Raph's Website » Monday Mailbag: a new MMO blog, Karma Tycoon

Monday Mailbag: a new MMO blog, Karma Tycoon

June 11th, 2007 (Visited 2661 times) Tags:

It’s a very light mailbag this week. Remember, anyone who wants to drop me a line and maybe get an answer here can send me an email here — be sure to click the checkbox so it goes to me instead of Webmaster. She’ll forward it, but why spam her mailbox…

Howdy Raph, Let me introduce my self, basically an MMO hobbyist going on 20 years+. I currently run a small software shop(procurement related) but decided to start writing some thoughts down. Will publish more over the next couple of weeks as time permits. Would love to hear your opinions on it. archimedian.wordpress.com

Thanks for sending along the link –let’s see if we can push some readers your way!

Your take on instancing is interesting. I am still overall of mixed feelings about instancing. There’s basically two ways to use it: as the centerpiece of a game, and as a way to embed games with different rules from the “main world.” In general, the reason to use it is to make a world be less “massively multiplayer” — in other words, to prevent interference by other groups in what you’re doing, basically.

In general, I tend to think that the fact that we seem to need to rely on instancing is an indicator that most of our game design within virtual worlds is still not particularly suited for large groups of people. Rather, it seems more like we keep designing for 1-6 people.

An interesting development, of course, is the use of instancing for games aimed at 20-60 people — raids. I guess it’smore accurate to say that what we have trouble designing for is unbounded numbers of people with contradictory goals.

Hey Raph, I very much appreciate your work on SWG and have participated in some thread discussions with you on RLMMO. Your recent Monday Mailbag jarred my memory. I work for JP Chase and thought you might find this interesting. I remember hearing about Karma Tycoon on our internal website at work a few months ago and meant to sen it too you. I am pretty sure you are aware of it, but if not here is an article about it on MSNBC. Although not an MMO, I think it captures alot of what you think gaming “could be” in the years ahead.

Wow, why did I not hear about this before? Very cool. And you’re right, I find it reminiscent of stuff like The Healing Game I proposed. albeit with more of a Serious Games bent.

Which reminds me, did everyone see the news about the new G4C/Microsoft partnership?

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Talaen said on June 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am:

I thnk instancing is a valid design option any time you’re presenting content that is “lockable” by X number of players. By this I mean that if you have a dungeon or area that’s really only set up to support a single group or a single raid, then you might as well go ahead and instance the thing. But if you have a dungeon or area that is set up to support 3-4 groups as well as a raid, then instancing would be stupid.

The real problem here is content design. For whatever reason, a lot of content design in MMORPGs seems to be very linear. Areas seem to be built purposely so that people have to move “through” them to the goal. Now don’t get me wrong, I like a good dungeon crawl as good as any player, but at the same time, if you’re going to support multiple groups of people in an area, you can’t have one big linear path or they’ll end up running into each other and generally getting in the way of each other’s gameplay.

In a “traditional diku” game, without instancing, I would expect that content would be built with multiple entry/exit points and multiple self-contained sub-areas so that it could support several discrete groups of people. This allows them to interact without hampering each other’s play.

Danc said on June 12th, 2007 at 1:02 pm:

Perhaps the limitation is not just in our designs, but in our players. If people are biased towards working harmoniously in bounded group sizes, the game design should support that behavior.

I can imagine that players only benefit from ‘massively multi-player’ game in a rather roundabout ways. Such games provide them a wider population to build their intimate circle of <10 players and their functional social circle of <80 players. Big games = big ‘dating’ pools.

The millions of other players who don’t make it into the friends circle are classified as outsiders. Historically, such a status means that they are seen as little more than animals that meander around the environment, to be killed, hunted, used or perhaps eradicated if they are a pest. From this tribal perspective, it is quite reasonable that players with a full social circle wish to build walls and create their own private utopia. Once you are married, Match.com is replaced by the private family blog.

Michael Chui said on June 16th, 2007 at 4:16 pm:

I was at the G4C conference (er, sorry, “festival”) umm… half a week ago and I played Karma Tycoon.

Not easy. Could use a manual to give me some solid understanding of what affects what in centers. I feel as though I made a good run as an animal shelter thingy, but I want to see a manual for it. (Which, as you might guess, inclines me to say that it was a good game: I just couldn’t get a grip on the play in 5 minutes.)