On Player-Based Government

Earlier I wrote on how, in most virtual worlds, the ``hard-wired'' factions, those which are defined by the game iself, such as The Alliance in World of Warcraft, can often be safely ignored since they don't really do anything. That is not always the case. Matt Mihaly, founder of Iron Realms Entertainment, has a degree in Political Science from Cornell University and has found excellent ways of including Government into the Mud's he's designed. This bears some consideration as player-based Government, as implemented via ``hard-wired'' factions, can be a Godsend in establishing and maintaining player culture(s) in your virtual world.

A player-based Government legitimizes and channels political play into a sanctioned arena. There simply are some players who wish to engage in politics, that is the orchestration of collective action, so why deny them the opportunity? You are making a virtual world supporting many players, which means politics will emerge one way or the other. The question you can ask yourself, will it be along the lines of The Lord of The Flies or The Federalist Papers? If you want the former then fine, and you can stop reading now. I would prefer the latter.

A player-based Government is also your greatest asset at managing the culture within your virtual world, albeit from one or two degrees of remove. The players who occupy the various Governmental seats are trend-setters and opinion-leaders. When the King of The Great North rewards someone for raiding the Central Plains, then he is encouraging more such raids in that culture. He is saying ``This is what we value''. By the same token if The Grand Emperor rewards someone for publishing a play, then he is encouraging more such publications in that culture. He is also saying ``This is what we value''. As a designer you must approve, because otherwise you would not have included the ability to raid farmers or publish books.

This cultural development and enforcement extends also to deterrence. When the Grand Duke rebukes someone for raiding the The Great North, then he is saying ``Don't nobody do that'', and when he actually punishes someone then he is deterring other individuals from doing the same. The opion-leaders can offer both carrot and stick to shape and enforce the specific cultural norms they desire, which are founded on the broader menu of cultural norms you, the designer, have established. If you didn't want people raiding then you wouldn't have included raiding, but you did include it so therefore you must desire it.

For this to work one must understand it absolutely requires PvP. That just means ``my character can do stuff to your character''. It is difficult to reward someone if I cannot give an item to him. Sure, I might ask everyone ``At the next Boss raid, everyone let Fred pick first. It's his reward!'', but it is much better if my character can directly gift an item. The same holes true for punishments. I could say ``Don't nobody heal Fred during the next Boss fight'', but how would enforce it? Also, maybe Fred doesn't want to risk being ignored by the healers, so he doesn't show up to the Boss fight. How can I compel him? For this to work, I should be able to wuss-slap Fred in order to maintain order. If there is no ``friendly fire'' then it is impossible to discipline Fred. Fred can just do what he wants w/o fear of reprimand.

Now you might first think most people would shy away if they learned virtual Government could beat up or kill their character. This fear is unfounded. Most punishments are typically fines intended along restorative justice. If you cheat Fred, then you have to make Fred whole plus a little extra to teach you a lesson. Violence only comes up when someone refuses to pay their fines. Sure I have had characters slain to teach them a lesson, and over the course of multiple decades I can say the punishment was never arbitrary or heavy-handed. Offenses to the state were usually resolved by doing something nice for the state rather than getting beat up. Also, in a modern virtual world of plentiful healing potions and extremely lax death penalties, violence for deterrence or punishment is quite overrated; it amounts to a wuss-slap.

Naturally interest in political play, like all other forms, falls along a continuum. It's not for everyone, so some will be satisfied with only a tiny bit of power, perhaps because that office is a pet-interest to them, and others want to command the whole show as The Big Guy. People will determine their comfort level for theirself by dipping a toe into the political waters and testing things from there. In order for politics to be at all feasible, any offices or positions you create must have actual power. Power is not found in a title, but the actual physics of the virtual world. The sort of powers you'll include in your virtual world may vary from others, but these will typically be the sorts of things one expects of Government such as zoning areas for commerce (more shops) vs residential (more housing), or providing for the national defense (laser turets or enchanted statues) and offense (the fighters and PK'ers), or establishing good relations and trade agreements with other powers, etc.

Whatever powers you grant Governments you must next consider how they shall be devolved and split about. In the Real World we divide our Governments into several branches. This is because the stakes are quite high in the Real World, so we'd all prefer Government acted only after deliberation (so two chambers in our Legislatures), we limit the Executive by binding him to the established laws, and even then further protect oursleves by establishing an independent Judiciary. All of this is largely unnecessary in a Mud. Yes, in the Real World we all agree the people who decide the laws should not be the people who enforce the laws should not be the same people who interpret the laws. Honestly, you can skip the Judiciary in your virtual world. No player has time for an actual trial given how slight most punishments are.

There is nothing stopping you from consolidating all legislative and executive power into a single individual. If you have a small population when you first start out, this might be the only feasible approach to Government. However as your population grows, more players will want to try their hand at politics, and so you'll be forced to devolve powers. Typically you'll want a plurality in the Legislature. Weather you call this group of people a Council or Senate or Parliament doesn't matter. Their job is to come up with resolutions (opinions on the way things should be, or ought to have been) and laws (the way things shall be or else you'll get it). If they must be unanimous then expect very little to get done. You might like that. If a simple majority is sufficient then expect too much to get done. You might like that too. A good suggestion is to require a supermajority. This guarantees broad support based on consensus. A single executive is sufficient. There are some nations with a dual-executive. In the Russian Federation, for example, the President and the Prime Minister are two different people, with powers divided between them rather than shared.

Your players hail from the Western Democracies, so they'll expect democratic norms. Or at least a fig leaf and a nod. This can come directly against some of your other goals. If, in order to better cement the various factions into your virtual world, to prevent their sudden departure with 25% of your players, you might decide that each of these factions, or those with at least X members, make up the legislature. This will require those delegates to be elected somehow. At one time each class in Lusternia offered it's own guild, and each guild elected a member to serve in their national council. This is not the only way. For example, one could define multiple chambers, and the guildmasters might appoint their delegate to House of Trades and the People might elect representatives to the House of Representatives. Great Families might appoint a delegate a House of Nobles, etc. I caution against such complexities as multiple chambers. So long as everyone can vote for someone to represent them specifically, it doesn't matter if their vote is transmitted through their faction, such as Lusternia, or directly applied via public ballot, as we do with our Town Council in the Real World.

The number of seats in your legislatures don't have to be uniform between all nations. Some places can have more than others, but the number of seats for any particular place should not be arbitrary. When you grant seats to each Great Family, then you are saying something about the nature and origin of the true power of that nation. Likewise, you are saying something about the origin and nature of the true power of a nation when you offer some number directly to the People.

There is much more freedom with the executive. In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister is not defined by Constitution but instead honoured from Long Tradition. The true executive, the Monarch, who actually is defined in the Constitution, does not actually rule directly. The traditional form is the Monarch asks the person whom she thinks carries the greatest respect in the House of Commons to form a Cabinet of Government and to rule in her name. What really happens is there is an election and she invites this person, regardless of whom she thinks may or may not command the most respect. This person stands between two worlds, directing both Legislature and Executive departments. It evolved over 300 years of history, and is all rather convoluted for a Mud. We who design a virtual world enjoy the luxury of Hamilton and Madison and Jay: we can start from scratch and prescribe the Best Practices immediately rather than waiting for some evolution. In the United States we have a unitary executive. This simplifies a lot of things! The means of election are complicated by neccessity in the Real World, but can be simplified in your virtual world. In the Real World, the President of the United States presides over the several Sovereign States. Therefore a mechanism was created to require the majority of the states to approve the candidate to office. Since each state is permitted to decide how her ballots are cast, most states have devolved that power to the People, so we presently have a system where the majority of people from the majority of the States must approve the candidate to office. With the exception of Trump, this has thankfully led to a very long sequence of decidedly centrist Presidents. But this can all be skipped. In your virtual world, the People of the city or kingdom or whatever should simply have a direct vote for the executive.

