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His famous paper "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit muds"
            http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm [mud.co.uk]
incorrectly assumes that the taxonomy MUST include kilers.

Those players are still there. Just because (some) modern games have been designed with the intent of excluding them doesn't make them stop existing, and knowing that they exist is important for future game designers.

I think you find most players these days are more interested in cooperation then competition

I'm a long way from convinced. If this were true, why do people complain every time an MMO's cash shop offers an item that gives the players who buy it an "advantage" (scare quotes because it's not entirely clear that items that make a game easier are actually advantageous to the players who purchase them, as doing so actually reduces the amount of fun they get from the game)?

Does Richard understand modern game design?

Yes. And if you want to start understanding it yourself, read that article. Then read it again. This is at least part of the key to why WoW is still the most popular subscription-based game in the world, all these years later.

His famous paper "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit muds"
      http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
incorrectly assumes that the taxonomy MUST include kilers. "Old-Skool" MUDs like Eve allow PKing as a fundamental game design. Modern games do not. Modern game design is heavily driven by anti-griefing because most players don't find griefing to be fun _for_ them (those _doing_ the PKing definitely find a sense of adrenaline.) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer

I think you find most players these days are more interested in cooperation then competition hence dynamic spawn rates, heavily instanced world (so miners can't ninja loot your ore), etc.

Does Richard understand modern game design?

While not patented, this game based on hand gestures is under copyright. To be fair, the game is copyrighted, not necessarily the gestures. Could the gestures be used in another game? Also, the author is quite liberal in his enforcement of his copyright. I suspect the game is rarely played by gestures in any case, rather is it played online or in a pencil-and-paper version.

Players Who Suit Muds

I expected to get some sort of analysis of all the various muds with respect to this, but instead the its just a Rift fan article.
You might be suprised, but the addictive gameplay elements aren't what drives large mmo populations, its the social people chatting with their friends. WoW isn't on the decline because "Rift is so awesome", like the TFA says. WoW is declining because they are focusing on Acheivers and Killers, ignoring Socializers, and patching out all of the exploits and strange game mechanics that Explorers love.

The Patent Filing date is Jan 24 2001, meaning useful prior art is pre 2000 (12 months before filing date) - where did you get 1996 from?

As far as MUD is concerned, the original one (from 1978 onwards) is still available

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

http://www.mud.co.uk/muse/home.htm
(I'm trying to work out if MUSE are alive - the site is up but seems to have been updated a decade ago)

Compunet (Commodore 64 network, UK only) ran a copy of MUD on their DEC10 - it was GBP1.10/hour (on top of Compunet access) to play - definitely billable time...

See: http://www.mud.co.uk/muse/compunet_mud.htm

MUD Essex University 1978-1987ish - kept a record of your level (thus a database), being rewarded with increased abilities every level until you got to Witch/Wizard level, and allowed remote play.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/ecsjun84.htm

Obviously it depends on exactly how the claims of the patent are phrased, but from the abstract it would appear that this constitutes substantial prior art nearly 20 years before the 2001 filing date.

A quick look at some of the claims show it would probably be prior art against some of them. The game stored level and sex, (claims 1-2), it was a game of skill (claim 3). Claims 8,9,10 appear to be fairly generic method of interacting with any remote game, leaving only the association of payment with the game. I'm sure online games needing payment were present in the 80's too

In summary, the patent appears to have been awarded for something that is obvious and where prior art already exists

To each their own..

Pretty much. Obligatory serious reading for anyone interested in balancing MUDs (and MMOs in general).

TL;DR: there are different types of players and you want to catter to all of them, being watchful of how each group thrives or decays, since you are risking the stability of your entire system (i.e. all players suddenly leaving).

I have no problem with PvP-oriented games, but don't try to portray it as also a PvE game, suitable for PvE people. That's simply fraud.

Bartle's paper calls it a Type 3 equilibrium. To be sustainable, though, there needs to be just enough PKer presence to get your pulse racing now and then, not so much that you can't go two steps out of town without getting demolished.

Ultimately, I believe a lack of gameplay depth drove the out-of-control level of griefing. UO experimented seemingly endlessly with new (and invariably shallow) mechanics to try to defuse the explosion of griefers, but never managed to come up with something that worked. The only real depth seemed to be -- ironically enough -- the clever loopholes in rules intended to impede griefing!

As a result, the early-stage equilibrium shifted solidly into PvP-centric Type 1 territory, since the only effective way to deal with griefers was to play equally hard, grind like mad, use mules to fund your combat characters, and stay in large, well-coordinated squads when outside of law zones.

