Knights of the Greenback

I have a long-standing interest in the economies (and cultures) of massively multiplayer games. There are a few things that really interest me about these systems, but a few of the major factors are that (A) they adapt much faster than a real economy and (B) the distribution/creation of goods does not have to follow real-world algorithms.

Of course, to economists, massively multiplayer games are something of a silver bullet. If only they could find a way to load them into their gun, they could really get some great research in!

But, like all games that have a "purpose", games that are economic experiments will pretty much suck. So economists grind their teeth.

To me, the cool thing is not the idea that we could study shadows of real-world economies. I'm of the opinion that such studies would be hopelessly damaged by factor B. It would be equivalent to calculating the optimum approach for the space shuttle with a high school physics textbook. You know, the one that starts every question with "ignoring air resistance, we can calculate the..."

Instead, I'm a big fan of taking factor B and running with it. After all, as technology advances, our method of creating and distributing goods (and what kinds of goods) radically changes. The idea that technological advances are "more of the same, but better" is crap.

A cell phone is not "more of the same, but better" to third world populations. It's "this changes everything!" Similarly, vaccines aren't just "more of the same, but better" medicine. The combustion engine isn't just "more horses, but better". The gun isn't "a bow and arrow, but better". It may appear that way at first blush, but once it's out of the starting gate, it will finish the race before its predecessor even gets in one lap.

My interest is therefore in modeling the effects of this kind of advancement. Since a massively multiplayer game can more or less arbitrarily set the distribution and type of goods (and what those goods can do), I think it would be interesting to create a world to take advantage of that, and get some interesting data on how it affects things.

Specifically, I'm thinking of the idea of many worlds, each of which has different economic and technological underpinnings. For example, a post-apocalyptic world where technology is high enough that people can survive in small enclaves. A world of high fantasy and magic, where monsters run rampant and the economy is largely about how to travel and communicate over distance... a world of tribal plainspeople where gods exist and a major part of the economy is in sacrificing to them and receiving their blessings... there are a million possibilities.

One of the big problems with this is player population. It's almost impossible to guess how much population a game will have, and if you aim for a specific amount, you'll probably either never reach it or blow right past it. This idea of "gated worlds" would allow you to control the population in any given economy by allowing or disallowing players access: if a world is getting too hot, block new players from going there. If a world is too cold, make the player advantages of getting goods from that world higher. Add new worlds (even simple duplicates) as needed.

Of course, you'll still have the problem of a minimum player number you'd have to reach... you need the game to be fun and exciting enough to draw players in. Economies aren't fun and exciting as they stand.

The idea of a bunch of very unique worlds... that's pretty exciting. Especially if there's some kind of advanced crafting system and interpretive transitions: if you're a shaman moving from the tribal world to the future world, you transform into a hacker and all your shamanistic equipment transforms into equivalent hacker tools...

This creates a semi-permeable barrier allowing you to see how things flow between economies, and it also gives the players something really interesting to play around with.

Most interestingly, if you could figure out exactly how, you could actually allow the players to establish and back different kinds of economic models. Not just "pick and choose" from existing models, but actually implement entirely new models. For example, what about an economic model where copyright protects a work from corporate or government duplication, but not from individual duplication? What about an economic model where the primary currency is dragon scales, and they degrade over time? What about an economic model where data is completely free - no copyright, no government-assisted protection... if you can find it, you can duplicate it infinitely? What about an economic model where cash is backed by acres of arable land?

Anyway, that's how I would do it, if someone gave me a few million dollars of grant money. :D

Zombie: The Brain Eatening

This weekend was my old college's Gaming Weekend. Whenever I'm fairly nearby, I always try to run a game or two. Plus, it's a great opportunity to hang out with people who haven't seen you in long enough that they've forgotten how irritating you are.

The big game I ran this year was Zombie: The Brain Eatening. A farcical take on Vampire: The Masquerade, it was a "horde LARP". What this means is that there were five zombies and a large number of people playing walk-on roles as various humans. And, of course, getting eaten by zombies.

The zombies all had clans, like vampires do, and they all had "undisciplines" such as arrrrghiturgy and midbossamalism and amateurian. Potence made you smell really bad, and presents let you put special items down as rewards for quests... instead of spending blood points, you spend brains. And, of course, dying is strictly temporary.