Mihaly recommends hierarchial divisions rather than federalist divisions. This means instead of individual, stand-alone mayor positions throughout the kingdom, as we have in the United States, a more fuedal system where a mayor reports to a Count who reports to the King. This way new people can try just a taste of power to see if they like it, and it also provides a means of vindication or restoration of those who fall from the national stage. Mihaly also refuses any special ``politics'' skill so that any player of any type can jump into politics if they like. Mihaly has designed and produced several Muds so he may know what he's talking about. Star Wars: Galaxies flatly ignored this advice. Koster not only created a special class, Politician, who can only establish settlements, but also went with a Federalist approach in that each village was a soverign unto itself, and none stood above another. Naturally this didn't stop various towns from trying to act in concert, but without any means of coercion things functioned as a confederacy. See, rebel town A could not use threat of force to compel rebel town B to obey a treaty commitment, for example, because A would find itself an enemy of the Rebellion if it attacked B. So violence between towns was largely unknown.

Finally a word for direct democracy. If the population of any particular nation is kept to fewer than 2,000 or so, then direct democracy might be feasible. Naturally it is best if at only a few hundred, perhaps no more than 400, but it is possible. There is one Mud operated by Iron Realms Entertainment, Starmourn, which bears special consideration. There are three nations within this Mud. One has unified all power into a single Despot. One has an single executive and legislative council. The third is direct democracy. To my experience, no nation enjoyed a political advantage over the others. Regardless of mechanism, each nation was able to maintain their culture by sharing rewards and meting out justice.

Player-Based Factions Concluded

So now we've looked at what player-based factions are, what sort of code you need to implment to have them, what the pros and cons may be, expedients which might mitigate the cons, what sorts of functionality will support which sizes, and now can finally ask, ``Do I even want player-based factions?'' Maybe that question is misleading, because you might really want them but realize the structures of your virtual world won't support them. Perhaps you love the idea of great Uberguilds clashing against eachother, giving an epic backdrop to the whole of your creation, but if nothing lasts past a reboot and only the admin can add new content, then factions just won't work for you.

If you are building a Mud along neo-traditional lines then I should say your players will simply come to expect something along the lines of player-based factions. They'll have seen them in every other Mud they played, and they'll expect it even if this is their first because they've heard so much about clans or guilds or whatever you call them. You should never add something just because it is conventional. Do consider if player-based factions will serve to integrate the players into the whole of the world, or if it will isolate them into that private little bubble.

I know lots of people who say they play World of Warcraft, but they really don't; they play Instance of Warcraft. See, their sessions consist of logging in, ignoring/disabling public chat to focus only on guild chat, to grind with a few friends as warm-up to tonight's raid, and then disappear in a guild-only instance for a few hours. After the raid, they hang about the guildhall swapping and depositing loot. At no point are they involved any sort of World at all. They have quarantined theirselves into a pocket universe which consists solely of the guild. They are not tied to your world in any way. They could be doing this anywhere, so they won't mind if their faction leader decides to pack up and leave.

If you do see a need for player-based factions, then just remember how they might interact with other aspects of your virtual world and new design delights will open up. Obviously factions will interact with the simple economy of buying and selling inventory items, but what of real estate? If guildhalls were real places in towns, rather than some instanced island, and if there were limits as to how many guildhalls could be available in the various settlements, what sort of play opportunities does this provide?

I want to close with that teaser in the opening article. Bartle identified a ``hardwired vs softwired'' axis. Hardwired is when your virtual world supports it right ``out of the box'' even if no one ever logs in. It isn't created by any person; it just is. In diku-based Muds we often see some sort of guild or clan based strictly on one's character's class. So all the Rangers automatically belong to the Ranger Guild, etc. The ``starter'' corporations in EVE come to mind. These typically serve as nothing more than a communications channel since there's no political or economic function at play. ``Softwired'' factions are those instantiated by the players, which is what we have focused on for this series of articles.

Even More on Player-Based Factions, Continued

So now that we've explained what a faction is, and what it buys you, and what it costs you, we can get back to the real question of ``Do I even want factions at all?'' As heretical as this may seem, it's entirely possible that player-based factions are unneccessary. They might even prove detrimental, so beware! There are a few questions one should ask theirself to help one get to the root of this answer, and these all ultimately tie back to the very introduction of the article which opened this series. I bet you thought I forgot about those.

Demographers, sociologists, and ethnographers have identified several sorts of political groupings, and these are functionally based. Each exists to serve the specific needs of a community of a specific size. While there may be optimizations to be made here and there, it should be noted that these structures have held true for all societies for all time for all geographies. Thusly we can anticipate specific structures if we define and permit specific functions. Each mode is implied by the functions and features, rather than the other way around. I will rely on Elman Service's divisions as a convenient groups, which are the band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. True there are different sorts of states (a monoglot kingdom is very different from a polyglot federation, for example), and indeed there are even things such as empires, which practice diplomacy entirely different than states, but we shall stick to the basics. The subject matter doesn't warrant much depth anyway.

The smallest social unit, according to Service, is the band which consists of not more than a few dozen individuals. Political decisions are made largely by consensus. Sure the opinion of the best hunter might carry more weight than others, and the wisdom of the elders might be highly prized during times of famine (only they might have the long memory of which bitter weeds saved one would never eat actually them from the previous famine in their childhood), but otherwise members of the band are peers. This is not because of any sort of high-minded egalitarianism, but because the population is low enough that everyone's mind can be heard on all matters. Also because they lack any sophisticated infrastructure, any materials or resources acquired are immediately shared out and sharing is based on the needs of the recipient rather than the merits of the producers. Consider that in an age w/o electric refridgeration and salt-curing, meat is better stored in the body as fat than left outside to rot, and so long as everyone gets something then it's just fine to give more to the hungry; most providers will recall a time when they were the most in need and so honour this reciprocity. Conflict, for there is really no ``crime'' beyond taboo, is resolved via reconciliation. To banish someone would be, in effect, to slay them and that means the band as a whole would be deprived of a valuable hunter or gatherer, so it is better for all concerned if the two parties are to come to some terms.

One can see this rather dovetails with the notion of ``persistence'' described by Dr. Richard Bartle in his book /Designing Virtual Worlds/. In his use ``persistence'' is ``what survives a reboot'' such as ``If I kill the Ogre and the server is immediately rebooted, will it's corpse still be laying there on the ground?''. For our purposes here I should also extend this to include content-resets as well. See, if we have only a few minutes to loot the Ogre's corpse before it, and all it's loot, disolve then we are in a ``loot it or lose it'' mindset very much like the above band. We must immediately share out spoils lest they themselves spoil. This will also tie into what Bartle has defined as ``change'' in the sense of ``who can change what?''. If, for whatever reason, we are not at liberty to just whip up a guildhall, then we are under pressure to immediately share out the spoils since we have no way to store any surplus. Because we're all friends here, the sharing criteria will typically be ``accorrding to his need'' rather than ``according to his ability''.

It is no coincidence sounds like a typical PUG, but one should bear in mind this is because of the underlying physics of the virtual world. How the world operates says ``this is how people will interact''. So if you want to support ``fellowships'' or PUGs then there is very little design and implementation you need to do. Indeed, people will naturally form this sort of arrangement even if you don't include any formal functionality for declaring such a grouping. They'll come to agreement via chat and simple cooperation.

