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Restart, Restore, or Continue Creating Democracy?
The Importance of writes "LawMeme's James Grimmelmann, whose work has previously been noted on Slashdot, has written a new piece about virtual life and death in MMORPGs, and what that means for online democracy. Any serious discussion of democracy online that features comments on "The Secret of Monkey Island" has got to be good."
Plus gaming industry created 5000 new jobs last year. How more democratic can we get ;)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Re-elected baby!!
Amen!
I totally agree with this post!
Hi, I'm Guybrush Threepwood. I want to be a pirate.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
respawn is needed because i dont want to wait forever waiting forever for players to take forever in completing the mission.
i once played this game where there was no respawn.. so if i was killed in the first 5 minutes, i would have to wait almost 30 minutes to play again. i could have shit, showered, and shaved!
respawn is needed because players dont want to wait for their turn again. waiting for other players is like waiting for paint to dry. i would rather play the game then wait for other players to complete their mission. respawn keeps the players playing and not waiting for the remaining players to complete or die off so they can play again. no one likes to wait.
I don't mind playing a good LAN party game with people I know, but back when I was pretty good at Quake II, and started to try out MMRPG's like the "Ultima Online" beta, I realized that I just didn't enjoy playing the online games for one simple reason:
Most of the people online acted like assholes.
Too often, I'd log into a Quake/Quake II server, and get some punk calling me a MotherF---er because his team was losing at Capture the Flag. I got tired of Ultima Online when, during the beta, some jackass got in the way of the door and wouldn't let me walk out.
Diablo? Town killed by someone who thought it was fun to use the cheats to kill people.
On the whole, I tend to like the gamers I know in person and through my writings. But in online games, it seems that there are hordes of people who never learned to act above the age of 12, and need a good kick in the ass - or just never be allowed to play with anyone else online again.
It's probably the #1 reason why Nintendo still hasn't moved into online gaming in a big way (so far, Sega's Phantasy Star Online is their only online experience) - they don't want Jimmy's parents complaining about how their child got ragged on as a "Pikachu-f---er" during Pokemon Online.
The author's right - the penalities for "bad" behavior in an online format might work with some who have a community in the game, but for those who just want to be a dickhead, it's hard to do much other than ban them, since they have little emotionally wrapped up in the game.
Eh - just my opinion, and I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I for one welcome our new democratic police state.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
FUD.
On every forum on games, music, sports, or anything not directly related to "our continued survival as a race", there'll be some idiot who chirps up some "this is a waste of time, think of the children!"
Today, you're that idiot.
There's plenty of places to out your insightless politic - games.slashdot.org isn't one of them.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
This is very similar to playing on-line poker with virtual money. What's the point of playing poker with virtual money you may ask? Bluffing no longer works, after all. What's the point of playing poker if you cannot bluff because everyone has infinite money? Surprisingly I found that most people DO place value in their online money - and treat it like real money. They want to accumulate as much online money as possible. Why? What's the point? I guess it's the never ending quest to be better than the next guy at something - even something as useless as an online game.
And I enjoy a good read about games, gaming, nerdy stuff in general. But that article was kind of meatless. Like a soup made of mostly water. I didn't see any profound concepts or ideas or even a point other than, "in games you can die and it's interesting that people can choose to kill or help others in games."
The blurb on slashdot was MORE interesting than RingTFA - which why people not wasting 15min of their time reading the article will probably mod me down for flaimbate and overrated.
Ave Molech Setting
Becuase english lacks a gender neutral pronoun some authors randomly use his, her or some combination of the two. Some people prefer "they" to "his" or "her". "Tey" has also been proposed to replace his/her.
I... don't... know...
I think there's a larger point here too -- destructive forces usually come either from outside a community or from someone who has voluntarily withdrawn from that community. People within the friendship network cannot attack that network without attacking part of themselves, and are reluctant to do this. It's why real-world wars occur between groups that don't understand each other or have chosen to disassociate themselves from each other -- a necessary part of the process of "othering."
And this, like online democracy, is important because people are the same people in different media -- they just have different levels of investment in the community.
