The wikipedia page is said to describe a game, although it rather looks like a description of Switzerland's political system.
Nomic
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Nomic
#32If there is one thing that the "internet" has lost, it's games like this. I used to love playing #wolfgame on IRC. Even Ultima Online (although hardly a typical heritage game) definitely shaped the way MMORPGs evolved. Anyway, back onto Nomic. After reading the Wiki and seeing the "Initial Rule Set" [1] then reading through a lot of the archives it became clear that "chaos" and administration was the downfall of this…
Sadly, UO didn't shape the way MMOs evolved, with the rare exception of niche games like EVE. Current MMORPGs are almost exclusively of the DikuMUD / EverQuest / WoW lineage, just hack and slash with very few other options for interacting with or changing the game world.
As a non-UO player: can you explain what was unique or different about it, or link me to somebody who writes about this?
MMOs bore me, and the thought that UO did MMOs somehow better intrigues me. I find it easy to believe, but hard to understand why.
Re: Nomic
#33A college friend named Zach Barth was incredibly into this sort of thing, a game where the rules and units were made up as the game progressed. He tried quite a few times to make such a game, usually called infini-something such as Infinitron[1] and later Infinarena. The [1] link talks a lot about the challenges that came up trying to make such a game and I think its a neat read if you're into this sort of thing. It'…
He also made SpaceChem, which is possibly one of the greatest games of all time. I can't recommend it strongly enough. There's a demo on his site and steam. Go try it.
(OK, one caveat - programmers/logic puzzle types may like this game more than the average member of the public.)
Re: Nomic
#34Re: Nomic
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, UO didn't shape the way MMOs evolved, with the rare exception of niche games like EVE. Current MMORPGs are almost exclusively of the DikuMUD / EverQuest / WoW lineage, just hack and slash with very few other options for interacting with or changing the game world.
As a non-UO player: can you explain what was unique or different about it, or link me to somebody who writes about this? MMOs bore me, and the thought that UO did MMOs somehow better intrigues me. I find it easy to believe, but hard to understand why.
First read "The In-game Economics of Ultima Online"[1] which I just submitted to HN for comment[2].
The hiccups of developing UO's in-game economy along the way are incredibly interesting in their own right.
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I'll try to summarize some of UO.
UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucia (not), and some servers only had Fel. In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to die from an extremely hostile environment, and (I think it was) PC Gamer described the learning curve as "A frozen wall of acid." Brutal, but very exciting. A goddamn wild west MMO.
(In Fel) UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal.
This Blue/Gray/Red name system created a sort of cautiousness among travelers. Being near a pack of "blue" people might be safe, since any person that tried to steal or kill would turn gray and they'd immediately kill him.
Unless of course, all those blue-named people were conspiring, and you are the target.
You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils.
The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time.
UO had so much more than that. UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted it to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the ridiculously limited PvP found in games like WoW.
In a lot of ways it was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great.
Re: Nomic
#36I've been interested in this idea of games with modifiable rules on and off, but something about the voting aspect doesn't appeal to me that much. Not entirely sure why. I like the self-referentiality of the rules being modifiable, but it just being a vote, "what rule change do you want?", feels unsatisfying. I'm not sure what to replace it by, admittedly. I did one experiment where instead of saying what the rules w…
My friends and I used to occasionally play a card game called Mao. The winner of each round (the first to get rid of the cards in their hand) could make up a new rule governing game play for following rounds. But they didn't announce their rule, instead punishing players who broke it by giving them an extra card. By watching the punishments, you had to try to work out their rule so you could avoid breaking it. With t…
Mao belongs to a class of games called inductive reasoning games. They're mostly crap, but there are a few gems. IMO the best one of the bunch is Zendo where one player makes up a rule that determines whether a grouping of playing pieces is valid or not (usually played with Treehouse pieces, but e.g. a limited selection of lego pieces can also work). The other players then basically need to use an experimentation / induction loop to determine the rule. This can be really fun in a hackerly group. And once the players get experience, it's surprising how complicated rules are solveable.
The story of the Zendo design process is a great read: http://www.koryheath.com/games/zendo/design-history/
Re: Nomic
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, UO didn't shape the way MMOs evolved, with the rare exception of niche games like EVE. Current MMORPGs are almost exclusively of the DikuMUD / EverQuest / WoW lineage, just hack and slash with very few other options for interacting with or changing the game world.
As a non-UO player: can you explain what was unique or different about it, or link me to somebody who writes about this? MMOs bore me, and the thought that UO did MMOs somehow better intrigues me. I find it easy to believe, but hard to understand why.
