A highly imperialistic (or more precisely feudal) game would be travian, a free browser based web game. There are no npcs to aim your aggression towards, every gain for you is a loss for another person and often coupled with an ingame pm, usually begging or threatening. Often in another language at that(thank you bablefish). Why would a player steal from another player when the resources can be grown? to deny those resources to other players that would have taken them, of course. This is a fevered race to gain catapults, the medival version of nuclear arms, which can hold opponents in unwinnable situations often resulting in people quitting and restarting.

it is indeed a matter of perception, why would I cause another player so much grief that he has no other sensible option than quit and restart? necissary evil? or perhaps it is basic human nature and therefore fun (for the few at the top, while they are at the top)

[...] if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = “show”; var tocHideText = “hide”; showTocToggle(); } [edit]Stuff to Consider Dicta – Dicta are things we have generally agreed to be guidelines and certainties in our design. [edit]Potential Systems Mitigatable Factors Psionics – Incorporated into the Transitional Vis system. Physical fitness [edit]Good Reading [edit]Raph Koster – Thoughts and Conclusions The evil we pretend to do, by Raph Koster Do levels suck? Part I, by Raph Koster Do levels suck? Part II, by Raph Koster “levels push towards cooperative rather than competitive play” Do we therefore still want skill(s)? Skills, as done in Dragonrealms, are effectively levels in the above sense. (There’s more to Koster’s article than what I quoted; it’s a beginning, not a conclusion.) One of the most salient points is a very succinct reasoning as to why a content race does not and cannot work. Ask Kevin how oten his TrekMUSHs added actual content. I don’t know the answer, but I can make a reasonable guess: almost never. The secondmost salient point is in his conclusion. =P Ethics of Online Design Of note. Ask Michael about this. [edit]Economics Economic Stages of MMOGs (The paper itself) Economics and society [edit]Culture and Creation Constructed Languages (or conlangs) World-Builders On Creating an Earth-like Planet [edit]Unattached References History of Technology (Wikipedia) [edit]Fiction [edit]Histories Creation Story Foundation Stories – Where did the things of today come from? [edit]Why Stuff Works How Magic Works Mindscape – Only if Psionics is implemented [edit]Factbook Data Planetology – Astronomical Data, Rotation Speed, Revolution Time, Axis of rotation, etc. Celestial Bodies – Moons, Constellations, etc. Calendar (absolute) – Seasons, Weather Conditions, Major Planetary Events, etc. Calendar (per culture) – Celebration Dates, Month and Year layouts, etc. Based on above. Cultures [edit]Cultural Idiosyncracies Games Card games Dice games Board games Chess variants Go variants Bluff games [edit]Systems [...]

Raph: I’m more interested in why exactly we pretend this way.

Well, from a practical point of view, we pretend this way because it’s the easiest to implement on a computer. It’s easy to do combat, it’s easy to do logic puzzles (although there’s little of that in most MMORPGs, as they cater to a mass market), and it’s easy to make a static environment (which means there are no real consequences for your actions).

From a philisophical point of view, we pretend this way for the same reasons kids play cops and robbers or cowboys and indians.

But calling what happens in a computer game genocide is an insult to the victims of actual genocide.

What if the child orcs squealed in terror and covered their eyes, or ran away screaming and pointing? What if the adult orcs attacking you were clearly doing it to defend their terrified children? What if the little child orc ran to his mother and she scooped the crying tyke up in one arm and attacked you with the other?

I submit that stuff like this would turn players off of the game. They don’t want to face the ethical dilemmas involved in killing off the parents of a cute baby orc. They want to kill orcs perhaps because of the lingering hunter-gatherer instincts, or perhaps because it feels ‘heroic’ (at least if they are Elite level 55 orcs guarding a Orc Boss), but most likely just because the game design is telling them to. That’s the mechanic–killing mobs for their money and loot and for the ‘experience’ which is required to advance.

Question: Diablo I and II were enormously successful games based on the same hack-and-slash mechanic and the same randomized loot drops and XP and such. But in those games you generally killed aggressive monsters or demons. You weren’t killing defenseless things, or ‘proto-human’ things, or things that were just minding their own business. What changed between those days and the days of the modern MMORPG?

I can hear the reaction already. “It’s just a game.” “That’s stupid.” “We’re just pretending.”

I’m more interested in why exactly we pretend this way.

[...] Hmm. No, no parallels here at all, nope! [...]

[...] This is the blog of an SOE MMO designer Raph Koster… please dont let this prevent you from reading the rest of this post! I found a link to this article on stratics and followed it just as I was browsing the net, what I found was an absolutely fascinating article, but an even moreso fascinating follow-up discussion, which is not only educated but also quite civilsed. If you are interested in MMOs at all, and think that we are only just scraping the surface of this form of entertainment, give this a read, I personally just went post after post, caught up in the discussion… http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=232 cheers, a._________________Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me. -Theme from “Firefly”. Go watch Serenity. [...]

It is not entirely unlikely that we (as a species) are genetically programmed for genocide — to split the world into ‘my tribe’ and ‘everyone else’, and to want to kill or conquer anyone in the ‘everyone else’ category. But we also have these great big forebrains sitting on top of that hostile, animal, mind, which can suborn and alter that impulse. We can seek to conquer with ideas — religion or politics or economics — rather than with swords. We can change who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ quickly and trivially, basing not on genetics or location but on ideology. And we can satisfy the impulse vicariously.

There is a certain sublime satisfaction in knowing you have conquered your foes — whether it is wiping the last piece off a chessboard, staring at a newly-monocolor Risk board, or surveying the carnage at an orc camp. The part of the mind constantly screaming “Kill the Other!” is momentarily sated — so you don’t need to feed that hunger in any other way.

Also, let’s face it — most of us are pretty powerless in ‘real life’. There’s very little room at the top. MMORPGS offer a ‘top’ which anyone can attain with enough patience, or, if not, at least a very broad second tier. (Not everyone can be in the ultra-leet guilds, but anyone can usually make it to nearly there in most games I’m familiar with.) The ability to exercise power and control virtually provides a very needed relief.

Lastly, let us not carry some analogies too far. One can easily see the falseness of dehumanizing Indians or Aborigines or what-have-you — the conquered and exterminated people are *factually* human. But a digital orc is not. It is not being ‘dehumanized’ or ‘objectified’ — it IS an inhuman object, a collection of numbers on a server somewhere. To draw too close a parallel between treating a human like an object and treating an OBJECT like an object is folly.

Consider that this is understood even subconsciously by players. Being killed by a griefer generates genuine rage, frustration, or a desire for payback. Being killed by an orc generates a sigh and a desire to learn to play a bit better (or stay out of that zone, or whatever). There is an intuitive understanding of the difference.

Now, when there’s some sort of true AI behind these things — not ‘better pathfinding AI’ but ‘HAL 9000 AI’…then we’ve got a moral dilemma.

BTW, Raph, what do you think of ‘pure’ PVP games like Shadowbane or Planetside, where the majority of the targets are the avatars of actual human beings? Are these more or less ‘genocidal’?