Improving NPC AI +

The bottom line problem with non-player mob (that is, NPC and creature) AI is that it's reactive, not active. NPCs and critters are either loot bags waiting to be popped or mindless quest dispensers. They don't act; they exist only to be acted upon.

To some degree, that's how it has to be. Those are functions players want NPCs/critters to have, so that's what developers give them. Except that developers stop there. But why stop there?

Well, partly it's because there are only so many hours in a day, even if you work programmers like galley slaves. (Something that courts are beginning to take a dim view of.) Stop for a second and ask yourself: How many important systems are there in a major MMORPG?

Go ahead, come up with a number.

Now multiply that number by 10, and you'll start to be in the ballpark of how many systems there really are that somebody has to design, implement, and test. (And you can easily double or triple that number if you also take into account server code, behind-the-scenes "helper" systems, and tool development.)

With so much to do that absolutely has to get done, I'm sympathetic to not implementing super-AI. "Minimally plausible" starts looking like a more appropriate goal.

It's also the case that you don't necessarily want your mobs doing things when there's not a player there to be affected by those behaviors -- that can be perceived as a waste of processor cycles. (Do you want more lag?)

Finally, there's the argument that despite what some of them may say, most players don't actually want mobs that are smart enough to wipe the floor with them. The highly gameplay-oriented players -- to whom most MMORPG developers cater slavishly -- want mobs they can beat so that they can take their stuff. (Actually, that applies to PvP as well, but that's another thread.) Making mobs smart enough to run away or gang up on a player might wind up being very unpopular with many of today's gamers.

And yet... what a waste of good mobs. If a MMORPG is a game world, then shouldn't "world" be roughly as important as "game?" In which case, shouldn't mobs be designed to support the goal of making the gameworld feel like a living, breathing, dynamic place?

Bearing in mind all the objections, I think the answer to that (as the editorialist said) has to be "yes." To make the gameworld as dynamic as it should be to make it feel "alive," mobs need to be more than loot bags and quest dispensers. Instead of just existing to be acted upon, they need (to some degree) to be independent actors themselves.

I believe that accomplishing this will require non-player mob AI to improve in at least four specific categories: agenda, environment, communication, and ecology.

AGENDA

Agenda is easy to describe, but hard to implement: mobs need to have goals and desires and interests, and then (according to their level of intelligence) should be able to devise and carry out plans that will plausibly allow them to achieve their goals.

In some cases, that will mean that they do exactly what they do right now: stand around and wait to be activated by a player. Maybe they're in "guard" mode, which means patrolling a certain area to protect something (shops if they're NPCs, babies if they're critters). Maybe they're just lazy and don't have a job. Maybe they're injured, or lost. There are plenty of reasons why some mobs could do exactly what they do now; the differences would be that there's a plausible reason why they're doing it, and other mobs are capable of doing something else because now they have a reason for that.

Being able to form and carry out plans -- in other words, having an agenda -- along with the subsidiary capability of being able to describe this agenda to players who ask would tell players that they are part of a world that has a life of its own. Creatures would seek to feed and breed. NPCs would have player-like aspirations that they, like players, would attempt to fulfill.

Not being at the center of the universe could be a shock to some players... but there are, I think, a lot of other players who would feel much more satisfied to be playing in a gameworld where even the mobs have interesting stories to tell.

ENVIRONMENT

Why is it that I can unleash electric death on an NPC and another NPC who is three feet away -- who belongs to the same faction as the first NPC -- will simply continue lounging against the wall?

How can that some creature can detect me from a hundred feet away when I'm behind a tree, at night, wearing all black, downwind and masking my scent, and not moving?

I cannot think of a single MMORPG that implements the gameworld as a place where the various emissions of the electromagnetic spectrum are used to any serious degree. Most games let their mobs do simple A* pathfinding around collidable obstacles. Some games give you line-of-sight. A few games allow terrain or character position (standing/crouching/prone) to matter. But how many really incorporate sound? Smell? Environmentally-appropriate camouflage? Reduction in visibility due to darkness/rain/dust/fog/smoke? UV or IR detection/masking? Heat or power signature detection/masking? Weight/mass detection (as for pressure-sensitive switches)?

Can you imagine a game where mobs could detect and recognize other mobs (including players) through all these environmental cues, and could incorporate that information into their agendas?

Creatures could stalk their prey, and prey could use various means (natural, technological, magical, whatever) to avoid or break detection by predators. NPCs could see or hear when their allies are being attacked and run to the rescue. Mobs in general would become able to interact with each other and with players in a vastly more plausible way because they would finally have access to the same kind of environmental information that we as players take for granted when we’re deciding what to do.