Finally, in order to attempt to stem the bleeding, they created separate PvP and PvE worlds, essentially giving up on regaining Type 3 in exchange for being able to hold onto separate Type 1 and Type 2 playerbases. Unfortunately, this is somewhat inferior because the PvP-centric Type 1 has high churn and the PvE-based but ultimately socialization-centric Type 2 is an unstable equilibrium, prone to sudden dramatic swings in player count.

Ahem. No offense, but it's pretty clear that you're type B. ;)

And to add something constructive to the discussion, I'll refer people to Players Who Suit MUDs by Richard Bartle. It's a (very long) paper that describes a taxonomy of players that divides people into four categories: achievers, explorers, killers, and socializers.

Interesting to see where price fell into this as well.

The first MUD's ran on university mainframes, and were maintained by sysadmins. As access would either be through a system terminal they were essentially free for students. For other users, it required an annual 25 pound subscription. Here is a link to the original book describing the University of Essex's MUD game.

Here. But you could have found that yourself on Wikipedia...

You're right of course. I intended in my post to describe WOW from the friend's point of view. A more complete discussion can be found in this piece by Richard Bartle. Bartle describes four basic types of motivation that exist in multiplayer games, using MUDs as his example.

After reading Designing Virtual Worlds I happened to log onto his MUD2 server and look around. Ahh.. memories. And so many missing features! The MUD descendants truly were fertile lands of innovation. Anyway, after about 10 minutes of wandering around in MUD2 I got sufficiently bored and tried to kill something. Bartle kindly informed me that I was a guest and guests should act more polite than that. If I wanted to create an account I could do some killing, but only in the appropriate area, etc, etc. All very British and proper. Of course, the next command I just had to try was 'rape'. Bartle hates that command, so the result was predictably hilarious. I was immediately disconnected and my IP address was banned. Beautiful.

In WoW you *must* grind.

I can't agree with this statement. I can agree that WoW *encourages* grinding, it does, but as for "must", it's an exaggeration. (In my book, grinding is any repetitious behavior that does not grant you a satisfying experience in itself, but the rewards for which are.)

You can get to level 70 just by doing quests and an occasional instance run for a change. By that time you will normally be able to join a guild that can get you to all non-heroic 5-man top world content (assuming you have at least some basic social skills, lacking which you won't be advancing far either way, grinding or not). And once you are good at these 5-mans, you're qualified for Karazhan.

Many of these folks complaining about the grinding fail to see one simple thing: not everyone plays the game like they do. Not everyone is obsessed about their power level and the quality of their items - many people are just happy to play along. They however are often not very vocal, and Slashdot has an IT crowd so it's no surprise that many readers assume all players think in the same terms and have the same values as they do. There's a truly insightful article about it at:

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

And as this has gone pretty far off topic here already, I'd like to stop here.

everquest: people have swords and spells. they hurt things. that's the whole damn point of it to begin with: pointless violent escapism.

Correction: That's the whole damn point of it to you.

In my MUDing days we used to discuss the four classes of MUD player. In the overall, it is perilous to say that the point of a game is any one of those, since even games that are geared in every way to one of them tend to create subcultures of the others. It is--or can be--a form of escapism, but it is not necessarily pointless and not necessarily violent.

Cheers, you've given me some more stuff to ponder! For other people's interest, Bartle's classification of players can be read about here, and is a very good read. Indeed, the success of MMORPG's (which have almost no learning even from the start) and meta-games like XBox Live's Achievement system definitely point towards the more general idea of rewards. I think Koster's book is still an interesting read, but I definitely agree that it is nowhere near a comprehensive explanation of what makes games fun.

The earliest mud was written at Colchester University back in 1979. Check out http://www.mud.co.uk/ for a history.

It's modern day versions are still running at www.mud2.co.uk and www.mud2.com

"How much enjoyment could you have with what is essentially somebody else's high-level character? A good deal of the enjoyment of having such a character is remembering the effort it took"
If it's made according to how you wanted the character made, You paid for it, it's yours.

"... then quit the game."
There ARE aspects of the game payers like, why not just let them play those parts?
Their subscriptions help pay improvement of the aspects you like, just as much as yours does

"[Your argument is] nothing in the game should require any effort to acquire"
No, my argument is nothing in the game should be a boring to acquire.

"You'd have a game full of Paris Hiltons"
If a game is made so that one strategy dominates the others, then the game is already flawed, please read about game theory.