The zombies had their own variant of the Masquerade called the Disco. If a zombie acted unzombielike (or really powerful), the hordelings could shout "DISCO!" and run for it. If they survived, they could respawn as hunters - more powerful, more dangerous, more useful characters. Also, the zombies could dance for health and brains, so it's one of the few games where choreographed team dancing was a major component of the game...

The game was testing a few limits. Every game I run tests aspects of gaming I want to know more about, and this one had a few things I wanted to test.

It went well enough. The room was too small, which was actually a huge problem that totally screwed up one element I was testing: I built it so that the hordelings (the human walk-ons) were supposed to run around pretending to be in a movie, but with a small room they didn't really have enough space to improv properly.

The next test would have involved more complex management of this kind of unguided improv, but the data are dirty because of the small room. I don't know whether I want to do the more advanced test without knowing more about the more limited situations.

The other bits came away clean, though.

One bit was inspired by the fact that I never have enough GMs. I always underestimate how many GMs I need. This game, I made all the zombies GMs:

The zombies were trying to save the world from the six forces trying to make it uninhabitable for zombie-kind. However, to do this they needed to guide the humans into saving the world. Therefore, the zombies were all about putting down quests and trying to finagle the humans into being willing and able to do them.

However, the humans were also the power source of the zombies - they needed brains to do these things, which meant they had to eat humans... and, of course, hunters had more skills to win quests with, but were also significantly more dangerous to zombies...

So, in essence, the zombies were those stereotypical 12-year-old GMs who need you to get through the plot line, but also just want to torture you and kill you a lot.

It worked out pretty well, although it was just a test, so the questing dynamics were a bit oversimplified.

I also wanted to see how much nonverbal communication could be brought to the fore. Although zombies were perfectly capable of talking, if anyone heard them talking, they would call "DISCO!" and turn into a hunter. Almost all of the interactions - combat, special abilities - were done through a limited number of hand gestures. Whole combat sequences could be run without needing any kind of spoken word at all.

This worked out fairly well, but my instructions were muddy at times, so there was more OOC communication than I would have liked. The zombies did develop a nice, subtle method of communicating with both each other and humans (without being clear enough to call Disco).

Also, I wanted the zombies to dance, because I wanted to see how comfortable players were with doing physically dumb stuff in teams. Normally, if you give someone the ability to dance in a game, they'll under-utilize it. Even if they're not the shy sort, dancing is too aggressively outside the normal actions in the LARP. So, I moved normal: I figured, if everyone's dancing, nobody will have any problems with joining in.

This worked absolutely spectacularly: many zombies who probably wouldn't have ever danced on their own were perfectly happy dancing in a team, to the point where they choreographed it. While in the first hour or two attendance was spotty, by halfway through the game zombies would rush over to any dancing zombie to join in and reap the rewards of acting like a silly person.

Actually, it worked really well, because even the humans - who gained no benefit from dancing - would break into dance as well.

The last thing I really wanted to test was the idea of a game that couldn't be LOST. It was physically impossible to lose the game, which makes it almost unique among LARPs. I wanted to see whether or not this significantly affected the way people played the game.

The answer is: no, it doesn't. So long as people have a goal, they'll play to achieve that goal even if there is no force acting against them and no time limit. Which is good to know.

A lot of emergent behavior I had hoped to see came out perfectly clear. For example, although an innocent (normal hordeling) calls Disco when he sees a zombie being weird or uber, once he's a hunter (super hordeling) he can't do that any more. Which gives the zombies no real reason to be careful around him. Over the course of the game, zombies became more cavalier about breaking Disco in front of hunters.

Also, something I had thought might be necessary but wasn't sure: the zombies would purposefully break Disco at endgame to turn innocents into hunters. The greater skills the hunters had were required to achieve the better quests, so one of the zombies would perform a "moster hug" - sprint up to a group of players, trump their combat (waaay overpower for a zombie), and then pat them on the head and run away.

I had allowed for a mechanic where humans could get stronger by searching for equipment. This very simple system would allow humans, if not being eaten by zombies, to power up and power up and power up. The zombies quickly learned that if they were over in a corner trying to figure out what to do, the humans were probably all over in another corner getting power armor, rocket launchers, and bandoliers of grenades.

Anyway, the game accomplished what I wanted it to. I'll have to run the improv test again (probably in a different game), but the others told me a lot. I count it as a success!