The Playabilty Problem
A great deal of effort is being invested in creating a realistic (self-cohesive) environment.
However, I am worried that not so much is being given to making sure that such an environment is enjoyable to play in. I would love to have the shopkeepers I meet be played realistically, and generally this means they need to have a human behind them. But I could never make myself play one. If everyone must eat to survive, find shelter or die of cold, visit their contacts or lose them, hone their skills or forget them, how much time is left for just having fun, for doing great deeds?
The 'standard adventurer', a fighter/mage who travels the world righting wrongs (usually by bashing heads, admittedly), came about because such a role provides immense scope for excitement. A Grand Vizier may be plotting to overthrow the Emperor, but meanwhile there's a lot of paper every morning. Most people, even in stories, only get a chance at world-changing once in their lives, and to play the rest of such a life for that moment would take obsession. Adventurers work on the aesthete - they live to work, the player can't wine, dine and whore.
Ged has written elsewhere on the Wiki that no simple player-to-player communication or character-analysis devices will be present, except as provided by the environment. Leaving aside issues of enforcement (given programs like ICQ), I think most players will want to be able to see their character develop in some obvious way. Roleplaying has always been a social activity, and I don't see why realism should be allowed to stifle that aspect on FaerieMUD.
This is an invitation for suggestions.
— Alexis Li? - 10 Apr 2002
I point to Artificial Intelligence as a resolution of the problem of "shopkeepers should be played realistically, but noone wants to play them. I added in the latest of what we plan for that.
Also, to some extent i am also wary of the lack of OOC communication lines. While it certainly does make for a very realistic playing environment, i would begin to fret at being alone (at least until i personally recognize the social worth of the characters in faeriemud regardless of any real-world correlation; however, i feel this may border on more than a few types of mental deviance, so have yet to take this step, not to mention there aren't any characters to do that with yet.). i'm not sure where the line can be pushed into believability while still letting it be a social game between the players (only). so long as you can distinguish between PCs and NPCs, it's a social game between players; but that same ability prevents realism. well, maybe PCs could be partially recognizable anyway - they'll be more interesting, and at that point, if an NPC is interesting enough to fool someone into thinking they're a PC, it doesn't matter whether or not it actually is. hmm...
— Stillflame - 13 Apr 2002
Ged's Rejoinder
FærieMUD's playability has been a concern of mine from the very beginning, so I couldn't agree more with AlexisLi?'s concern. There is a balance to be maintained in a game, especially one in which most of the value of the game is created in the interaction of the participants. FærieMUD will only succeed if enough people play it to maintain an interesting player density, and people won't play it if it's not enjoyable. Given that, I think we can all agree that "enjoyable" is a measure by which we should hold ourselves accountable when creating it.
I, however, disagree with much that has been written so far about how to make it enjoyable. I think the root cause of this disagreement is that "enjoyable" is an extremely subjective word. Gamers are a pretty diverse bunch, with diverse tastes and requirements. When we say "enjoyable", whose definition do we mean? Well, us for one. It has to be interesting and enjoyable firstly to its creators, in order that they might be rewarded for their effort and expenditure of time and creative energy. Once that is accomplished, it must be interesting to players. Not every player, not necessarily even a majority of players, but enough that the world is worth visiting. This, I think, is the trickiest decision.
When I started the FærieMUD project, I did so because I didn't find the online multi-user games that I'd been playing for years enjoyable anymore. They weren't enjoyable because I was interested in, as AlexisLi? says, "doing great deeds", and I didn't feel like those games were giving that to me. FærieMUD was born of the desire to create a MUD in which characters are full-figured, well-rounded individuals that are distinct in many ways from the player playing them, much like D&D or other paper-and-pencil RPGs. This, for me at least, is what would make me play a role-playing game.