COMMUNICATION

Some mobs are social. While individuals, they are also members of a group or groups. Accordingly, these mobs ought to be able to communicate information to and among each other.

A mob who enters a "danger" or "opportunity" state ought to be able to transmit that information to other mobs who could benefit from the knowledge.

When a creature makes a kill, why can't he alert his packmates to come share in the bounty when doing so helps to insure the group's survival? When an NPC sees an enemy force coming over the town walls, why can't she race to the watchtower to ring the warning bell, then run through the town calling for all allied NPCs (and players!) to help repel the invaders?

A decent level of communication capability would allow mobs to share these kinds of useful information. Rather than acting purely independently, they would be able to act together as a group. And that would finally allow mobs to effectively match the ability of players to act in a coordinated way.

Which brings me to:

ECOLOGY

Why is it that I can whack the same mob eight zillion times, and he will respawn in roughly the same place to allow himself to be whacked for eight zillion more times? Why is it that I can wipe out an entire zoneful of orcs, and they'll just reform in the same place as soon as I turn my back so I can wipe them out again? How come I and other players can all take the same quest from the same NPC for weeks at a time and he never learns to recognize us?

Here's an answer: Player actions have no long-term consequences because mobs have no long-term memory or social decision-making capability. There's no ecological response to repeated external stimuli.

(The larger answer is of course "to make the game fair for all players." But there has to be a way to do this that doesn't turn the gameworld into a bizarrely static place! When it comes to gameplay challenges, is "equivalent" good enough? Or is "identical" required? Right, back to mob ecology.)

The last major component of a full, integrated mob AI system would be to allow groups of mobs to change their behaviors over time. Creatures (as less intelligent mobs) would simply react to player incursions by migrating elsewhere from their hunting or feeding grounds. (Unless of course they happen to regard players as tasty snacks, in which case maybe breeding rates go up to take advantage of the unexpected bounty.)

NPC mob groups would have even more types of long-term behavioral choices available to them. Maybe when you wipe out an orc encampment several times, the orcs move somewhere else. Now they're someone else's problem (or opportunity.) But perhaps instead you've stumbled across a particularly warlike band of orcs, and they don't take kindly to your depredations. So they've dispatched a runner to invite some of their friends over to hide in the woods around their encampment. The next time you show up to casually mete out destruction, you discover that you're facing not five orcs, but fifty. Surprise!

Or suppose a group of NPCs realize that a lot of players have been asking them for a particular type of quest. What if the rewards for that quest become less valuable to reflect an increased supply in reaction to demand? Conversely, what if those NPCs decided to offer more quests like that one, since obviously it's very popular? Why shouldn’t NPCs be able to change their behaviors in response to the ways that players interact with them?

As a final example, what if an entire faction of NPCs decides that players have been beating up on them a little too much, and coordinates a massive assault (maybe physical, maybe economic) on some player resource or location? Isn't that exactly the kind of large-scale action many players say they'd love to see in a MMORPG?

An ecological AI capability could enable precisely that sort of event.

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Agenda, environment, communication, and ecology. Design your mob AI to incorporate those capabilities, and you will have a gameworld that players will remember with pleasure for years to come.

Crafting as a Process in MMORPGs

I've sort of started to wonder whether a lot of developers have a funny idea of what "crafting" is... or maybe I'm the one with the funny idea. Either way, there's a gap.

I can understand designers thinking of crafting as being about servicing the game economy. In other words, designers design a crafting system as an economic support system -- its purpose is to insure that other players can have the stuff they need/want to play the game.

Well, yes, that's a useful function of a crafting system... but what does that offer the people who like to make things?

My problem with crafting systems in nearly all current and discussed MMORPGs is that they're not focused on satisfying the people who craft because they actually enjoy crafting. "Crafters" aren't all automatons who thrill to the opportunity to grind out gazillions of copies of some uber weapon, nor are they all hypercompetitive economic PvPers who see crafting as a sales game -- they are creative people who enjoy imagining new things and bringing them into the (game) world. It's the enjoyment of making new things in and of itself that appeals to the crafter personality, not the utility of the end product.

Accordingly, my one great interest in any MMORPG's crafting system is that it be more about process than product.

Don't worry about whether crafters will crank out enough units of Product X to satisfy demand. Make the process of crafting so much fun in and of itself that lots of people want to do it and (assuming you also implement a free-market player economy) the results will take care of themselves.

