[MUD-Dev] Birthday Cake (or Why Large Scale Sometimes Sucks) (long)

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2000 11:06:09 -0400 
Dave Rickey <daver at mythicgames.com> wrote:

>     If you think EQ and AC are "dumbed down", I think you're in
> for disappointment.  My expectation is that for the true
> mass-market they are far too hardcore.  Everybody wants to reach
> out to that "Casual Gamer", the millions of people who currently
> play Online Backgammon for free, and somehow rope them into a
> pay-for-play.  If they succeed, it will be with a game so
> simplified you'll long for the "Golden Age" of UO and EQ.

There are some dichotomies that aren't being confronted here.  We
talk glowingly of community involvement, of social structures and
involvement, of our games being, at the social level, truly "real"
for the players involved.  We talk of the methods and techniques
that can be used to transparently move purely GoP players to more
socially-oriented activities and then how to ensnare them in the
endlessly complex and enmeshing immersion of the resulting social
fabrics.  And then we talk about ways to decrease bandwidth
consumption by reducing the time players spend in our worlds, to get
players to not play so much, for players to be less involved in our
worlds (and conveniently escape some of the responsibility for
abused of our games), and in general, to cheapskate on the
immediately prior goals.  And finally, we suddenly realise that
we've only ever touched a fraction of one percent of the available
playerbase out there, and that the real untapped masses are the
indolent, occassional, casual players who can be safely trusted to
just not give a damn, and who outnumber every other single player
classification and demographic by multiple orders of magnitude.

I posit that the single greatest challenge we confront as game
designers is building games that are capable of withstanding the
infinite onslaught of players who have no interest in our finer
design points, have no interest or appreciation of the social
structures, have no interest in the effects they are actually
creating on other players (its not real after all), and have no
interest in investing the time or attention such that they might
gain any one of those things.

Could ANY of our games, our worlds, survive a simple onslaught of
10,000 hormonal Quake/Half-life players all viewing our game as a
wimpy Quake-analogue?  What sort of world would we have to build
that would do what we want and yet also be able to absorb such an
invasion without a burp?

Even Rome fell.  That's a fight we cannot and will not win.  Our
only recourse is to change the rules by changing the opponent.

Societies are built on agreements.  The members of the society agree
to certain tenets which define that society.  In the virtual world,
the most basic of those tents tend to center around what is 'real"
and what has "value" in that virtual world and society.  IRL we
rarely question the fact that life is valuable.  Quake players tend
to a different tent on Quake lives -- a view that doesn't import
comfortably into Furcadia.  This is not a question of barbarians and
"civilised man", but of what the player is actually doing there in
your games (cf Laws).  Bungle is a criminal only if you accept some
of the basic tents of Lambda society of the time.  The occupants of
Kazola's Tavern, and their social structures, fit even less well in
your average Quake match.  You can't mix the two and rationally
expect it to work without changing the base rules somewhere.

Many of us have some appreciation for cultures other than our own.
We realise that some other people might actually (not) eat meat,
believe in different gods and religious strictures, be atheists, and
just have different social expectations, values, and mannerisms than
we do.  We haven't reached that point for VR.

We have a job of education to do.  To educate that great unwashed
out there that the virtual reality and societies and people of our
games are not necessarily any less real than the ones we live in and
pay our mortgages with.  To do that it is going to have to become
pervasive, and for the basic, simple, endlessly offensive meme of
"VR is actually made of real people" is going to have to spread to
the point where it becomes an instantly assumable.

Further, realise that at some point, CitiBank or some equivalent,
are going to base their electronic interface on the work we've done
in our game worlds.  They're going to open branches serving real RL
currency in that day's equivalent of UO/EQ/AC/whatever and we're all
going to spend a lot of time blinking.

Thing is, nobody spends as much time and attention on interface as
game designers -- and no other field has the simple endlessly
churning evolutionary background that this endlessly failing game
development business has.

How's *them* apples?

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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