permadeath

"Permadeath" is almost a taboo word on the gaming industry, but it's almost a need in having a immersive Virtual World. I wrote about it a couple of days ago, saying:

Death is death. If you died, you're dead. Dead. You shouldn't "respawn", you shouldn't turn into a ghost. Most critics on MMOG's are on the fact that they are "excessively violent". Well, if death meant death in a virtual world, players wouldn't be killing each other (at least not that much). On the other hand, if in real life when someone dies he respawns in another place, people would be killing themselves all the time.

Now that known MMO's are getting in the wild, with both the number of MMO's and number of MMO players growing, the issue is getting hot again - people start to be sick to see "yet another hack'n'slash MMO game", specially when the differences are only names, graphics and, with luck, the background story. The Guardian has a piece exactly on this issue: "Why do we have to die in games?" formulates an answer: no, we don't. Let me quote a little bit (but you really should read the whole article):

But do you need to die at all? Eric Zimmerman, a New York-based game designer who helps run the studio Gamelab, says: "Dying in games is a strange artifact of certain kinds of historical forms and content, and there is no good reason for including it in many cases." Molyneux concurs: "If we were starting from scratch, we wouldn't come up with this paradigm."

The only thing I have to add to explain my point on permadeath, is to give a footnote on a previous affirmation I did. When i said that:

I also agree that if you're paying to play a hack'n'slash game like World of Warcraft, you have to have the ability to respawn after death, but I'm not talking about building another WoW-like world, I'm talking about building a real good, new and innovative Virtual World.

this doesn't meen that hack'n'slash games can't have permadeath, or that they shouldn't have it. That sentence is meant to say that "the hack'n'slash trend we see is hugely flawed in it's concept". See, if you take into consideration that those MMORPG's are just varients of MUDs, heavilly inspired in D&D, you'll have to ask yourself: "Why is death permanent in D&D and not in a MMORPG?"

On MMO's - Part II

On my latest blog post, I intended to write about why am I interested on Virtual Worlds, but the text kept flowing, and I ended with a rant on Virtual Worlds nowadays, and what aspects in them I don't like and would like to see changed. Yet, Robert seems to disagree with me in several aspects, and made a comment with his opinion. So, let's revisit my initial comment, Robert's disagreement, and my considerations for each of those points.

I claim that in a Virtual World you have to abide to some sort of well-defined physics: for instance, if you have the concept of physical body, then bodies must follow physic rules - for instance being able to step on something on the floor, but not being able to pass through walls or other avatar bodies. Robert claims that this can lead into frustration, and I have to agree in a certain point. A MMOG designed so that players can have the immersive feeling of embodiment need to have a stable, well-defined and non-conflituous set of physics. That's what I mean when I say, for instance, that people shouldn't be able to trespass themselves, but must be able to "pass through" a sword abandoned on the ground. In the same stream of thoughts, the game must be designed in a way that, while bodies have physics, they must not mess up with the user experience. See, I'm not talking here about "there's a 1x1 passage, where 1 is one square in a squared field, where every object (including avatars) occupy 1x1, and there's a NPC in that passage". I even told that a Virtual World shouldn't have NPC's. I was talking about a simulation of real world, with it's physics. If I go to a crowded club, I might take a couple of minutes passing through the crowd from the entrance of that club until the bar. Having someone in front of me doesn't mean I can't go towards that direction - you just need the right set of physics to implement such movement laws. Of course that if there's the possibility of having people stand in front of things, of course that if there's only one seat only one person can sit there. That, considered by Robert as annoying, is, for me, one advantage on having physics applied to VW's. Yes, people will tend to act differently in VW's and IRL - but that's not necessarily bad. Plus, if you decide to do a "real-world like" VW, like Second Life, for instance, where players have sex (heck, they can even engage into sexual intercourse), then it should be possible to give that swift kick to the groin you wanted to.

Still talking about avatars, bodies and crowds, Robert says that he should choose to tour one virtual museum alone, "no matter how many people are there". But, Robert, is that a virtual world then? I understand your point, but I see it in another perspective. I think that it would be awesome if I was able to visit a virtual version of every museum of the world, for instance, but that doesn't have to be a multiplayer experience. Yet, when I go to a massively multiplayer online world, it's expected to go there to interact with the crowd, and the results of it (like the world itself, affected by players, not individually but as one entity alone - the crowd). Yet, nothing stops a Virtual World to implement a set of physics different from those of the real life, and I'm certainly not against it. For instance, Second Life lets people fly. Why shouldn't a virtual world have every player with the ability to have "superman vision", seeing through things (including people?). If that's implemented with a good set of physics, it might be really cool, and my vision on Virtual Worlds definitively isn't against such physics.

