This Is How the World Ends

In his gaming blog today, Brian "Psychochild" Green offers a thoughtful discussion of the difference in "feel" between how the lights went out for earlier games versus today's games, prompted by the termination on Saturday of Tabula Rasa.

In considering Brian's reflections, I can't help but see this difference in feel as yet another expression of the difference between the "play in" and "live in" preferences of gamers.

I've described this theory here before, but to put it another way: some people naturally look to MMOGs for their rules-based gameplay. Their focus is on the mechanics of play in a MMOG; their rallying cry is "it's just a game!" To the extent that they see a MMOG as a place, it's just a location to "play in."

Others see a MMOG for its worldy qualities. They talk about "immersion"; they like having houses and emotes and complex systems to discover over time. The rules-based play of a MMOG is less important to these gamers than that it feel plausible as a place they can pretend to "live in."

Where this intersects with shutting down gameworlds is that the latter kind of gamer, who tend to form the deeper and longer-lasting communities within one particular world, were more prominent in the dawn of MMOGs than in today's gameworlds. More of the few MMOGs there were catered more to the interests of "live in" players than today's games do.

Maybe there were always more people who wanted "play in" than live in, and game developers just got better at satisfying the former group. Or maybe game developers started making more "play in" games, creating more of those gamers as kids get old enough to start playing. (I suspect that both processes occurred.)

Either way, MMOGs shifted from being about "live in" to focusing more on "play in." Thus, when earlier "live in" games shut down, their players wanted to come together as a community to say goodbye to the world in which they'd lived. Later "play in" games, which focused less on supporting that type of emotional investment in a sense of place, saw a different kind of send-off. For the "play in" gamer, gameplay is gameplay; if one game shuts down, you just find a new game.

I think this theory not only explains the different feel of turning off a M59 versus a TR, it also puts the "New Gameplay Experience" of Star Wars Galaxies in perspective. If the goodbye for M59 felt like a wake, the NGE seems to have felt to the "live in" players of SWG like a doctor pulling the plug without giving the family members a chance to say their farewells. For the "live in" gamers, the worldiness of pre-NGE SWG has become a Paradise Lost -- it was the last, best expression of a theory of MMOG design that says "live in" is as important as "play in." Losing that unique place for scratching the "live in" itch generated intensely emotional reactions that some players are still expressing to this day.

Perhaps if they'd been given a chance to say goodbye -- "closure" as we call it today -- the gamers who most enjoy the feeling of "living in" a secondary reality would have been able to let go with less drama. They'd have felt more free to look for some new gameworld in which they could put down roots.

... Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

SWG's dispossessed have never found their Happy Isles, since the MMOG developer gods in our age have elected not to create anything like pre-NGE SWG's worldiness. But that's another topic. :)

The point here is that MMOG sendoffs today may feel different than they once did because games -- and the majority gamer type these games attract -- have shifted from "live in" to "play in."

Five Ways MMORPGs Can Be Fixed

Tom Chick, over at fidgit.com, put together a very interesting list of his "Five reasons MMOs are broken." He concludes by saying, "MMOs have failed me and I have no idea how they can get me back into their good graces."

Like Tom, I also feel that the MMOGs available today (and most of the ones known to be in development) have failed me. He mentions some of the reasons why I feel that way; I have others. (*cough*balance of content for different playstyles*cough*)

But before I launch into my own suggested "solutions," I'd like to express the optimistic view that this journey to discover new frontiers in online game design is worth making. These online game things have only been around for a few years now; we have only just dipped our toes into the ocean of possibilities awaiting us.

This is because online games, in addition to having rules of play, can be worlds. There are certainly going to be limits to the size and depth of a gameworld -- in a commercial game particularly, time and budget are always constraints. But in terms of creative expression, there are no limits. Designers of MMOGs get to create entire universes!

In which case, how can we reasonably assert that the few online games created so far have already exhausted all the possibilities?

I go into this in more detail (and offer a visual guide to what hasn't been tried yet) in my essay, "It's All Been Done? No Way!" Recommended reading if you need a fast way to get to sleep. :)

So with that said, let's get to the five problems that the author sees in MMOGs (or, more accurately, MMORPGs) today.

5) The problem: subscription fees

What needs to be done to fix it: The subscription fee is brilliant, insidious, and tremendously effective. It is single-handedly responsible for the immense success of MMOs. I have no idea how to overcome that sort of fiscal momentum. I have no answers here.

I think the tremendous success of paying the equivalent of fifteen dollars a month for unlimited play time is a pretty good clue that this revenue model is not a problem requiring a solution.

To the extent that it forces game developers to be creative in finding gameplay that's so much fun that it discourages subscribers from canceling their accounts... how is that a bad thing?

4) The problem: aggro

What needs to be done to fix it: Search me. Someone hurry and invent a new gameplay model that doesn't rely on aggro.

I've agreed with this one before. As pure gameplay it's not inherently evil. But as an attempt to model interestingly aggressive conflict resolution methods, "aggro" is a cheap hack applied to avoid implementing environmental depth.

A sufficiently complex environment creates opportunities for competitive success that don't require abitrary and artificial gimmicks like "pulling" and "taunting," not to mention having to jam the entire play experience into a few stovepiped classes based entirely on bizarrely restrictive roles like "tank" and "DPS." The fact that some people mistake this stuff for actual tactical gameplay does not mean that MMORPG developers must mindlessly copy these tropes in every single game from now unto eternity.

3) The problem: button lock

What needs to be done to fix it: Can someone replace all the math with action? Is there some way to do this? Is it even possible? Or should I just stick to Diablo?

See above re: environmental depth. Button-mashing is not, never has been, and never will be "tactics." And the problem with button-mashing isn't that it involves math -- it's that the mathematical calculations are being applied to the intersection of character-inherent "special moves" instead of to how each character interacts with functional elements of their local environment.

So I conclude that MMORPGs won't support interesting tactical gameplay until their developers abandon this belief that cheap game-rule gimmicks are an adequate substitute for environmental depth. For example, an environment whose features are selected to highlight visibility and detection would enable stealthy play as a viable alternative to the silly special-move-spamming slapfights that pass for "combat" in today's MMORPGs.

Bottom line: spending the time to build a gameworld with a broad spectrum of environmental phenomena that can be detected, created, and countered by characters will reduce mindless button-mashing intended to game some mathematical calculation in favor of action that rewards perceptiveness, adaptability and creativity.

2) The problem: static worlds

What needs to be done to fix it: Beats me. You can't very well have evil get vanquished by the first hero to come along. Is this just an innate problem by virtue of the word "massively" in the genre?

Actually... yes. I think it is. Fairness mandates that everyone have exactly the same opportunity to enjoy exactly the same content. Most MMORPG developers interpret that requirement by implementing the "respawn" mechanic.

But what does "same" mean? Exactly the same in every inherent respect? Or just the same kind of content?

If being able to experience the same kind of content is (in some cases) acceptable, then one solution to static worlds is to rethink how content is generated. Rather than hardcoding every piece of content to specifically reference some existing physical object within the game world, developers could try instead to create "fill-in-the-blanks" content. Content that references a specific NPC could instead reference any appropriate NPC, allowing NPCs who have different qualities and goals to come and go. Rather than specifying particular objects as targets of quests/missions, different objects from one specific class of objects could be permitted as targets of a mission, allowing many players to have a highly similar but still distinct play experience.

In effect, a fill-in-the-blanks approach would allow some aspects of a massively shared world to change over time while preserving the general actions defined in each piece of quest content.

Another -- and possibly better -- solution to the problem of a massively multiplayer gameworld that doesn't change: give up. Stop trying to allow multiple people to share the unchanging assets of a gameworld. Switch to making massively single-player games, whose worlds can and should change over time depending the actions of the player's character and the NPCs in that world.

I explore the possibilities of this option in my "Living World" essay, also guaranteed to cure insomnia.

1) The problem: you can't play with the people you want to play with

What needs to be done to fix it: Something. Anything. For pete's sake, if I can't play with my friends, I'm just going to go mess around with horde mode in Gears of War 2.

I think this is not quite as bad a problem as the author makes it out to be, but it certainly wouldn't hurt if playing with friends could be made easier.

One possibility may be found in the gradual transition away from hardcore games to games with a more casual set of rules. More granular gameplay makes it easier for friends to drop in and drop out with a minimum of negative consequences.

Another possibility, albeit one much more difficult to contemplate or implement, might come from a greater level of integration among all MMORPGs. Imagine if one game-building system were to completely dominate all MMORPG development -- in that case, it might be possible to design every game on the same foundation, making it relatively much easier to jump between gameworlds. That way if you're playing Game A but your friends are over on Game B, it's quick and easy for you to join them.

There could be some severe creative problems in that kind of environment. I'm not convinced it would be a good thing to have One Platform To Rule Them All, and I certainly don't want to see one company controlling the means of (game) production. But maybe that's what it would take to lower the perceived barriers to friends playing with friends.

...

