something - probably something he
> wouldn't otherwise do were he not lead around by the carrot. It's a form
> of manipulation. You are saying to the player, I want you to play THIS WAY
> and ONLY THIS WAY.

Agreed. It is was allowable in the beginning because games were so rare 
(comparatively) that you could afford to dictate to the player - they 
had little choice.

> That has been the game design philosophy from almost the beginning, but I
> think that sandbox games have really proven their worth as the antithesis
> of this. With something like GTA3, you are given broad goals and a variety
> of interacting behaviors and environments in which to accomplish these
> goals. If your goal is to kill NPC-X, there is really no limit to how you
> can accomplish that.

Exactly. If players don't like our game, they can much more easily go 
somewhere else - so it behooves us to be more accomodating to the way 
the players want to do things.

> However, you can declare more immediate rulesets. For instance, in GTA3,
> you might have a race where you can only use a particular kind of car and
> if you miss a waypoint, you fail the challenge. This is okay in small
> doses because you really are trying to deliver a particular experience to
> the player. A designed experience.

Which is actually an extension of the same principle - because some 
players don't have as much curiousity - they like to be given external 
goals and guided through. So by placing such sign-posts within the 
world, we allow players to choose between wandering around and directed 
travel.

*snip*
> So, to create a rewarding experience for the player without over reliance
> on manipulating them into behaving like you want, you create a more
> systematic world. A complex system which changes and modifies itself based
> the ebb and flow of its pieces. You make every building functionally
> different just by nature of where it is located, what inhabits it, and
> what functions it performs.

Emergent behaviour from principles. Which is *hard* to get right, 
because we start bumping up against chaos theory and such, but, hey, I 
like challenges :P

> I remember an example from Ultima Online where the population of the
> different animals could be changed by players. Hunt too many rabbits, I
> think it went, and the wolves would come into town to look for food. A
> really cool idea, but unfortunately, it breaks the fundamental needs of
> the player for security. The idea that they may not be able to find the
> enemies they need, or that the actions of someone else could affect their
> safety and enjoyment of the game.

"Oh noes!11! I'm surrounded by other people but don't let them touch 
me!" I understand where the reaction comes from - heck, we've just had a 
very long thread about ti all - but rejecting the idea of other players 
affecting your experience of the game in an MMOG just seems...slightly 
oxymornic :P

> Anyway, you create a playground that a player can define his own role in,
> and interact with at his own pace and play style, and there will be more
> than enough intrinsic rewards from simply exploring this system,
> understanding it, mastering it, exploiting it, or challenging one another
> within it. You won't have to bribe the player to play your game, though if
> you want to deliver a particular sub-experience, you will still have to.

Absolutely. Offer a general experience for people to find their place 
in, with occasional "guided tours" for those that need some inspiration.