[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Spore and MMOs

[John Buehler]

Michael Chui writes:

> What I wanted to pose was this:
> 
> Will Wright and Spore have a decidedly advantageous position. Everyone
> is expecting miracles and wonders etc. One thing I want to focus on,
> however, is his coinage of "massively single-player": the idea that you
> are affected and effect everyone else who plays, but the game remains
> single-player in its essence. Spore implements this by uploading your
> creations to a central server and pushing it back out to people to be
> controlled by AI. And I wonder... will we start seeing ports of this
> concept to more traditional genres, like the Strategy, the FPS, the
> RPG?
> 
> My thoughts:
> 
> I see two paths for this. One is the "truly single-player" approach. In
> this case, you'd be doing what Spore is doing: making stuff, uploading
> it to a server for inclusion into others' games and that'd be the end
> of your contribution.
> 
> The other is a kind of PBEM/Hotseat Civilization-type of approach,
> wherein there are periodic updates of changes. For instance, consider a
> game of Battlefield played across a couple dozen sessions of
> Counterstrike, each session involving different groups of related and
> allied persons. You'd have specific missions: essentially, "Capture
> this point." and the outcome would be saved and the next group to play
> would have to deal with it thusly.

Coming from the MMO side of things, the latter is more or less what I've
come up with as well.  Instead of quests advancing player state, let them
advance global state.  Any given quest then needs to be reserved by a player
or group of players so that they can take their shot at advancing that
global state.  (A quest to change global state can be anything from
eliminating rats in somebody's basement to assassinating an enemy leader)

With such a structure, the massive game breaks down into a series of
single-player and multiplayer vignettes, all of which are contributing to
the global state.

Although this is apparently little more than a variation on questing, the
sandboxing of players into temporarily-isolated experiences means that the
exact technology that is used in small-scale gaming can be used to entertain
players who are ostensibly in a massively multiplayer setting.

Counterstrike is a perfectly good example.  Let a group of players volunteer
to tackle the task of "capture this point" and they are literally thrown
into Counterstrike and faced with their task.  If they succeed, then the
global state is advanced, and the map point is considered captured.  Or
consider the technology of the game Crysis.  It won't work for 100 players,
but it'll work marvelously well to entertain 8 players for the duration of a
combat task.

This structure also permits many different types of entertainment to coexist
because the game changes for each type of task.  There can be Crysis-style
combat, chess-style diplomacy, poker-style big business, Tycoon-style
crafting, etc, all intermeshed into a vast graph of state transitions,
moving towards some global set of goals defined by the game designers.

While Will is using a clever technique to create content for his users,
neither the genre nor the novelty of having content coming from other
players has any real appeal to me.  Massively multiplayer appeals because of
the opportunity to interact with other players.  My problems with current
games are focused on the types of interactions that are available and the
eyedropper delivery technique.  I think that changing from a single
homogenous experience to a game environment that uses many different game
technologies that are suited to many different types of interactions would
make for a far more entertaining thingamabob.

JB