Characters with depth require a world that is deep enough to contain them. I tried to enumerate many of these requirements in the General Philosophy topic, but I've refined my reasons a bit since then, in part due to reading things like Mu's Unbelievably Long and Disjointed Ramblings About RPG Design, The Art of Computer Game Design, The Laws of Online World Design, and many other interesting discussions on the MUD-Dev list. While I don't happen to agree with all of the gaming philosophy in them, they've convinced me that we're (mostly) on the right track.
There are some issues raised by both AlexisLi? and Stillflame that I'd like to address, too:
Eliminating Basic Needs
AlexisLi? asks "If everyone must eat to survive, ... how much time is left for just having fun, for doing great deeds?"
I agree that a world that requires Players to pay copious amounts of attention to every mundane detail of their character's life is a recipe for tedium, but that doesn't mean that the elimination of the requirement for food, rest, and training will make things more fun or interesting. The base needs are, by and large, the factors that separate the heroic journeys from the vacations to Disneyland.
FærieMUD most definitely should not be a game of pure logistics. The mundane concerns should be muted and placed somewhere in the background of gameplay, but to eliminate them entirely makes it trivially easy to undertake an epic journey, lead a massive army, or build a city -- things which not just anyone should succeed at. What is a hero in the most general sense except someone who perseveres through adversity? If you eliminate the bottom levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, it results in a game in which the designers must introduce the other higher levels artificially. Certainly characters are heroes, so giving them super-human tolerances and talents is a part of making it interesting to play one, but I am loathe to give up the story possibilities of eliminating the baser needs altogether.
I think our idea of how characters work can go a long way to solving part of the tedium of the basic needs. Instead of being obligated to type the commands to eat or drink (and perhaps other such minor tasks), the character could handle them himself for the most part. Non-player characters will have to do this, so keeping the appropriate actions as part of the stories in the "default" role should handle them fairly well. The player, of course, will need some means of controlling the character's automation, but I think that can be handled with roles as well. If your character is in a survival situation, part of the survival role should be to alter the "eat" story to only be triggered if there's enough water, and then to eat conservatively and as seldom as possible, etc.
The other tedious part -- the necessity of buying/carrying/storing the necessary provisions -- overlaps with economy, which is another area that most games do badly, but that we should try to model with some amount of accuracy for both balance and gameplay. We should also build in some tunable parameter which will let us make provisions more effective should it become too burdonsome to maintain them for the average character.
Exposed Game Mechanics and OOC Communication
AlexisLi? says:
[...]most players will want to be able to see their character develop in some obvious way. Roleplaying has always been a social activity, and I don't see why realism should be allowed to stifle that aspect on FærieMUD.
This, to me, is three separate issues: exposed game mechanics, out-of-character communication, and the social implications of both.
Exposed game mechanics are the use of raw game values, numeric "levels", and other such programmatic data to present a measure of the character's progress and state in the game. This is typically how players of a MU* observe their character's development, but it's also what causes them to devolve into statistics-chasing hack-and-slash games. Not that there's anything wrong with hack-and-slash, but it gets tedious quick, and the only way to motivate players is by adding more and more levels at increasingly ridiculous amounts of experience. Once you've exposed the player to statistics, it'll always be about the statistics.
If, instead, you make the measure of progress somewhat similar to how progress is measured in reality, eg., empirical evidence, assessment by peers, assessment by a more knowledgeable person, it adds to the value of several social behaviours which are sorely lacking in other games. Apprenticeship, the guild environment, clans and families, and knight/squire kinds of relationships are all encouraged by the dependency on each other for advancement in skill and ability.
Out-of-character communication usually takes the form of either "channels" or some form of ubiquitous telepathy like "tell" or "shout". These sorts of commands are useful if you want to build social interaction between players, but they are inherently destructive to the social interactions of characters. The lack of in-game inter-player communication is another factor which naturally leads to social interaction. If you can communicate with anyone in the world at will, what reason is there to gather? Why have meetings if you can broadcast a message OOC through some ubiquitous "channel"? The difficulty of communicating leads to town criers, heralds, semaphores, smoke signals, runners, coats of arms, and other sorts of character-wise communication mechanisms which make the game richer and more believable.
