a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Changes to consider:
- spawn on any player, not just women
- become an adult instantly when given a name
Childbirth and childcare are supposed to be the most important mechanics in the game. But would the game be really different if the changes above were implemented? Or is the human-childbirth-and-childcare-related theme just flavor with no substance?
Edit: yes, both changes are intentionally ridiculous. I'm not saying they should be implemented.
I think having to balance the system by manually adjusting parameters is a design smell. It means that the system doesn't actually guarantee good results in any way. At best it can improve the situation on average.
Babies can't curse because of the character limit, can they?
I specifically pointed out in the post why even a fully communist society would want ownership -_-
Seems like you're suggesting something looser... like maybe automatic labels that aren't enforced? But what would that do, really?
For example, Tim might want to leave the axe in the forest, since he's the only one who needs to know the location, and the base is always cramped. Normally the first person with a spare slot in their cart would bring the axe back to base and just leave it somewhere, and Tim would waste a lot of time looking for it. Claiming the axe would show that it was not simply abandoned, though other people could still choose to ignore the claim.
There are at least two kinds of information you'd want to know: "is anyone using this item?" and "is anyone doing this job?".
The first one can be answered with a tooltip. "Last used X seconds ago by Tim Treefeller", or "claimed X seconds ago by Tim Treefeller (dead)".
Not sure what to do about the second one. Claiming stationary objects works for some jobs. For others there could be a billboard with a list of all the claimed objects.
Some thoughts for global karma:
- the game isn't free, so new players can start with slightly positive karma
- the game isn't free, so it should be possible to recover from negative karma
- recovery shouldn't be automatic, to avoid cycling through multiple accounts
- it shouldn't be possible to hide a large amount of negative karma by saving or farming positive karma in advance
On another note, it would be nice to manipulate karma with in-game actions, not commands.
I think movies are a bad example, because asking someone to move is just a bad idea. (Otherwise people would keep asking each other to move forever.) They're not following the "first come, first serve" rule against their personal incentives.
In our context rules are something people agree to follow despite their own incentives. Eating an extra carrot when you're almost full is convenient, but you don't want other people to do it, so you agree to avoid wasting food.
There is no third party to enforce these rules. If there's a rule, it means that someone at some point invented that rule, and then it spread and outcompeted all the other similar and incompatible rules. There are network effects, the most obvious one being the threat of getting stabbed for being in the wrong camp. Early adopters gain less by joining, so it makes sense that, all else being equal, "first come, first serve" rules are more successful.
Shower thought: ownership makes sense even when everyone is 100% altruistic.
(Edit: that is, even in an ideal communist society.)
Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be an object, land/real estate or intellectual property.
Ownership makes it possible to divide responsibilities. In practice owning an item means that you're also responsible for managing it.
Suppose you have an axe. Naturally, people will expect you to use it whenever the village runs out of lumber. But you will also have to make sure it won't get lost (or stolen), you will have to replace it with a new one when it breaks, and you will be the one to decide which job gets done first.
(Selfishness doesn't change much: you get paid for using the axe, and you sell it once you don't want to own it. Monetary value merely represents the amount of stuff you are allowed to own at the same time.)
The alternative is to manage every item collectively. Ownership reduces cognitive load: you only need to know that the axe belongs to Tim the Lumberjack. Otherwise you'd have to discuss every issue that involves the axe with everyone else.
Ownership is not restricted to physical objects. Ultimately it's about having exclusive rights to make decisions and being responsible for the outcomes. None of the physical objects stored in the library belong to Tom the Librarian, but he owns the information about the books.
Perhaps the game could somehow make it easier for people to communicate that someone owns something?
Sheesh.... game design is hard!
:D
A more complicated alternative:
- any player can curse or bless any other player, it means their opinion of that other player is -1 or +1
- doing it again rewrites the previous value
- dying does not reset opinions
- karma is determined at birth
- karma equals the sum of opinions of all players that have been previously born in this family
The goal is to let families disagree without forcing players to curse/bless the same friend/enemy over and over, and without making it possible to use the system to label people.