So how can this be accomplished? I believe the three keys to enabling a fun crafting process are:

1. Great variation in resource and configuration inputs is possible.
2. The attributes of outputs mirror the attributes of their inputs. (a nod there to the Doctrine of Signatures)
3. Players can choose to trade quality for quantity in outputs.

In a little more detail:

1. By variation of inputs I mean two things. First, there should be a vast number of resources/components needed to make things, and all those resources and components should have multiple attributes of varying degrees. And second, there should be a appropriate number of ways to connect each of those resources and components to each other.

Variation of inputs allows players to experiment with inputs to see what works best for a given purpose. It supports treating crafting as an exploratory process.

2. Allowing outputs to derive their attributes from their inputs gives structure to crafting exploration. If through crafting some test items I can learn that using a certain kind of wood or a resource with a high level of copper turns my finished product green, that's information I can use later if I ever want to make something that's green.

Similarly, letting crafters experiment with how resources and components are connected to each other (in more complex crafting procedures) should also have some plausible effect on the final product. Perhaps connecting a flywheel to an engine through a gear will make the complete device more efficient, though perhaps also resulting in a higher maintenance cost due to more parts....

3. Letting players decide whether to optimize an individual crafting process for quality or quantity is a way to support both creative crafters as well as those current players who regard crafting as a competitive economic game. If you want to try to corner the market on widgets, OK, but optimizing your crafting process for quantity will mean that you can't make the "best" widget possible. Likewise, if you want to try to make the most perfect widget possible, you're only going to be able to make a very small number of them, and the cost in failed experiments will probably be pretty high.

...

A crafting system designed to incorporate these principles for focusing on process would, I think, be one that satisfies everyone's needs. The artistic crafter can create; the exploratory crafter can tinker; the sales crafter can meet market demands; and the developers can all buy Ferraris with the revenue from the subscriptions from happy gamers.

Cooperative Play in MMORPGs

These MMORPG things need more cooperative play options.

Of course that's a tricky thing to do. What the heck do we mean by "cooperative" play, anyway? Everybody knows what competitive play is like, but how do you implement the alternative? Worse, how does a designer offer cooperative play if doing so will be used by two players just to level each other up or gain money or loot rewards by playing like bots?

First, I think it's important to recognize that just as there are different levels of competition -- tactical, operational, strategic -- there are different levels of cooperation.

Combo moves are one type of tactical cooperation that's starting to get some attention. (The MMORPG Hero's Journey from Simutronics, for example, will be offering this feature.) Something similar could probably be designed for crafting by a clever designer, or even for socializing.

But what about operational and strategic cooperation? I can't think of any MMORPG that has even considered such features, much less implemented them. That would be a game that would definitely get my attention.

Second, regarding how to encourage cooperation generally, I feel pretty strongly that the ubercompetitive nature of most MMORPGs is driven by their fundamental design as zero-sum games.

Most MMORPGs are built as "lands" on some individual world, or as a few planets... and that's all there is. Those are the only places you can be. Which means that any game that allows players to compete for places are zero-sum games -- you just fight over the same patch of ground over and over and over again because that's all you can do.

A non-zero sum game takes that pressure off by offering an alternative. Instead of competing for scarce resources, players can choose to add to the total number of resources through exploration and discovery. In effect, they can compete by cooperating to see who can add more resources to the game world the fastest.

Very few gameworlds offer a non-zero-sum game. The only such game I can think of that's actually running currently is EVE Online. It's still highly competitive, however. Because the number of star systems, while relatively large (~5000), is still fairly low compared to the number of players, and because maintaining security in these player-run systems is a full-time job, players compete fiercely to keep what they've been able to wrest from tough NPCs.

An even more non-zero-sum game is currently being developed, called Infinity: The Quest for Earth. Although I disagree with some of the design decisions being made, there's one that I agree with wholeheartedly. (In fact, it's something I wanted to do myself before I ever even heard of Infinity.) Namely, Infinity's playing field will consist of literally billions of procedurally-generated worlds.

With that many worlds, it will take years before players are able to explore (much less exploit) even a fraction of them. And that should be enough to take the pressure off players to compete over every square inch of known ground, enabling cooperation as a viable way to play the game.

So where are the other persistent online games that offer both strategic and non-zero-sum play? Why expect cooperative play to emerge if the game isn't designed to encourage and reward such play?

The Passage of Time in MMORPGs

Let's consider the question of how time passes (or not) in online worlds. It takes us into multiple game systems, and winds up having some deep connections to how different people experience a game world.

The first question that has to be asked is, should time pass at all?

It's not a requirement for a game. You could simply make time in the game an eternal "now," and eliminate all questions related to the passage of time.