The online world provides us with a model for solving real social problems: don't increase the legal threat of punishment (for that depends on being caught) -- increase people's sense of belonging to a caring community, and threaten their feeling of status in that community if they violate its norms. That's the real way to solve real-life social problems.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. Would we actually have world peace if people weren't so "isolated" as they are in the real world? And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.
One of the emerging trends that I see coming is the ability for international players to freely communicate and interact with each other, free of language barriers. Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this problem for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with dynanmic improvement in translation accuracy using in-game human feedback and machine learning.
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world free of linguistic, political, and physical barriers.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
i have seen your other posts and like your style.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
is dead
is this dead too?
It's because of the faggity-ass politically correct movement from the 90s that espoused the use of the feminie form for reference to individuals of unknown gender--which is exactly the opposite of what English grammrians have been using for centuries. It's rubbish. In English there is only one true way: masculine form (i.e.: him, his, he.) Anyone who uses otherwise is a fucktard of monstrous proportions.
I saw this "Breaking the Silence" report on the telly the other night... very well worth watching, and rather disturbing. I just wish he'd do something with his hair.
http://pilger.carlton.com/h tml 8 51.htm
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/09/272644.s
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
idiot.
whitehouse.org is fun but whitehouse.net is even more so.
There is no real democracy anywhere.
[insensitive clod]The US of A is a Democratic Republic.[/insensitive clod]
Democracy is inherently evil and results in Mob Rule. A republic provides a much more civilized way of tempering mood swings of the public.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's the konami code you uneducated troglodytes.
Not much to the article, and nothing about democracy. Social issues != democratic issues. Indeed, online game servers are usually run autocratically by the game company.
Democracy is not the reason why most games fail, its due to the lack of socialism. In every single online game I have played, I have seen a sharp division between the "leets" and the "noobs". The so called elite players will do their level best to create a social system that is beneficial to themselves, whilst the noobs quit in disgust due to the inequality. The very nature of PvP is that the strong survive and the weak find other games.
:)
Now since the problem has been identified, whats the solution? Some games have taken out Player vs Player aspect, for example Horizons (www.istaria.com) or a game called Shattered Galaxy (www.sgalaxy.com) has something called a power rating system, the stronger the player the more noobs he has to fight.
Attaining equality is easy, however, attaining it whilst still allowing people to get on the levelling treadmill is hard. I am sure that developers all over the world are looking at ways to appeal not only to their most loyal hardcore fans but also to the travelling lowbie.
Misquoting someone important - "With great power comes great responsibility", If the gameplay was set in a way that it is beneficial to help lowbies, then I am quite sure most games problems will be solved, till then I will keep dodging the "I ownz joo, noob" comments
I know exactly when I starting hating the programmers at Sierra On-Line. It was Space Quest 2. You crash onto a planet and begin looking around for a way to escape. Only problem is that every single thing on that planet is trying to kill you. Let's see, I think I'll walk over here... oops! Didn't see those faint dotted lines that marked a trap door over a spike pit! Here's a maze of vines I have to carefully manuever, pixel by pixel with the keyboard arrows... whooops! I touched a vine, and now the plant is eating me! Hmmmmm, I wonder if I should take some of these berries to eat. Nope! I guess my convulsing, and now dead body indicates I shouldn't have!
But here's the worst puzzle on that planet - every single tree is too slippery to climb except for one which has a slightly different description, indicating you can probably climb it. So you type "climb tree" and guess what? Roger Wilco gets his hands and feet stuck on the tree, critters descend from the tree limbs, and eat him.
GAAAAHHHHHHH!! Not only did Sierra On-line games kill you for making a wrong move - they killed you for doing something entirely logical! End result? You creep through the game with a trembling hand, expecting death at every step, stabbing the "Save" key every 30 seconds or so.
LucasArts was a breath of fresh air. In "The Secret of Monkey Island" there was only one way to die. One! You had to be foolish enough to stay underwater for more than twenty minutes. And in "Monkey Island 2" you couldn't die at all!