Bands grade and meld into the next larger and more complex structure, the tribe, which consists of a not more than a few hundred individuals. In The Real World, with a few exceptions, this only happens with the advent of agriculture; the exceptions are Japan's Ainu people or North America's Pacific North West peoples, who inhabit particular fertile lands supporting a larger hunger-gather population. Tribes continue the rather egalitarian distribution of wealth. Because they have largely settled a single area they also have some infrastructure for storage. In the case of agrarians this settlement will be a village of some sort, but in the case of particularly rich hunter-gather prospects you will find a semi-nomadic lifestyle anchored to some limited geography. Decisions still come about by seeking a democratic consensus, but there may be a ``big man'' who functions as a weak leader via his charisma rather than by any sort of physical intimidation.

If your Mud offers any sort of communal property, a guildhall, and items deposited therein, such as within a vault but possibly also just dropped onto the floor, can persist over a reboot, then you have offered functionality which will foster a society at the tribal level. Because we are within just a few hundred, it is possible for everyone to know everyone else by both face and name, in addition to reputation. When I graduated high school, there were maybe 450 students in total attendance. Yes, I knew each and every one of them. In this mode it just isn't natural for the ``big man'' to operate as a bully over all. Loot will still be shared out fairly evenly, with an eye for the needy before the greedy, but because of communal storage then not everything needs to be shared immediately. Some goods can be preserved for a furture time of need.

It is at this point when communal identity appears. We have a name, and we have specific territory which we've claimed, and we have developped our own culture and precedents beyond simple taboos. We start using the ``we'' word a lot. This is also about the optimal size of most player-based factions. The group is small enough for everyone to know eachother, so conflict is still resolved via reconcilliation, charity is reciprocal rather than abstract, everyone has a voice in the important decisions (even if Robert's Rules need to be imposed at this point). But thanks to community property then everyone has a stake in the joint venture. If you offer guildhalls and storage vaults and such then you will have tribes.

Service says the next level is that of the chiefdom. Chiefdoms emerge after the advent of agriculture. Because chiefdoms include thousands of people, we are looking at intensive agriculture with lots of supporting infrastructure. We also see further political development. Since it's not feasible for thousands of people to intimately know eachother, chiefdoms develop shared ideologies for cultural and religious practice, as well as establish a ruling elite. This establishment is often explained in the developing religious dogma as some sort of ``divine right''. The chief's seat is usually hereditary. The chief may have advisors, but his word is the final word. He might rule purely through physical intimidation, or by skillfully navigating the myriad, and often conflicting, concerns of his people. Either way, his word is law. Chiefdoms occupy and defend fixed settlements with great storage facilities. Resources collected are no longer so evenly shared. Because the agriculture is operating at a surplus, the chiefdom can subsidize artists and craftsmen and holy men and even a standing army. These are a redistributive economy, in that the produce of labour is collected as a tax by the chief's tax collector, and portioned out as among these non-producing professions.

This is the ultimate point of any player-based faction within a virtual world and is typically only realized in an informal alliance between other factions. Player-factions just seem to break down when they get far north of 250 or so. It's possible that players start to resent supporting ``bloodsuckers'' who don't pull their own weight, or they feel anonymous when what they really want is societal involvement. I suspect there are many reasons operating together. Suffice it to say factions don't usually get this big, and those that do often collapse under their own weight. The followers lose any sense of say in the decisions, they don't know who their leaders are, they feel like they got roped into a second job instead of a delightful Mud, etc.

So if you provide the functionality for player-factions to raise a standing army, to take and defend a permanent settlement, to automatically collect dues or taxes, to efficiently collect fixed resources near said settlement, then you can expect player-factions to seek to become this big purely by momentum rather than any effort of will. This begs the question then what to do if one of these Uberguilds disintegrates? I should advise to do nothing at all. Those players who are not disenchanted with the Mud will be aborbed into other factions, as will the claimed territories. The real problem is those players who do become disenchanted from the experience of their ``home'' disintegrating is they typically leave. It is better to avoid such a predicament in the first place and provide functionality only up to the tribal level and go no further. Factions at the size and complexity are extremely stable, and prove robust enough to withstand almost any shock or scandal.

The next level, according to Service, is that of the state. I shall not describe this thing here since it would serve no purpose, but I highly recommend studying the Song of Hiawatha. This may be the only ballad which accurately reports the point of transition where five chiefdoms became a single state. The nice folks at Extra Credits have prepared a sort of ``Cliff's Notes'' on this topic: part 1 and part two.

On the Political-Economic Means of Regulating the Destructive Power of Player-Based Factions

As an aside to the previous article, there are some economic means of maintaining social integration in the tension between a faction and the virtual world. As should be remembered, factions can and have simply packed up and moved between worlds en bloc, all at once. This movement is destructive to the virtual world being left in specific, and all virtual worlds in general. This movement only happens because the players of a faction are divorced, socially, from the rest of the virual world. Economics is but one means of maintaining social ties between the players of a faction and the rest of the virtual world, and the ties between factions as well. There are some political options, but these are not as universal as the economic alternatives.

Limit Total Economic Integration of Factions

No doubt you intend to integrate these factions with your overall economy. Crafters will need benches or forges or anvils and such, and gatherers will need farms or orchards or herds and such. It is a common mistake to let a faction aquire many or even all such resources. Some designers even advertise their mistake as a feature! If the faction can do this, then it has effectly removed itself and all her members from the greater economy of the virtual world, and therefore from the virtual world itself. If I never need to go to the market for anything because I can always get it, whatever ``it'' is, for free or at-cost, then I simply do not participate in the market. If I never need to brave the wilds to harvest apples because we have our own private orchards, then I no longer participate in the market. If I never need to use or visit a community forge because my corporation owns one, then I simply never will use or visit one, which means I am no longer participating in the market. If a faction can acquire all or even many the different means of production, then you have removed that faction and all her players from the market and, by extension, from the virutal world itself. Do not do this. Strictly limit how many of these resources any faction can aquire.

Limit Vertical Economic Integration of Factions

Even if you have to hand-tune a series of specific cases, you must never let any particular faction control all steps of production for the various goods and services available. To give an example, if I owned all the coal mines, steel mills, and rubber plantations, then it would be trivial to open a car factory and undercut my competitors. Great care must be taken to examine the crafting and trade systems of your Mud to ensure there are no loopholes either. There is no time to ``patch it later''; the moment your Mud launches, someone will identify that path and exploit it. They will regard it as a feature and complain loudly when you correct that ``bug''. If the shortest production path is three steps, then limit faction participation to only two. If any faction can control even a single production path they are not removed from the market (monopolies do not participate in markets; they dictate markets) but they are causing serious harm to the market as well.

Limit Horizontal Economic Integration of Factions

A starship requires phaser banks, shield generators, warp transduction coils, and multiphasic variacs, etc. If any faction can operate a factory producing each subcomponent of starship, they bottleneck an important path of your economy via monopolistic power. They are not only removed from the economy but are actively causing great harm to it. This one is a bit more tricky to work out, but some effort should be made nonetheless.

