[...] Koster just posted a reprint of Whither Online (circa 2005), where he [...]

The goal isn’t “more immersive”, in this case. There’s a hard limit to immersion that is trumped by gamer intelligence. Practically speaking, immersion is just a line that the culture has agreed not to cross; it’s a magic circle, not a suspension of disbelief.

The goal is to have infinite choice. Right now, the only thing that can provide infinite choice is player dynamics. The fact that your buddy Steve might backstab you tomorrow in order to take your Sword of a Thousand Truths. Or maybe he has it and you backstab him. That’s player dynamicism.

The problem with this is that there’s a steep barrier to entry. It takes three steps: imagine the story, map the story to game elements, perform the story. You can’t steal someone else’s weapon when you kill them in any MMO I’ve heard of. So, in steps 2 and 3, you implicitly agree that, when he’s got less than 10 hit points, he’ll just give you his weapon and then you’ll strike the final blow.

Now you turn this from PC-PC to PC-NPC. You get David (Talaen)’s comment #11 above: choices are limited because you kind have to trick the game into doing what you want. The hack around this, at the moment, is to have a nice long chat with a GM about what you need done and if you’re lucky, they can make it happen. Which kinda sucks. (It only really happens in text-based environments; it’s just too expensive to do it graphically. But it does happen; I once sculpted a tree into a cavern wall by emoting a lot and sending the transcript to the CEO and he changed the room description.)

So, high barrier to entry. What’s Raph talking about? World dynamicism.

No one may have thought that you’d try to scale the tower wall to rescue the princess. The designers think that’s insane. But if you go to the tower wall, you’ll discover that combining some mountain gear equipment with the Spider Climb spell and the Strength of Hercules spell and suddenly you can do it. Completely unanticipated, but what’s happened is that Step 2 is gone. You don’t have to conform your story or trick the system. It just works. You don’t have to beg a GM to convince the GMs in charge of Caemlyn to alter the course of a river; you just start digging and earthmoving and damming.

You have choice. And the choice isn’t, “Gee, should I fight them or stealth and go past?” It’s “Given all the assets I have available to me, how can I deal with this obstacle?”

To come back to the topic, MMO games that don’t have full Chinese interfaces (including great double-byte and emote support) AND a ubiquitous way to pre-pay will fail in China. Amazingly, every day irl I see “China” biz plans overlooking the simple fact that very few people have credit cards here.

I guess I’d like to see in the general “Whither Online?” discussion a “can we please get beyond the monthly subscription hit idea?” mini-discussion.

It’s like, remember UO’s resource system? Where NPCs wanted stuff, and would seek it out? Like a dragon coming towards town for food, but if a player left a shitload of ribs sitting in it’s path, it would probably be placated and wander back to it’s cave? We want a world that wants things for itself. Combat isn’t always the only way to resolve an issue. Except in MMO’s.

Try picking up a console in China. Xbox? What’s that?

Ah, take a walk on Gulou Dajie in Beijing — you’ll see Xboxes and PS2s moving out half a hundred doors so fast it will make your head spin.

Of course, they’re all chipped, and they are all used exclusively to play pirated games, so no they’re not used to get online and play the latest MMO.

But still — it’s sad to see a good argument weakened by truthiness for any reason.

I explained to my friend that in the beginning, the person who wrote the quest probably could have dreamed up 8 different ways of solving the quest, each which would have relied on different mechanics and systems within the game. But therein lies the problem. It might take a designer say 2 days to come up with a nice spec for a system design. But the coder who has to implement that spec might take 2 weeks. That’s not bad, you say, but now suppose your game has specs for a few hundred systems like that. And each one interrelates with the others, which means the design of each is affected by the design of the others. That coding time grows exponentially.

So what do you do? You’ve got a great game on paper, but it’ll be 20 years to get it to market without skimping somewhere or hiring 500 programmers. The answer is you start cutting. So out of all those options for “rescuing” the princess, you end up with one or two making it into the game if you’re lucky. Thus, you’re killing the prince instead of sneaking into the castle.

I think one of the things that MUDs have/had going for them, and that commercial MMORPGs haven’t really been able to approach yet, is the whole UCC/distributed authoring model. Most MUDs allowed players to become builders after fulfilling some requirements. These builders then worked in-world (although often in a seperate copy of the world so that theyw ere subject to a content approval process) to create new content using a robust set of creation tools. And it didn’t matter where the builders were, as long as they could connect to the MUD’s server they could build. I think that if a commercial MMORPG can find a way to do that, then it will be much easier to get closer to that dream of cyberspace.