[Freeciv-Dev] the scope of games

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Mark Metson [mailto:markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
>
> 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.

The problem is, you want a game that is very very long and very very
detailed.  4X TBS games are long by strategy / wargame standards, say
16..24 hours to complete a typical yawner like Civ II.  But what you
want, would go on for months.  You need to decide what scope of game you
want to work on.  Just as writers decide whether to write poems, short
stories, novels, or epics, you need to decide whether your goal is RTS,
TBS, RPG, or MMORPG.

You are only going to have so many real world hours to create content
for these experiences.  You could accept a lower quality of content and
have it more automated... that's what "4X TBS driving RPG" amounts to.
Or you could do lotsa manual labor to have high quality content, which
is the more traditional pencil-and-paper RPG approach.  You'd just
*pretend* that there's some 4X TBS game happening.  Take out pencil and
paper, draw a map, say the armies are marching this way.  That's what I
did when I was 8 years old, and conquering a knockoff of Mirkwood by
yelling "SCCshshHHsHSHHHHH!!!" for 5 seconds is still the best RPG
experience of my life.

> 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? :)

You need to subscribe to MUD-Dev list.  That's where all the
professional developers hang out who contemplate the interface between
real and virtual economies. And some of them have acted upon it.  The
most successful model seems to be selling unique custom game objects.
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev/

> 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.

Interesting concept.  But is it enough money compared to people's time?


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.