Slashdot Mirror
The Psychology of Collection and Hoarding In Games
This article at Gamasutra takes a look at how the compulsion to hoard and accumulate objects, as well as the desire to accomplish entirely abstract goals, has become part of the modern gaming mindset.
"The Obsessive Compulsive Foundation explains that in compulsive hoarders: 'Acquiring is often associated with positive emotions, such as pleasure and excitement, motivating individuals who experience these emotions while acquiring to keep acquiring, despite negative consequences.' Sound familiar? The 'negative consequences' of chasing after the 120th star in Mario 64 or all 100 hidden packages in Grand Theft Auto III may be more subdued than those of filling your entire house with orange peels and old cans of refried beans. But game designers know that it's pretty damn easy to tap into this deep-rooted need to collect and accumulate. And like happy suckers we buy into it all the time, some to a greater degree than others."
It is also a no-no in yoga. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamas see Aparigraha (non-horading).
I had a hell of a debate with the people in my yoga class about MP3s. Because they violate asteya (non-stealing) and Aparigraha (non-hoarding) and they just would consider the idea, free MP3s beat out philiospy, practive and truth in their minds.
The reason you are not supposed to hoard is because someone else might have a current use that outweighs your possible future use for the item. I have often thought that making NPC need items in games would make hoarding harder ethically to pursue. I also think that monster ecologies would be cool. Kill all the fur seal in freezly land when power leveling and fuck... they went extinct. Kill all the predators and shit we are overrun with disease carrying rats!
At least my pack rat nature has been channelled in digital things that can be stored on hard drives. Sure I spend 250 dollars last month upgrading because I'd filled every drive I owned, but I'm lucky.
My dad accumulates books. Online used book stores like abebooks are the worst thing to ever happen to my mother. Now five or six books arrive in the mail most weeks from all over the country. Last time I was home pretty much every open wall in the house had vanished behind bookshelves.
Hording in the digital age may still be expensive, but at least it takes up a lot less total volume in meatspace
Yes, but you are talking IRL and we are talking game. Hell your MP3 analogy doesn't even hold up IRL because you can't actually "hoard" MP3s, as you can plug your flash into my PC and "take" my MP3s and I'll still have them. And in game it is a whole different ball of wax.
For instance I like this game called Sacred Gold that I picked up out of the bargain bin. I never heard of it but the screenshots looked good and for $20 I'll give any game a shot. if you haven't picked it up it rocks. Anyway they have this "green" armor, which gives major bonuses in a set, like in Legends of Aranna. Unlike Legends where you could get a walkthrough to tell you where each piece is Sacred is random drops, and the green set armor is one of the rarest. Worse, since there are six characters you can get green drops that aren't for your character and even if they ARE for your character there are about 5 suits per character so it may not respond to the set you are trying to build. So I'd set there for hours going "nope nope nope nope Green? &^%^&%$&^%$ Gladiator crap! nope nope nope" while I'm dripping with expensive items and all the cheap shit is in 20 foot mounds around my character.
But who cares? It is A GAME. And I'm enjoying myself, even when I'm cursing the damned gladiator and battle mage because I keep getting their crap. By hoarding i now have huge amounts of money by selling the lesser crap, so when I walk into a village and see a "ring of badass" that is a crazy price I just slap the gold on the table, my character has gotten powerful enough that even midlevel monsters refuse to attack me for fear of getting their asses kicked, hell its fun. So while I HATE those "bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" kinds of quests, which thankfully aren't that many in Sacred, as long as whether to hoard or not is my choice and it is fun, who cares . it is a GAME. The whole bloody point is we get to do the kinds of antisocial crap we wouldn't pull IRL. And as long as the designer remember to make it fun as opposed to "bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" I'm a happy little camper.
And if you haven't tried Sacred give it a spin. Good graphics and random monsters and items makes for the fun and lots of replay in my book.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Rule 10: Greed is eternal.
but my favourite is...
Rule 113: Always have sex with the boss.
I wonder how that applies in the Ferrengi patriarchy where the women are expected, for the most part, to stay out of business.
Ultima Online actually did this when it first came out. It was removed when it turned out that there was a small but sufficient minority who enjoyed *deliberately* exhausting a resource for no other reason than the sheer joy of screwing over all the players who needed it.
THey did that in UO early on.
I run a simulation that I am reasearching that takes the spawns of creatures and moves, add, deletes them as a result of activity.
Simple version:
Spawn X criteria
Damage Done to Players: + 1 per 100
Players Killed: + 10 per 1
Dmage Done to Mobs: +1 per 50
Mobs Killed: +5 per 1
Damage Taken by players: -1 per 80
Times Killed by players: -1 per 1
Damage Taken by Mobs: - 1 per 50
Times Killed by Mobs: -1 per 5
The location of Spawn X is then shifted a random direction away from the last J spawns where J was negative and towards the last M spawns where M was positive.
If the last spawn was positive the level of the mob spawn is +1, if the last spawn was negative then -1. The last 5 spawns are active at all times. For every 3 in a row positive spawn we turn the oldest of those three spawns into a new roaming spawn (e.g. the population went up by one.)
If a spawn hits a streak of 5 negative spawns we expire the current roaming spawn.
Over simplified (we actually track males and females, level averaging, migratory behavior, etc..)
There is a lot of interest in ecology modelling in games these days, don't ask how much the consultant ask for these days...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-