May Contain Nuts

To paraphrase Strong Bad, “oh, you thought there was no more Uru deconstruction butguesswhatthere’sUrudeconstruction!”

This article on Joystiq summarizing the Austin GDC panel on the psychology of MMO gamers got me thinking a bit on griefing in MOUL, and ways to try to counteract it.  By and large, MOUL was pretty devoid of griefers, probably in equal parts because of how little the game itself did to make griefing a viable activity and the general makeup of the MOUL community at large (stunningly, the number of people I had to deal with for griefing in my 3 months as a ResEng could probably be counted on one hand).  I think it’s somewhat surprising, given the somewhat poor attitude most “hard-core” gamers seem to have towards Myst, that MOUL wasn’t more of a target for people just looking to have a laugh at our expense… perhaps the 3-gig download put many of them off.

To the best of my knowledge, the only griefing tactic that was in any way inconveniencing for an individual player was Relto-spamming, wherein a person would repeatedly and rapidly attempt to share their Relto Book with another player, preventing them from being able to move away or even call for help as a result of the way Uru’s GUI was designed (Books act as modal dialogs that block access to any other UI functionality, including the KI and the game’s menu system).  There are of course other ways that players can grief each other… one such common method was sabotaging the Delin and Tsogahl door runs, but even that was typically no more than a 5-minute problem, as contacting a ResEng would usually have the person bounced to Biegalski’s Tetsonot shortly thereafter.  Other tactics were typically limited to lack of respect for personal space (intentionally walking through/standing in other avatars) and verbal diarrhea in the chat channels, again something that was usually remedied by calling a ResEng (abuse of the chat channel was also easily remedied by ignoring the offender using the in-game chat command).

Ultimately, the worst that a player could do as a drive-by griefing was the Relto-spamming (of course stalking and other such serial offenses weren’t unheard of, but were at least extremely rare during the run of the game that I was present for), and I think there’s an easy way to make sure that such actions aren’t possible in the future (I say “easy” because it’s something that would be trivial to implement if one were building the game from scratch… doing it in the current platform would probably be akin to pulling out your wisdom teeth with a pair of tweezers).

Whenever a player attempts to share a Book with another player (typically their Relto Book, but this is basically a pre-emptive removal of other Book-based griefing attempts), they will be presented with a game dialog asking the player if they want to accept the other person’s invitation to use their shared Book (in the format of “<User> wants to share their <Age Name> Book with you.”).  The sharee may then choose “Accept” or “Deny”, with a check-box to always perform the selected action for that sharer.  So, every time a new person wants to share a Book with you, you’ll see that prompt, and if it’s a one-time deal, you can be prompted again the next time you see them.  If they’re a good friend or someone you otherwise trust not to be a jackass, you can forgo the prompt and the game will skip straight to sharing the Book with you.  If you’ve been drive-by’d, you can deny the share offer, and if you’re being intentionally griefed, you can deny all further efforts by that person to share their Book with you.  At that time, the sharer would no longer be able to click on you as a sharee when in “Share Book” mode.

When this dialog appears, it will be semi-modal, in that it will block your ability to move, but not your ability to use the current chat channel or get to the game’s menu system (at the very least, access to the ResEng call screen will not be blocked).  This way, you can continue to use the chat channel to talk with those around you, and still call for help if you need to.

To deal with the possibility that this preference may need to be changed for certain people at some point in the future (either because your good friend has decided to start wearing his ass hat, or because you accidentally ignored someone permanently), there needs to be a panel in the game’s menu that allows players to manage the people on their list of sharers.  This dialog would contain a filterable list of all the people who have offered to share a Book with you, with options to set each person to “Always Accept”, “Always Deny”, and “Prompt”, which covers the other two options.

I realize that griefing is still going to find its way into any incarnation of any MMO, and that Uru is not an exception, but I think that Uru is in a unique position - both because of its community and its inherent design - to be a game where griefing on the whole requires significantly more effort than most griefers are willing to expend to get their jollies.  While Cyan’s tendency towards naievte and idealism regarding people’s interactions online means they probably never even considered Relto-spamming to be a potential issue (and I think justifiably so… it was only ever reported to be a problem to any degree in MOUL, a full 5 years after the game’s original release, so it clearly wasn’t something that had come up as something to deal with before then), I think it’s one of the few instances of griefing that can actually be eliminated because of its ability to put control of the situation in the hands of the target and not the perpetrator, without burdening the game with excessive overhead, or creating a confusing or time-consuming process for the player to maneuver through to block the perpetrator’s actions.

I apologize, by the way, for the lack of visuals to illustrate the way I envision this anti-Book-spamming feature looking… I’m writing from work and don’t really have the time to dedicate to putting together my usual visual aids.

Also, I really hope someone from Joystiq manages to find their way into the Austin GDC panel on Uru, if only so I don’t have to wait for Eleri’s convention report to see how it went.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Game Development, Games, Myst, Uru Deconstruction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.