>Unfortunately, none of the companies have really addressed the
>full implications of this. You're not playing a game; you're
>running around in a virtual world. To prevent it from
>dissolving into the anarchy where every guttersnipe can get
>away with whatever he wants to do, you need a social support
>structure - laws, some form of government
The problem is that game mechanics, which are a simple system, can never
ever hope to address the highly complex organic system that is human
behavior. It just can't be done. Look at Faction Hits on RZ, it seems
obvious that you should take a faction hit for killing your own race right?
Well, that is like saying that anyone who kills another person IRL, no
matter what the cause, is ostracized from society. Even if the person doing
the killing is a Peace Officer is of the highest moral fiber and the person
killed is holding a gun to a child's head, with the safety off and squeezing
the trigger. The dead guy had not committed the crime yet when he was shot,
and yes had he done it he would have been ostracized by society, but that
does the child no good at all.
And this is a comic-book simple situation, not at all in the gray area that
we all spend 99.9% of our on- or off-line time in.
I have watched the interaction between social systems and game mechanics in
UO and EQ, in both cases out of a desire to become skilled in social
engineering in online communities, for large scale story-writing as well as
a method of discovering how they work. I have flummoxed and confused lots
and lots of people in a manner that caught them up in the story, raised
huge angry (and RL angry, not just RP'd) mobs (groups of crazy people, not
mobiles :o) and essentially learned to reach through the computer and
emotionally hook the people behind the avatars as well as modify motivations
to effect their in-game behavior. It is /really really/ hard, immensely
subtle and any given effort only succeeds a small fraction of the time.
Because essentially we are free to turn off the computer, "rules" and
"demands" don't work out here because no one has the right, or ability to
enforce, any requirement on my or anyone else's behavior. Therefore if you
want a specific result all you can do is provide a path for people to walk
and make it look desirable enough that they will walk it of their own free
will.
Why did Dark Unity work so well on RZ before faction? Because it was cool
idea, way cool, a *voluntary* support system for the evil races. Why did the
Imperium thrive on Napa and now thrives on Siege Perilous? Because it is a
cool idea, (and well executed by creative people - the foundation of the
Imperium is in it's Laws, Laws which the game mechanics don't support) and
people may hate it for it's "oppressiveness" (which it isn't :o), but they
want it more than boredom and random violence. so the *choose* to support
the Imperium story.
Laws and social systems can't be coded in to a game with more than one
person playing it, all you can do is code to minimize the effects of those
who see freedom as lack of consequences for selfishness, after that it is up
to the players to *make* something out of the tools of their world, and make
the benefits of what they have created so desirable that people want to
support it.
Tszaaz/Tengu