Aha. It isn’t infinite. It’s situation-limited. That’s why Star Trek is a tragi-comedy and The Guild is a water shed.

How to take the initial constraints that set the gestalt and then figure out how to evolve it to get more seasons without jumping the shark… well that’s the trick ain’t it?

“I banged your Mother!” I’m still not sure that’s brilliant or just over the top.

Right. The more I studied the problems of initiative and real time over the years in the IETM world where flexible repair scheduling is fundamental to a changing battlefield (the real ones), the more what we were doing looked on one side like jazz improvisation (loosely structured, finely played, scheduled by gestural systems, uses small sequences that are order-independent (think modal, particularly raga systems)), and on the other side was sound object-oriented programming inside a framework.

The problem is always ‘say interactive; say programming’ so it becomes necessary to provide a means to add modules adaptively and recode their properties on the fly. It takes a helluva team to grok that and not fall into the traps of either a) over authoring so no non-deterministic branching or b) making is loose to the point that the magic circle or suspension of disbelief is frequently shattered by the need to take off the masks and work on the scripts.

And of course, someone has to have a real talent for situation design, seeing the tension and release (to musicians, the ADSR paradigm) and being to the game what a composer is to the orchestra: a thematic/action engineer so to speak.

I’m not a game programmer, but this all looks familiar. Advice? Don’t over rehearse and don’t stick to a setlist if you can avoid t.

“Few MMOs allow for multiple solutions to quests and that hasn’t stopped them from gaining market share.”

I don’t think we can dismiss the potential impact of a flexible, dynamic quest system until somebody deploys one. UO’s broken quest system was so back-burnered that it fell off the stove. Nobody much cared. Then EverQuest exploded onto the scene, and part of the reason for its success was its robust quest system.

Now, in the age of WoW, the linear quest is so firmly established that it’s hard to imagine a mainstream MMO without such a system. What I’m hoping to see is another EverQuest-style revolution — somebody who takes the static, stagnant quest and shocks it back into life with an infusion of choice and consequence, not because current players are clamoring for it, but because once they play it, they’ll take it as the new standard.

Then again… it’d probably require a significant investment to develop, and it seems like huge development budgets mitigate against innovation (“We don’t want something fresh! We want WoW in Space!”). So I may be waiting for awhile… until some indy genius does an end run around the dinosaurs.

Speaking as a player, I care. It frustrates me to waltz into an ambush like a lamb to the slaughter, even though it’s blatantly obvious that it’s a trap, because there’s no other way to advance the quest. It thwarts my narrative vision of what my character would do in such a situation, and substitutes the designers’ vision of what a generic character should do. If I can’t make meaningful decisions that affect outcomes, it’s less the experience of telling stories around a campfire and more like listening to a tape recording of stories around a campfire.

Except that for every person that cares how many are there who do not? Few MMOs allow for multiple solutions to quests and that hasn’t stopped them from gaining market share. I happen to agree with you, but the market doesn’t seem to.

I think it would be great to have more things like what happened in the UO storyline happen, but how many players would care? Enough to actually support the development cost for something like that?

I play a lot of Puzzle Pirates and with my flag we have a goal to take an island and change the game state. Or change the economy by attempting to manipulate the market. Or just hang out and defeat computer pirates (which doesn’t change the world) until we are Legendary or Ultimate (which changes everyone’s comparison rankings).

But is taking an island in Puzzle Pirates really any more meaningful than defeating some instance in WoW? One changes the world and one doesn’t but does anyone really care?

A non-deterministic game should be subject to entropy. A story isn’t. You can share it as widely as desired but the boy always gets eaten by the wolf. Otherwise, it’s not a story; it’s a framework.

I’d care if a shared game allowed a player to refresh resources at will, or the ending of a story can be changed by the reader. Both have the emotional satisfaction of children’s make-believe.

No consequences; no contest… except on Wall Street.

Co-workers and I were discussing the issue of paper and pencil role-playing versus computer based and it came up that one guy didn’t see the value of having that unique experience with a live dungeon master (DM) with one reason being the common context wasn’t there between different group with different DMs. He argued that in a computer game players could talk about how they approached solving it and share that context. (The issue being he’s never played any face-to-face games and doesn’t care for MMO RPGs either.)

In some ways my co-worker has a point, who hasn’t been bored by someone attempting to recount the actions of someone’s character in a face-to-face RPG. But he also didn’t agree in the value of alternative choices you can have with a face-to-face game that computer games do not have.

The closest would be to talk about your experience with a specific module. Like everyone seems to have a Tomb of Horror story. But even then each DM would have an individual way of dealing with the module. Possibly something closer would be to talk about what opponents you defeated, which then comes back to combat. And if the interaction is mostly combat then a computer moderated experience is more likely to be consistant between players.

Our discussion eventually digressed into Gamist vs Narrativist vs Simulationist and the goal of why you play Role Playing Games. But the main point of does it matter how much choice you have when you need to defeat an opponent and do the extra choices really matter to the mass market still stands. Do people care that their MMO quests can be solved in a limited number ways? Would it matter if there are more ways considering how much more expensive the extra content would be to make?

In MMOs the people on that quest all made the same decision to join it, they aren’t significantly changing the story compared to a player soloing the same quest.

“Most valid” is a meaningless phrase, and most meaningless in this context. Are novels somehow inferior to movies because no one is kicking the back of my seat while I’m reading?

It would take a lot of work, but it would be interesting to have a game (single or multiplayer) that did much more of this kind of virtual DM who was as much a part of the game as the game’s world and the player.

Like Planescape: Torment, but with more triggers that go off when you move over a square or trigger an event rather than when you mouse over something? I mean there was a huge amount of fluff text of that nature for clicking on parts of the environment. It wouldn’t have taken much to shift some of that to a more dynamic triggers. At least, not compared to how MUCH of it they put in that game.

One thing I enjoy about the D&D Online MMO is the occasional DM voice over. “You hear the scrabbling of sharp claws on stone ahead”, etc.

It would take a lot of work, but it would be interesting to have a game (single or multiplayer) that did much more of this kind of virtual DM who was as much a part of the game as the game’s world and the player.

To me, the shared experience is something like telling my friends about the awesome thing that happened in a game. How I beat the boss, or how I did things differently, or this totally awesome bug I found. Like in Ultima 9, there was a bug when you come out of the Hythloth dungeon where the sun goes out and you’re left in a world of darkness and wolves and it doesn’t fix itself untill you find your way to Katrina’s house and take a nap in her bed. That sort of thing!

I remember when I played Okami, I really liked using the Glaive weapon and I was really good at using the slice ability, but later I saw a friend playing and he used the Rosary weapon and liked to use the brush to blind enemies with ink. It was a really different story for each of us in what was actually a very structured game.