For some game worlds, that might be desirable. Social worlds, for example, probably don't need to create their own local time format. It's also possible to imagine game worlds that are more like tone poems; they're not about gameplay so much as experiencing a particular feeling or event.

It's when we consider larger and more complex game worlds in which players can, to some degree, tell their own stories that marking time in the game world becomes useful. For these worlds that try to balance gameplay and immersiveness, the next question is whether time should pass with reference to physical or social phenomena (or both).

Examples of physical phenomena related to time are things like the day/night cycle, circadian rhythms, tides, seasons (temperature, weather), erosion, plant and animal responses to long-term temperature changes (as during the "Little Ice Age"), and continental drift.

And examples of social phenomena related to time are interest on loans, labor organization, traffic patterns, housing styles, city growth, and migration routes.

To explore these possibilities for features in a gameworld, let's look at the most common ways in which time is measured.

Seconds
The measurement of seconds only gains importance when you can measure them accurately. That means you need the ability to build clocks/watches. So does the technology in your game (whether mechanical or magical) support that?

And from a game perspective, do players need to know exactly what second something happened or will happen?

Minutes
See "seconds."

Hours
Hours are primarily a social measure of time. As civilizations become more complex, they tend to develop labor specializations. To support people of different professions working together, it's useful to be able to coordinate times at which exchanges can be made.

Is this really necessary in your game? Is there gameplay value in players knowing exactly what hour (within some larger measure of time, usually a day) it is?

Days
Is your game set in a location on a planet that rotates near a star, revolves around that star, and whose rotation period does not match its revolution period? If so, then logically it would have a day/night cycle. (Some orbital bodies are what's called "tidally-locked" -- from the perspective of someone on the body they revolve around, such a satellite always presents basically the same face. Our Moon is like that.)

And do you want to spend time developing the graphics and code to dynamically change both the ambient lighting and the sky textures?

If both of these conditions are true, if you implement a day/night cycle, then you'll probably want to define the "day" of your game to be shorter than a real-world day. All of the MMORPGs I know of with day/night cycles do this; it just seems to be perceived as more fun by most players -- probably a function of variety/novelty.

Weeks
Another socially-generated measure of time that your game probably doesn't need.

Months
Yet another primarily social measure of time. Because months are usually named, they're potentially interesting as lore flavoring if your game also implements days and years.

Seasons
Seasons -- cyclically recurring periods of global temperature and weather variation -- are sometimes thought to be caused by a planet's orbit being elliptical, but that's not correct... at least not for Earth, whose orbit is not very elliptical. (A planet in a more elliptical orbit, such as Mars, does have orbitally-induced seasons.)

Earth's seasons are caused by its axis being tilted (rather than perpendicular) with respect to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. Because of its tilt and average distance from the Sun, both of the northern and southern hemispheres get roughly four seasons. (Except for Minnesota, which has only two seasons: Winter and Construction.)

So if you set your game world on a planet, is that planet tilted on its axis? And will you implement weather in your game?

If so, then it's conceivable that weather patterns could change over the year according to seasons. Knowing when a season was about to start was incredibly important when survival depended on predicting when the local delta would flood. That permitted sufficient crops to be irrigated to feed a growing city. But as technology improved, and agriculture became less critical, seasons became mostly a mildly interesting way to break up the passage of a year -- basically they allow some variation in the local weather.

So are seasons worth the development time?

To put it another way: If weather is implemented at all in your game, will it have any practical effect? Or will it just be pretty?

If it has some actual effect, then seasons might be worthwhile. Otherwise, probably not.

Years
The period of a planetary body's revolution around a star is its year. It's a good measure of the passage of time compared to a human's lifespan.

If characters in your game are effectively immortal, years might not be worth implementing.

On the other hand, if nothing else ever changes cyclically in the game, then there's no real downside to implementing years as an accumulation of some number of days (other than the time to write and maintain the code). If players can know that they started playing in the year 3371 and it's now the year 3402, what are the benefits of that, and do they outweigh the cost in terms of the time it took to code that capability?

What about if instead of numbering years, you named them (as in the "Year of the Fruit Bat")?

Decades and Longer Periods
It would be fascinating to see an online game world that tried to deepen its immersiveness by reflecting some of the phenomena related to multi-year spans of time. These could be physical, such as changes in tree types or animal migrations; or they could be social, as in organizing periods of years according to who's in charge politically ("the 12th year of the glorious reign of Planodigitus Maximus").

Perhaps someone will give this kind of thing a shot someday.