There were no classes, no levels. None of this "level 99 guy one shots level 1 guy". Skills did give advantages, but it was nothing that drastic. No real need to farm mobs to get items, as they weren't that important to begin with. Magical weapons did give a minor advantage, but were rare and you could lose them, so most of the time an old fashioned steel sword would suffice (bought from NPCs or crafted by player blacksmiths). Items mostly mattered in quantity: lots of ore, wood, reagents, money, etc.
You learned skills by using them. So, if you wanted to hit things better with a sword, you went out and hit things. If you wanted to become a better magician, you had to cast spells. Wanted to become a better tailor? You had to make lots of clothing :) That wasn't perfect and later gave rise to macroers, but the system itself is awesome.
Death was meaningful: you lost everything you were carrying (changed in later versions with the 'insurance system'), unless you made it back to your body before it decayed and noone got to it first. And your ghost had to find a healer (or a player mage or highly skilled healer) in order to get resurrected. And, while dead, you couldn't speak to anyone, except players with 'Spirit Speak'.
You could own houses (which did occupy real state, they were not instanced), to have a safe place and a way to store items. That eventually became a market by itself, as the world was finite.
There were just a few safe zones, all the rest were automatically PVP areas. Even in "safe" zones, you could get mugged or killed if you didn't pay attention, as you had to call "guards" in order for them to appear (other people could call them for you, so it wasn't wise to leave your character in an deserted place and leave the computer).
You could steal from other people's bags - and get caught or not. You could even steal reagents from mages and prevent them casting. Yes, you had to carry a supply of reagents to cast and could run out if you didn't pay attention, possibly leaving you stranded.
You could create weapons, furniture, potions and whatnot from basic materials. This is very different from, say, WoW crafting system - you didn't have to wait for any drops from monsters. In fact, you didn't have to kill anything (not counting maybe birds for feathers, to use in arrows, or leather)
They even experimented with real ecology and a food chain in the beta. That didn't work, because players are too predatory.
Basically, they did almost everything very differently from MMOs that came later. The end result is that the world felt more 'alive', as you could interact with almost anything, given the right tools. See trees and got an axe? You could chop them. No axe? You could mine those rocks over there, smelt at a forge, then build the axe. And so on.
Re: Nomic
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non-UO player: can you explain what was unique or different about it, or link me to somebody who writes about this? MMOs bore me, and the thought that UO did MMOs somehow better intrigues me. I find it easy to believe, but hard to understand why.
First read "The In-game Economics of Ultima Online"[1] which I just submitted to HN for comment[2]. The hiccups of developing UO's in-game economy along the way are incredibly interesting in their own right. -------------- I'll try to summarize some of UO. UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucia (not), and some servers only had Fel. In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to…
Btw, Trammel and Felucca was a distinction that came later. Apparently, because Origin wanted to attract more players, which would be known as 'carebears'.
For quite some time, UO had only Felucca.
Re: Nomic
#39I've been interested in this idea of games with modifiable rules on and off, but something about the voting aspect doesn't appeal to me that much. Not entirely sure why. I like the self-referentiality of the rules being modifiable, but it just being a vote, "what rule change do you want?", feels unsatisfying. I'm not sure what to replace it by, admittedly. I did one experiment where instead of saying what the rules w…
Voting games can be painful. I remember Mafia, which is very crowd-dependent. People who slow-play/minimax games make Mafia intolerable. At 3:00 in the morning with 3 players left, the 30-minute discussions are painful. Just kill someone and lose or win already. The variant I built (to give something useful to start the discussion, rather than blind suspicion) had a combat mechanic. You actually had to "buy" arms in…
I used to play board games with people like that, and the problem is easily fixed with a kitchen timer :)
Timer goes off? Turn over, too bad. Given the average number of turns in a game and how long you want to play for, you can work out what to set it at (maybe with a 25-50% leeway)
An interesting variant is to put the timer in a box so that you don't know how long you have left.
Re: Nomic
#40If there is one thing that the "internet" has lost, it's games like this. I used to love playing #wolfgame on IRC. Even Ultima Online (although hardly a typical heritage game) definitely shaped the way MMORPGs evolved. Anyway, back onto Nomic. After reading the Wiki and seeing the "Initial Rule Set" [1] then reading through a lot of the archives it became clear that "chaos" and administration was the downfall of this…
If by '#wolfgame' you mean what we call Werewolf, where there are a bunch of 'villagers' and one or more randomly selected 'werewolves' where the werewolves get to kill a villager in the night and the villagers get to lynch someone during the day, we have a group who frequently plays this (or the Mafia variant) at uni through IRC or their forums.