The lack of OOC communication provides a natural power-balancing factor to the game. The ability of a character to communicate with her allies or vassals, and their ability to communicate to her quickly degrades with larger groups. This acts as a limiting factor to how effective larger groups of players can be with each other.
Players, as AlexisLi? suggests, will inevitably work around this by communicating outside of the game, but to encourage such activity by building it into the game is, again, to guarantee that it will become the predominant means of communication.
Stillflame's concerns that there won't be anyone to talk to at the beginning are well-founded -- there will be a distinct lack of player-characters to interact with at the beginning. OOC communication won't change that, though. We can somewhat alleviate the difficulty of starting out on one's own with the family ties we propose to give new characters, and we can also cause the character generation process to always pick cities of origin which have a certain density of player-characters in them.
To sum up: I, too, believe in the importance of playability, but I think the plans we have will make for a more enjoyable game to a select group of players. I suspect that the players who will find the game enjoyable will be those who are interested in a roleplaying environment, and will appreciate the increased level of detail and realism. We just have to try to find the balance between playable and believable to succeed.
— GedTheGreysHain - 20 Apr 2002
Well, Ged and I had a little ICQ chat sometime ago, so here's the log. I'll try and turn this into something more cohesive at some point.
memehack(17:07 PM) : The idea of Maslow's hierarchy I find quite compelling, and I thought of having the autonomous character handle eating about 10secs before I read you saying that. What I was thinking of is a sliding scale of need-relevance, as described by Maslow. memehack(17:08 PM) : For example, in a desert your foremost need is water economy, so the player should deal with it. However, in a city environment, food is 2-3 levels below your current need level, so the character should deal with a minimum of fuss Ged(17:08 PM) : Ooo... that sounds cool. =:) So, the character would automate tasks based on what level of needs were already met? memehack(17:11 PM) : Something like breathing, where your body controls it invisibly unless you start thinking about it Ged(17:11 PM) : *nog* We could base the "default" role on the pyramid. memehack(17:11 PM) : How do you mean, 'default role'? Default need level? Ged(17:13 PM) : Roles are like story templates with associated actions, so that when the character observes patterns of events which match the role-story, the associated action is fired off. Default role would be a role that characters have in common. memehack(17:15 PM) : I see... so the 'merchant' role would be based on the 'social' role, based on the 'security' role, on the 'coping' role? Ged(17:16 PM) : Yes, except they don't have to necessarily be inherited. The character can have multiple roles at once, albeit with some heuristic for doing prioritization that we haven't yet worked out. memehack(17:18 PM) : Great. Maybe some very basic learning, so the role becomes 'complacent' and fades into the bg if it's needs are consistently met? I wonder whether some of the cultural modelling could be achieved from these roles? IE a predator culture would become very aggressive at the 'security' level, whereas herbivores would exhibit grouping behaviour Ged(17:23 PM) : I just realized we don't have anything at all about Roles in the Wiki. memehack(17:25 PM) : I was also wondering whether the complacency model might be applicable to communication. Fx a member of a tribe of old style Amerindians, in possession of a fire and blanket, might not have to think twice about using smoke signals. If the makings of a fire are near, perhaps 'shout boo' could get translated into build fire, wave blanket fairly automatically? Ged(17:29 PM) : Yes, but the problem them becomes disambiguation between when you really just want to shout, and when you want to send smoke signals. It wouldn't do to have your character start making a fire when you're the sentry raising an alarm for your sleeping comrades. This can still be handled directly, though, through the Skills system without requiring the more granular steps to be explicitly expressed. FX, the 'signal' command might be Ged(17:29 PM) : an aggregate command that