Price Stability in MMORPGs

The subject of how to keep game economies stable -- that is, to prevent both inflation and deflation -- keeps coming up over and over again. Price maintenance is about keeping the game's level of challenge balanced, especially for new and casual players. If prices rise too high, new and casual players can’t afford goods, making the game too hard. If prices fall too low, everyone can afford anything and the game gets too easy.

So, in a game where players can essentially create money and items, how can prices be kept stable?

The key to price stability is to hold the inputs equal to the outputs: the total amount of wealth entering the game should over time be roughly equal to the total amount of wealth exiting the game world. Some games have tried to do this with "closed" economies -- outputs are cycled back into the game as inputs. This approach has the advantage of insuring price stability, and resembles a simulation of a real-world economy, but it has the serious disadvantage of being very difficult to maintain.

Instead, most MMORPGs use an open economy model. Wealth enters the game world by simply being created out of nothing, and exits by simply being destroyed. In this "faucet/drain" economic model (originally developed for Ultima Online after the closed economic model proved too hard to manage), items are easy to create, but finding ways to remove money from the game economy becomes crucial. Compounding the difficulty is that some kinds of money drains are more palatable to players than other kinds. You can't just impose any kind of drain, because some kinds will make players so unhappy that they will quit the game.

So here are some ideas for MMORPG money drains. To reflect the point that not all ideas are equal, they're listed in rough order of popularity with players, from most acceptable to least acceptable. (It's important to realize that this is intended to be a descriptive list, not prescriptive. This is just an attempt to develop a reasonably comprehensive list of possibilities; I'm not saying that every game should offer all these drains.)

• recognition for having the most money: (hoarding removes currency from the game economy) (Note: This isn't a true drain since money is not "physically" removed from the economy. But it's still a drain in that it does prevent money from having any practical effect on the game economy.)
• purchase of system-created items: (Note: This isn't a perfect drain because players receive items for their currency.)
• tradable commodity items:
• "required" items (e.g., class-based basic gear not crafted/craftable by players)
• consumables
• unfarmable/untradeable luxury items:
• house decorations
• special clothing
• one-to-a-customer benefits (such as a sign for a shop)
• purchase of system-created non-items as status markers (titles, memberships, temporary appearance changes, etc.)
• system-run games of chance (gambling):
• lottery (someone will win big, but more will lose)
• "house" games
• NPC gamblers
• fees:
• public services:
• transportation
• skill training by NPCs
• protection (city guards)
• space for a player-operated public vendor
• rental of public housing
• maintenance:
• structures -- usage/upkeep cost
• objects -- damage repair cost (decay)
• taxes:
• on stored money
• on each intermediated transaction ("auction house," Bazaar, etc.)
• removal within the gameworld context (stolen by NPC thief, natural disaster, etc.)
• outright removal by the developers

Note that this list refers only to money drains, to ways to remove currency from a game economy. But currency isn't the only form of wealth in an economy -- wealth also enters a game world in the form of items such as loot drops and crafted goods.

If your interest is to maintain price stability (that is, to avoid both inflation and deflation), then there can't just be currency drains. You’ll almost certainly also want item drains. This gives you another tool for keeping the total amount of wealth (money + items) entering the game world roughly equal over time to the amount of wealth leaving the game world.

Here are some possible item drains, again in rough order of popularity with players, from most acceptable to least acceptable:

• selling items to NPC vendors (Note: this isn't a perfect drain because players receive currency for their items.)
• recycling (e.g., junk dealer who takes multiple items and returns one item or some nominal amount of money)
• consumables:
• ammunition (bullets, arrows, etc.)
• components (spell reagents, crafting subassemblies, etc.)
• deliberate destruction by players
• maintenance destruction (item is destroyed when condition falls to 0% through either usage or damage)
• failure destruction (item is destroyed through some critical failure, as in combat or crafting)
• destruction within the gameworld context (theft, story-based disaster, etc.)
• outright destruction by the developers

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One particularly good discussion of the factors involved in MMORPG economies is Zachary Simpson's analysis of the Ultima Online economy, "The In-game Economics of Ultima Online." Despite being written in 1999, a surprising number of the observations made by Simpson are still relevant to today's MMORPGs.

I strongly encourage anyone who's interested in this kind of stuff to review Simpson's essay. (Note: This is a Word document.)

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In considering what might be effective money and item drains, it's useful to bear in mind what ideas actually don't constitute drains. (Not being a drain doesn't make something a bad idea; it just means it won't help to take stuff out of the game economy.)

For example, there's my Player Contracts idea (condensed version here). (I find it interesting to note that Simpson also proposes this idea as "enforceable contracts." One important difference is that he assumes that a third player would be required to enforce a contract, where I believe the game itself can and should fill that role.)