Just Simply Limit Economic Integration

By including factions within the economy you establish ties between the players outside of the faction. By limiting the faction's integration into said economy, you strengthen those bonds. So if your crafting system is along abstract skills, such as ``Tailoring'' or ``Baking'', then limit each faction to specialize in a single trade. My faction, The Weft Coast, specializes in weaving cloth from thread and yarn. Your faction, Tailors R Us, sews garments from cloth. Don't make a trade declaration required either. If someone doesn't know what they want, then don't make them decide. If your crafting system involves modern theories on harvest->processing->intermediateGood->finalAssembly->service, then limit a faction to one and only one tier in that chain. If any tier has multiple options, such as hard rock mining vs vegetable farming, then further limit the faction to chosing only a few or even just one within that tier. Again, if a faction can make all subassemblies for a starship then they effectively operate outside the economy wrt starships.

Limit Political Influence

If your virtual world has any sort of player-based Government, the preclude officers/leaders of factions from holding public office. By forcing them to chose between leading the faction and leading the kingdom, for example, they are hampered in attempts to use political clout to aggrandize their host faction, which could simply pack up and leave at any moment. Either they represent their faction or they represent their Government, but cannot do either. If a faction is ever permitted to set up a ``factory town'' then that town is lost to you. Do not let this happen.

Encourage Political Involvement

If your virtual world has any sort of player-based Government, then extend any sort of privy council, legislature, etc, to include one delegate from each of the factions registered at that place. This ambassadorial position should be a leadership position like any other within the faction system, it's only purpose should be to represent the faction to the council, and the person appointed to this position should not be eligible for any other position within Government or their home faction. If they have absolutely no say in matters then the position is insulting and meaningless, so by all means grant these representatives suffrage.

Do Not Implement Instanced Content

If your players' sessions consist mainly of hanging about the guildhall and running instanced raids, then your players are not invovled in any sort of world at all. To make an analogy, they are playing Instance of Warcraft not World of Warcraft. The players have quarantined theirselves into tiny little pocket universes shaped just like their guild. They are not part of your world and therefore they could be doing this anywhere, so they will have little reason to stay here. If you need to support 100,000 simultaneous players then just make more dungeons and add more land area. There are procedural techniques available, so you don't need to hire a team of writers.

These are a few options which can mitigate the potential for an Uberguild to abscond in the dark of night with a sizeable portion of your player base. They are not the only solutions, and I hope there are better solutions forthcoming, but they will work as a decent start.

Even More on Player-Based Factions

Now that we have a better understanding of ``Just what is a faction?'' (answer: formalized grouping enforced by code), we can look into ``What benefits do player-based factions bring, and what are their costs?'', and yes it is important to bear in mind there are costs. In essence their inclusion engenders and cements the social bonds. This can be accomplished by shared interest, communal resources, or purely the honour afforded by association. A PUG or trade guild aren't the only examples of the first but they are the most common. Most ``guilds'' or ``clans'' one finds in the various Mud's exist as examplars of the second (they help you get loot by regularly organizing raids and grinds and will buff you up from the vault if you don't have the ``proper'' gear) and to facilitate the first. Looking for someone to team up with you for that Kill 10 Rats quest? There's bound to be someone else with that same quest who can join you. Many guilds, if they cannot create a self-contained economy by recruiting every trade profession imaginable, will try to corner one particular market to become the best or most profitable bakers or weaponsmiths, etc. As a faction rises in popularity it will develop a reputation all its own. Some players will even perceive that as a short-hand or stereotype for all her members. One faction is peopled only by scoundrels, but another has nice folks. Here recruitment might simply be a matter of being associated with that honour or that glory. Look at me, everyone! I'm part of the winning team!

When people feel they belong to a social group they tend to feel invested in the virtual world. When people are invested, they are more like to be retained within your virtual world rather than to seek greener pastures elsewhere. So naturally you will be tempted then to identify all the possible reasons for creating a faction, and all the possible functions and perquisites, in an effort to offer the most compelling social environment possible. Here we come to one of the great costs. Time spent analyzing and designing this stuff cannot be spent analyzing and designing other things. If player-based factions are the very core of your Mud then you are on the right track, but if they are not, if they are fairly ancillary, you may have wasted considerable time. The second great cost is that once something is designed then it must be implemented. It cannot be left ``unsaid'' or else your ultimate produce is incomplete. Since all pieces of your Mud exist to butress and support your vision, if any one piece is removed the result suffers horribly. You narrative and fighting and exploration may all be the best there ever was, but w/o this missing piece you're no better than second-best; possibly much worse. It is true your Mud is not complete unless there is nothing left to remove, a corollary is ``The stuff that survives the culling must be implemented.'' It would be like letting characters swim the sea while in plate armour because you couldn't get around to implementing that weight or density or that buoyancy stuff yet. It shocks the mind, breaks immersion, and smacks of intellectually laziness. A third cost is risked if one makes factions self-contained. This bears elaboration.

If your virtual world permits factions to become entirely self-contained, that is to say if once I join a faction then I no longer need to interact with any other faction or even the game world itself (outside of questing and raiding, I mean), if once I join a faction then I can rely on them for all my needs (leveling, gear, advice, etc.), then you have successfully externalized all social commitment. A proper design would have social commitment, certainly, but it would be spread over multiple factions. See, if I spend 100% of my time within Clan Uberguild, if I only spend time in faction chat and only shop and trade with my guildies and only ever go on raids or grinds with my guildies, then I no longer have any commitment to your virutal world at all, and my association is tenuous at best. This situation makes it incredibly easy for entire groups of people, dozens and even hundreds of people, to just cloe up shop and move on to some other virtual world. Believe me, no matter how successful your virtual world may be, if 500 people, no matter how misanthropic or shy they may be, just suddenly pack up and clear out then your virtual world will suffer horribly. This situation must be avoided. Fortunately there is prevention.

Sociologists have noted there are ``weak bonds'' and ``strong bonds'' between people at various interfaces. Along traditional lines, I am strongly connected to my parents, my siblings, and my offspring. I am still connected, but not as stringly, to my grandparents and cousins. I am similarly connected to my friends, but not quite so keenly connected to their family or my coworkers. If we follow the logic out, eventually we don't give a shit about starving people even if we can support them for just 50¢/day (that's less than the price of a cup of coffee!). In the ideal model these form concentric circles radiating out from oneself toward The Known Universe, with distance indicating the degree of care, which is how the bond is measured as stronger or weaker than other bonds.

Demographers look at social networks. I'm connected to Fred by virtue of employment. The postal carrier delivers my mail. I'm only half-joking when I say we should bomb Japan because they built my minivan and so I'd be screwed w/o them. They also speak of weak and strong connections, and their notion is very similar to the above degrees of separation. I should deal fairly with the friend of my friend, because if I treat this person unfairly it may come back to me via reducing relations with my friend.

There is nothing at all contradictory between the two ideas. I look at them combined, similar to the particle-wave duality of light. Instead of a single node with various ripples and waves, imagine casting a handful of pebbles into a pond, each radiating out their own influences and each mutually communicating with the others via specific edges of connectivity.

Keeping that model in one's mind, now one can consider the impacts of various design decisions WRT factions, which is the whole point of any of this. We can very easily, through ignorance and not thinking things through, sabotage ourselves by placing players into convenient 500-person apartments and then encourage these blocs to depart for the Next New Thing. I'm not aware of any perfect solution, but I do have some ideas which mitigate the possibilities. These are largely economic in nature which I'll cover in a later article.

More on Player-based Factions

Players can certainly go alone. Depending on your design, they might not get far, but they can always try. Being that as it may, we humans are social creatures and even the most misanthropic among us will join with others now and then. Indeed there is something innately social about the fundamentals of our psychology. Evolutionary biologists attribute this to our primative roots in the truest sense: from when we were as but the more base of primates. So we humans are organically ``wired'' to seek the company of others.