He also asks why can't he decide to "ban" (as in "he doesn't exist for me") someone from his world. And this sets the whole difference in our vision: I'm describing one Virtual World, and you're describing "your Virtual World". If we're talking about one Virtual World, the world isn't yourse, or mine, or from his creators, if that matters. If a set of people choose to have a presence in that virtual world, they have. Of course that you can try to ignore someone you don't like, but - like in the real world - that person still exists, no matter you know or acknowledge it or not. The same goes with Robert's next question: why can't he have an experience in that virtual world where only his friends exist there? That follows the same line of thoughts, but raises a cool question. One one hand, you're still telling that you don't want to be in a massively populated virtual world with lots of people, but instead you want to be in your own virtual world, with your friends that go to the same world. While that can seem something against my own vision of a Virtual World, as a matter of fact it isn't. You want, and should have, the ability to have your own "instance" of that Virtual World, meaning - in fact - that you have your own Virtual World. Picking your example of World of Warcraft, you don't really want to go to WoW and "don't see" all the other players, you want to buy a game called WoW that lets you either create one virtual world (and invite there whomever you want) or connect to other's VW's (possibly including Blizzard's VW).

Then, Robert wrote a paragraph that was describing something that he considers bad, but that's exactly what I think it would be good about a Virtual World like I described. He said:

If you think that people in virtual worlds will behave themselves without restrictions you are sadly mistaken. A small group probably will but larger groups will not. Too many people get online to vent in ways that the real world prevents because they can more often than not act like a jerk without reprise because of the anominity and protection the virtual world provides. The only reason real life people don't act like this is because of the fear of immediate and long term reprisal, providing that infrastructure would require a massive programming and social undertaking for a virtual world. That undertaking world mean work and that is not what people are there for online. We have to enforce civility in RL because we can never truly escape it, online you just need to turn the computer off.

I completely agree with Robert here. If you set up a real world without rules or restrictions (beyond physic ones), several groups of people will act in several different ways, and one player won't like several of them. That is, in my opinion, awesome, since this exactly describes "a new world" - and people will have to adapt themselves, and the world, to fit in. That also means that the world itself have to adapt and evolve, and citizens of that wold will end creating their notion of civility, their set of rules, and define what's "socially acceptable" or not. The big difference here is that it is not the worlds' creator that defines what is that set of rules, but instead players do - like what happened in the real world.

Finaly, on the issue of death. Robert says that "good police work is difficult and how many people want to play a game where they have to be policeman, social workers, lawyers, etc to enforce civility?", but I also disagree here. See, the fix for this one is really a no-brainer, if you implement the right physics: for instance a newbie to the game may not have the ability to kill another player. Also, while this kinds of settings implicitly demand a social structure, possibly with different roles and different people assuming that role, those roles don't have to be those of the policeman, the social worker, the lawyer and so on. Maintain civility will probably be one of the targets of that virtual world community, but the idea that it must be enforced isn't really true - there are several ways that such a virtual world could evolve into, and most of them are completely different steps for those that humanity took. That's one of the most funniest parts of the whole concept of Virtual Worlds. I also agree that if you're paying to play a hack'n'slash game like World of Warcraft, you have to have the ability to re-spawn after death, but I'm not talking about building another WoW-like world, I'm talking about building a real good, new and innovative Virtual World.

The comment ends with one sentence: "If the virtual world is there for me to view the worlds wonders from my living room, why even make it possible for me to die at all? Or get mugged, raped, or otherwise violated." My reply to that is cynical, yet truthful to my beliefs: would you like a (real) world (or humanity) where people hadn't the possibility to have urges to kill, rape, mug, or otherwise violate? Where there was no sadness, no depression, no pain? The concept is far from new: a world like that as called as a dystopia, and if you want to see the dark side of that I recommend you to read some books like Zamyatin's "We", or the well-known 1984, Brave New World or Farhenheit 951.

On MMO's

Sometimes I get asked about why am I doing so much research about games, specially MMO's. Well, on one hand what I'm doing can't be even considered a research of any sort, so it's completely away of the "so much research" idea that some people seem to have. On another hand, I do not have a specific focus on MMO's, I'm not working in nothing directly related with games (if I was I wouldn't talk about MMO's in my blog), and I'm not thinking in ditching my job (that I really like, BTW) to create a games start-up of any sort, or moving into the games business.

What I am, in fact, is a curious about lots of things, including thoughts of the future, in general, technology and virtual worlds. Those who've read some research and/or SciFi on the issue will surely agree with me here: we are doing a really poor job on the virtual world field. There are issues that were explained, studied and dissected for more than twenty years, that highlight problems that you see even in nowadays successful games, like World of Warcraft. Neal Stephenson described the Metaverse several years from now in his SciFi book "Snow Crash", and while he kept developing his own concepts around it (take, for instance, the peer-to-peer and decentralized networking technology he roughly describes in his Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), we're so far from his Metaverse concept that any exciting new online game has a bad taste in mouth for those that, like me, are craving for something like what he described back then. See, I'm not complaining that the made a game conception and design that nobody implemented, nor I'm really interested in a Snow Crash'y version of a Metaverse (or the future). What I want, really, is something as simple as a game at least as well designed as his Metaverse was.