"You're assuming that everybody would be equally satisfied with instant gratification"
No I'm not, i actually state that if people prefer the adventure of getting the item through adventure, they should have the choice! I'm just not assuming that everyone plays the game to achieve. Personally I'm an explorer/killer as gamer. From what i read about you, you're mainly an achiever/socializer(nothing wrong with that) but please try to understand the other types of players.

"Then play a different game."
But I love pvp in this game and I pay my subscription like everyone else.

"Does the term..."
You failed to detect sarcasm, I'm sorry that's partly my fault.

"Oh, I already know. "The world owes me."
You said that, I didn't :)

Bleh, now for a working link for the article...sorry for the newbishness.

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats). I'd like to see a game where NOBODY get's to see ANY numeric values for ANYTHING. The only player indication should be health which should be some sort of description at the bottom of the page which says something like "you feel awful" or "the pain in my leg hurts like hell!".


I don't know if this has been tried in MMORPGs or not. It has been tried in text MUDs and, at least in my experience, wasn't liked all that much by players. A significant portion of players of these type of games really like the numbers...spend hours analyzing skills, running the math, and trying to come up with a perfect "build" for their character. Ignore these players at your own risk.

Richard Bartle wrote an article http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm/ a while back discussing the various types of players who play online games (the article was for MUDs, but I think this transfers well to other online roleplaying type games). You've either got to decide which types of player to cater to and ignore the rest, or build a game that has elements that will satisfy all player types.

Getting rid of numbers, while being a laudable goal and something I pushed for on Nightmare LPMud for a long time, turned out to be something that a large segment of the players ended up not liking much at all. YMMV.

-pete

I tried to be constructive in my criticism on the boards and to take a deeper look at WHY the CURB was not working for myself. I got some postive feedback from other players with it so I assume there are others who feel like I do. I agree. There can be little doubt amongst gamers that several varieties of player exist. Every player is unique, certainly, but it can be demonstrated with relative ease that the majority of players fit in somewhere within a matrix that is, for ease, broken down into a four axis grid of Interactive, Active, World, Player. This model has been comprehensively discussed and developed by Richard Bartle in his seminal essay "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDS and can be read online here: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm&e=9801/ I encourage everyone with an interest in understanding their gaming a little more deeply than "Log on, Kill, Log Out" to read over this document. I think with a greater understanding that there are multiple character types coming to MMORPG's with multiple expectations and needs, then the rhetoric behind "CU rawks vs CU sux" discussions could be moderated and more discussion could be had to steer the game to a compromise that everyone can live with might be had. In a nutshell, Mr Bartle identifies several player types in his essay; Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and killers, "One of the things that separates a really well-designed role playing game from a hack and slash through a single corridor is the concept of choice. Players need to be able to have choices, and those choices have to matter. A player should be able to pick and choose a course of action for his character from as wide a variety of possibilities as is feasible, and while some of these choices will be obviously stupid ones, there should not be only one option for becoming "heroic." Unfortunately, the nature of modern CRPG design seems to mandate that players kill stuff and rob it, due to the relative ease of focusing on combat only as a path of advancement, as well as the "monsteritis" syndrome that relegates all non-player characters to the role of "thing that sits around waiting for players to attack it." "The most elementary system for expanding the number of options open to a player is meaningful craft skills. This means artisan trades that players can explore that exist for some reason besides equipping "real" characters who go out to kill stuff. In a world where food is required by PC's and NPC's alike, agronomy and foraging could be important skills, as could hunting game. Indeed, a nomadic character who stays away from town would need these abilities, even if he supplements his rations by murdering other players for their salt pork and waybread. If food is not required, other skills would certainly be valuable, like leatherworking, ore refining, smithy, woodwork, bowyery... the classics, as it were. If the engine is sophisticated enough to track the construction of new buildings over time, carpentry and architecture take on new possibilities. Cartography, dowsing, herbalism, medicine, tinsmithy... trade skills can number in the hundreds easily, limited only by the complexities of code and the ability of developers to think outside of the norm when considering trade skills. "Some of the most rewarding aspects of playing an RPG for some players lies in the less quantifiable pursuits like diplomacy, the acquisition of a title, political influence, and inter-community trade. These are more difficult to simulate in a system relying on hard code, as by and large these are subjective skills, not measurable in terms of points. However, one can always start somewhere. The acquisition of titles like "Grand Master of the Four Flowers School of Swordsmanship" can be done through quests, say to prove one's worth in a contest of skill at the school, assuming one has spent enough time there to qualify for the test in the first place. This sort of contest is nice, because it doesn't confer anything but a tit

For more about Prof. Bartle check his site. He knows what he's talking about and "Designing Virtual Worlds" was thoroughly informative.
It'll be interesting to see how Roma Victor turns out since he's apparently involved in that, among other things.