I think a player contract feature would be a valuable addition to any MMORPG that wants a meaningful player economy. For one thing, it would create a new reason for players to want to interact socially -- a Good Thing in a "massively multiplayer" game. But in a purely economic sense, a player contract feature would also help to level out the Pareto effect that concentrates the majority of wealth in a few hands. Instead of a few players hoarding cash, they'd be able to spread it around more by hiring other players to do things for them.

What's important to realize about this is that while it would be socially and economically useful, it would have absolutely zero effect on inflation/deflation because it would not alter the total amount of wealth within the entire economy. Letting players trade with each other wouldn't actually constitute any kind of drain -- rather than removing currency, it would simply shift currency from one player to another.

The same can be said about other proposals for ways to allow players to trade with each other. Player-to-player trades don't actually remove anything from the game world, so they can't be considered true drains. Only player-to-system interactions can be true drains.

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Side note: There's an important difference between tangible wealth in MMORPGs and in the real world. In most MMORPGs, players generally aren't permitted to own or create two very important kinds of real-world property: land (real property, AKA "real estate") and ideas (intellectual property). (Side side note: property that is not real property is actually recognized legally: it's called "personal property," or "moveable property," or even "chattel property," and it's treated differently than real property in several ways under most modern legal systems.)

Concerning land, although players in some games can occupy land with a house or other object, few games allow player characters to actually "own" that land. (Second Life appears to be an exception to this, but SL is much more a social world than a game world.)

As for intellectual property, few game worlds allow players to create truly new kinds of objects or processes within the game world, either. The most you can do (if you're lucky and the game even has a decent crafting system) is make instances of predefined item types. So it's not possible to create original IP that either a character or player could own. (SL is again exceptional in legally acknowledging a right of players to own the scripts they can write to create new objects in SL. But again, SL isn't a game world.)

My question: What would a game economy look like that did allow ownership of real (virtual) property, creation of intellectual property, and the trading of both?

For example, suppose some MMORPG decided to allow characters to own land in the game world... would this require the game to have "eminent domain" rules? How would they be enforced? And what if players themselves could constitute the governments that applied eminent domain to some player character's land? Could this work, or would it only bog down in appeals to the developer?

Social Engineering in MMORPGs

What is this antipathy to "social engineering" that keeps cropping up in discussions?

If we're talking about real life, I'm with you. The belief that you can perfect human beings is responsible for more killing of humans by other humans than anything else in our history. Attempts to impose this perfection by any means, including the design of social structures into which people must be forced for their own good, needs to be resisted.

And if we're talking about sandboxes like There or Second Life, I'm also with you. One of the points of these games is emergent gameplay; to stick a finger on the scales by imposing certain favored social behaviors would be to reduce the value of the sandbox.

But a MMORPG is neither real life nor a sandbox. I like 'em to be simulations, but I also like 'em to be games.And if it's a game, then there is no alternative to designing social structures -- if you're a game designer, you have to set rules for social interaction. You must consciously encode rules that define punishments and rewards to encourage or discourage specific social behaviors or it's not a multiplayer game.

Having said that, I certainly agree that it's best not to design social structures that force people to interact, or that manipulate players for the amusement of the developers or others. Players should be free to choose. Take away player control over their actions and you're basically treating people like lab rats. Yuk. But there still need to be consequences, and developers still need to be able to encourage friendly social interaction (since that's kind of the point of "massively multiplayer online game").

If forced interaction is what you mean by "social engineering," then I agree -- that's bad juju. But the fundamental idea of the developers setting up sticks and carrots to penalize or promote specific player behaviors, and in particular to encourage (not force, but encourage) friendly interaction between players... I don't agree with hammering on that, because you can't not do it and still offer a game that multiple people can happily play together.

Game Worlds Should Be Internally Consistent

I'm perfectly fine with imaginary worlds that don't share the same physical laws as this Real World of ours, but I do expect that at a high enough level there's some consistency to the laws of any world.

I qualify that with "at a high enough level" because I'd even be good with an imagined world in which different parts of the universe operate under different physical laws... as long as there's some plausible high-level explanation for that effect. Maybe (as in more than one fantasy novel) there was a horrific magical disaster that shattered the universe into multiple planes of existence, each with its own slightly different physical constants but all interconnected in the same universe. Or maybe -- and it's conceivable that this is the case even for our own universe -- the physical constants at the extreme edge of the expanding universe aren't the same as those at the "center" (wherever that may be).

