[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Game Design: put up or shut up

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> I am, however, disappointed that you are squandering your talents IMO.
> I do think it's time to put up or shut up about major game design
> changes.  What's gonna change?

Another thing I would like to head towards is the standalone nature of
most games. Again this probably comes from a RPG background, where the
game has no specific "objective" other than actually playing. I would like
to eventually have universes in which these kinds of games are not
standalone so that the dont count you can just throw them away and start
over. Sure you can play such standalone versions for practice, but come 
the real game what happens to your character or nation or planet or galaxy 
or whatever will count somehow. For example if you start as one of several 
civilisations on a Civ-type planet and your civilisation loses, then you 
are no longer an whole civilisation and will have to be just a unit or 
somesuch. Then if that unit gets destroyed you'll have to maybe revert to 
being a sub-unit or an individual, some part of the original unit that 
survived - or maybe that wasn't even at that battle, if there were no 
survivors maybe you were off on sick leave when the unit went to battle 
thus were not present and are actually back at home base still recovering 
from the flu or some other excuse for why you did not die with your unit.

For many years I despaired of finding a way to make such never-ending 
games "interesting" but from various fiction I have read I had one 
potential solution in mind: money. In some stories, some characters 
basically dont have lives, they live some game or other. If gaming could 
be made profitable maybe it could support professional players. Then the 
lure of maybe becoming a professional player might keep people playing. 
Hey, it seems to work for sports, right? :)

So one of the ideas I have in the works now is to come up with a method of 
divvying up money based on in-game factors, so that given a supply of 
money it can be divided among players of a game based on what happens 
inside the game. It seems to be proven now that it is very reasonable and 
reproducable long-term to be able to make money grow at rates 
approximating one percent per day. Thus for example if ten players all 
"put up" ten dollars as deposit to play a game, the resulting one hundred 
dollars of capital can very reasonably and reproducibly be expected to be 
able to grow by one dollar per day, resulting in and average of 
approximately one dollar per day available for divvying up among the 
players without reducing the capital thus allowing the players to receive 
their entire deposit back at the end of the game over and above any 
earnings accrued by play. I am thinking that maybe by building upon that 
kind of idea it might be possible over many years to build up quite a 
massive capital base with which to provide finance that will enable more 
and more players to be lured into playing any games that are incorporated 
into such a system.

The biggest problem now is various governmental interferences that try to 
control how players, games, and money interact and seek to help prevent 
such things as "problem gambling" ("problem players"?)

-MarkM-


-- 
Got a website? Get 10,000+ hits a day FREE...
http://makemoney.knotwork.com/10000hits/