Re: designing socially-constructive spaces

["Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes" <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>]

Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 01:47:01AM -0700 in <42AE9985.6010009@indiegamedesign.com>,
Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com> spake:
>David Galiel wrote:
>>That is why NPCs that appear superficially like other players are a 
>>deep design error, in my opinion, and why, in the worlds I am 
>>designing, everything that looks human, is human, and everything that 
>>is AI/AL driven, looks like a machine or a non-sentient life-form 
>>(and, in fact, anything that is supposed to be an AI is, in fact, a 
>>human-operated puppet).

  That's great if you have enormous financial resources to hire good
actors, and can charge accordingly.  I don't see the finances adding up
otherwise, and you can't rely on randomly-selected untrained humans to
provide deep entertainment.

>I had thought of ripping off Picasso or Giaccometti.  Make all humans 
>unrealistic.  Go back to all the various tribal masks.  Various cultures 
>have specific functions for their masks.  Some visiting artist talked 
>about some group in West Africa, I forget which one.  They had 3 masks: 
>an animal, a woman, or a grotesque.  I remember the function of a 
>'woman' mask was to not scare children, so that they could become 
>educated about the masks.  Can't remember more.  Perhaps the idea of 
>"there's only 3 roles for anyone who comes here" is a good 
>simplification to make.

  That's already done with humans in MMORPGs and combat-oriented MUDs.
They call the masks "classes" ("races" only determine how easy each
class's job is to perform), and your job in a party is determined by
your class.  People who don't correctly fill their job of tank ("keep
the monster's attention and get hit"), puller ("find monsters, plink
them with arrows, then bring them back to our ambush"), healer, dd
("damage dealer", whether physical or magical), or debuffer ("lower the
monster's defenses") are lectured about their duties and then ostracized
if they can't conform.

  Doing your job badly will result in yourself and others "dying" and
having to waste 10-15 minutes getting back into play, so there's a vital
community purpose served by the harsh reactions bad play gets.

  It'd be pretty easy to automate some of these classes, but others are
very hard.  I mostly play a White Mage in FFXI, and my second-by-second
triage decision-making in combat has to weigh who's taking damage, how
many MP I have left, how long the spell will take to cast and recover
from (preventing me from healing someone who might be more important),
who else can do backup healing, how much I like the person who's taking
damage, and whether using my attack spells to kill the monster would
prevent more damage to the party than just healing people while they
kill it.  Making an AI do my job adequately would be tough, maybe
impossible at present tech levels.  Making an AI play as a Black Mage,
who just nukes the monsters with element-appropriate spells until
they're dead or the mage is out of MP, that's trivial.

  The .HACK videogames use NPC "PCs" to fill out your party, and you
issue them chat commands which they usually follow, but they require a
lot of hand-holding to do anything but attack or cast.  I'm curious to
see what'll happen with FFXII, since it's doing something very similar.
The one limitation on this kind of game is that .HACK (and presumably
FFXII) substitute a lot of scripted material for algorithmic complexity.
Smaller indie developers would have to do more with "artificial
stupidity" to make the other party members plausible.

-- 
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/";> Mark Hughes </a>
"I think [Robert Heinlein] would take it kindly if we were all to refrain from
 abandoning civilization as a failed experiment that requires too much hard
 work." -_Rah, Rah, RAH!_, by Spider Robinson