I've read science fiction and fantasy my entire life; I have no problem wrapping my head around alternate modes of reality. What I expect from a literary creation of an alternate reality is that it will be internally self-consistent so as to be effective at telling a good story. And as a form of literary creation (albeit one with extra constraints), MMORPGs are not exempt from this expectation. If they have any interest in telling a good story, a reasonable attention to internal consistency is mandatory.

Where this gets a little funny is that caveat about "extra constraints." That being, these MMORPG things aren't just literary creations -- they also need to succeed as games. (I think perhaps people don't appreciate just how hard it is to do one thing well, like make a fun game or tell a good story, much less do both at the same time.) If you see MMORPGs primarily or exclusively as "just a game," then sure, you probably think that caring about consistency is just a waste of developer time that would be better spent adding new kinds of loot drops.

But I can, have, and will argue that to think of MMORPGs as "only" games is to miss a rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor of defining a new art form. MMORPGs are sometimes compared to theme parks because both are about creating a massively shared entertainment experience. What sets MMORPGs apart from theme parks is that a MMORPG can do more; because it's just code and data it's easy to change, giving developers the power to tell a coherent story by defining the world and its inhabitants at will.

So for a developer to pass up that opportunity, for them to always rule in favor of game over world whenever there's a conflict, is to choose not to participate in exploring the possibilities of a new kind of art. Being a part of that process means taking the time to make the world literarily consistent -- there must be reasons why things are the way they are, and those reasons must be consciously organized in order to most effectively tell a good story.

Do We Need a "Corporation for Public Games"?

Should there be a "Corporation for Public Games" in the United States? Do we need more public media, and should games be one of those media?

I would say no.

I'm not persuaded that the US should be increasing its share of state-sponsored broadcasting. A private, commercial mass media certainly has its problems, but becoming a bureaucratized institution like the BBC doesn't seem like an improvement.

Assuming we can accept the premises that art is of sufficient public value that funding it with money taken by taxation is appropriate, and that videogames are a valid art form, I think we can still question the "CPG" proposal on two grounds: propriety and efficacy.

"Games in the public interest" sounds to me like "the state should use its power to tax workers because they won't voluntarily give me money for my brilliant game." In other words, it sounds to me like yet another impatient attempt to bypass the marketplace.

If people aren't interested enough in some entertainment product (regardless of its artistic qualities) to be willing to buy it, who is wise enough to say that, well, these people don't know what's good for them and what we really need is another public, state-run bureaucracy to provide this game to them whether they like it or not?

In a nation founded on the principle that the power of the state should be limited, is it appropriate to expand that power for any trivial purpose? What necessity is addressed by allowing the state to compete with the private sector by providing games that are (in someone's opinion) good for us?

The argument from efficacy is that even if the intentions are good, the results will eventually wind up being not so good: power corrupts. Instead of trusting the marketplace to do its thing, state-run media forcibly extracts money from people so that a few elites can broadcast the messages they think the people should hear. Eventually it becomes impossible to resist using that power to push one's favored point of view. The unbalanced and hysterically over-the-top charges made by the Moyers and Totenbergs of NPR in the U.S., and the BBC's frequent anti-Bush editorializing, are merely recent examples of how state power over communications channels can be abused. Conservatives could just as easily install their own mouthpieces if they assumed power and decided to fight fire with fire.

Do we really need more of that? It's all very well when the state favors your political views, but how will you feel when you learn that your tax dollars are subsidizing "World of Limbaugh"?

I'm skeptical. I don't think there is any mandate for citizens to accept being forced to pay for yet another bureaucratic agency, and in particular I don't think a public game development institution is justifiable. Given the examples of CPB handouts thus far (some foolishly political subsidies among many worthwhile disbursements), it's unlikely that a similar institution would fund games that people would want to play. And given the degree to which game developers tend to be left of center politically, it's highly unlikely that such an institution -- if headed by people with any professional experience in game development -- would remain unpoliticized.

The odds of a Corporation for Public Gaming serving all the people effectively are just too poor to make such a suggestion a serious one. I think we're better off without a CPG.

Please note that this is not some philistinic, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding, "ban Big Bird" argument. The question isn't whether art is socially valuable -- it's whether government is the best or an appropriate source of such art.

Maybe next time we'll take up the "are videogames art?" question. :)

Gameplay Pacing

How "fast" should gameplay go in a multiplayer game? Should it be like a first-person shooter? Or like a real-time strategy game? Or should it be turn-based like 4X games?

For me this choice isn't so much about what kind of game I'd want to emulate as it is about what kind of gameplay I'm trying to support.