And even better, you couldn't do anything in either game to permanently ruin your chances of winning. What's that, you forgot to read the combination at the beginning of the game in Space Quest? Too bad for you, when you need it 10 hours later! Hope you saved that game! But what's that, you insulted Governer Elaine Marley so much that she threw you out of her room in the mansion of "Monkey Island 2"? No problem! Go back in and she'll sigh and give you another chance! Try all the funny conversation choices! It's OK, you can always do the right thing later!
Of course certain LucasArts games had elements of risk (you could kill Indy in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" if you weren't a good fighter), but for the most part their philosophy was "Explore - solve - have fun! Don't worry about trying different things - you can't mess anything up permanently."
Which, IMHO, made for a much more fun adventuring experience than wondering if you're die the very second you step onto the next screen because you wandered out into the desert one screen too far. Thank you so much, Sierra On-Line.
If I were to go up to some random person on the street and call him some of the things that I've been called online, even some of the tamer things, they'd knock my ass out. That, however, would be the least of my worries. If I were to perform this action on a regular basis, word would very quickly spread about my rude behavior and soon nobody would want to have anything to do with me. It would take a long time to repair that damage to my reputation.
When somebody is online, however, they generally feel that they can behave like that as much as they want. What's anybody going to do about it, after all? If people ostracize you socially, you can just log out and come back when the heat dies down. Worst case: create a new account and start over. In real life, not only can people not escape punishment like that, we also have harsher measures to deal with them, like restraining orders, fines, and prisons. You can't just leave whenever you feel like it. If you could, the whole system would fall apart.
What? I warned him!
a painless execution is the absolute worst punishment any game society can impose on the characters who are its citizens. Torture is not an option. Imprisonment and fines can be imposed, true, but as soon as the player behind the character finds that these punishments are too onerous, she can simply terminate her account
I don't agree, actually IMHO 'virtual jail' -is- the worst possible punishment if implemented properly: while you are sentenced you
- can't create new identities or log in as a different character (assuming they're all in your name in terms of billing) for as long as the sentence lasts
- can't just leave the computer on and walk away, the sentence time would go down only if you are performing some action (ideally not fun, say, playing tic-tac-toe games with the computer which is not easily scriptable and really boring: every move gives you, say, 5 seconds off your sentence).
- can't chat with fellow players or move about, you'd be put in a virtual cell in a virtual prison.
Also I really can't figure out why MMPORGs don't implement police/jails etc. after all you could have all the various dynamics that currently exist in society (punishment for crimes, opportunities for people who like to play cops/guards, risk/reward for trying to organize a breakout, risk/reward for accepting bribes etc. etc. etc.)
If you delete the player account somebody will just recreate a new one and, helped by their guild, fairly rapidly regain lost levels/items: a sentence of, say, 40 hours of jail (tic-tac-toe) would be much worse, don't you think?
-- the cake is a lie
SCUMM (LucasArts) games are bound by a certain number of possible actions you can take. All of those actions are predestined to succeed or fail. You can't "think outside of the box" in these games. If the writer of the game doesn't want you to use the pickaxe on the dog, then forget it. MMORPGs are much more open. Even games like Quake allow for more flexibility. Take Rocket Jumping for example.
Abstraction.
Ever notice people in their cars waiting in line are a hell of a lot more rude than people *standing* in line? Same principle...when people feel abstracted from the rest of the people around them they tend to give in to whim and emotion to a greater degree.
But that's not going to change. The only interesting question (which was not, interestingly enough, brought up by this article) is "Will the internet decay into a shithole completely devoid of personal accountability or will it slowly evolve into a place where people realize that everyone they're chatting with have feelings too"?
I'm rooting for the latter, but it's too soon to tell.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
And how does one go about examining democracy and its inherent problems? How does one go about changing them without throwing nations into turmoil and playing God with millions of innocent lives? How does even buy a clue about what to change?
Exactly the same way I go about designing a car that's safer, has higher performance and greater efficiency without risking the lives of test drivers and the general populace.
I model it. Virtually. On a computer.