Demographers, sociologists, and ethnographers have identified several sorts of groupings. Some of the greatest minds have studied the phenomenom and most elegantly articulated their findings. Very little of that matters in terms of a Mud. Oh, there are certainly functional aspects which will come into play, but because the players and you, the designer, are not actually founding any Real World society charged with establishing Real World Justice, or preserving Real World Life, many of the forms and trappings are purely non sequitur. The structural differences between Nation-States vs City-States vs Tribes in neither here nor there in this endevour. This is because it is extremely unlikely any functional grouping of players will ever exceed the degree of Tribe. Moreover, if your virtual world is a living and breathing world, the players of any given faction will have ties to several other factions. Some which the sociologist might call ``strong'' and some ``weak'', but more than just a few. Just as each faction impacts every other faction through their own culture and the shared culture of your virtual world, the greater culture of the virtual world both shapes and is shaped by these factions in an autocatalytic way. Therefore a good understanding of ``what is a faction?'' is in order.

In both his Designing Virtual Worlds and his MMOs From the Inside Out, Dr. Richard Bartle cleanly identifies two key properties of player-based factions which dominate, if not completely govern, the mechanics of any system. You must understand that before we get into the sorts of factions there might be, what their purposes and powers ought to be, their functions and forms, etc., indeed before we even ask the question ``Should we even have factions?'', we must first ask of ourselves ``Just what is a player-based faction?''.

A player-based faction would be any group of 2 or more players activing collectively. Assuming there is any sort of public chat, anyone can announce ``25 Fighter LFG for MC''. This is the parlance for announcing ``25th level Fighter is looking for a group to raid Monster Capitol''. Now w/o coding any functionality, most people should be able to just follow others around, and if you don't do any of that extra work then you have the default mode of in-context support for factions: none. Alice and Bob can agree to team up, but there if is no formal mechanism in the game enforcing loot or XP is shared out then Alice and Bob will have to come to some agreement about loot shares and, depending on support for PvP, there may be nothing either can do if the other breaks their word.

A greater level of support might be a formalized ``fellowship'' of a squad of players. In Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit, we see a small group of adventurers set forth to do their business as a single unit. You might think this idea is simply smashing, and want to encourage such formations in-context by coding in functionality. You might code up automatic loot-sharing mechanics (dice rolls, or only treasure masters can collect for redistribution later, etc.) or you might permit some sort of ``team name''. This field is ripe for innovation, but the gist is you've added code to the virtual world, which means there are now in-context physics supporting these things. Just as gravity is a fundamental force in Real World Physics, you've now made ``fellowships'' (or whatever you call them) a fundamental force in your Virtual World Physics.

This addition of code now creates its own set of properties by which we can measure and qualify factions. This can range from ``none at all'' to some rather complicated systems involving elections and property redistribution and so forth. The fundamental aspects we have fall along the lines of permanance and authority. There is a third notion, ``hardwired vs softwired'' which we really do not consider and will only be discussed but briefly at the end.

The axis of permanance concerns the very existence of the group itself. If all the members log off, does the group still exist? Quick ``pick-up'' groups blink right out of existence if everyone were to log out. There may even be a mechanism to disband a faction, such as the captain announcing ``Ok, we defeated the Ogre so our adventure is complete.'' Another group, perhaps a trade federation of all the tailors in your virtual world, might best continue to exist even if every tailor were to disconnect. Because that which is fine for one is not necessarily fine for another, the designer does need to consider this mechanic carefully. He may very well want to support both sorts of permanance, but unless he is thinking directly about the issue itself, if he just checks items from a list, he won't get what he likes. So fellowships and PUGs would have very low permanance while great trade guilds or mercenary companies might have a great degree of permanance.

The authority axis details who can do what within the faction. This isn't about titles, such as ``Fred is Captain of The Wolf Guards'', but along the lines of invoking underlying code by exercising faction-powers in-context. For example, if your faction is ``invitation-only'', then can just anyone extend an invitation, or is that power granted only to specific ``recruiters''? Can just anyone withdraw from the vault? Is access to the alchemist a privilige of rank, or is it a perquisite available to any member? Can just anyone disband the faction?

Understanding the authority axis involves enumerating a specific number of faction related features/functions, and then determining who can and cannot invoke them. EVE Online, for example, even considers delegation as a specific authority. For example, the CFO has the authority to withdraw funds but also may delegate that authority to others, and ultimately the Grand Poobah may even delegate delegation itself, thus forming his trusted cotier of trusted lieutenants (``officers'' in EVE). This enumeration is prone to inflation and inclusion ``just because'', so great care must be taken to ensure one is not adding things just because some other game has them, or because they sound cool. These are functions, which mean they serve a material purpose in your physics. What functions or features support your greater design? Implement them and leave the remaining by the wayside.

So these are the mechanics of factions. The next article will address their costs and benefits so we can better approach the question ``Do we even want player-based factions in the first place?''

The Difficulties Engendered by Equation #3 Concluded, or, Not Done Completed

No system, and especially none so complicated as a decent Mud, is complete unless and until there is nothing left to remove.

Take any Mud of your choice. WoW, LotRO, GW, APB, SW:ToR, etc., and look at any feature of that Mud. Now pluck at that feature and draw it completely out of the Mud. If the Mud survives, then that feature was superfluous. It should not have been there in the first place and was a distraction. It was more than a distraction. It also caused considerable harm to the Mud. How was harm done by such an innocuous thing? Consider that time, money, energy, and so forth were expended on designing and implementing that feature. Those resources could have been spent elsewhere. They certainly should have been spent elsewhere. It certainly would have been better were they expended elsewhere.

It would be trivial to add email capability to your Mud. But what purpose would email serve? What requirement of your design could only be served by the addition of email? If you can't come up with an answer, then simply do not add it in the first place. Focus your energies on those areas that actually align with your design!

Failure to abide by this rule results in a ``kitchen sink'' mindset which is incapable of producing naught but nuts & gum abominations.

Expanding upon the proper relationships of your atoms, ¬( A ⇒ B )

In a previous post we declared that if some thing, A, implies to some other thing, B, and if nothing else implies B, and A implies nothing else, then we have a serious design flaw. That is to say if ( A ⇒ B ), then we should omit one entirely and only work with the other.

This is not the only thing worth understanding. There are two other rules which one should bear in mind when designing a proper Mud. The following are simultaneoously true at all times for any properly designed Mud:

1. ( A → B ) ⇒ ( A ∨ B )
2. ( A ∧ B ) ⇒ C
3. A ⇒ { B, C, …, ℵ_∞, … }

The first equation, which we've seen before, tells us that if a thing, B, has one and only one antecedent, A, and A does not give rise to anything else, then A must be removed to leave B to stand on its own. To recycle the earlier example, if you were to design an attribute Endurance to give rise to some other attribute, Health, and Endurance didn't do anything else and Health didn't depend on anything else, then Endurance should be dropped. This is beause, in essence, Endurance doesn't actually exist; all we have is Health.

The second equation tells us that if we include some attribute or mechanic C, then it must be based on two or more other things. The players in your Mud might experience locked doors, and they may not be able to pick the locks. Could they force the door open by brute strength? You might be tempted to include a ``break doors'' attribute. Should strength matter? Should the bookworm have just as good a chance at smashing a door into splinters as the burly barbarian? If you say yes, then you have the dangerous ground of equation #1. The easy resolution is to skip the ``break doors'' attribute and just base everything directly on Strength. However, you might also want a character's level to matter as well. High level characters are natually better at breaking doors because of their vast experience in the art. This is fine, and we can then restore the ``break doors'' attribute, because now it is based on two or more other attributes, ( stregnth ∧ level ) ⇒ breakDoors.

