Raph Koster's Home Page

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The "Laws of Online World Design" in various forms.

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A Theory of Fun for Game Design
My book on why games matter and what fun is.

Insubstantial Pageants
A book I started and never finished outlining the basics of online world design.

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Raphael Koster.
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The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily endorsed by any former or current employer.

These snippets are taken from various posts to Usenet written in January of 2002.

"Cooperative games don't have to be static..."

It's easy to say "they don't have to be," because it's true. But in order for that to be put in practice, it has to be realistically possible.

Currently, content is statically generated. Players prefer handcrafted content to generated content, generally (there are notable exceptions, like Diablo multiplayer and item collection). It's pretty expensive to generate, and the consumption rate is far faster than the generation rate.

Impact players have on content necessitates either recycling the content, or creating new content to replace it. The economics of replacing the content is insupportable, and players quickly determine cycled content (such as seesaw states) to be static in truth.

There's content which can be experienced multiple times without severely diminished enjoyment. This tends to be fairly simplistic content, like PvE combat against creatures for example. You have to do the same fight many times, as a player. The more complex and rich the content is, the less likely it is to be able to be repeated in a fulfilling manner.

Then there's attempts to algorithmically generate content or behaviors that are richer than what we have now. This is what the resource and AI system in UO was intended to do, but it didn't get there, not by a long shot.

But basically, there aren't any solutions out there right now to the "cooperative games have to be static" problem.

What you're saying goes against all the available evidence. Looks like wishful thinking to me.

I don't see how you can say that. The cooperative games on the market at the moment (EQ, AC, DAoC) are all static, heavily level-stratified, and players cannot impact the world. In cases where they can impact each other (say, A Tale in the Desert, a game where there is no combat system at all) the admin load is very high, and the games are definitely targeted at niches.

What is all the available evidence that you say flies in the face of this?

What I'm saying is pretty simple. If you impact the world, it affects other players in some fashion.

Solution A, limit the impact to be on NPCs/content only. This is tremendously expensive. It's effectively a single-player or multi-user cooperative game.

Scenario A1, a large game, which cannot afford to update all the content as frequently as players might want to have an impact. Result: static or static cycling content.

Scenario A2, a small game, where the load is small enough and the target audience small enough that admins actually can keep pace. Solution B,

Solution B, don't limit the impact to be on NPCs/content. This will inevitably come to be a competitive game to some degree, as different players impose changes on the game state that other players dislike.

Scenario B1, a large game. We don't know how to solve this.

Scenario B2, a small game. Admins, through dint of expensive effort, work to keep the grief down and channeled. This is likely a niche game or a hardcore player's game, and in order to afford the overhead, may be premium priced.

I see tons of evidence of these scenarios playing out... don't you? Genuinely curious. I may be missing something obvious.

As great examples of small games which do manage to pull this sort of thing off, I offer up A Tale in the Desert from the graphical world, and Castle Marrach from the commercial text mud world.