I talked about it before (sorry, no network at the moment to provide you the link): the biggest problem in virtual worlds developing is that these projects are only financially backed up from for-profit corporations, with only profit in mind. I'm not saying that having profit is bad, what I'm saying is that those who are actively playing in this field are restrained of being creative, and instead are compelled to do a product that will maximize profit while minimizing investment. You have tons of well known and profitable MMORPG's, but they're all pretty similar. While the same formulae sells, why would the gaming industry invest in new ones?

The only thing (at least that I can recall now) that I do not agree with Neal Stephenson's metaverse is the (well explained, in fact) necessity he felt for avatars trespassing each other. I'm sorry, but while it's acceptable that characters in Second Life have the ability to fly, it's unacceptable that a character has no difficulty on going from a street to inside a building, while a river of people are between him and the door. Avatars should be able to "pass though" a sword abandoned on the ground, but not a tree, a wall or another avatar.

The first perceptions achieved by babies is that of the existence of world dynamics: permutable, mutable and ever changing. If you want to create a virtual world, you must, above all, emulate that experience, creating what some thinkers call as a "dynamic landscape". You've seen it before: take as an example the old single-player game "Sim City". While you start with a randomly generated environment, you're allowed (with a certain amount of money) of turning rivers into mountains and vice-versa. It's feasible, for instance, to start with two different and randomly generated landscapes and affect them in a way that one is exactly a copy of the other. Now take this experience no new levels - the multiplayer experience. Imagine a new version of Simcity where two players can play together, via a network connection, collaboratively. In that scenario, they could dispute over what was to be done in a certain corner, and, in fact, spend all of their resources by turning a river into a mountain into a river into a mountain. Now take that new level of experience into the Virtual Worlds realm. Think of Second Life, World of Warcraft, Ultima Online, or whatever your favorite virtual world is. Are you able to do that? Wouldn't it be a great enhancement to the gaming experience?

On the topic of Simcity, it also has a characteristic that unfortunately many MMOG's adopted: the end of the world. See, you can design a virtual world that, instead of being a planet, are, for instance, a turtle shell. Yet, heading always in a certain direction should not lead me to "a wall" or any other limit. While it might be easier to see it in Simcity (where the world is basically a small bidimentional squared matrix) if you think about it you'll notice that most "Virtual Worlds" also fail this test, thus not being really Virtual Worlds.

One of the things that are lately being sold as "new" is the concept of in-game economy. The thing is, this concept is not new - at all, and was even implemented for more than a decade. What's yet to be seen is the mindset on the gaming industry that virtual worlds are only good when they give a collective user experience - which is to say that the gaming experience of a single user must be such that the experience itself only have value by being online. In other words, let's kill the NPC's and have a fully player-driven economy. Don't take economy as "money talking" - I'm here talking about the player role and his effect into the world itself. One of the biggest critics I do on WoW is actually that: if you took out every player of WoW out of there, the world would be entirely unchanged, and if you took half of them, randomly or not, the game experience of those others wouldn't be affected - at all. Players of a MMORPG's are citizens on a Virtual World - and should be able to role play as such. That means that they should be able to create, change and break rules, to act alone or as a community (including creating social synergistic concepts, like governments/polytics or religions). In a scenario as the one described, players naturally create relations, bondings and groups that go beyond the "capacity to play" - avatars tend to group up with those with similar value chains, morality and the concept of right and wrong arises, and "rules" (that can be simply viewed as chaotic organization) emerge.

Now, for a change, let's talk about a classic issue: physics. While this is being sold as a big feature, it should be, instead, taken as an obligatory one. What kind of immersion and embodiement is expected when, in a simulation of an Earth-like world rains do not make rivers rise, clothes get wet and dust turning into mud? Just to tease you off, even the first MUD ever created had both the concept of physics - the most obvious being stamina, day time and seasons.

Also, please stop imposing real-world social restrictions and taboos into the virtual worlds - worlds dynamics should not be affected by external sources. This implies that stuff like we're used to see in Second Life are bad for the world itself - things like player bans, kill restrictions, passage of real world laws into virtual worlds and stuff like that. If you want to see a world evolve, you have to let it evolve.

Finally, and probably the most arguable requirement... Death is death. If you died, you're dead. Dead. You shouldn't "respawn", you shouldn't turn into a ghost. Most critics on MMOG's are on the fact that they are "excessively violent". Well, if death meant death in a virtual world, players wouldn't be killing each other (at least not that much). On the other hand, if in real life when someone dies he respawns in another place, people would be killing themselves all the time.