Go figure.
KFG
Yeah i never read an article that had so little to say and yet took so long to say it.
Regardless of what barriers the internet's nature dissolves (color, geography, etc), my observation is that people will simply find or create some other divide to align themselves upon.
You are currently reading this post on slashdot, a forum dedicated to technology and related issues. Obviously, this is not a place for someone interested in knitting socks. Your interest in slashdot is a kind of communication barrier, as you are unlikely to communicate with someone with interests that do not overlap yours. Is this wrong? No, it is simple human nature. You're simply making the most efficient use of your time by following your interests.
So essentially, the internet population organizes itself around artifically created barriers of interest or ideology.
As for MMORPGs.. they tend to be the underbelly of the internet when it comes to interactions between groups. The rest of the internet, you have what, message boards, chat rooms, etc? The worst you could get there is a ban and a boot. When you give people assets to protect and weapons to smack each other with, guess what happens?
That's right, Shit Happens.
I'd go on, but I think you can work out the rest yourself..
*hoofprint*
They also use:
servedby.advertising.com
People who are alone and anonymous in an online setting tend to clump up with people with at least one similar attribute, same as in real life. Just listen in when one player in a game is found out to be French, or German, or Canadian. Why shoot an American when you can shoot a Hungarian? If English isn't your first language, you frequently become a target.
In Diablo, there were people who would pk (player kill) only Koreans - they had a different character set for typing so it was instantly known who was Korean. Sometimes it was the opposite and the Koreans would kill the English speakers.
Human Nature?
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
This meme about online gamers being dicks is really getting to me. I've been playing online since quakeworld (not the first generation, I know, but older than the majority I suspect), and the opinion I've taken away is that people playing online are generally really nice.
/. thread) generally offer a lot more incentive to play well, and to encourage others to play well. Also, often the communities are small. Speaking from my experience, Navy Seals:Q3 and GloomQ2 both have very tight knit communities, with celebreties and common faces to get to know, as well as a need for teamplay in order to succeed. You may be less likely to run into the same people over and over while playing Natural Selection just due to the number of players and servers, but people generally want to win, and winning takes cooperation.
Every now and then you run into someone having some fun disrupting a game; I can picture plenty of times someone grappled their spy in the exit of the 2fort spawn room on a MegaTF server. But I can also picture plenty of times when people were communicative and friendly and cool; willing to organize some teamwork for a little while; willing to point newbies in the right direction....
There's some fun to be had being disruptive, but far from negative consequences deterring most people, most people derive much more fun from playing the game.
Maybe (and I think the article addresses this somewhat) MMORPGs are poorly designed when the situation is that theres LOTS to be gained from looting corpses. This is different from people who are getting a kick from causing some chaos. Those people can easily be avoided, and with many games, voted off the server. Or just let them goof off for a bit, they'll get bored eventually and move on. Corpse looters WANT to play the game, and are just taking a shortcut; one frowned on by the community for being unfriendly.
Modern mods (game modifications -- made by players to change the gameplay of an existing game; someone was asking in a recent
Yelling at the newbies won't get them to play any better, and making friends who like doing things that you like doing is always a positive situation.
Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation. -debord
Train to zone!!!!!!!!!
Now give me a single MMORPG where you can have sex with a mare and I'd consider playing it. Interacting with all that 2-legged races is far too boring.
MMORPG: Replace your dull, boring real life, with a fake dull boring life online.
Or something like that.
Alas, it's no longer politically correct to use the phrase "faggity-ass politically correct movement".
Now you're supposed to use the phrase "differently intolerant".
-kgj
I played Asheron's Call for 3 years as a 'hardcore' player (40+ hours a week). Played in multiple worlds, and I played with a lot of people. In the PvP world (Darktide), the entiriry of your life was pure Chaos. High level players would sit in the 'newbie' towns and just kill newbs repeatedly. The only way out was to have another high level friend escort you away from everyone else.