To sum up, I'd say all of these perceived problems with MMORPGs are symptoms of a more systemic disease, which is that their designers are much, much too focused on providing Achiever-oriented play to the exclusion of other content. The "play" in these games is wrapped almost entirely around formal rules enshrining zero-sum competitive/acquisitive economics. In other words, they're mostly about "winning" by killing others and taking their stuff.

It should be noted: there is nothing inherently wrong with Achiever-oriented play! The only problem with it is the degree to which this one playstyle is permitted to overwhelm every other possible kind of fun. At best, narrative and exploration play get implemented as mere support systems for combat and object-collection. But without treating those other playstyles as worthy of actual content, attracting other kinds of gamers and creating a healthy diversity of player types within a gameworld, the fun of the competitive/acquisitive style of play gets concentrated down into mere grinding: fun for a while, but eventually stale.

Aggro, button lock, static worlds, and content so hardcore that it's necessary to schedule one's fun time... all these things are typical of highly Achieverish designs. If they're perceived as problems, they can't be fixed by going after them piecemeal. They are -- and they need to be understood as -- part of an overall pattern of design. And the solution to them is to change the pattern. It's to stop making yet more excessively-Achieverish gameworlds, and instead design gameworlds to have a broader appeal by offering richer physical and emotional environments, creating a gameworld with a far better balance of gameplay opportunities for more potential players.

To put it another way, most of the things that Tom Chick describes as problems are artifacts -- side-effects -- of focusing the design of MMORPGs too much on the hands of players, and not enough on their hearts and minds. When developers finally decide to change that pattern, then the problems mentioned here will begin to recede...

...to be replaced with other problems. :) But that's just how it goes when trying to make any system in which lots of people can interact in relative anonymity. There is no perfect solution for imperfect human beings.

Which is probably just as well.

Aggro Considered Harmful

I find all the various debates about "aggro" and "tanking" and "taunting" very strange, regardless of whether they're related to PvE or PvP.

From my perspective, aggro was a relatively simple/quick coding hack invented back in the days of slow computers to avoid having to spend precious CPU cycles doing collision testing. Tanking and taunting showed up soon thereafter as natural extensions of the aggro concept. So why in the world does anyone talk today about aggro and tanking and taunting as though they're a permanent and even desirable design goal in and of themselves, rather than artifacts of an arbitrary solution to a temporary problem?

I love the idea of competitive encounters (combat and otherwise) being opportunities to intelligently select and skillfully execute offensive and defensive actions from a rich assortment of tactical options. But if that's an appropriate goal, is "aggro control" really the only possible way to get there? Why should gamers be satisfied with (much less demand) that "combat" be defined in terms of "managing" an abstract value like "aggro"? How are pulling and taunting adequate substitutes for stealth and formation and maneuver and cover and camouflage and ambuscade and overlapping fields of fire and occupying the high ground and shock/surprise and all the other well-known forms of tactical action?

I truly don't mind if some people enjoy playing the aggro game. People are free to like what they like. And it's true that even aggro and its attendant functions (tanking, taunting) can be made complex enough to support tactical decision-making.

What bugs me is the notion that some gamers, because they've never seen and can't imagine anything different, now actually resist suggestions that other rules for combat in online games might even be more fun than aggro management and are worth trying. I'm not saying, "all games must immediately cease and desist using aggro rules"; I'm saying, "hey, can't we have just a few games that, instead of cloning some other game's aggro rules, try something that's possibly even more tactically interesting?"

So my intention here is not to try to kill aggro as the starting point of a model for combat content. As the title of this piece indicates, I don't think much of it as a basis for combat rules in MMOGs today, but if some people really like it, I support their having games that provide it. All I want to do here is express the view that, in addition to there being games where the combat rules are wrapped around the notion of aggro management, I'd like to see some games that define combat content using different rules. I'd hope they're as diverse and interesting as the examples of tactical action I gave earlier, but just "different" would be worth trying at this point.

Ownership of Items in Online Games

A recent post by Tobold on "virtual property rights" has been setting the geekosphere all a-flutter, so as a geek I figure I might as well weigh in on this again myself.

I agree that some folks seem, for whatever reason, to want to view this "who owns in-game objects" issue through a Marxian lens... but I'm not buying their conclusions any more than I buy other arguments that reduce to "because I want it."

What you do in a game isn't "work." When you pay to play a game, you aren't paying for a product, or for an opportunity to expend labor -- you're paying for an entertainment experience. On that basis, the whole notion of player ownership of any game object evaporates.

Let's say you rent an ATV for a couple of hours. When you're done, you don't get to keep the ATV. It was a tool for enabling you to enjoy an entertainment experience, and all you were doing was renting the use of that tool. In this light, whether the ATV is real or virtual is irrelevant; all that matters is whether you had a reasonable chance to have fun.

IANAL, but as I understand it, the product provided has to be fit for its communicated purpose. (That might make for an interesting legal challenge related to a MMOG, actually.) But again, the fitness qualification should apply regardless of whether the experience-enabling product is real or virtual. If the ones and zeros are being rented to you to allow you to have fun, then you don't own those ones and zeros any more than you own the ATV.

To the argument that game-specific virtual worlds are somehow unique by being RPGs, that an entertainment experience based on letting you pretend to be a literary character somehow grants you more of a right to ownership than some other kind of entertainment experience... I'd like to see that line of reasoning. How does it matter that you're pretending to be a character who can store objects in some inventory slot?

Again, I don't think being virtual makes any difference when what's being sold is an entertainment experience. Suppose I'm playing a character in a real-world Alternate Reality Game of your devising. As the operator of that ARG, you've bought a bunch of props to hand out to the people playing your game. Let's say that one of those props is a hammer, which you assign to my character for use as part of the game. If I then assert that because you let me use that hammer, I now own it, how would you respond?

More pointedly, suppose that in preparing for people to play your game you buy a hammer, some nails and some boards. You then assign those items to my character as props. If I have my character build a birdhouse out of those items, do I-the-player own the birdhouse?

If you say I do own it, what is the basis for that conclusion? If you say that I don't own the item I created in your game, then on what basis can you assert that players of a computer game own the looted or crafted objects in that game?

All that said, I will agree that the question of object ownership gets trickier for non-game virtual worlds like Second Life. And it's right to note that admitting the possibility of user ownership of in-world IP in non-game virtual worlds forces a need to try to distinguish between game and non-game virtual worlds. Since we can easily imagine gray areas between those types, that blurs somewhat any bright line we might want to draw.

But having acknowledged that there can be gray areas, I think we can still say that anything not in the gray area, anything that's clearly a game (such as WoW), creates no expectation of user ownership of anything other than time expended. All you're doing as a player is renting ones and zeros from a game operator to enable an entertainment experience. So far I've yet to see a satisfactory argument that being able to "create" "things" -- i.e., add more ones and zeros to the game operator's database through crafting a sword or other object -- during an entertainment experience creates any legally defensible expectation of ownership of those ones and zeros.

Of course, while I believe that a lawyer who understands virtual worlds could make the above case to even a gaming-impaired judge, game publishers obviously don't share that belief -- at least not to the extent that I do. And considering their lawyers would probably be arguing such a case in California, which case would therefore rise on appeal to the "we'll just make up whatever laws we want" Ninth Circuit, I can't say that the publishers are entirely wrong....

Asynchronous Collaboration in Online Games

One of the most persistent myths of online gaming is that people who aren't gregarious don't contribute usefully in massively multiplayer online games.

I've observed more than once that being "massively multiplayer" is what's most unique about these online games, and therefore that this is what most needs to be leveraged through appropriate design features. In other words, designers ought to be looking for ways to iterate on the massively multiplayer aspect of these MMO games because that's where the unique value is to be found.

So making social games highly social is a Good Thing. But here's the sticking point: it's a mistake to equate "social" with "grouped." The goal of social activity is collaboration, but not all collaboration has to happen in real time to have value.

The question is whether someone can make useful contributions to a society without face-to-face grouping. A cursory glance at history is enough to provide examples of individuals who -- as individuals -- made world-changing contributions to the societies of which they were a part, even if they were not actively engaged with others. Isaac Newton, for example, made crucial discoveries (published later) in the fields of calculus, optics, and gravitation during the two years during which he had removed to a small hamlet in Lincolnshire while the Great Plague raged.

Fortunately, we don't have to be a Newton to contribute to a group without directly engaging with other group members. Discussion forums are another example of how individuals can play useful roles in a group while never chatting in real time.

So here's the phrase that sums up how and why non-social gamers ought to be welcomed in MMORPGs: asynchronous collaboration.

Most people tend to perceive right-here-right-now -- synchronous collaboration -- to be the only valid form of social interaction because it's the most visible form. But "asynchronous collaboration" benefits a society as well. Where synchronous collaboration features (such as pick-up groups) enable the local/immediate interactions preferred by outgoing gamers, providing gameplay features that support asynchronous collaboration creates opportunities for more socially reserved players to engage in the non-local/non-immediate interactions they're comfortable with.