The last equation states that if an attribute exists, it may be self-supporting, such as Health in the first example, or it must support two or more other attributes; it cannot support just one. So Health can exist on it's own and Endurance discarded, unless we find further use for Endurance. To give an obvious example, Strength would not only impact the ``break doors'' attribute but also impact meleeDamage attribute, and the encumberance attribute, and so forth.

Applying equation #3 is often the trickiest part of design. We designers are often quite eager to add more and more stuff, so we seldom have a trouble with multi-purposing these Attributes. This gives rise to the very real problem of adding an attribute just for the sake of justifying some other attribute, which perhaps ought to have been left out completely. For example, maybe you really really really want to give characters different maximum running speeds. This is great and fine, and perhaps you want Strength to modify on the assumption that strong leg muscles make for faster people. However this would violate equation #1 so you, grasping at straws, invent some other attribute to satisfy equation #2, which then leaves you in a lurch regarding equation #3, because this new attribute can't exist to support only one thing because violates #1, but you're notion is so specific you can't see how it applies to anything else. You would be better off making Speed a base attribute rather than an implied attribute.

On Attributes

So how many attributes should characters in your Mud have?

You're probably totally stoked and thinking you'll have Strength and Agility and, you know what? Screwit! You'll even have Charisma and Personality and Perception! Let's look at some fundamental play here.

In everyone's favourite, Pac-Man, the Hero of our story, Pac, is either alive or dead. This means we have but a single attribute. Now the blokes at Namco could've been dicks and used a simple boolean, but instead gave us 3 guys. When all your guys were gone then play ceases, so isAlive isn't a yes/no Boolean, but instead a lifeCount integer. Naturally lots of people of different skill levels could play for different durations, so a need to identify ``how do I compare to others?'' was identified. This was resolved with an additional attribute, score. Finally it was decided that at certain times Pac-Man should be able to turn the tables on the monsters and chase them instead, giving the canAttack attribute which is a yes/no Boolean after eating certain dots. That's it. Pac-Man has just three attributes and game-play has held up just fine for 40 years. Notice in Pac-Man the attributes were defined by the game-play and not by checking items off of a list. If the designers of Pac-Man also thought floating over the walls in the maze was a good idea, but wanted to meter or ration that ability, then they would have added a fourth attribute. Take note they did not add a stupidAssJustBecause attribute, nor did they add a becauseEveryoneThoughtItWasCool attribute. Each attribute is present for one and only one reason: it supports the game-play.

The lesson we should be learning here is we should not first ask ``How many attributes should we have?'' but instead ask ``Should we even have attributes in the first place?''. An attribute of the character, any character, exists to support some mechanic within your virtual world. The first question shouldn't be ``Should we have Dexterity?'' but ``Will there be challenges of dexterity or agility?'', followed by ``Will those be of the player or the character?''. Naturally this answer will vary depending on genre. Twitch is a very bad thing in a Mud, for example, but is par for the course for any respectable First-Person Shooter. Could you seriously imagine playing Call of Duty, holding the crosshairs perfectly against someone's head at point-blank range, and being told ``You're character is so clumsy he missed'' ?

So let's consider some functional points and see how they play into things. So let's say you want to make a Mud along traditional lines, like World of Warcraft or some such. OK, so we know that whacking baddies until they go away is part of the game. That paradigm also includes baddies whacking you until you go away. Nevermind what ``go away'' means for the moment (spoiler: you're character isn't ``killed'' unless you are forced to re-roll a new 'toon; it's just a wuss-slap otherwise). So this notion implies, via the standard metaphors, some sort of ``health'' or ``stamina''. A character can take only so many ``hits'' before they are removed from play (even if but only temporarily). In The Lord of the Rings Online this was called ``morale'' (which was confusing, because did that mean when I fell from Weathertop, just before hitting the ground my character was so scared that he fled from it?) or ``hit points'' in traditional table-top D&D. By whatever name it is known, you'll need some sort of ``health'' score. OK, check. Now at this point you might be thinking something very stupid. You might say ``Yes, we will have an Endurance attribute which implies Health and then we will ...'', and that is probably the stupidest thing you can say. Attributes are fundamental. You already have one, Health. Why are you adding a second? The following mechanism is just plain wrong:
A ⇒ B
If A does imply B, and A is alone in that venture, and A does not imply anything else, THEN FORGET A AND JUST FUCKING WORK WITH B YOU SHITHEEL! I seriously cannot understand why people, who insist they are adults, need to be told this. So in this model we have a single attribute for characters: Health. We don't have an Endurance which gives rise to Health. We just have Health.

Now let's expand the functional requirements of this a bit. We're making not just any old slasher, but a swashbuckling game! You know, like the like the black & white Zoro shorts or the b&w Ereol Flynn pirate movies, or the Three Muskateers flick from 1993. Wow did those first two date me. In these we see a lot of back-and-forth sword play. You thrust and I parry, I swipe and you dodge. Each of us is attempting to overcome the other's defenses to strike some blow. Can I slip past your guard and pin your shoulder? Will your feint to my thigh distract me enough for you to scalp me? This is an exciting and dynamic form of combat! This isn't the usual bullshit of ``well I click attack and then I wait for him to run out of HP''. So how would we do this? Well we'll need to start with some sort of ``defense capacity''. This is how much defense I got before you start hitting my HP. If we watch the old films, this sort of thing is somewhat elastic and springy. The moment I catch my breath, my defenses return to me. There is some sort of regeneration at play. So now we also have a ``defense regeneration''. So one good trick might be to overwhelm me with multiple opponents! Sure, you and I might be an even match but when you bring three friendly mobs, even if they are peons, I might not be able to keep up with the constant attacks. There is just one other thing I think important to balance all this out. There needs to be some sort of limit on how much of my ``defense'' which can be spent at any time. A sort of ``attacks above this value completely bypass defense''. Do consider not everyone is so perfectly agile that they can avoid being struck indefinitely. Most of us w/o training would be hard-pressed to dodge a paper airplane. Seriously. So we have a another attribute, ``defense expenditure ceiling''. Now you can call those things whatever you like. Agility, Reflex, Guard, Dexterity, etc. It doesn't matter what you call them. What matters is the mechanic; the functional purpose. So now we have Four attributes, Health, Vitality, Reflex, and Agility, and at no point did I ever ask ``So... just how many attributes should we have in our Mud?''

That itself is something worth considering.

On Player-based Factions, a.k.a., ``guilds'' or ``clans''

It's good to let the players self-organize. In most Muds the default factions are but mere placeholders for the newbies and these factions don't have any actual power at all. The starting Corporations in EVE, for example, are never going to conquer any star system or build any space stations. Players are instead encouraged to either start their own Corporation or join some other fellow's Corporation. We designers like the idea of player-based factions because that fosters ``engagement'' and hopefully encourages ``retention''.

These expectations of engagement and retention are based on some rather common-sense notions. Here in the West, we enjoy a Freedom of Association. I can associate with the people of my choice and likewise I may also avoid the people of my choice. If there are some like-minded people out there then I can go be with them while at the same time I can separate myself from those who I find disagreeable. This is part of our national Constitution here in the United States.