PvP attracts the immature set..

That's not entirely true.

Here's a paper written a long time ago about different player types in MUDs. It holds for other games as well. If you dig around, you can also probably find a test to tell you what type you are.

Granted, I think the author's own biases show. He describes the "killer" type, which would be the type drawn to PvP, as about griefing. I don't think that's true, though it might certainly seem so from an achiever standpoint. More, I think it's about competition, about an ideal that you're the best because you can and do go out and beat other people, not because you log more hours.

Players of the current crop of MMORPGs are almost universally achievers by Bartle's model. If you wonder why these games turn into super levelling treadmills, the answer is fairly simple: It's because that's what their core audience genuinely wants. They might bitch about the timesink that it is, but their choice to continue playing demonstrates more clearly than words that they anything but despise it.

Yes, you are correct.

It's been a while since I read it, so I did a little Googling and found this interesting article by Phil Goetz here.

Here's a relevant quote:

"Hypertext is text with links. Links take you from one text to another. Sometimes there is a default linear path which the reader can follow through the narrative, and the links are optional.

For instance, say you were reading the hypertext version of Hamlet on an Apple Macintosh. After reading Act II, you might be prompted, 'Should Hamlet (A) kill his uncle, (B) leave the country, or (C) mope about life and death?' You type 'A', and read a considerably shortened version of Hamlet (This exhibits one problem with interactive fiction - sometimes the action which builds up to more dramatic climax is not the action which a goal-oriented reader would take.)...

...Jorge Luis Borges described such a book (though he did not write one) in 'El jardin de senderos que se bifurca' ('The garden of forking paths') in 1941 (Fishburn, 1990):

'In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneosly - all of them... Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up his mind to kill him. Naturally there are varios possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die and so on and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departrre for other bifurcations. Sometimes the pathways for this labyrinth converge. For example, you come to this house: but in some possible pasts you are my enemy: in others my friend.' (Borges, 1944)

In the same year Borges described a backwards hypertext fiction, the likes of which has never been written, in 'An examination of the work of Herbert Quain' (Borges, 1944). Herbert Quain's supposed book April March was a backwards-branching hypertext. The first chapter described the events of an evening. The next theee chapters describe three alternate prececling evenings. The next nine chapters describe nine alternate evenings before those in the second through fourth chapters with three possible preludes to each of those three chapters. There never was any such book; Borges often pretended to review an imaginary book in order to explain the principles he had in mind for a book without actually writing it.

Julio Cortazar wrote the novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) in 1963, which is a simple non-interactive type of hypertext. He provides two ways of reading it: With or without a set of optional chapters between the required chapters (Cortazar, 1966). To my lnowledge, the only interactive fiction written on paper before it had been demonstrated on a computer was 'Norman vs America', a 20-frame cartoon by Charles Platt based on an idea by John Sladek, published in an underground comic in 1971 (Platt, 1971)."

The real problem with the MMORPG (and MUDs for that matter) is that every quest and activity is prescripted and has a fixed outcome. Once you can tell how simple the computer mind is behind everything, you can 'solve' each quest or activity. So you have a load of aliases/macros. Great.

There is no suspension of disbelief as there can be in pencil and paper gaming, or in a solo game such as Baldur's Gate, let's say. (a better example would be Ultima Underworld, a far superior game).

Bartle provides us with a great simplification of the online gaming personality problem. The author of this article is an achiever (as I am) and is jaded (as I am as well). Socializers will be happy with whatever online game they decide to frequent, as long as there are people there. Explorers will be happy as long as there are new areas to check out, and Killers are just leeches on the society as a whole.

I fear the author is never going to find the answer in a MMORPG or a MUD. The only answer is a live GM, or solo play in one of the aforementioned games.

According to this he also currently works for the Themis Group.

anyway, how many games has this guy designed since 1979?

Other than MUD2? Try his website

You want to read this. It's a bit more advanced than your theory. Social interactions is just one of the things that keeps people in a multiplayer online game.

Daniel

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

This is the source of "reduce killers to increase achievers" and such. I haven't had the chance to see this book yet to verify if they give him the proper credit for his research, however.

The killer types would make such an environment a travesty. Your weapon against killers is loss of character, loss of level. If it is easily obtainable, eveyone will take that option. You've just created a new, level playing field for the kind of people who like to torture others.

Admittedly, every environment needs a few 'killer' types. Still, it is the task of the administrator to keep them in check.

For reference...Bartle