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The UFP and the Filthy Humans

This isn't really an MMORPG idea, but it's a game idea so I'm filing it with the others of those. Here's the thing: you are an officer, say a commodore, in the military-diplomatic-exploration organization of an interplanetary nation with United Federation of Planets (UFP) membership. You've been tasked with asserting your nation's interests with respect to a certain out-of-the-way planet that happens to be rich in natural resources. Unfortunately, it's already inhabited, by a race of disgusting natives we will call the Filthy Humans.

(26 September 2008)

Text-rewriting for adventure gaming

About 15 years ago I worked briefly on a multiplayer text adventure project. The idea I had in mind was that it would work with as close as possible to full English as the input and output language, and it would change the words to reflect multiple viewpoints. The world of computer gaming has changed a lot since that time and I'm not sure there'd still be interest in this kind of system, but on the other hand, it looks like I'm going to be working as a computational linguist in the next few years and it seems like it might be cool, and might build my skills, to dust this off and work on it again.

(22 June 2008)

MMORPG articles

Ideas and analysis on massively multiplayer online role-playing games. (18 May 2008)

Time travel chaos game

Okay, here's a game sketch.  This idea is supposed to be a game that could live on a Web site somewhere, support a large number of players, but be fun to participate in even if you are brand new, or only connect occasionally, or if there are few or no other players.  Kind of like Wikipedia - except that my idea would actually know it's a game, unlike Wikipedia which thinks it's an encyclopedia.  I'm posting this here to make it harder for anyone to patent. (30 May 2007)

On games that don't suck

When the ever-amusing Jeff Vogel posted his piece about why he hates fantasy RPGs a couple weeks ago, I thought (because of the come-on at the end for what he'll talk about next time) that it was the first half of a two-parter, so I'd wait until the second half came out before commenting.  It's been a while, though, and on re-reading it I now think that his next column is simply going to be another one in the ongoing series instead of specifically a second half for this column, so I'm going to go ahead and comment now.  The thing is, Jeff's gripe is that fantasy RPGs are all about the levelling up.  You start out sucky, most of the game is spent doing otherwise-pointless tasks in order to improve yourself, and it's tedious and boring and too much like real life.  That got me thinking, well, what kind of game could we make that would be just the opposite?  It would have to be a game where you start out really cool, with lots of power to do things, and then you progressively lose that and it becomes harder and harder and a big part of the object is simply to retain enough of your powers until the end of the game to be able to finish.  After going through a few permutations of stuff like "role-play a hero who suffers from a debilitating, advancing illness," I realised that the problem has already been solved.  One of the most popular computer games today exhibits just the properties I'm imagining.  You probably already have a copy.  It's notorious as an addictive time-waster. (25 February 2007)

Stateless gaming

I had another of my late-night ideas this morning.  We've spent a lot of time talking about how to manage property in MMORPGs.  Many of the articles in my MMORPG category are on that theme.  Some people don't like the idea of players being able to sell game property; on the other hand, the fact that it's impossible to prevent such sales suggests that rather than trying to catch and punish people who do it, game operators might do better to simply allow sales and try to design games that will continue to be fun when sales are occurring.  I've written a bit on the technical aspects of a system to allow sales while reducing centralization; and I recently saw an interesting article considering the causes and effects of item sales in economic terms (note:  I haven't read this article carefully and at first glance I think the assumptions it makes simplify the problem too much for the conclusions to be useful; but it's worth at least a skim).  My rule is to challenge assumptions, though, and I've realised that there's still one assumption I haven't seen anyone challenge yet. (4 May 2005)

The monster with ten thousand secrets

On thinking some more about the hash cash for virtual real estate idea, one possibility I imagined was that it could be applied to possession of items as well as real estate.  I imagine a game something like Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD), which was very popular back in the BBS era. (21 March 2005)

MMORPG economy problem solved?

So, this afternoon on the bus I was thinking about some of the MMORPG economic problems raised by James Grimmelmann in his law review article.  Look, the problem is that players accumulate too much value, right?  There's a lack of "drains" in the economy.  You need to come up with some way of reducing players' accumulated wealth.  Grimmelmann talks about how games try to get players to give up their wealth by selling them superfluous things like hair dye.  But there's an easier way.  Players have too much stuff?  So why not just take some of it away?  Problem solved!  To be more precise, what I propose is an MMORPG with a tax system.  As far as I know, no current system implements that on a significant scale. (11 March 2005)

World of Burgercraft

What if your local fast food joint was run like World of Warcraft?  The original forum posting of this cautionary tale seems to have been deleted, but since it seems to have been intended for public consumption, I'll mirror it below.  This is direct cut-and-paste, so the spelling errors are from the original; note, too, that I'm pretty sure "$!$%roach" was "cockroach" until an overenthusiastic profanity filter attempted to remove the "cock" from it.  Which just makes the whole thing funnier, of course. (10 March 2005)

Synthetic Statehood

I recently had occasion to take another look at the Ceejbot blog, run by talk.bizarre alumna C.J. Silverio (and possibly other people, too; the way it's set up isn't 100% clear to me).  Lots of interesting stuff in there, and I think I'll be adding it to my Rippy configuration, but the article that caught my attention today was the link to Terranova's commentary on the WoW Naked Gnome Protest. (3 February 2005)

Hash cash for virtual real estate

I've been thinking a bit more recently about peer-to-peer MMORPG systems à la Kosmos Online.  Here are some thoughts on that. (20 January 2005)

LawMeme covers virtual property

This article from James Grimmelmann in LawMeme is absolutely fascinating, and I recommend you read it carefully.  It's all about the legal and social questions raised by the concept of "property" in online communities, as discussed at the State of Play conference.  We've all been thinking about "intellectual property" in meatspace, but the existence of systems like MMORPGs creates a whole parallel set of "virtual property" issues which are sort of like "intellectual property", sort of not, and interact with intellectual and real property in complicated ways.  Attempts to solve virtual property issues may have consequences for intellectual and real property issues as well. (3 December 2003)

Peer-to-peer storytelling

I used to be part of a project, spearheaded by Nicholas "Mordred" Vining who writes Braincrash, called Kosmos Online.  The idea of KO was to build a massively multiplayer online role-playing game similar in general nature to systems like Everquest, but with some important differences:  KO was to be open-source, KO was to be peer-to-peer with little or no central authority, and KO was to be immune to cheating.  Well, in recent weeks Nicholas has been talking about resurrecting KO in some form, and I've thought about it a bit.  Here's my proposal (likely long and technical) for a system which might be cool.  It's not meant to be the same thing that KO was intended to be, but it's inspired by some of the ideas I had while working on KO. (23 April 2003)