And my point is that because asynchronous collaboration is a valid way of contributing to a MMOG, non-social players who participate in these indirect interactions absolutely do contribute to those gameworlds, just as people leaving messages on a discussion forum contribute to those discussions.

Probably the most visible example of this kind of interaction is crafting and auction house activity. How effective would the in-game economy of any major MMOG be without the non-social people who collect resources, make things with those resources, and buy and sell them via the game's marketplace system? The many indirect interactions of non-social players with other players directly benefit everyone in the game by efficiently creating and distributing goods.

So let's dump this mistaken belief that you have to be a "people person" to deserve to enjoy a massively multiplayer gameworld. That's bogus. And it's past time for developers to say so by providing more features that allow asynchronous collaboration.

Markets (auction houses) are one such feature. But auction houses shouldn't be the only way that more socially reserved players can be encouraged to contribute to a gameworld. What about other kinds of asynchronous collaboration? More specifically, what are some other game features that would allow players in a massively multiplayer world to collaborate that are either non-local, or non-immediate, or both?

Freedom and Responsibility

I like the idea of sandbox games. I prefer games that give me the freedom to explore. But I’m not the only one who plays these games, which means there's a social point to be made concerning freedom: for it to work in any social system, freedom must be balanced against responsibility.

One thing that is crystal-clear about online games is this: freedom will be abused. If you design a game so that players receive an in-game reward for some in-game action (the usual Achiever-oriented design), there will be players who will do anything they can -- up to and including client-side hacks -- to perform those actions as rapidly and as continuously as possible in order to obtain an advantage over other players.

So we need to be very careful how we implement "freedoms" in an online/persistent-world game. Player A may enjoy some freedom responsibly, but Player B may take that freedom as license to disrupt the game for other players (including Player A). And you can't design a game assuming that the only people who'll ever play it will be just like Player A. It can't be all about freedom; any functional social system has to be survivable against the Player Bs.

On the other hand, it can't be just rules without freedom, either, where there is no possibility for unique or novel behavior. In a game world, that's just Progress Quest.

Thus, I think a maximally inviting mass-market MMOG has to be designed from the ground up to balance freedom and responsibility. Offering freedom for free (shades of Rush!) means it will not be valued. That holds true in both the real world and virtual worlds because we're talking about how human beings organize themselves socially. But gameplay can't be all responsibility and no freedom, either; a game run like a police state will probably not attract many players -- not for very long, anyway.

So, like the real world, the freedom to do stuff in an online, massively multiplayer game should be made directly proportional to a player's demonstrated willingness and ability to behave responsibly in the game world. Proven good citizens get more power -- it's that simple.

Well, simple in concept, anyway. Execution is always trickier. But "it's hard" is no excuse not to do something that's worth doing.

As a concrete example of what I'm talking about here, I've had a feature like this in my MMORPG design for over a year now. Although my game is mostly skill-based, rather than class-based, I do offer some professions, some of which have ranks. In my game, however, you don't just get to advance in rank because you've collected 8000 zorkmids or whatever -- advancement is built on service to other players. In short, your power in the game is directly proportional to the effort you put into helping other players have fun in the game.

Freedom and responsibility. One without the other is no fun. And I believe game designers who want to maximize fun in these social spaces ought to consciously design their games so that freedom and responsibility are in balance with each other.

Character Advancement in MMORPGs +

The online game industry is desperately in need of a MMORPG that's about actually playing a character, not grinding to grow a character.

It seems to me that the single most common cause of grinding in MMORPGs is the design choice of giving characters "levels" that determine the character's abilities and that can be increased to allow characters to improve their abilities. Designers appear to be accepting without question the assumption that characters must advance in power. They then grab the first obvious mechanism for accomplishing this that comes along: character levels.

As soon as this "characters must advance" assumption gets baked into a design, however, the same results follow inexorably:

• Levels are increased by gaining "experience points."
• XP is gained by performing specific tasks (quests, killing random mobs, etc.).
• Different tasks give different amounts of XP.
• Some tasks give little XP, but are easy/safe.
• Players repeat easy/safe tasks (i.e., "grind") to rise in level with little risk.
• Grinding easy/safe tasks takes time and is boring.

The overall result is that the first thing players get to do in all of these games is to spend weeks or even months in mindless, double-plus-unfun grinding before getting to the "high-level game" that is (theoretically) where the really fun content becomes available. Players don't have to do it this way, but they do because the design rewards it.

Grinding is thus an inescapable consequence of having character levels.

So why have character levels?

To begin with, let's admit something: a gamer who's determined to grind will find a way to do it in pretty much any game. The fact that the overwhelming majority of today's MMORPGs accept the character advancement assumption means that it has become what the current crop of online gamers are used to. Even so, why should designers shrug their shoulders and only make games that cater to this mindset, thereby turning all future online gamers into grinders as well?

A common objection to dropping the "characters must advance" assumption is that players absolutely must have some way of becoming more powerful in the game world, and that without character levels, players will simply replace grinding for XP with grinding for loot or in-game currency. There's some merit to this objection. In RPGs without character levels, character possessions become more important as one kind of marker of a character's personal history.

My suggested response to this boils down to loot atoms being "bigger" than XP atoms. Compared to XP-generating content, I think it's a little easier to define ways to generate loot (including money) that lead to less grinding because they occur less often. Since increasing in power is what these games are about, it’s OK for the rewards that support that goal to be medium-frequency rewards, rather than the very frequent little rewards (usually XP) they are currently. But that's open to debate.

Either way, that's a mechanistic response that begs the question of why all MMORPGs should reward power-chasing. Why do we accept this assumption that the most important attribute for distinguishing one character from another is power? Why is power the only thing that should drive gameplay? (Bear in mind that I'm using the word "power" here to mean both direct power over other players/characters and resource security with respect to other players/characters -- the defining characteristics of the Killer-Manipulator/Artisan and the Achiever/Guardian respectively.)

Certainly power -- gaining it and holding it -- is a strong motivator for some people. It's fine that there are some games that reward it. (It's also easier for designers to simply do another power-centric DikuMUD-style game than to dream up something new, and not a surprise that publishers are more willing to fund games that are like what's been done before.) But having power over others isn't the strongest motivator for everyone, and that includes people who play online games.

So why limit your audience when you don't have to? If you can create a game that Achievers can still enjoy but that is more welcoming to other playstyles (because it’s about more than just character advancement), then why not do that?

A final objection is from the customer-control perspective: designs that require players to grind out character advancement levels offer simple gameplay that keeps people playing. In other words, grinding for XP is a deliberately built-in time sink intended to keep subscription money rolling in.

That might seem to make financial sense, but it's not exactly a fun-centric approach to designing a game, is it?

On the other hand, there are counter-examples of successful games without character advancement... at least, there are in the tabletop RPG world. Probably the best example is Marc Miller's Traveller RPG. Traveller (and its descendants since 1977) offered an extremely full-featured character generation system, but once that was done you simply played the game. There wasn't any leveling or grinding necessary; the game was all "high-end content." And yet Traveller was at one time the most popular science-fiction RPG. (In fact, it's still popular -- a new incarnation, Traveller5, is being developed now.) A lot of gamers seemed very happy with an RPG that wasn't about character advancement at all.

Why wouldn’t an online RPG want a piece of that action?

In my copious free time I've been developing a design document for a MMORPG that doesn't force all players to level up their characters before getting to The Good Stuff, but which does provide a kind of level system for those who enjoy it. But I'm just a self-funded amateur with a day job. Where is the pro developer willing to profit from the stated desire of so many gamers to play an MMORPG that's not so grindy?

I don't claim that dumping the assumption that character levels are necessary is a perfect solution to grinding, or that it's "the future of MMORPGs" or any such thing. I just wish someone would give it a serious AAA shot so that we can see if it might work after all.

Card Games in MMOGs

The idea of offering a card game as a minigame within a larger MMOG is one that seems popular. Some general questions to consider when thinking about how to implement a card game in a MMOG include:

1. How many people can play?

Is a match between two players? Or can more than two people play a match at a time, in which case what should the upper limit be?

2. What's the interface?

Are cards displayed publicly somehow (on the ground or a table)? Or does each player get a special pop-up interface GUI with some shared display area so that other players can see any public cards, as well as a private area so that only they can see their private cards?

3. Can spectators watch?

It might be nice if there were an option to allow spectators to watch a game somehow. If both/all players of a session agree, spectators would get their own interface allowing them to see the public cards played in a hand.

4. Should players be allowed to wager on the outcomes of matches?

If so, should there be an upper limit on wagers?

Note: This item and the next one are dicey (so to speak) in that there may be state/regional, federal/national, or international laws regarding "gambling" that might potentially be applicable to games of chance even set solely within virtual worlds. In other words, there are possible legal issues above and beyond any technical/design aspects of wagering on card-based minigames inside a MMOG.

5. Should spectators be able to wager on the outcomes of matches?

If so, does there need to be an interface insuring that wagers are guaranteed? (Sort of like the Secure Trade Window, except that the transfer doesn't happen until the match is decided.) Or should spectators be on the honor system?