On the 'normal' servers, it was totally different. True you had your jerks / scammers etc, but for the most part, people helped each other out. I was in one of the largest guilds for the world for a couple years (even sat on the executive board) and it was interesting to see the dynamic as users pulled resources together to buy the guilds mansion (you honestly couldn't support a mansion without a largish group to donate resources). People in the guild helped each other out on missions, on getting upgrades in armor and spells, and everyone benefitted.
Everyone's experience in the online world is different, but for the most part people will surprise you.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
I know Im an asshole for doing this, but when I am playing an online game I try to be the most obnoxious person possible. I play warcraft3, 3v3 and just buy shredders...steal my teamates wood, then start calling them names for bening dumb enough to team up with me. On some of the custom maps in starcraft you can build invincible buildings, so I spend all my time covering the map with them...so no one else can build. I am definetely part of the problem, but I wouldnt stick out compared to everyone else. Ive also fined tuned my insults playing monkey island insult swordfighting, and insult armwrestling in escape from monkey island.
damn that was a good flick i mean seriously it summed up everything
On the re-election poster for Governor Marley on the dock house on Melee Island: "When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice."
(Is it scary I remember that and haven't played the game in 6+ years?)
The essential problem with all current MMORPGs is not that players cannot be punished effectively, but rather that the companies which host these games do not enforce their own policies against bad behavior. They do not enforce them because they have a vested financial interest in maintaining as many paying customers as possible over the expected lifetime of the game. This is the same reasoning process that companies go through when they decide that the privacy policy is less important than the revenue which could be generated by selling the information in violation of the "Privacy Policy" or "Mission Statement". Thus, the game company is likely to adopt policies which never completely satisfy any one faction of players, but which also never alienate them quite enough to give up what they have already "invested" in the game either. In this manner they continue to receive a stream of monthly payments from the largest possible audience of players/subscribers with the least possible amount of work in maintenance, administration, etc...
The best solution, in my humble opinion, involves the players as a stakeholder in the long terms success of the game not just by granting in game rewards, but rather by dividing the real world ownership of the company that administers the game among the players who support it. The effect of shareholder ownership and market forces would necessarily isolate and eliminate those players who choose to be jerks from continuing to harass the majority of the remaining players, only this time, since the players are owners the enforcement would have teeth. As the article stated, the main problem now is deterrence of bad behavior and the problem exists because of inadequate enforcement due to corporate conflict of interest.
Yes, players need tools. If a game allows a player to build a wall - someone will inevitably trap another player inside a box to torment them.
So the game needs to allow you to also -break- anything that can be built.
If a player can lock or block a door, they will find a way to lock another player on the wrong side of the door intentionally. Therefore the game needs to allow you to -push- such barriers.
the problem of course is that - even with all the right tools, if someone treats you like a complete *sshole, I'll never know it. They could have spent 4 hours trapping people in boxes, and I would treat them like anyone else if I hadn't seen it or happened to be in your immediate circle of friends.
massmog communities are too loose. Only 10-20% of players on any given server are playing at any one time. the odds of an effective server-wide community notification system are pretty slim.
So what's a good solution? karma. an aura. perhaps only visible with a skill or spell.
Every day that a player logs in, they have some karma points to spend on other players. positively or negatively.
you simply institute a law of diminishing returns, so that no one person or small group of people can give you enough karma to undo the negative karma a large group of people gave you - and there you have it. (probably put an upper cap on the amt of negative or positive karma a single person can give you and weight it)
you could even make it so that a person with negative karma themselves has their outgoing karma points reduced in 'worth'. so if an indescriminate killer calls you a jerk - it means even less.
Don't allow karma to gradually return to neutral over time (easily exploited). And most importantly -never- automatically assume any given action in-game is inherently good or bad karma. Leave it up to the players to decide.
You may have started a pvp fight with another player - but they may have stolen from you, or been hassling you. It could very well be justified. The game code can't possibly know - but a witness could.
You may likewise have killed a killer - but you could have done it out of greed or malice or an attempt to game the system. If no trustworthy witness deems it 'good', then there's no reason to assume it was.
