[MUD-Dev2] [Design] [REPOST] Food in MMOs

[Matt Chatterley]

On 15/05/07, Dana V. Baldwin <dbaldwin at playnet.com> wrote:
>
> Morris Cox wrote:


[Snip]

> I've played on quite a few MUDs that required a char to intake food
> > and drink periodically. It was a pain. I tended to avoid MUDs that
> > required food and drink as it was too much of a hassle to have enough
> > food and drink.
>
> Slaving to realism is generally not fun for most people. Sure, players
> like shooting the bad guys but marching to the front and sleeping in a
> cold ditch aren't real draws. Instancing IMHO should not be considered a
> cheat any more than not making players sail for 3 weeks to a deserted
> island to attack the fabled cyclops who may or may not be there or even
> exist. The reason the island is deserted is no one wants to sail for 3
> weeks. The reason the beast is fabled is because no one has yet thought
> it would be fun to go for a visit and stay for a cup of tea.


[Snip]

As previous threads have undoubtedly shown, I have a bit of a thing for
economic simulation elements in games - and it seems to me that there might
be an opportunity to integrate food/drink into these elements. However, lets
start from first principles and look at why we eat and drink in the real
world:

1. If we don't, we get sick and eventually die.
2. It's a social event.
3. It tastes nice.

I agree with those who have already said that requiring players to eat and
drink would not work in many game models (if nothing else it is harmful to
social aspects - if i log in for 2 hours just to chat, I have to sustain my
character, which costs me hard earned cash). It's annoying, too, and
annoying things in games are bad, IMHO - at least, those which annoy almost
all players are.

So. Lets look at eating/drinking as a sort of buff/unbuff combination. How
about if we assign the player a "health level" - in order to sustain good
health, the right balance of food/drink and exercise are required. We'll
consider 1.0 to be "normal health" - the state in which the character's body
performs as expected, and permit (through normal circumstances) this level
to fluctuate between 0.8 and 1.2 (acting as a percentile modifier to
abilities and skills). A decrease rate through hunger and thirst can be set
- perhaps to 0.0025 per hour for food - this means that after 80 (real)
hours of not eating, the player is at their weakest. Drinking is more
important, so that will cause decline at 0.005 - 40 hours before you hit
rock bottom.

Then we'll permit that eating and drinking some foods (perhaps magical,
perhaps merely 'super health' - certainly more expensive and harder to
find), will permit a slow rate of increase - allowing the gradual climb to
1.2. Once you get there, eating in a balanced way might slow decline
sufficiently that you can maintain it for some time.

Given typical player behaviour, this means everyone will most likely strive
to keep their health at 1.2 all the time. But this has met our purpose, as
they are now habitually eating and drinking as part of game play.

We could even introduce a range of illnesses, both magical and mundane,
which can affect the health level, or the way you eat and drink (e.g. if you
have a stomach problem, you might not be able to eat so much, etc). Lots of
room for imagination here.

In terms of socialising, there will undoubtedly be communal places to eat
and drink (or get drunk), and I'm sure we could work some entertaining
passtimes into these settings - perhaps even some with a gain to players -
armwrestling leagues, etc.

We can't really pick up on the gourmet attitude, although we can push
players towards the higher end of a quality scale by suggesting this helps
them in their mission to keep health above "normal".

Moving back to economy, though - I suppose there is a gap here for bakers,
butchers, etc as well as for farmers who create the original produce - even
explorers who recover the rare "Phting" mushrooms, whose health benefits are
matched only by their exorbitant price tag.

What would be really interesting, though, would be to ensure that crafters
who produce foodstuffs (cooks, brewers, bakers, etc), have flexible control
over the taste, smell and nutrition levels of the foods they produce.

It'd be quite cool to work some cues into the environment on this basis - if
you're hungry and you walk past a bakers shop, and he's just taken a fresh
tray of his special "extra-smelly bread" out of the oven, you might receive
a cue about the smell, and it might make you a little bit hungrier (at
least, psychologically).

I'm starting to ramble now, so I'll get back to one of my points and close:

The trick is to stop players always eating mega-value-1-gp-hedge-bread
simply because it "makes the hunger go away" - which hints at basic notions
of nutrition, etc. If they always choose to eat in the inn because thats the
easiest way - then thats fine by me, because under the hood, the innkeeper
might be hiring a crafter (cook), who is buying items from other crafters
(farmer, butcher, baker), and it makes the whole cycle continue - because it
creates a chain of sinks for produce.



Cheers,

Matt