6. How are cards obtained?

Does everybody get a deck for free? Or are there special cards that can only be obtained as individual items? If so, which of the following ways of obtaining cards should be offered:

• dropped as loot


• quest reward


• crafted or produced by magic


• given as mark of divine favor


• purchased from public market


• traded/purchased directed from other players


• found through exploration of new/hidden places

7. How are cards stored?

This could be dependent on the rules of the game, but it's worth considering. Are all cards necessary to play the game stored individually in a player's inventory? Or are all cards stored as a full deck in every player's inventory? Or are there standard cards that aren't actually stored anywhere; they're just assumed to exist and get pulled out of nowhere when a game starts?

8. Can the game only be played in certain locations or at certain times?

Is a special "table" required to play the game? Or can two people meet up out in the wilderness and fire up a game?

9. Is tournament play possible?

To ask this question another way, should the results of matches be public information?

The idea is that players would be able to agree that the results of their games would be tracked globally (across a shard, at any rate). Basically there'd be a leader board for whoever wanted to participate.

The best players each real-time month (whether "best" is defined as # of games won, or percentage of games won, or -- my preference -- amount of money won) would then be invited at regular intervals to participate in a monthly tournament, with nice items or possibly even a few months of prepaid HJ game time as a reward for winning the tournament.

Character Advancement in MMORPGs +

As I've observed previously, I don't accept the assumption (and that's all it is so far) that players only like character advancement games. Maybe it is true, but how do we know? Where are the alternative games that would give us some evidence as to whether this assumption is correct or not?

In fact, I think there are reasons to believe that character advancement games have some innate flaws, and thus that alternatives could prove to be fun, too.

Designing a game to have character advancement automatically means that players spend the first part of their in-game lives levelling up just so they can get to the end game which, theoretically, is where the real fun of a game is. Instead of playing the fun part of the game, players spend weeks or months training to get to the fun. Instead of implementing the fun content, developers spend weeks and months implementing character advancement content that players feel they have to grind through.

Why do we accept this state of affairs as "what players really want?"

Here's a concept I've been working on. Let players choose from among a large number of skills when they create their character... and that's it. When you're done creating your character, you're ready to play the game. No leveling, no grinding, no "low-level" content -- it's all end game from the moment you exit character creation.

This does not imply that "everyone can do everything." Because there are skills, because different skills favor different gameplay styles and thus appeal to different kinds of players, and because not everyone will choose the same skills, some characters will be better than others at performing certain tasks. A character with a lot of combat skills won't be as good at building houses as a character with crafting skills; a crafter won't be as good at making money as a character who learned financial skills; and so on.

Furthermore, content doesn't have to be graded by level. It can also vary according to how hard it is to reach through travel, or by how many players (and how many unique skills) are typically needed to complete that content. Again, a game without character advancement does not imply that every character can take on all content. It just means you don't have to spend time trying to open up the content that's already been designed for you.

Not having skill-based character advancement also doesn't mean it's impossible to improve a character over time. For combat players, there are all kinds of rewards that don't vastly increase the power of veteran players over new players: perks like rank, badges, leader boards. For the other type of competitive player -- economic players -- there's the other big form of improvement: money. Even if there aren't crazy things to buy, players will still collect money as a form of keeping score.

Finally, it's possible to have skill advancement even in a non-advancement game... but the only way to make this work is if each improvement comes with additional responsibility for helping other players have fun. When the rewards for collecting XP are nothing but more power (as in current character advancement games), everybody goes for advancement. When a reward is all benefit and no cost, everyone will try to take that benefit. Why not? Except that this leads to a game full of cookie-cutter characters.

Instead, I believe every reward should come with strings attached. In particular, advancing in some level such as rank should impose new and larger responsibilities. This means treating tactical gameplay as distinct from operational gameplay, and operational gameplay as different from strategic gameplay. Each higher level should require more abstract thinking and more time spent coordinating the gameplay of other players instead of just being concerned with one's own immediate gratification.

This requires one additional feature: players must be free to choose not to advance. If you like pedal-to-the-metal, full-tilt-boogie combat action, there's no reason why a game should force you to stop playing at that tactical level game just because you "have to" advance in level. If you're willing to take on the logistical and long-range planning headaches that go with strategic-level gameplay, then you're free to advance to seek those challenges, but if you like being a sergeant, you ought to be able to stay a sergeant.

In summary, yes, character advancement is a familiar model, and players do like to feel that their characters are becoming more powerful. But character advancement also imposes some effects that aren't much fun, like having to spend weeks grinding to level up before you can start enjoying the deepest content. On balance, I believe a game that lets you create a complete character has at least an equal chance of success as character advancement games, and I look forward to some enterprising developer giving this idea a shot.

MMOGs as Balanced Systems

As much as I go on about needing more "world" in the very game-y MMOGs being developed these days, I don't mind there being game aspects within the world. In fact, I think a successful MMOG needs both.

The big thing I've been headed toward lately is what I'd call "balanced focus." (Or "focused balance.") That is, pick one or two key experiences you want your subscribers to enjoy, and focus your entire design on providing those experiences... but be sure that the actual features that generate those experiences are balanced for breadth and depth.

In other words, first decide how your players should feel when they end a session of your game: tired, exhilarated, pumped, satiated, clever, happy, proud, etc. Then, as you imagine what features can produce the feeling you want, try to balance them within each system and across all systems so that everything adds up to the same effect, and nothing detracts from that experience.

By "balancing within a system" (balancing for depth) I mean trying to insure that both the low levels and high levels of any system are enjoyable, and that they feed back appropriately with each other. This is the kind of thing I'm trying to achieve when I yap about having tactical, operational, and strategic levels of gameplay -- each should be fun in and of itself, but each should also supply something useful to the other levels and depend on resources supplied by the other levels. This internal balancing process makes each system coherent.

By "balancing across systems" (balancing for breadth) I'm trying to describe making the whole supersystem coherent as a persistent environment. Consider the range of systems often developed for a MMOG:

• economics
• lore/backstory
• physics
• crafting
• graphics and sound
• quests/missions
• mob AI
• socialization
• travel
• communication
• exploration/discovery
• grouping
• character maintenance
• combat

MMOG designers also have to make high-level choices for systems:

• fear/anger/terror vs. sense of humor
• hardcoded anti-griefing measures vs. player policing
• character advancement vs. complete characters
• classes/levels vs. standalone skills
• rewards for destruction vs. rewards for construction
• XP earned through player action vs. real-time skill improvement
• permadeath vs. cloning/resurrection

In a multiplayer online game, every one of these choices (and many more I haven't listed) should all be balanced among themselves so that no one system takes over. If one or two game systems get too much attention relative to the others, you'll wind up with a game that's too much a simulation, or too much a button-masher. That's not necessarily a problem for a simple single-player game (in fact that kind of focus may be an advantage), but in a large multiplayer online game that needs "world-y" qualities, letting one system dominate the others is likely to detract from achieving the emotional result state you want your players to experience. Balancing systems with and across each other aligns them to produce the strongest possible effect.

Essentially I'm saying I think a masssively multiplayer online game needs to be both a satisfying world and a fun game for as many people as possible. A MMOG isn't just a game, and it isn't just a virtual world -- it's both. It's going to be both lived in (world) and played in (game). So its designers need to try to accomplish both of these goals in one seamless product... and that means having balance, Daniel-san.

Inflation and Mudflation in MMOGs

The first thing to notice about faucet/drain economies is that there are actually three things going on in them. There's wealth (in the two forms of items and money) that enters the game through the "faucet" of mission payouts and currency loot drops; there's wealth exiting the economy through the "drain" (item destruction and things like taxes and service fees); and there's wealth circulating in the game among players (people exchanging money and items).

What's important to see here is that only the faucet and drain matter when considering whether inflation is occurring inside the game world. Money and goods circulating among players do not contribute to inflation -- in fact, the more of this that happens, the better for everyone in the game it is.

To understand how the faucets and drains determine inflation, we first need to agree on what "inflation" really is. According to economists, inflation is the condition that occurs when the price of a broad array of standard goods rises over time relative to the perceived usefulness of those goods. Note that term "broad array" -- it means you can't just look at the price of swords only, or at the prices of very rare items, to know whether inflation is occurring. You have to consider the average price of several different kinds of readily available goods. If that average price goes up meaningfully over an extended period of time, then you've got inflation, but not otherwise.

And just to make life more entertaining, there's not just one kind of inflation -- there are at least three.

Standard inflation is the kind most of us think of; this is where a bunch of money enters an economy while the number and quality of goods produced remain relatively constant. In standard inflation, the value of an individual unit of currency decreases over time for most available goods. If 10 dollars today is worth half of what it was yesterday, then an item whose absolute value was generally agreed to be 100 dollars yesterday will cost you 200 dollars today.

