The slideshow (which is excellent, by the way, but you knew that) addresses social mechanics, but I’ve veered off into the related but distinct topic of the mechanics of socializing. Chat systems and their effects on immersion vs. augmentation definitely deserves further discussion.

Michael, your proposed game sounds interesting. Most faction vs. faction (vs. faction) games I’ve played depend on maintaining the conflict indefinitely for the life of the game, or on hitting the reset button whenever one side ‘wins’. Perhaps the closest I’ve seen to what you’re describing are the null-sec dynamics of EVE Online, where the factions designed into the game are supplanted by player corporations.

Rift: “You got Guild Wars in my WoW!” “No, you got WoW in my Guild Wars!”

I don’t want to be unnecessarily cruel towards Rift. The team put in a lot of effort and it shows — it’s a premium product. But… yeah, it’s a premium product we’ve already played.

And the social game? Hrmmm… the whole rift thing actually does provide a nexus to draw people together to accomplish a common goal. But after the goal is achieved, there’s no particular reason to hang around, chat, and make any connections beyond that, and it’s too intense to have a conversation during a Rift event.

You know… I’ve said it before, and it sounds trivial, but one of the things I miss most about modern MMOs is the ability to SIT in a chair. As I recall, it took a clever sprite manipulation to enable sitting in UO, and some tricky scaling work to enable it in SWG, but it was worth the effort. Sitting is like a placard reading, “I’m not currently doing any goal-oriented questing or farming and am free to engage in social discourse”. Such a subtle visual cue, but one that can have a profound impact.

I don’t really like the way I ended that last comment, so let me throw in a “serious game MMO” idea that I had last year as an example.

Archiving the below on my personal website: The Melting Pot

The “serious issue” theme is race relations. This is instrumented through a series of expansions to the game. So let’s start out with some boilerplate. Take your usual “rape the countryside” advancement trees, and take some inspiration from Vanguard:SOH having three spheres of activity… gallivanting, making stuff, and diplomacy. Since I’ve never played WoW, pull more inspiration out of RIFT’s invasion mechanics (or EVE’s Sansha Incursions) as a carrot/stick on getting players to work together cooperatively and lose access to quest hubs or whatever on occasion. Now take the cue from WoW/RIFT and split out two superfactions based on race: you’re either Green or Purple, or whatever. You can have the usual factions to curry favor with… whatever floats the designer’s boat.

The game opens on a civil war between the two races. (I think my original idea had three initial races.) Each race has a special shiny: maybe an extra way to make weapons or maybe special techniques for combat or whatever. The important thing is that it’s intellectual property, and it’s cultural in some way. In any case, it’s worth having. Players pick a race and their goal is to acquire that shiny. You have three basic options: integrate, subjugate, or pillage-and-burn.

The pillage-and-burn path is via espionage, torture, and what other unsavory means of looting and theft we can come up with. You take their shiny and you kill all the members of the inferior race. Genocide. Endgame. This means that the losing side no longer gets to have new characters. This is important.

The subjugation path is much the same, except that it’s a straight out, clean cut military win. You enslave the losers and take their shiny without wiping them out. You have your cake and eat it, too. The losing side gets to continue having their characters, but their lot in life is an asymmetric game of being mechanically oppressed. As a bonus, they get to organize uprisings if they want, and they may even successfully overthrow. This makes the pillage-and-burn option more appealing.

The integration path is the moral high ground. It’s done through diplomacy mechanics. It’s an everyone wins path, but it’s boring. You do have a clear victory point: when you get the shiny: but you still have to tediously maintain the integration and it may slip at some point and you’ll lose access to the shiny again. Hooray for grind!

So there’s a clear game over, right? Expansion time! The expansion uses some random gimmick: settlers from over the sea, natives in a newly discovered land, etc.: in order to introduce a new race. The new race brings new shinies. The new race does odd things to established mechanics, making it hard to simply out-and-out repeat the last strategy. Players are allowed to create characters using the new race… but again, if the race is genocided, they lose those characters.

I’d imagine you could make the mechanics deep enough to ensure that no path lasts less than a year realtime. You could create classes and specializations, incentivize these with quest designs and random encounter designs in order to favor all three paths in a fairly balanced manner, which would encourage internal conflict over which path to take. All the paths can be run in parallel: you could have one hand sending ambassadors all the time while the other hand is achieving tangible victories while the third is compiling secret knowledge. The diplomatic path might block a military victory by sharing important information; the military path might make a diplomatic promise sound disingenuous.

Break the critical mass and they won’t all cooperate. This gives you plenty of time to do your tweaking, your bughunting, your UI upgrades, and your expansion plans. I’ve left out all the details, but this is a blog comment, not a design document.

I’m sure there are plenty of problems with the above, but I think it’s very clearly informed by the past while also very distinctly a step outside (above?) the current morass. You might disagree (I would like to know why), but that’s my thought.

From another medium, it happens, Yukon. I’m playing for tips in a coffee house. All the way back to the beginning with one guitar, one mic, one voice. Is it the same? It’s similar. In music or most performance art, once a group is lost, one starts over. Everytime. The advance is in chops and styles mastered, particular signature pieces etc. It becomes conversion time where I throw out a half to three quarters of a songbook and start replacing parts. Everything I learned in ensemble has to be replaced or adapted to solo. That means finding a new approach to old numbers, etc.

I think that’s how the game market works as well, please correct me if I’m wrong. There will be bits that can transition and become new again. Others drop away. No bang in the new act.

So I wonder if you looked again at what you do in terms of repetoire and asked yourself what you would build in the new environment or platform as a single or small team developer (same as a new room going solo or duo), what would you drop? What would you keep?

Just an exercise in analogy, but perhaps, seminal.