Now if this is so delightful in The Real World then we would be fools to avoid it in our virutal world. By necessity this requires some notion of exclusivity. The VFW, for example, is for Veterans of Foreign Wars and not just any old Tom, Dick, or Harriet. So let's say a Fighter is tired of hanging out with Archers and Mages, so he decides to form the Fighters Guild. This is a club just for Fighters. Fighters can now hang out just with other Fighters and they can talk Fighter stuff and get together to do Fighter things, all in the safety of their own space and w/o the gross distractions of Priests or Burglars. This sounds pretty great, yeah?

What of minority groups? There are many who assert forms of repression are all around them. Consider what have become termed ``micro-aggressions''. You and I might be the most inclusive and progressive of folks on the planet, but it is argued that even we, as products of the preceding culture, on occasion will, quite unknowingly, let slip some terribly hurtful slur. Why shouldn't these folks be allowed a private space where they can be free from such, accidental to be sure but hurtful nonetheless, noise? I have been assured, on excellent authority, being gay and black is a lot more troublesome than being only one of either.

Sure this all sounds very well and good, but when it comes time to implementing player-based factions in your Mud then you have to write some actual code to enforce these different rules, and therefore you will be offering social commentary. Dr. Richard Bartle poses some interesting questions concerning membership criteria in his excellent MMOs From The Inside Out and MMOs From The Outside In books, but one of which touches on this matter of our modern democratic notions of inclusivity and how they impact with the individual's right of association. Which of the following membership criteria should be forbidden by Your Favourite Mud?

• Clan for gay characters only
• Clan for gay players only
• Guild for female characters only
• Guild for female players only
• Corporation for black characters only
• Corporation for black players only

Golly, those all sounds great to me! Who could possibly object to such open-minded and liberal notions of fraternity and unity? I mean, it's all just so obviously democratic that none of them should be forbidden. So how do they differ from the following prohibitions?

• No gays
• No girls
• No blacks

Don't worry, I'll wait while you fumble for an answer.

On Gender

On Gender? Why not? I seem to be knocking everything else down.

Most designers are an inoffensive and liberal lot. Consider most game designers are not trying to import 19th century stereotypes and bigotry into their games, but rather exercise them from the minds of their players, and rightly so! I would not stomach any player or group of players who wanted to devote their time to demeaning and bad mouthing either gender. So having them fairly even rather helps dissuade such childish antics.

To them, if an Enchantress is every bit as good as an Enchanter, then a Warrioress should be every bit as good as a Warrior. It's not because they are going out of their way to try to be ``PC'', but because they genuinely don't see any fundamental difference, or at least don't see any difference worth mentioning. So whatever differences there may be, such as textures or pronouns, are purely cosmetic. They all have the same bounding box and the same chance of to-hit, etc. This may be a very democratic and liberal message, but they often don't realize they are sending another message as well, and it's one they may not completely agree with. Had they bothered to stop and think on things they might have taken a different course.

See, they are also saying individuals across genders are also completely identical and functionally equivalent for all roles. The part of that first statement is patently false. Only women can have babies. Even if you wish really, really hard nothing can change that. Is that fair to women? Is that fair to men? In a world w/o children this point may be completely moot. OK, fair enough, but what about the second part?

Most men can beat me at arm wrestling. I can beat most women at arm wrestling. Most women are shorter than most men. I know a fellow who is taller than most men, but is shorter than his wife. In the every day course of events none of these differences matter one whit. I may have been 6" taller than my wife, but she was seldom inconvenienced by her stature. Certainly I could beat her at arm wrestling, but this didn't really come up all that often. On the face of it, it looks like this also isn't a trouble either. Except, also on the face of it, we're not making a Virtual World consisting of ``mundane, everyday common experience''. We're usually making a Virtual World filled with High Adventure and Thrilling Action. Would not some of these differences come into play?

If in your world even the shortest of gnomes can reach things from even the top of the tallest shelf, then none of this matters. Now you've really broke my immersion, and you have a lot of explaining to do regarding just why that 3'2" gnome could reach the soup tureen from the top of that 7' cupboard, but if it's your game then it's your game. In this case it may make perfect sense to have identical bounding boxes and such. But it doesn't make perfect sense to have Ol' Shorty there be able to dunk on top of Shaq. Men, on average, have greater upper-body strength than women. Wouldn't men have an advantage in swinging heavy, sharp pieces of metal?

In the original MUD, Females had a distinct advantage. There were three attributes which were rolled randomly. For men they were taken as-is, but for women 10 points were removed from Strength and 5 points were added to both Agility and Stamina. Now every time one gained a level, 10 points were added to each attribute up to a maximum of 100. Females would max their ``ability to hit you w/o missing'' and their HP before males. The fact that males tended to hit just a tad harder was statistically insignificant, whereas Females hit more often and could withstand more blows was significant. Was this fair to Females? Was this fair to Males?

If you believe the two genders are functionally equivalent, that is to say if we can replace any male with any female and vice versa, then why even bother with the inclusion of gender in the first place? Just make everyone a Eunuch.

If you believe there are differences, such as child-rearing is some sort of inheritance mechanism or the ``you don't really die and reroll another toon, you just respawn'' fiction, then these differences are rather important and need to be addressed.

Including gender makes a statement. Not including gender also makes a statement. Be aware that you are making a statement no matter if you like it or not.

On a closing note, the /funny command in WoW will cause your 'toon to make some sexual innuendo. These are unique to each gender-race combination. For the most part they are funny, and also quite mild; Disney could certainly get away with them. Have you noticed each /funny joke is entirely heteronormative? Well they are. This could mean our friends at Blizzard are an extremely homophobic lot, but I suspect the real reason behind it all is some designer simply added this w/o THINKING. Yes the designer said something alright with his joke, and I'm sure it was not what the designer intended. Now do you see the importance of thinking when designing instead of just checking off items from a list?

On Races

Why do we have races? Let me clarify that. In Mud's yes we can often turn a bunch of skin-tone and hair-colour sliders to select what an ethnographer would call ethnicity. What I'm talking about is what the biologist would call species: Elf, Dwarf, Orc, etc.

I saw one Mud advertise 30 different races. 30! Gawd. How could any player, even an experienced one, possibly make any sort of informed decision on that one?

Do they each have different advantages or abilities? Are those differences important or tangential? Is your list a bunch of opposites? Is your list full of re-skinned duplicates?

Should I chose the race with a really long name consisting only of vowels and no consonants? Or should I chose the race with a really long name consisting only of consonants and no vowels?

If to succeed as a Wizard then I just *have* to be an Elf, or if the only way to succeed as a barbarian is to be a liontaur, then why are race and class selected separately? Why include both class and race if one automatically decides the other? Why not just have one?

All too often we see this sort of thing, and it boggles the mind. It's almost as if the designer isn't actually designing, but checking items from a grocery list.

I'm also curious why there is a word for the offspring between a human and an elf, a half-elf, but there is no word ``half-dwarf''. And would ``half-dwarf'' be the word for the offspring between a dwarf and an orc?

What is wrong with just making everyone the same? It is understandable that some people, in a fantasy environment, would want to play a lizard man shaman from the steaming jungles. My issue is when the *only* way to succeed as a shaman or a lizard-man is to be a lizard-man shaman.

If we can't force everyone to be Human, then I say force everyone to be some made-up fantasy bullshit race. There, now everyone is happy!

But if you must include the traditional races, please recall the plural of dwarf is dwarfs, not dwarves; Tolkien could not spell despite his literary degree.

On Classes

Q:Why do Mud's have classes?
A: You have been trained with Pavlovian expertise into expecting them.