Demand-pull inflation is the next type. Suppose you have a fixed amount of money circulating in your economy. Now, slowly cut back on the kinds and numbers of goods being created in that economy, or add a lot of new people to the economy without also increasing production. Over time, prices will generally increase as people consider goods to be worth more (i.e., as demand increases because supply is not keeping up with purchasing power). As prices rise for the same goods over time, an individual unit of currency is worth less and less... and that's demand-pull inflation. (This is something that can happen in a MMOG if crafters are widely supplanted by loot drops for high-end objects, or if you irritate your crafters so thoroughly that they quit your game and aren't replaced by new crafters.)

Finally, cost-push inflation is what you get when the costs to produce goods rise generally. This kind of price increase is usually caused by things like increased wage costs (as through "minimum wage" increases or hikes in corporate taxation) that are passed on to consumers. In games that don't support corporations or that don't have corporate taxes applied by the system, this type of inflation generally doesn't happen. But it can happen if crafting requires natural resources, and the developers cut back sharply on the amount or quality of those resources.

The most common type of inflation in MMOGs is standard inflation. It shows up when the amount of money being created in the game by players (doing whatever the game allows them to do to make money -- usually running quests) exceeds the amount of money exiting the economy in the form of taxes and fees. This can happen if taxes and fees aren't set high enough to match the amount of money players are creating.

This can also happen when there's a currency dupe exploit. If when these happen they aren't corrected by changing the code (to stop the exploit) and removing the money very quickly (so that innocent players don't exchange valuable goods for "dirty" money), a game economy can inflate badly, possibly to the point of ruining the game. So tools for tracking the creation, circulation, and destruction of money in the economy are crucial.

Finally, not every MMOG winds up dealing with inflation. Another potential problem for MMOG economies is deflation (sometimes called "mudflation"). This occurs when valuable objects enter the game world and never leave while the money supply remains relatively constant.

Mudflation tends to happen in particular as developers create high-level content. If powerful items can be obtained more than once and/or can be transferred to other players, then over time the price of low-level or average items of the same type will decline as more of the high-end items enter the general economy and trickle down to younger characters.

Note that a major secondary effect of mudflation is to make many quests and mobs irrelevant. When everyone can afford to buy very good items, there's no need to loot mobs or do quests that yield less valuable items. For a developer, this decreases the value of time spent developing low- to mid-level quest and mob content because now users are able to complete this content more easily than expected.

Various efforts have been made to combat mudflation. The concept of "soulbinding" -- setting the "no-drop" and "no-trade" flags on items -- is only partly to counter twinking; its primary purpose is to prevent valuable items from entering the general economy. Decay and damage effects also help reduce mudflation, though not as effectively as soulbinding.

The main reason that both inflation and deflation are bad news for a MMOG is because they alter the difficulty balance of the game, especially for new players. Because new players have less money than established players, the value of their money is significantly greater. So if new players are unable to buy standard items because of inflation, the starting game will feel too hard. If they are able to buy more items and more powerful items than the designers intended for them to be able to own (due to deflation), their starting gameplay experience can be too easy.

In both cases, these first impressions of a game can be the difference between a long-term subscriber and someone who goes elsewhere to find a game that isn't too easy or too hard.

Designing systems to effectively monitor and manage the economy is non-optional for a large gameworld.

MMORPGs, Jerks, and the Evolution of Cooperation

Why do some online games seem to breed so many jerks?

The players in massively multiplayer roleplaying games (MMORPGS) often seem to demonstrate one of two radically different philosophies of interactive play. On the one hand, you have players who believe that they do best for themselves by helping the entire group do well. And on the other hand, you have players who believe that the best (most fun/efficient) way to succeed is by taking advantage of other players.

Their high level of social interaction makes MMORPGs fertile ground for studying what Robert Axelrod called "The Evolution of Cooperation."

THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION

In his groundbreaking work, which has been applied in fields from evolutionary psychology to international conflict resolution, Axelrod created a computer simulation of the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game, where two players must choose whether to cooperate with each other or defect (take advantage of the other player). Axelrod's innovation was to use the computer to simulate the effects of allowing players to interact many times beyond a single interaction. This permitted the emergence of strategies for play over multiple interactions.

What Axelrod found was that the consistent winner was the simplest strategy, submitted by Anatol Rapaport, called "Tit-for-Tat." TFT's rules were simple: cooperate on the first move with another player, and subsequently do unto the other player what it does to TFT. Tit-for-Tat never did very well in individual interactions -- the strategies which defected more frequently without provocation in order to try to take advantage of "nicer" strategies tended to do best in individual interactions.

But when interactions were extended over long periods, Tit-for-Tat did best overall. By eliciting cooperative behavior from other players, TFT did just well enough for itself to win over the long term.

Axelrod then modified the simulation to create an evolutionary aspect: many interactions among many strategies (including TFT) were held simultaneously as a "generation." Based on the results of individual interactions, winning strategies were retained to play again in the next generation, while losing strategies were culled from the field of players.

This time, Tit-for-Tat not only won again as the most effective strategy over many generations, it did so even more conclusively than in the previous tournament. By being best at eliciting cooperative behavior from other players, TFT did best for itself over the long term.

COOPERATION CAN BE PROMOTED BY WORLD DESIGN

In his analysis of these results, Axelrod observed that while defectors tend to do well over the short term, defining the world in which interactions occur so that several conditions are met can allow a world full of defectors to evolve over time into a world full of cooperators:

• players must be able to recognize each other
• players must be able to remember past interactions
• cooperators must be able to interact frequently with each other
• there must not be a known limit on the number of possible interactions
• cooperation must pay more than an average defection
• the initial population must contain a minimum percentage of cooperators

In other words, game features that support reliable recognition of, memory of, and frequent interaction with other cooperators are crucial to establishing cooperation as the primary mode of play in that gameworld, rather than defection. Knowing that other players can recognize you and remember what you did to them provides just enough of a disincentive to defection to make cooperative behavior the norm through repeated interactions of cooperators.

Conversely, anonymity and lack of grouping tools breed bad behavior. Anonymity in particular -- or, in MMORPGs, pseudonymity -- is lethal to cooperation. When the odds are high that someone with whom you interact will never know the "real" you behind your avatar, or that interactions are unlikely to be repeated, the price of defection is low enough to allow defection to survive or even thrive as a general behavior. This is why it appears that gameworlds (such as WoW or EVE) which permit large numbers of characters in one area have a much higher percentage of jerks than very small gameworlds (such as MUDs) where the players have a high frequency of recognizable interactions, and may even know each other personally in real life.

If a game is structured so that it's hard to find and group with other cooperators, or if players can easily create new characters on a server and thereby remain effectively anonymous, then it is safe to expect that game to be much more of a Hobbesian environment, full of players taking advantage of each other, safe in the knowledge that they'll probably never see that other player again. Players of games whose rules permit high levels of anonymity have less incentive to cooperate because the cost of defection is low. The typical interaction will be finding creative ways to hose your fellow players.

WHAT KIND OF GAMEWORLD DO YOU WANT?

From a game designer point of view, Axelrod's observations offer some practical tips on how to structure an online game's rules for player interaction to either promote or discourage cooperative social behaviors. If you like the idea of a dog-eat-dog, 24x7 gankfest, then you'd encode game rules that turn the knobs way down on the bullet-pointed conditions for cooperation listed above. If instead you want to create a game that rewards trust and punishes parasites, then you'd implement game rules that crank the dial to 11 on these conditions.

Here's what I wonder: What would such games be like? Assuming other game features that make those games fun to play, would a game that deliberately violates all the conditions for cooperation be successful, either critically or commercially? Could a game that actively promotes being a bastard to every other player be enough fun for enough people to be successful?

What about the opposite: how about a game that deliberately defines the rules of the gameworld so that a very high degree of cooperation is encouraged? (Not forced, just indirectly encouraged.) Would such a game be too "angelic" to survive? Would the defectors still show up and prevent the cooperators from winning over the long term? Or would such a highly cooperative game wind up being The Game that the computer-owning but non-game-playing public are waiting for?

Nothing Wrong With People Who Don't "Get" Online Games

I believe it's a mistake to characterize people who don't "get" online worlds as somehow defective. They're not. Not appreciating online play does not mean that there is something wrong with these people intellectually, ethically, emotionally, politically, or otherwise -- all it means is that they have a different understanding of what's important than people whose primary goal is something other than security.

Nor is it correct to say that this difference in world-goals is a matter of learned habits, or a reaction to some "trauma" experienced early in life, or any other such environmental phenomenon. People are just born different. They pop out of the womb with different fundamental motivations, and to a great extent they retain those different motivations throughout their lives.

A study of the behavior toward strangers of newborn babies (Thomas & Chess, 1977) characterized newborns as outgoing, reserved, or "slow-to-warm-up." Some babies would coo and express curiosity at being held by new people; others would cry if they noticed a stranger; others would express concern but would accept the stranger as non-threatening after a time in which nothing bad happened.

What's interesting is that these attitudes toward security are apparently retained throughout one's life, and underlie decision-making regardless of most life experiences. They appear to be based on innate preferences... which means that we ought to view those preferences non-judgementally.