The actions themselves can't be coded good or bad (UO's failed notoriety system being the prime example). Only another player has the proper context to interpret that.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Quoth Gupta's signature (just in case he changes it):
Gupta is an old troll. He's pretty good at generating a combination of techno-babble and plausible facts, but he sure as hell isn't really involved in Nintendo research.
Mind you, sometimes he's actually posts interesting ideas, but he claims that his ideas represent current Nintendo research. If any of his claims do match Nintendo actions, it's only by accident or external research by the author; it's not based on inside information.
I suspect Gupta gets a kick out of knowing that he is misleading people, "Look, they all believe I work at Nintendo and am privy to secrets, aren't I clever."
Apparently Gupta is getting lazy, this post is just a copy of his post from last month. (At the very least, this duplication should earn him a "Redundant") And that post is an almost word-for-word retrend of one of his posts from July.
Some classic Gupta for comparison. Some of his technobabble can be hard to sort through if you're not familiar with the field.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
What's really weird is that I'm an Atari person, but I still remember that.
That will only let you hold office 30 times.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Laboratory experiments with whole human societies are quite disgusting, as history has shown us. As a graduate student of social sciences i have dreamed about a simulation of a whole human society. Perhaps we might soon have enough computing power?
SimSociety, a game for some, a research tool for others.
We really need a lot more convergence between social scientists, game developers and gamers. As far as i know there have not been very serious attempts at using simulations in social sciences.
The irony of ironies relating to MMORPGs is that most people play to escape the mundane, hamster-wheel-like existence of real life. Who doesn't yearn to escape the real world, where you're constantly bombarded with messages that you're inadequate and less-resourceful than everyone else? Who doesn't dream of being a valiant warrior or explorer with great riches and power? The lure of MMORPGs is that you can be whatever you want to be in this fantasy world.
The problem is, the games have become so complex and "realistic" that they end up embodying the very nature of existence which people were trying to take a break from. In today's games, you have just as much ass-kissing and mindless grinding as you do in real life, only your rewards are more-or-less intangible. Ultimately as a result, you become an even more pathetic slave to the power-hierarchy.
Someone should do a study and compare the effects of a MMORPG time/productivity-sink with alcohol and other drugs. I think the results would be surprising. There's a new kid in town sucking productivity into a big black hole. It's called Everquest, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, SWG, etc.
Players can always flip the switch or pull the plug on a game that has ceased being fun. The image of a frustrated player upending the checkerboard contains an important truth: there is nothing in the rules of checkers to keep both players in their chairs.
Joshua: Strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
I would propose a form of Draconian copy protection to ensure that the game is distributed on a one-to-one basis with the physical media. Perhaps a hardware card would come with the game to allow playability. This is to ensure that each account is, in fact, legit.
Secondly, paid accounts. This is to maintain the server and to create an incentive to remain a decent citizen of the game world. You screw up, and your account is terminated, no refunds and no way of getting back.
Third, a moderation system. For the most part, what's used on Slashdot seems to find the comments worth reading while weeding out the poor ones. It works quite well. I think something akin to how that is done here could be applied in a game world.
Fourth, focus adventure games on exploration rather than combat. My particular favorite concept of any game of late is Uru: Ages beyond MYST. I'm not a fan of MMORPGs. In fact, if and when I do by this game, I'll play the online single player version. However, to those who do like cooperative gaming, the idea of having multiple persons to solve a single puzzle and infinite worlds to explore has a certain appeal.
It's such a radical concept. I really hope people don't fuck up others' suspension of disbelief by posting cracks and cheats and walkthroughs, during gameplay. A game like Uru requires one to be fully immersed in the world. The puzzles of the Myst series were challenging, creative, and unique. That one game pretty much launched an entire genre of clones.
Fifth, on the topic of suspension of disbelief. Let us consider the grammar of a certain portion of gamers. "stfu n00b! i ownzored j00." Let's say the scope of the game is a medieval battlefield (all hypothetical). The characters in question are knights. I seriously doubt any knight spoke in 1337. That creates a problem. How believable is a world where the language and customs of that world have not been assimilated by the players therein? Not very.
