Organic Creation

One of the hard problems still unresolved in FaerieMUD is how to create Cultures, Magical Colleges, Military Units, Kingdoms, Cities and all the other long-lived composed objects which make FaerieMUD's cultural model so interesting.

Some of the proposals:

• Start everything with a primitive hunter-gatherer society, and let the larger social structures evolve. This is the solution tried in Ultima Online with less than satisfactory results (the "guilds" that evolved had the social structure of a gang). We are assuming the fact that the FaerieMUD system understands more complex emergent structures (cultures, guilds, and militiary or political units) will mean more complex structures could emerge.
• Start everything with a variety of developmental levels being represented among the extant cultures. This would allow us to demonstrate some of the potential of FaerieMUD right from the start, and players could learn about how the more complex structures were created from the stories they tell. Then player-characters would have more hints as to how to create their own.

The first proposal has the advantage of being more organic. All the guilds or whatnot which arise would have stories associated with them naturally and without requiring someone to write them (or write story-generatiing code). The problem with this one is that we have no way of knowing how long it would take such structures to develop. It took millennia in human history. We can probably assume it would go quicker with modern humans playing it (knowing what they know). But it still might take years. It would be unfortunate for us to have coded a system which allows for complex feudal heirarchies and have to wait decades for it to be fully realized.

The second proposal gets around this problem by providing a working society which players can join or emulate (or both). Players can learn how to do it by watching the extant civilizations. Then they can try their own hand. The problem with this one is that such an extant cultural situation will take time to develop. The stories will not be grown organically. They will have to be created by writing them or by writing story-generating code. We have many of the tools for such code because the Three Fates have to be able to identify stories as they happen to characters. But we would probably to be fooling ourselves if we thought we were creating a system that will write prize-winning fiction. We'd have to settle for something that sounds like it really happened. (Of course, once the stories were auto-generated, they might be tweaked by humans to sound a little better.)

Stillflame's !SimKingdom idea offers a way out of this dilemma:

• Each new region starts as game of SimCulture. The FaerieMUD players who have the highest levels of immortal statistics (especially Divinity indicating a high degree of creativity) will be invited to play a culture or a race. The basic outlines of the region will be sketched out from this game and the stories which define these highest levels of cultural abstraction will be written (by playing them).
• After the outlines of the cultures have formed, each player will have the option of continuing to play as a representative SimKingdom unit from their culture or race: a kingdom, a religion, a city-state or some other mid-level cultural abstraction. And others with high Divinity can join as well. The time scale will be slowed down a bit. A more detailed picture of the new region will arise from this game and the stories which are played out there.
• Once this more detailed picture has been filled in, each player will be invited to pick a guild or military unit or magical college or religious order which arises out of their "character" from the previous game to play in a SimCovenant game. Sill others (just cracking the higher levels of the immortal statistics) can join. Time slows still more. A fine-grained view of the new region thus arises from the stories of this game. Ready for:
• ...the region to be opened for true FaerieMUD.

See also Hard Problems and Divinity.

— Scotus - 07 Apr 2002