The Multiplayer Games Roundtable focused
on the problems and solutions involved in developing and supporting
an online game. Most of the participants in the Roundtables were designers
and developers. The biggest area of discussion and concern in all three
Roundtables was the care and feeding of customers and dealing with problem
users.
One heated debate was the complicated subject of customer handling in
free vs. pay environments. It was clear that the free environment was
left to the managing of the players themselves. In most cases these
free internet sites, especially those with peer to peer architectures,
became hacker fests. The play among oponents was left to those with
perceived better hacks played against others with hacks. The hacks were
circulated among friends. Those with "virgin" or unhacked games were
at a severe disadvantage. Of course, since the site was free, there
is no advantage to the developer to control or even attempt to stop
this sort of behavior.
In the pay environment, discussions revolved around limiting the damage
done by problem customers. A number of possibilities surfaced in each
of the discussions. The most extreme was to give the problem children
their own playground to play in (similar to the free environment). This
was countered with the fact that a person with a bent for abuse is still
going to go into the main area just to cause problems for other customers.
A second idea that surfaced dealt with allowing the game society to
take care of the problems. This can be completely in the hands of the
customers with designer input when the problem customers get out of
hand. The other can be dealt with by having the designer in a very select
way aid the customers in ridding themselves of the troublemakers.
The second heated debate was how to provide a game world that was satisfying
for everyone. The feelings ranged from it can’t be done to design
different features for different types of players. Designing features
included allowing customers to design worlds within the game world and
incorporating the community aspects (email, message bases, etc.) into
the game world.
One discussion that was not adequately discussed was whether it is possible
to design a game for the larger masses of people. People who are not
interested in fighting against other people or against the computer.
The subject of designing multiplayer problem solving games similar to
Infocom’s Planetfall was left undiscussed and open for a discussion
of another time and place.
