Bummer

I do believe that what makes a game a game is a boundary though. You can’t pick up the ball in football. You can’t throw pieces at the other player in chess. If the boundary didn’t exist, it would be just real life and that’s no fun.

Aaron has excellent points though. It’s true that I also don’t play UO anymore, but in my defense (dunno if that’s also in Kevin’s defense), UO became stupid when all the restrictions were put in. Not to say that we would still be playing, but..

I find that wow+pvp gets somewhat close to what I liked about uo. If only I could pk (and be pk’d) by people on my side as well, then the game would be complete.

Kevin, I remember your being shocked by these two guys pretending to have sex near the inn in britannia, one of them was called Jesus Christ. I know I’m deviating a little bit, but do you think that should be allowed or not so much?

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/v2/play.php?id=54811

In the real world we have a socially enforced behavior system. If you break the law you are usually punished for it. Everyone understands this and their freedom and livelihood depend on them following the rules.

In a virtual world, it is not nearly that critical. Some people play these games for the SOLE PURPOSE of harassing other people. They don’t care about the game, the immersion, the competition, the exploration, nothing. The only aspect of the game they enjoy is to make other people unhappy and there are no real consequences for it. There is so far no game where the players can keep you from playing. You can *always* start a new account and do it all again. For this reason, there will always be a much bigger hole and a much larger population that will exploit an enabling favored system to do bad things.

If we are to accept the above as a fact (which I do) I have stated before that I believe it is a lot more work to enable these freedoms in a game combines with the mechanism to prevent people to do bad things with it then it is to just create a game where bad behavior is not possible. It is like putting a warm apple pie on the kitchen table because it looks nice there, but having to keep a person at the table to keep the dog from climbing up and eating the pie instead of just putting the pie where the dog cannot get it. More work, not much gain.

I understand the viewpoint of your discussion and your desire for such a thing. I just never hear the argument that it would be in any way practical.

The difference between our arguments is yours assumes limitless time limitless resources. It is very easy to say “Players can’t move chairs around”. It is very hard to say, “Players can move chairs around. Oh look, people are using chairs to block doorways. Okay, we let players destroy chairs. Oh look, there are no chairs because people keep destroying them, so let’s make them respawn if they are destroyed. Oh look that created a bug in the system with timing threads and when people push a box on the respawn point. Okay that is fixed, now pwoplw are teleporting players into the chair spawn point to kill them. Wow, I wish we could just make chairs not movable because it really adds a very minor flavor to the game that only 5% of the players care about.”

So the question is, if you made the game you wanted, could you maintain the development requirements to allow players to do things, and would anyone play a game where you are basically spending all your development time adding things into the game that ultimately will be used more to cause grief and exploits than it will be used for immersion?

But when you, as a developer, uncover an opportunity for grief what’s your instinct? Clearly, if it’s a loophole, you close it. But if its a regular part of the game?

Do you look first for a constraining solution? Or an enabling one?

Either way, the opportunities for grief are never ending but in the enabling scenario the game gets bigger and bigger.