"First come, first serve" is a very natural system because it favors those who invented the rules above everyone else. That's obviously a good thing for those who invented the rules, and also for those who are currently enforcing them.
Lotteries and waiting in lines are kinda different because they're governed externally.
Note that this system doesn't actually have anything to do with cursing. You're basically marking other players with two or more colors.
Might as well have a more general system where you can label other players with text?
A client side mod could let players cooperate and ruin anonymity with fingerprinting.
no tool can ever help the good guys more than the bad guys
Well, this one was intentionally written to be false :)
To be more precise, it's meaningless without specifying whether we mean all morality systems or one specific system. We do need to know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.
Using one specific system is pointless because it's impossible to agree on a single system.
And it's clearly false for at least some systems. It's very easy to help enforce a rule where everyone should obey the oldest player in the village. For example, there could be a totem that makes the oldest player invulnerable. It's useless to those who don't want to help enforce the rule.
More generally, this seems very similar to the fallacy of gray (aka continuum fallacy): "no statement is certainly true or certainly false, therefore all statements are equally valid". The fallacy being that an inaccurate binary model is being replaced with an even more inaccurate unary model.
Jason, it seems you also think that there can be no universal moral system, yet you keep using words that force a black and white view of the world and confuse everyone, including yourself.
A global karma counter is a poor solution. It's a proxy for the average opinion of all the players. Not sure if you've explicitly stated the problem you're trying to solve here, but I see no reason for this solution to be aligned with this goal.
Private marks have another problem, they completely ruin the illusion of playing with strangers. Transcendental Facebook anyone?
Tools that help the good guys also help the bad guys.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this anymore. It could be anything, from "anyone can use any tool", to "good and bad are subjective", to "no tool can ever help the good guys more than the bad guys".
switching hands
What about super high temperatures?
Cryo bombs for tribe battles:
- Clicking a tile throws the bomb
- The thrown bomb turns into an exploding bomb after two seconds
- The exploding bomb lowers the temperature in the surrounding tiles, so much that adults die of starvation virtually instantly
- After one seconds turns into an empty shell
I think this should be even possible in the current code base?
Is superior to bows and arrows because of AoE.
No stun, combat is way faster.
Favors the side that is better prepared.
Wearing extra warm clothes burns food, but gives a chance to survive.
I guess the problem here is that learning to craft stuff is pure memorization. You have to either remember the whole tech tree (which isn't even a tree) below the item you want to build, or constantly reference some diagram, or mindlessly follow someone else's instructions.
Yay, characters in OHOL finally have two hands :P
As long as it doesn't matter what to optimize for, you could try optimizing for aggregate length of phrases said by other players in hearing range.
AFAIK one of the problems with buildings is that they are inherently multi-tile, and the game's engine doesn't like that. And without multi-tile interaction there's no way to tell if you're inside a building or outside one.
One crazy option is to have single-tile buildings that are bigger on the inside. The interior would be located in a separate world.
I wonder if it's possible to only allow building floors on tiles that are adjacent to two other floor or wall tiles. This way it would be impossible to build floors with no walls at all. Even then, an NxN square building would need N wall tiles, not 4N.
This has been discussed many times, grading systems are impossible to write down in enough detail, humans are too smart.
Do we have mods? It would be nice to start banning people for shit like personal attacks in this thread. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism.
pein, in the holy war between powergamers and roleplayer cliques social skills are usually not on your side. Do not treat a social fight as if it was a sincere disagreement.
See the first picture. Hugging must require acceptation of second player. You cannot just hug everyone.
I understand that, you still just hug everyone and hope someone hugs you back. Babies are all the same.
The idea is, without hugging (and maybe kissing next), there will be no more kids spawn to Eve. So you need two players of different sex to accept new player spawn.
Why would they need to build relationships and communicate? Just run around hugging everyone whenever you think the village needs more children. The effect would be mostly equal to introducing birth control.