The first Mud, MUD, did just fine without them. Indeed there are many modern skill-based systems out there with engaging and rich play. But the alternative merely suggests the option, not the superiority. We need to ask ``For what purpose?''

Classes, in the D&D sense of classes such as ``warrior-type'' or ``wizard-type'', offer someone a well-defined role. This role is not necessarily related to any role-playing, although it could be, but is specifically a functional role of ``Here is how I fit into party-based combat''. This sort of paradigm dates back before D&D, to wargames with little lead miniatures. D&D inherits from Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement, which itself inherits from Chainmail, which itself inherits from contemporary medieval wargames. For perspective, Warhammer inherits directly from Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement.

Classes offer a great short-hand for a lot of situations because they offer a package deal. We should use the sneaky-guy to get behind the enemy's lines, because he can also poison the enemy general. We should use the tough guy with armour to block the front lines so no one just charges through and slaughters our archers. Yes, truly great stuff. So it's a lot like getting on a railroad. If you get on the Fighter line then you'll eventually get better and better at doing Fighter things. The problem with railroads is they aren't known for making arbitrary turns. They actually have a fixed destination. You might start as a Fighter but after observing play, decide you would like to give being an Archer a try. In a class-based system then you're pretty much fucked.

Classless systems, typically implemented via skills but also by gear/kit, have a different mechanic altogether. In this mode, if you want to be an archer then you pick the sort of skills an archer might have. What skills are those? I don't know, that's your archer not mine. Your archer might be sneaky and dress in black. Mine might know something of forestry and dress in browns and greens. Unlike the class-based system, this offers quite a bit of flexibility to the player. I can try things as a Wizard for a while, and if it doesn't work out for me, I can try my luck as a sneaky-thiefy type for a while. It's entirely possible my previous career as a Wizard is even helpful as a thief. Levitation instead of trying to scale walls, for example, would be helpful to a cat bugler.

Classes are newbie-friendly, but oldbie-caustic. Skill-based systems are very unfriendly to the newbie, but those who give it a try find them superior. Do consider the newbie, when confronted with a lists of 100 skills won't make heads or tails of that list! How could they possibly make an informed choice? The solution is fairly simple. You make an equipment- or skill-based system, then you offer a choice of packages to the new character. You whip up a Fighter template or a Wizard template, and let them make a choice as well as offering the free-form selection. This is newbie-friendly, but as they experience the world and go on their adventures, they are entirely able to change their own fate to their own desires and needs. If you think you'd be happier playing a Healer, then enroll your Fighter into orders. If you think your Wizard would make the best Guildmaster of the thieves? Then find a way to learn some thiefy skills. You can start on the Yellow Brick Road, but you are not at all required to stay on it.

There is really no need for classes. I saw a Mud advertise something like 30 different classes once. How the Hell does the novice make an informed choice on which class to pick? And if there are 30, are they all actually different or are some merely re-skinned duplicates? Also, if there are 30 different classes, why not use a skill-based or kit-based system instead?

On Metaphor

Why don't game designers make use of metaphor?

In the original MUD, way back in 1978, time-period was a metaphor and hint at danger. A scene populated with contemporary artifacts might be perfectly safe: fax machines and television sets signal the modern day. A 1930's gramophone and tube-amplified radio set would indicate greater danger. An abandoned tin mine from the post-war Wild West would be even more dangerous. A medieval castle even more so. A neolithic stonehenge populated by picts and druids might be the most dangerous time yet.

Why don't designers use metaphor? I understand projects are now implemented and designed by a plurality of people, but there is still ONE and ONLY ONE ``lead designer''. Why can't he pick a set of metaphors and stick with them? Metaphors can communicate more than just danger or difficulty.

It seems like the artistry of the craft is diminishing.

The Lord of the Rings Online had an interesting metaphor. Depending on the danger and malice of the foes, the colours would fade and even the screen would darken. This was a brilliant (or should I say gloomy?) metaphor for danger! It offered immediate information, in the setting if LotRO was not ambiguous, and could even have been made to offer real-time feedback as the fortunes of the battle waxed and waned. Now in a Mud where night was actually dark rather than just applying a blue wash to the scene, and deep caves were as impenetrable as pitch, this metaphor wouldn't quite work. Is the Balrog really going to kill me, or is it just dark in Moria? Being that as it may, there are no reasons why metaphor, especially clever metaphor, cannot be applied to the Muds of the modern era.

The Level Game

Why the ``level game'' ? If your ``high level'' content is the same as your ``low level'' content, except it has more hit points, then game play at level 6 is just as engaging as level 96. Why do we have 90 intervening levels? A lot of people complain about ``the grind'' sometime in their 50's, but I'm pretty sick of it around level 5.

The very first Mud, MUD, invented by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw way back 1978, had only 10 levels. Do you even know why they had levels? It wasn't because D&D had levels, although that is the most common guess, but because they were making commentary on the British class system. People like Richard and Roy weren't ``supposed'' to be in University. Richard was born in North Yorkshire and sounded like a farmer. Roy was born in Wolverhampton, a factory city, so he sounded like a damned tinker. These are just not the sort of people who are ``supposed'' to attend university. Including levels in MUD was not to provide a sense of reward, another common guess, but a commentary on the British social classes.

MUD only needed 10 levels, so MUD only had 10 levels. Now Muds have 100 levels as the norm. Why? Unless the game-play is fundamentally different between, say, level 90 and level 100, then what is the purpose? Why have any levels between 90 and 100? Why not stop at 90?

We don't need a level game. We need new and interesting challenges of varying degrees of power and and even offer different modes of difficulty. No one should be powerful enough to take on a Krayt Dragon alone; some things should be so difficult as to require an ``adventuring party''. Even the meekest of newbies ought to be able to solve the murder mystery alone. There should not be any distinction between ``newbie'' content and ``high level'' content. Developers should be designing for solo, party, faction/guild play, not for level 3, 30, 300.

How much more powerful should the uber-elder be over the bare-newbie? In my ideal, that difference would be measured as ``not by much''. Double or triple sounds about right. The high level characters will have better gear and greater character skills (not to mention player skills), and that will be more than decisive. I wouldn't have power-ups and boosts of 500% either.

We don't need 100's of levels. We need content for all types of play. Yes, Virginia, some people actually do look forward to unwinding at the end of long day by ``grinding'', so sure let there be some of that. But there should be solo content for all types, including the sort who would rather be clever than ``fighty'', and there should be small group content, such as raiding a goblin village or raiding foreign lands for gold and slaves, or even large faction-oriented play such as besieging cities or questing for artifacts.

There is much fertile ground here, but I suspect so long as people are obsessed with inflating levels beyond all sense, we will never see one lick of it.

Teaching you the tutorial

The last time you played a Mud, be it a fancy AAA graphical Mud like World of Warcraft or a lower budget independent Mud, or even a text Mud, how long was the tutorial? Was it more than a few minutes? Or was it on the order of a few hours?

Why do modern Mud's even have a tutorial in the first place? Is a tutorial even necessary? I realize this may be stretching an analogy, but Super Mario Brothers didn't exactly have a tutorial. They just dropped you into Level 1 and you were to learn from your mistakes, but they did a good job of hanging a lantern on the challenges, so very few people made mistakes even on their first attempt.

We don't need a tutorial. The metaphors and paradigms of Mud's are fairly common anymore. New players should start their characters in a safe area, but experienced players should have the option of starting anywhere. A new character does not imply a new player. The first thing my new Engineer needs is not a backpack from the tutorial merchant, but a hyperdrive so I can connect with my buddies who owe me a dimensional storage vault.