(That's not to say that actual behavior should be immune to judgement, just that the basic motivations native to individuals are not "wrong" merely for being different.)

As for the specific motivations themselves, there are any number of reasonable categorizations, ranging from Myers-Briggs and Keirseian temperament theory to "Big Five" models to the description (by one of the DSM-IV's creators) of pathological behavior as a hyperexcess of one or two otherwise acceptable motivations. The main thing to recognize about all these models is that they begin with the modern assumption that "different" doesn't equal "wrong" where motivations are concerned.

So any of these models can work for understanding the behavior of people generally and gamers specifically. None of them are perfect ("it's only a model"), but perfection isn't required -- they just need to explain human behavior to a useful degree. I've found the models I've named generally good enough (because they're models based on empirical data, and not data generated to support a theory), but others may work as well.

Speaking for myself, I happen to prefer the model David Keirsey developed, with a few minor tweaks based on my own experience and analysis. To express it in terms appropriate for this discussion, most people are guided primarily by one of four motivations:

Artisan	sensation-seeking	external change
Guardian	security-seeking	external order
Rational	knowledge-seeking	internal order
Idealist	identity-seeking	internal change

(The names given for each of the four temperaments are Keirsey's; the descriptions are mine.)

Myers-Briggs statistics indicate that there are a lot more Guardians and Artisans than Idealists and Rationals -- that is, the general population contains a lot more folks who are concerned with the physical, concrete, external world than with conceptual, abstract, internal phenomena. Most people are content -- in fact, prefer -- to concern themselves with what is "real": building things, making money, shaking hands, acquiring possessions, manipulating objects and people. To these folks, even the word "game" has certain undesirable connotations of something adults just don't do, or something not meant to be taken seriously.

OK, so some people aren't interested in -- and live perfectly satisfying lives without -- playing computer games. So? How is that a problem for those of us who do find satisfaction in playing (and thinking about the playing of) games? Why should we consider others broken because they aren't like us?

Of course it's also true that Guardians and Artisans are wrong to consider gamers somehow defective because we don't share their externals-directed motivation. If someone doesn't want to play games themselves, that's fine, but if they go beyond this to attacking the value of gameplay (in moderation) to others, or even trying to prevent others from engaging in appropriate play, that's not fine and it deserves to be challenged.

But it's not a mistake we should copy. If someone is wrong to deny the value of play, let's not emulate them by questioning the value of security. If we don't let others be different, why should we expect them to let us be different?

If we don't respect their motivations, why should they respect ours?

SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Advanced Sensor Ops

RontoMike wrote:
Great idea! I had a similar (but much more simplistic) idea.... have the JtL in-game "radar" operate on a line-of-sight that can be blocked by planets & asteroids. (Maybe have nebulae have a % chance of blocking sensors, depending on the sophistication of the sensor package.)

I imagine a more advanced sensor system still being able to use the "radar" display -- it just gets a few more controls added to it to let you select between the various scan modes.

For example, you'd start out in the Passive EMS scanning mode, where you could pick up information on nearby energy sources without broadcasting your own location (assuming you've turned off your ID transponder). Below your scope would be two buttons: "Passive EMS" and "Active EMS". Clicking on either of these would reveal a radial menu of sensor options, including "All".

So if you then clicked on "Active EMS" | "All", your ship would start "pinging" with the entire suite of active sensors to locate and describe nearby objects. (This is where I'd like to see a Sensor Ops or Avionics discipline -- someone with better sensor skills should be able to get more information about other ships, in the same way that Scouts/Rangers get more detailed creature stats.) Or you could choose "Active EMS" | "Radar" and have your scope work just like it does now on the ground (with possibly a couple of enhancements for space combat).

This idea would also require some sort of object size vs. ship size check.... a Star Destroyer would have a much harder time hiding in an asteroid field than an X-Wing....

Which is absolutely as it should be. An ISD basically shouldn't care if you can see it -- in fact, the "shock and awe" they are intended to inspire depend on their being seen; the big Imperial ships should normally be doing everything they can to light up every sensor within a parsec. If their sheer size and destructive capability can persuade you to give up because the Emperor is too strong to fight, so much the better.

From the Empire's point of view, of course. :)

Although there are some Rebels who "prefer a straight fight to all this sneakin' around," you're right that the Rebellion would benefit more from having an enhanced sensor environment in SWG. Being able to use "natural cover" (nebulae, asteroids, stars, etc.) would give offer Rebels the tactical options necessary for the shadowy hit-and-run strikes that should be their modus operandi. (I don't recall seeing in the movies any Red Squadron pilots flying around looking for TIE fighters and saying things like, "d00d, u wanna duel?", then cloning and doing it again....)

SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Advanced Sensor Ops

NattyDreadlock wrote:
... at some point smaller Imperial patrol/scout ships need to have similar, but lesser versions of these senors for player controlled vessels. Now these smaller player controlled Imp ships may have problems handling some of the larger, stronger or better upgraded freighters, but the Imp player's identification of the "illegal" ship could possibly create a TEF, plus he can send message to friends to look out for the ship if he can't engage or if the ship escapes.

This is exactly the kind of great gameplay my sensors suggestion is designed to promote.

A little background might be useful here. I have several reasons for being interested in getting broad-spectrum sensing features into the space part of SWG, but three reasons stand out.

Advanced Tactical Gameplay: Advanced sensors would never be necessary for players who just want to duke it out, but players who enjoy exploring tactical options in combat need a detailed sensor system. Ships must have enough properties (size, mass, heat/power signature, ID, etc.), and space must have effects on those properties (nebulae can hide your ship or light it up, stars can mask your radiation, etc.) to give players a satisfying space combat experience beyond "fly, shoot, fly, shoot."

Enhanced Roleplaying: As suggested in the story of the Imperial frigate, having lots of sensor options allows players to roleplay characters who employ tactics of deception, and allows other players to roleplay characters who seek to expose what is hidden. A rich sensing system makes these roleplaying styles possible.

Strong Star Wars Resonance: With a Galactic Civil War playing havoc with law and order, the seamier parts of the galaxy are able to operate more openly... but some amount of hiding is still necessary. A richly detailed sensor system offers a greater number of more interesting gameplay options to SWG players who want to explore the world of Boba Fett, Calo Nord, Prince Xizor, and others. In particular, scanning technology as one form of sensor operations has been a part of Star Wars products from the original movie (remember the Imperial scanning team that goes -- briefly -- into the Millenium Falcon on the Death Star?) to the TIE Fighter space combat game (the cargo container scanning challenge) that Jump to Lightspeed is to some degree supposed to resemble.

I think there's enough gaming goodness inherent in a strong/deep sensor system to make it worth having in SWG's space game. It's probably not something that can implemented in the initial release, but I hope we'll see something like it some day.

SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Advanced Sensor Ops +

Janson wrote:
This may be something that gets included with capitol ships, though. It would be necessary for them, really.
Flat, how would you figure this would be implemented?

You're right about the applicability of this idea to capital ships, and I should have said so. Let me try it now:

This stuff is really intended for multi-person ships, and not for starfighters. Basically the only sensor stuff a starfighter needs is an integrated radar/ID transponder analyzer to recognize other ships, an ID transponder of its own, and possibly a sensor jammer (although all this is for is to make it harder for other ships to get lockons). More advanced sensors are really only needed on capital ships and certain highly tweaked freighters.

Of course, if other types of ships are ever introduced, such as research ships or safari vessels, then they'd probably want more complete sensor packages, too. But the full set of sensors (basically everything I proposed in my original message) would really only be seen on purely military craft. (And perhaps smuggler ships and "pirates" as well!)

As for how to implement this idea, there are three key areas that would need code:

• ships must have the physical characteristics described (mass, radiation, etc.)


• ships must have sensors that can read these characteristics of other ships


• space features must block or distort some of these characteristics from sensors

You could get more complicated with the idea of ships having detailed characteristics that can be detected, but these are the essential elements that would have to be implemented in the Jump to Lightspeed code. The good news is that once you have these three essential concepts coded to any degree, adding new types of characteristics (and new sensors to reveal those characteristics) would be relatively simple.

Easy for me to say, of course.

SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Advanced Sensor Ops

I'd like to see a detailed physics model that allows ships in Jump to Lightspeed to use stealth and disguise.

Consider the ways a spaceship could be detected or identified (these are just some examples I dreamed up):

• Active scan
• Physical
• radar
• laser reflection (ladar)
• Nuclear
• meson deflection
• pion absorption (think of this as the Star Wars "scanning" technology)
• Passive scan
• Nuclear
• neutrino emission
• Gravitic
• mass displacement
• Electromagnetic
• infrared (heat)
• visual
• size
• shape
• color/decals
• ultraviolet
• X-ray
• magnetic field
• Chemical
• ion trail
• Broadcast
• Identification-Friend-or-Foe (IFF) code (military only)
• ID transponder

Note that "active scans" are detection-and-identification technologies that send out some kind of signal and then read the signal that bounces back (or not). (Think of these as like the sonar "pings" in movies about submarine warfare.) Active scanning is good for resolving details about other vessels, but it has the drawback of letting other ships know exactly where you are and what you're doing. They use up a lot of power, too.