did what you suggest in the context of the given culure. memehack(17:30 PM) : Sure - I only used 'shout' because that's the command on most regular MUDs for a wide-area broadcast Ged(17:30 PM) : Though you'd still want non-Amerindians to be able to learn and use the smoke signal skill, so the cultural context would best be represented by making members of the Amerindian Culture start with that skill at a non-zero level, I think. Ged(17:31 PM) : Right, okay. memehack(17:33 PM) : Well, yes, but that wasn't really the thrust of my argument More than just having the skill, you also need a disposition to use it. My default comms mode is email (how sad...), so whenever I think 'I need to relay some information to XYZ, who isn't here', I start email. My Amerindian would start building a fire. thus the high level wish for communication is interfaced via dispositions to possible actions memehack(17:34 PM) : Of course, once he has been introduced to Linux, he will never rub sticks again ;-) Ged(17:35 PM) : I see. Perhaps the selection of a communication method based on distance, knowledge of skills (language, smoke signal-reading, etc.), current situation; all with a settable default? Ged(17:35 PM) : *giggle* True, true. memehack(17:37 PM) : Yep <beam> Although I would prefer to steer away from 'settable default', which stinks of mechanic exposition - from a CS POV, rather than playability, I'd rather have the agent's dispositions be trained Ged(17:38 PM) : Ah, right. Sort of like trend-analysis, so that if a character tends to always send smoke signals, that'll become her default after a while? memehack(17:41 PM) : Exactly, but the problem is, when do we transition the player from 'smoke- signal blah' to 'signal blah'? Ged(17:42 PM) : Yeah, that is tricky. memehack(17:48 PM) : the command issue is tricky... maybe we could allow the player to 'nudge' his characters dispositions? Only by 1 point or so, but just enough to establish a preference for a particular method? Ged(17:50 PM) : Yeah. The hard part is coming up with the command language, I think. Maybe something like 'prefer'?
— Alexis Li? - 01 May 2002
Cool stuff. I agree almost entirely. The "prefer" nudge reminds me of nudging your position in an emotion space. Perhaps "prefer" should be a proficiency or a talent.
— Scotus - 04 May 2002
See: Sim Culture
— Stillflame - 08 Jun 2002
I found this quote to be particularly relevant, especially in relation to things like limiting means of communication and keeping the baser character needs. It also serves, interestingly, as a caution against making the world too realistic, I think.
We want total freedom in our fantasy game world to do anything, but we forget that the essence of a game is the limitations of its world. The game of chess is a classic example of a severely limited playfield, but with mind-blowing intrigue. We face the freedom of the real world every day, but find it more interesting to play on our computer screens, because it holds the promise of a less infinite world that can be conquered.
— Eugene Jarvis, Creator of ''Robotron'' and ''Defender''.
— GedTheGreysHain - 24 Jul 2002
IRC Log (irc://irc.freenode.net/#mues)
stillflame - devEiant: "because it holds the promise of a less infinite world that can be conquered" - my ideas of FaerieMUD are that it will not be conquerable... stillflame - i'd say mu*'s in general should not be conquerable, but instead be social and imaginative and about living well or interestingly stillflame - but i definitely agree with: "the essence of a game is the limitations of its world" - but with the limitations being the imagination of the player and the willingness of others (PC or NPC) to accompany them on their journey devEiant - I tend to read that with a rather large definition of devEiant - ...'conquered'. stillflame - hmm? devEiant - Not the conquistadorish conquer, but more a world in which one can play an extraordinary individual. stillflame - ah, okay.... devEiant - I don't want it to be conquerable in that sense either. devEiant - I also think the words 'holds the promise of' are important. stillflame - good. i'm happy with the newly defined 'conquer' devEiant - They seem to mean to me that when one plays a game which meets that quality, one has a hope of impacting the goings-on there in a more dramatic way than in this one. devEiant - Of course, I may be reading an awful lot into that quote; I dunno. stillflame - right. that's a great way to read it, IMO
— Stillflame - 24 Jul 2002
