Essays
These are full-blown essays, papers, and articles.
Presentations
Slideshows and presentation materials from conferences.
Interviews and Panels
Reprints of non-game-specific interviews, and transcripts of panels and roundtables.
Snippets
Excerpts from blog, newsgroup, and forum posts.
Laws
The "Laws of Online World Design" in various forms.
Timeline
A timeline of developments in online worlds.
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.
Links
Links to resources on online world design.
All contents of this site are
© Copyright 1998-2010
Raphael Koster.
All rights reserved.
The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily endorsed by any former or current employer.
One of my axioms is that there is NEVER a real penalty for being a murderer in a virtual environment. There are only increasing obstacles. In the final analysis, it is not technologically feasible to completely bar someone from your environment. If you have a truly determined jerk, he can and will kill everyone on your mud as many times as he wants. Fortunately, few people are that determined.
As far as increased difficulty of communication... If you have a large enough world, the effective distances become large enough that traveling to a different city to act out your jerkhood is almost equivalent to traveling to another mud. Yes, act out long enough, and with the same identity, and eventually word spreads. But It's very EASY for the jerk to go from place to place, and comparatively hard for WORD of the jerk to go from place to place. (I don't know exactly why this is so, since word is carried by travelers with the same mobility as the jerk, but nonetheless it is so).
So the jerk keeps moving, and word never catches up. And by the time he cycles back around, well, everyone has forgotten the first incident, if they noticed it at all...
The problem is that "locality" may as well not exist. You don't have a local setting because travel to other areas is easy (for the PLAYER though perhaps not for the character). You don't have effective policing because you may not have the criminal to police.
In the real world, we have fingerprints, descriptions, birth records, dental records, family histories, school records, etc. It's been well-explored in jillions of dimestore thrillers how thoroughly someone can vanish if they do not have the above elements present. Yet in the virtual environment everyone lacks those elements. They are ALWAYS a persona.
Now, do outraged citizens eventually catch up with The Jerk? Yes. But whereas in the real world a criminal who escapes from the scene of more than say 20 murders is literally one in a million, a virtual criminal can easily rack up hundreds of times the kill count.
There's an oddball factor complicating this. The consequences for the aggressor are light, "virtual", easily shrugged off. The consequences for the VICTIM are often traumatic, deeply troubling, not easily recovered from, and quite real. Not every virtual citizen is going to see their murder in the virtual setting as a crime; but many will. My experience is that far more than half of them will. Doing simple math, that shows us that the societal impact of a jerk like this (on the virtual society) is much worse than it is in the real world (on the real society).
Tossing in other things that factor into this: there's a general lack of major support structures for victims, in the virtual setting (family, friends, Salvation Army, what have you); and it's very easy for a traumatized victim to just "check out" of your virtual environment and thus not deal with the trauma.
This means that you hemorrhage players. Yes, the ones that "couldn't stand the heat" and therefore get out of the kitchen... but still. Particularly if you are a commercial endeavor, but even if you aren't, this is a real serious problem.
To put it crudely:
In the real world, a serial killer kills 5 people before he is caught. He never kills again. You end up with 5 dead people, and maybe another few who give up on life because of it.
In the virtual world, a "virtual sociopath" (my term for those who take actions against others in the virtual context because they do not see virtual social mores as real) kills 50 characters before he is caught and killed. You end up with 50 dead characters, out of which 5 quit the mud, eg are actually "dead" to the context. You also end up with another 5 who quit because they saw their friend killed--also "dead". And our killer returns to kill again the next day under a different name, effectively anonymous.
One pitfall here is that in any system where you can kill both monsters and players, players will always be more rewarding. They will have more smarts, an excellent level of challenge to them, a wide selection of potential targets, and likely, a greater diversity and greater quantity of treasure, rewards, goodies, etc. I find this to be axiomatic. The question is how much risk they offer, and how much other penalty the killer may accrue for his actions. But in a flat choice, which is more rewarding "before taxes" I believe players always win, hands down.
Why can't players police and communicate the history of offenders to one another?
[IRC,ICQ, and other external means of communication] are generally peer-to-peer or narrow-band communication at best however. What's more, they are dreadfully inconstant. You have communication to limited recipients who are probably not local, and who may or may not be logged on. The "historicity" of communication breaks down. In the real world, if an isolated village got the message via telegraph that Black Bart was on his way to butcher them, it'd be everywhere--including on the local TV and radio stations. In the virtual setting, the recipient organizes a posse, they wait, Black Bart doesn't show, then they log off, and Bart comes along and butchers a set of people who were not privy to the info.
There's a failure here on multiple levels: the newbies for not being aware of a social context (checking the local bulletin boards), the oldbies for not contributing to the social context, perhaps because they do not perceive it as existing; and the game itself for not making the social context more important to the environment. Unfortunately, these are all really tough problems to solve. And the usual way to solve them is to make players have to invest in the environment. Yet few are willing to invest major time and effort into a patch of virtual space as small as one virtual village. More likely, they may invest in the mud as a whole, which won't solve the problem.
...In putting in place the mechanisms we did, our feeling was that the public wasn't ready to shoulder the burden yet, because they were not aware of its extent. Right now, when someone says to me, "ditch this code crutch stuff, it can't possibly work right!" I ask them tough questions:
Someday, I'll get "yes" for answers, and then I'll GLADLY take away the code crutches, because they DON'T fully work and never can, and because they are extra implementation as well which I might as well skip. But since we need societal mores, better that the code provide them than we abdicate responsibility to a playerbase that may claim to put them in place but isn't actually willing to do so.