Passive scans, by contrast, just take in information about other ships that they give off or deliberately broadcast. These don't always give you a lot of detail, and you need to be fairly close to the other ship for certain types of passive scans to work, but they're good for detecting other ships when you don't want to be detected yourself.

So -- given all these ways that we can detect objects in space, and, once detected, learn specific information about them, wouldn't it be interesting if JtL allowed us to explore all these phenomena as sensor options?

---

You're a Imperial frigate patrolling the spacelanes to control the piracy that's been reported in this sector of space. Your active radar scan is always on, "pinging" the space around you. This has the double effect of letting you "see" any ships in range of your radar, but also of warning off any Bad Guys (because they can detect your active scan).

Today you're cruising along near a "hot" star (one that puts out a lot of junk radiation that makes scans difficult) when your radar picks up a ship far ahead. You move in close enough to run an ID scan (passively reading the ID transponder code broadcast by all ships except pirates). The ID scan says it's the Ghazal, a YT-1300 bulk freighter registered out of Corellia, but you order your sensor operator to run a neutrino emission scan [to roughly determine the ship's power output] and a gravitic displacement scan [to measure the ship's tonnage] just in case. Given the recent outbreak of piracy, you want to make sure this ship really is who she claims to be.

The passive scans report that the Ghazal is a little bigger than expected, but within the upper boundary for freighters. Still, something in your gut is nagging you. Your sensor technician is pretty good, so you order your ship in a little closer and send to the Ghazal to submit to a routine cargo scan. (You're an officer of the Empire; you don't ask for permission.) Another ship shows up on the radar in the distance (too far for ID transmission), but you want to finish with the Ghazal first.

As you close to visual (and cargo scanning) range of the Ghazal, your sensor tech completes a set of active electromagnetic (EM) scans, and you can now see the ship for yourself visually. She appears to have more gun turrets than the typical bulk freighter... and the turrets appear to be sporting quad turbolaser cannons, which are rather more powerful than the typical freighter's defensive armament....

Suddenly your sensor tech looks sharply up at you and says, "Sir, infrared emissions suggest that this ship is masking its real power signature!" The readings on the neutrino scan spike upward abruptly as the Ghazal feeds power from its shielded (and hacked) engines to its weapons systems -- all of which suddenly lock on to you. It's a pirate! She's been using illegal technology to mask her power signature from other ships, and more illegal technology to change her ID transponder code to that of a ship with no outstanding warrants. This must be the ship that's been attacking the honest merchants in this sector!

You order your ship to power up its weapons, but the fake Ghazal is already firing on you. Normally your frigate would be more than a match for a freighter, but this is obviously no ordinary freighter... and that's when you notice that the ship you had seen just at the edge of your radar is running toward you. And so is the ship that has just appeared from out of the photosphere of that nearby "hot" star, where it was using the noise of the star to mask its emissions from passive scans.

Are these ships friends coming to your rescue? Or are they more pirates, which could put you in real jeopardy?

Better run your sensor scans!

So would anyone else like to see this kind of thing in Jump to Lightspeed? Or is it too complicated, and we should just stick to quick-and-dirty fights that are over in ten seconds or less?

Environment and Tactics

Why doesn't the physical environment of a MMOG play a larger role in what players can (and can't) do?

I may have some more to say on this later (uh-oh!), but for now let me just focus on the kinds of things we could do in combat if the game made better use of environmental phenomena.

Combat in MMOGs is still too much governed by who's carrying the bigger stick. Why are we as gamers satisfied with that? The really interesting stuff happens when you're able to make tactical plans (and counter-plans) based on environmental factors.

Environmental factors that should (but currently don't) play a meaningful role include:

• line-of-sight affected by:
• weather (rain, fog, haze, etc.)
• darkness
• distance
• ground/rocks
• water
• trees
• structures
• mounts
• vehicles
• mobs
• NPCs
• PCs
• paradrop ability (death from above)
• tunneling (death from below)
• underwater movement (sneak attack)
• camouflage effective against PvP foes
• tree density in forests (should slow vehicles down more)

All these things ought to factor into combat planning and operations... but they don't. Right now "tactics" in most MMOGs is basically just deciding which of your character's special attacks to spam at an opponent. And getting "good" at combat means grinding XP so you can get a bigger stick to whack someone with.

Yawn.

Wouldn't it be more fun to be able to sneak up on someone, or to have to carefully plan an assault on a fortified position to make use of environmental assets, or to make the most efficient use of faction points by thoughtfully using environmental features when setting up a base, or to plan the best place to ambush an enemy column, or to need to post guards, or to be able to outwit guards, or to plan your escape if something disrupts your op?

The bottom line is that it shouldn't be just the size of the stick that determines your effectiveness, but how you use it.

(Can I say that here? ;-)

In fact, not only should there be environmental factors to visibility and movement, there ought to be various types of technology that can make use of, add to, or cut through these factors as well.

For example, suppose you've been tasked with setting some demo packs in the middle of a lightly-populated enemy campsite. The enemy has cleverly set up camp out in the middle of an open field (rather than in a forest where the trees could hide your approach), but you've elected to make your infiltration attempt at night, when visibility is lowest. Now you have a better chance of sneaking up on that enemy camp without being detected... but what about guard animals that use scent? OK, there's scent masking, that's good... but what about the sniper in the guard tower whose rifle is probably equipped with an infrared scope? Maybe there's an armor mod that can mask your infrared signature (at the cost of some protection)... but what about motion tracking sensors? Well, maybe crawling will let you sneak under their beams... but what if moving so slowly exposes you to the searchlights on that tower? Would a HALO parachute jump be a better option?

Let's try another example. You and your team are driving your vehicles back to you HQ after a long session; you're low on powerups and stims, and your healer has just logged out. Suddenly dozens of laser bolts arc toward your team from behind the bushes and trees -- it's an ambush! What do you do? You can try to run, but they can run too, and they'll pick you off from behind by massing their fire on each of you one at a time. Would you like to be able to block LOS by popping smoke grenades? What if there were "caltrop grenades" -- little disposable robots you could drop whose function was to run toward an enemy vehicle and explode? What if you could duck behind other trees, or put away your vehicle and equip a rebreather that let you dive into the deep part of a nearby lake? Do you think having these options might increase your odds of surviving?

You get the idea. Allowing a meaningful set of environmental factors to alter visibility and movement options dramatically enhances the player's ability to make interesting combat choices. Adding such factors will definitely complicate the physics of the game, and that's a technical challenge... but it's one worth taking on for the major payoff in enjoyment provided.

Player Contracts +

Let's look at the sigh-inducing problem of griefing with respect to the system of player contracts as I've suggested it. How can this system be hardened against the exploiters?

The main thing to note is that I think of a contract as having three "boxes" into which anything (usually goods or money) can go:

• Payoff Account -- what you pay when the contract is activated
• Provision Account -- what you get when the contract is activated
• Penalty Account -- what either player gets if the other player breaks the contract

Assuming there was a way to allow purchased items to be transferred from a waiting Bazaar terminal to a contract Provision Account (something I didn't think of but that is an excellent idea), the contract would be loaded up in something like the following way:

The Payoff Account would contain the 1000 credits you offer for delivering the hat. The moment the contract is accepted this money would be transferred from your bank account to the contract's Payoff Account. (If you don't have enough cash in your bank account at that instant to pay off the deal, it never happens. This helps increase trust in the system.)

The Provision Account would contain the hat you purchased. Note that the player who takes the delivery contract never actually has the hat itself as an inventory item. It's considered to be "stored" in the contract's "inventory" to which players don't have any access -- the system itself automatically handles all transfers if it decides that a contract has been successfully activated (or restoration of items/money if it decides that a contract has been broken).

The Penalty Account would hold whatever sum you and the contracting player decided was fair as a penalty for failure to meet the other terms of the contract. To insure you against having your time wasted, you could set the Penalty amount at 1,000 credits. To take the deal, a contracting player would have to put up 500 credits (and so would you). This money would be transferred from each player's bank account the instant both parties agree to the deal -- this insures that the penalty can and will definitely be paid if anything happens that breaks the contract. Again, the point is to help players trust that the game system itself will fairly and impartially enforce any and all commitments made by participants in a contract.