At a high level like this, I find it useful to break down action using the old military model:

Tactics: short-term, small-unit actions in which the local environment can affect the outcome

Operations: medium-term tactical engagements organized to achieve a regional objective

Strategy: long-term operations organized and logistically supported to win a global conflict

Grand Strategy: very-long-term strategic actions intended to make conflict unnecessary

Where this helps the current discussion is in determining the time allowed for decision-making.

Tactical activity is more about the moment; it's a visceral, heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping kind of thing. So tactical gameplay, to accurately reflect the level of this kind of activity, needs to use a model that presents problems and opportunities as a continuous flow -- in short, tactical action needs to be real-time to "feel" right.

Operational- and strategic-level gameplay, on the other hand, just aren't much fun when you're constantly being interrupted. So-called "real-time strategy" (RTS) games aren't strategic at all -- they're operational-level resource collection and expenditure games. You can slow time down a little to give orders to multiple units, but you can't really stop it. That doesn't mean these games aren't fun; it just means calling them "strategy" games is misleading.

For a truly strategic game, you need to have some reasonable amount of time to understand large-scale problems and devise solutions to them, which is why most actual strategy games (such as 4X games) are turn-based. They actually let you freeze time to do as much thinking as you like -- if you don't win, it won't be because an opponent (i.e., the game) jogged your elbow.

So what I'd like to see is the passage of time keyed to the current mode of gameplay. The bigger the problem you choose to consider, the more time you should have to solve it. In short:

Tactical	real-time
Operational	slow-time
Strategic	stop-time

If I'm playing a single character who gets jumped by someone with a knife, I should mostly be in real-time gameplay mode. You might let me slow that down slightly and occasionally (as in the "bullet-time" feature of F.E.A.R.), but tactical-level gameplay should mostly be real-time.

When I'm asked to go up a level, to make operational decisions about how to string together tactical actions to attain some regional objective for an organization, there should still be a sense of urgency but I need a little more time for good decision-making. At this level, I'd like to be able to slow time without actually stopping it -- maybe give me ten minutes (plus or minus five minutes or so) before the opportunity to make a decision ends.

And for strategic-level gameplay, I want to be able to pause time so that I can survey all the relevant high-level information, identify what's needed to move the current state toward my desired end-state, and develop a plan to accomplish that motion. In a persistent-world, multiplayer game, of course, you can't actually stop the game! But you can find ways to control the speed of large objects (whether physical objects or groups of people) so that players have hours or even days in which to make strategic decisions and set them in motion before the window of opportunity closes.

In summary, the speed of gameplay decision-making should be determined by the window through which the player is viewing gameplay. A personal-sized window should be real-time; an organization-sized window should be slow-time; and a world-sized window should be stop-time... or as close to it as you can get.

As usual, this kind of thing is easier to describe than to implement.

Toward More Plausible Mob Behavior

For me, changing the appearance of mobs isn't enough to give me the perception of a well-realized animal ecosystem in a game world. For whatever reason, the appearance of a thing is less interesting to me than the behavior of that thing. Sure, I prefer pretty over ugly; it's just not what matters most to me.

So I don't get too excited by the occasional developer suggestion for changing the appearance of a mob (whether a creature or an NPC) based on that mob's age. It would be a minor addition to the worldiness of the game, so I wouldn't object to it, but it wouldn't excite me.

What would excite me would be if the behavior of a mob changed according to the maturity of an individual mob, the normal intelligence level for that type of mob, and the environmental conditions.

Assuming a world with Juvenile, Mature, and Aged versions of a mob, it's fun to imagine them displaying different behaviors in different circumstances. Maybe something like:

	NORMAL	THREATENED	ATTACKED	INJURED
Grazer
Juvenile	play	run to parent	defend	escape
Mature	graze/patrol	defend	defend	escape
Aged	rest/graze	defend	escape	escape
Predator
Juvenile	play	investigate	defend	escape
Mature	rest/patrol	attack	attack	escape
Aged	rest	defend	escape	defend
Semi-intelligent
Juvenile	investigate	attack	run to parent	escape
Mature	patrol	attack	attack	defend
Aged	rest	defend	attack	escape
Humanoid
Juvenile	play	investigate	run to parent	escape
Mature	patrol	investigate	attack	defend
Aged	rest/patrol	defend	defend	defend

(Note that this is primarily for combat interactions. For other kinds of activities, semi-intelligent and intelligent mobs -- NPCs -- would have other tables for generating other kinds of reactions in other situations.)

If distinctive behaviors like these were implemented (especially with a little bit of randomness, and with the ability for members of groups to signal their states to each other), the game world would feel vastly more dynamic.