Which leads to a game that could use adaptive latent semantic analysis on a player's messages. It would intelligently consider word pairs to find the emotional content of the message. stfu n00b would become [insulting command][insulting generic noun] (generically). i ownzored j00 i [claim to victory] you. With parsing of course.
The game could then substitute this with "Silence, thou swine. I hath claimed glorious victory over thine own." Or something of similar meaning. The point being that it would create language in the tradition of the game's historical and social context.
Sixth, culture, tradition. What makes a novel by Tolkien so rich? It's the history, and the traditions of each race. The Hobbits, for example live a life of peace and quiet, performing simple agricultural labors. The elves are stealthy and live in a woodland realm. The dwarves delve deep under the Earth and, being created by a God of a somewhat rebellious nature, have ever been in conflict with the elves. Point being, there's traditions and uniqueness to each race.
How is that to be adapted to give a game world depth? How does one make a person behave like an elf or a dwarf, etc.? Perhaps, before character creation a brief survey is given to match the personality of the player to a character that would best reflect an extension of that personality. Someone with a love for solitude and nature, for example, might be assigned an elf. Gold, metal, working with hands - a dwarf, et al.
These are the things I believe would most immediately improve multiplayer gaming.
1) Hardware "dongle's" were tried with various pieces of expensive software (like 3d studio max) and I beleive failed for the most part due to cracking of the software part that checks for the dongle.
:)
2) The no refund policy would cause a lot of problems without plenty of evidence to backup account removals. Logs are the only reason it woulnd't be easy to "frame people" in online games and get their account removed. I see no problem with the account removal part but a no refund policy would be bound to cause legal issues.
3) "It works quite well." That's definetly a seperate discussion for sure as I'm sure there are many slashdotters who will disagree, I for one don't bother screening any messages out because sometimes the moderation could become censorship. My question to you is, what are you talking about moderating? the forums (highly moderated already usually)? the chat? (how would one moderate real time chat? a warning system similar to aim? I would hope not since aim's system is very very easy to abuse. would you simply vote a good player up and their chat would be "bolder" ?), I don't really understand what your talking about.
4) that's really a matter of taste and really kinda pidgeonholing game design which is imo a bad idea. I personally think exploring games are VERY boring, but the point is that a game should go for whatever it's goal is. The difference between exploring and combat is that combat is more fun to repeat (subjective opinion of course). For example, you could explore and find some neat little tree. How many times would you want to "re-explore" that tree? once you've been everywhere there isn't much point to going back, it's a single shot single player kind of thing, imo not well suited to mmorpg's where people pay per month to do things over and over and socialize or whatever (I personally don't really get why people pay to do the same thing over and over, like leveling up). If you want an mmorpg type thing thats more about exploring then maybe you should check out some "virtual worlds" like There and Active Worlds. Combat seems to fill a need that many people are willing to pay for, no reason for them to remove that if people want it.
5) Natural langauge processing is always a lot more complicated then it seems, every tried talking to any chat bots? imo the way people talk on those games not being "realistic" is a social problem more then a technically solvable issue. You would think that if a majority of users wanted to talk "in character" then they would, so in essence (sp?) you would be forcing those that don't want to into a sort of censorship. But like I said, either way you slice it I don't think it's a technical issue.
6) I beleive daggerfall (a simple player, awesome rpg) did something very similar to what you suggest. You would have the choice of manually picking a race/class/etc or answering questions to determine it. There should probably always be a manual option but I definetly agree that implmenting that system in mmorpg's would be welcome as an OPTION.
Sounds to me like you want to try and impose lots of technical issues to solve social problems. While in some cases it's definetly a great idea to use technological tools to help smooth them out. In general it's up to the people themselves. You can't "force" people to be nice and "be a team player". Reward systems sometimes work good.
I agree a lot of thought needs to be put into the design of a good mmorpg since they are a far more social game then say "Counterstrike". All in all we just need good game designers that think things through and learn from mistakes.
Sorry for the long rant, just bored here at work
I don't have a sig, can I borrow yours?