So when a player honors this particular contract, several things happen:

• the 1000 credits in the Payoff Account are transferred to the other player's bank account
• the hat in the Provision Account is transferred into your bank vault (or personal inventory)
• the 500 credits each of you paid into the Penalty Account are restored to your bank accounts
• the contract documents are deleted from both your inventories

But what about those without honor? Well, if a contracting player decides that he just wants to annoy you, several things happen the moment he breaks the contract:

• the 1000 credits in the Payoff Account goes right back into your bank account
• the hat in the Provision Account goes back to the Bazaar terminal from whence it came
• the 1000 credits in the Penalty Account gets deposited into your bank account
• the contract documents are deleted from both your inventories

In other words, if a would-be griefer breaks your contract everything gets reset to exactly where it was before you wrote the contract -- the hat is still available to you and you're not out a single credit (since the 1500 you paid into the Payoff and Penalty accounts is restored to your bank account). There are only two differences:

1. You're out however many minutes it took for all this to happen.
2. The griefer lost 500 credits and you've got them.

The obvious potential problem here is that a rich griefer could run around taking contracts he has no intention of fulfilling. This is easily minimized: don't let anyone become a contracting player for more than N contracts (where N is some low number like 5 or 2). Player should probably be allowed to offer as many contracts as they like, since the fact that they have to put up goods or money in the Payoff account up front will tend to limit how many contracts they can offer.

From the griefer's point of view, the only practical result of griefing someone would be that they themselves lose money nearly every time they break a contract -- the griefed party wouldn't be out anything but a little time (during which they were somewhere else doing other other things). I suspect this setup would tend to limit griefage pretty effectively.

Player Contracts +

At this point I'd like to try to address the most obvious objections to implementing the Secure Contracts system described.

This isn't a truly general contract system.

The big question, of course, is whether the list of contract types implemented is broad enough to cover not only the kinds of cooperative economic behavior players currently engage in, but also the kinds of economic activities they might want to engage in but haven't even thought of yet. In other words, this system is more general than a simple Exchange Contract system... but is it general enough?

Honestly, I'm not sure that it is. The beauty of the real-world contract system is that you can write a contract to cover almost any kind of economic transaction you can imagine; the system itself doesn't impose any limits on you. That's why the contract is such a powerful economic innovation -- it makes possible enormous opportunities for economic creativity. (There are some limits on this creativity; for example, a contract to do something illegal is not legally binding. But these aren't limits imposed by the contract system itself.)

A hard-coded system of contract types, by contrast, circumscribes what you can do according to what the programmers were able to encode. And that places extreme limits on how far economic activity can be expanded -- the full creative potential of human beings can't be harnessed because there are too many novel behaviors that a hard-coded contract system just doesn't cover.

But as I said, I just can't think of a contract system that is both general AND guaranteed. If it's not guaranteed by the system, then you need a legal system with courts and lawyers and judges (oh, my!). If it's not general, then you fail to protect significant amounts of economic activity.

So I designed this system as a middle ground. It can't be as effective as a true general contract system; it has to be limited so the game can control contract resolution. That means there'll be some kinds of economic activity not supported by contracts, which means a failure to capture all the economic activity possible. This in turn raises the question of whether the contract system described here is sufficient to create the "order of magnitude" increases in economic activity that will constitute a true new stage of productivity in MMOGs.

It’s a fair question, to which the only answer I can give is "maybe not... but getting close is still worth trying."

If unilateral contracts allow one-sided termination, what's to prevent griefing?

The most obvious result of allowing unilateral termination without penalty as an option when setting terms is that it permits "no-fault" contracts. The (apparent) downside of allowing no-fault contracts is that by reducing the pain of penalties for defaulting we risk weakening the trust in contractual agreements that this whole system is intended to promote. To this objection I would respond in two ways.

First, it's not clear that making penalties optional really does "weaken" contracts. Yes, if penalties are optional then players will sometimes make that choice, which means that there will be deals broken when one player would rather maintain them. But for every player who complains, there'll be another player who will defend this system because he benefits from it. Additionally, low-cost, no-hassle contracts are a proper tool between two individuals who already trust each other. Why should PA members, for example, be treated (by a system that insists on a penalty) as though they were strangers? Allowing "no-fault" contracts as an option actually promotes trust and cooperation by offering streamlined contracts as a choice once trust has been established.

Second, unless you force a minimum penalty (which becomes a cost of making contracts, limiting their use) even the strong penalty could be bypassed by simply specifying a monetary-only penalty of 2 credits... so why insist on making players go through the motions? Being forced to do unnecessary paperwork adds no trust to the system.

Overall, I'd say the option to provide a penalty should be there, but it shouldn't be forced on players. No-fault contracts should be available.

Won't "Assassination" contracts allow griefing?

The Assassinate contract, in particular, would have to have some very secure conditions placed on it -- one condition might be that no player character can be the target of any Assassination contracts for more than one week out of any month. I think there'd probably also have to be factional limits -- only overt characters could be targets, for example. The potential for griefage without these limits is pretty obvious.

Can the game really enforce all the terms of player contracts reliably?

Enforcement of contracts is a critical element to contracts working and being used -- if the terms and penalties of contracts can't be reliably enforced, the system won't be trusted and therefore won't be used.

So how do we achieve this? A secondary system of law enforcement could possibly be developed that can not only be used to resolve contractual disputes but might provide other gameplay opportunities as well. (Although I can already hear the cries of "We don't want to play Star Wars: The People's Court!"....)

But for now, I'm thinking it's also possible to achieve reliable enforcement through the game system itself.

Consider the Guard contract. Let's say you and I sign a contract with the following terms:

I agree to prevent you from being killed.
You agree to pay me 10,000 credits, which you put into a payment account.
This is a one-time contract with a period of five game days.
Each of us puts up 4000 credits as a bond into a penalty account.
We agree that this is a bilateral contract.

Following the rules of general contracts and specific terms of this contract, if you get killed for any reason within the specified time period, all the money in the penalty account (8000 credits) is immediately transferred to your bank account by the game itself. If I delete the contract, again, all the money in the penalty account is transferred to your bank account. If you delete the contract, I get all the penalty money. If you make it through the specified time period without getting killed, then at the moment the time period is up the game transfers all the money specified in the payment account from your bank account to mine, and the game transfers back to each of us the original amount of penalty money we put up.

Logging out forever won't help you. (If you never come back, you can't play.) For that matter, if you default, I get the penalty money whether you're online or not, so running to another planet won't help you, either. If you make the deal, you're stuck with the consequences because the game enforces the results.

So I can't see any technical reason why this couldn't work. And I think the other types of contracts would work similarly.

But what about possible social reasons why this wouldn't work? Any obvious opportunities for grief play?

I suppose it's technically possible for someone to agree to a contract and then break the contract... but why? What would a griefer get out of this, since the only thing that could happen -- beyond the terms to which both parties agreed -- would be to make the other player richer by giving him the penalty money? No new money is being created by contracts (they only transfer money), so there's no opportunity for two players to collude to create new wealth that they can split between them.

As for "rich griefers," who theoretically might break contracts simply to be annoying, just how many of these folks are there? Aren't the terms "rich" and "griefer" usually (not always, but usually) mutually exclusive? Most griefers are too childish to have enough patience to be crafters or to run enough missions to make money; they just want to duel you... and you don't get rich that way. (It's not like medieval jousts, where the winner got to keep the loser's horse and weapons... although allowing player-looting as a totally optional feature might make PvP a bit more interesting, wouldn't you say? Maybe I should add "Duel" as a possible contract type to my list....)

One possibility in this particular case might be if I guard you for some amount of time right up to the limit... and just before the time expires, you break the contract. I get the penalty money, but you got virtually all of my time that you were (apparently) willing to pay even more money for. So, Mr. Smartypants Flatfingers, what about that, huh?

Well, I'd respond by saying that there are two ways my contract system allows players to prevent this kind of griefage. First, players -- because this contract system lets them specify penalty amounts -- can always make the total penalty value equal to (or greater than, if they like) the payment amount. That way breaking a contract will always be more painful than honoring it. Second, players can minimize their exposure on timed agreements by using shorter periods. In this case, instead of writing the deal as a one-time payment after three days, it could have been written as a recurring contract with a one-day period -- that is, every 24 hours in which the contract remains in force, X credits are transferred from the guarded player's account to the guarding player's account. (If the guarded player doesn't have the cash, the deal ends and the penalty money goes to the guarding player.) The advantage of this option is to minimize the exposure of the player who's investing his time in the deal by minimizing the period required for successfully fulfilling the deal's terms.

Finally, I note that a game system that "enforces" contracts (by insuring payments and applying penalties) is actually better than what we have in the real world! In the real world you can always litigate; no such option exists in existing MMORPGs. (Though I suppose one of the "Ace Attorney" games might get turned into an MMORPG some day, we're not there yet.) The game system is judge and jury -- if you can't do the time, you'd better not do the crime because no CSR will compensate you for a contract you voluntarily signed. If anything, this should actually induce more trust in a player contract system than in real world contracts! (And people certainly do trust computers to be perfectly fair -- you may have heard the story of an infamous program called ELIZA....)

So I think the system as I've currently described it is sufficiently mighty to address the most obvious forms of griefology, but if I'm still missing something I'm definitely listening.

At any rate, let me conclude by saying that I agree that "law enforcement" of contracts is critical; that's why I've described it as a non-negotiable feature of a contract system and discussed it at length. I think it's doable through a system of game-monitored conditions and outcomes, which if properly implemented (I know; big "if") would inspire sufficient trust to allow a vast amount of new economic activity.