The Air-Speed Velocity of Unladen Gaming

Now I had some ideas on this issue. I’d be curious to hear your views on them.

1) On-line Karma. The idea here is other players could rate you as a player. Not in terms of how good you are, but in terms of how well you behave. The better their karma is, the more it affects yours.

There are challenges to such a system. Firstly, if you beat someone, he may be a jerk and rate your karma down out of spite. Worse, they may have friends that would do the same. But as long as your online network had only one user ID per person (perhaps they could tie it to their CD serial), this would be somewhat limited. Obviously if most people playing the game online are jerks, there’s nothing that can be done.

There is a way around this we use on our skinning community website, WinCustomize. The Admins turns a considerable number of trustworthy users into “super users”. Think of them as having super-karma. These active members serve as avatars, people who the admins feel are representative of how they hope the community of users will behave. These avatars in turn could provide a good basis for giving other players high or low karma. Although the jerk user and his friends might be able to harm you slightly, the theory is that the avatars and the hundreds of people they have promoted, and the thousands of users those people then promote, would have far more effect. The odds are that you will play one of these “trusted users”, the ones who will have the most effect. Then as a user, you can avoid players who have bad karma.

2) Synthesized Multiplayer Gaming. The idea here is to have your AI so good that it plays as if you’re online. This is something we’re looking at doing in Galactic Civilizations, which is coming next year.

The idea is fairly straight forward. When you play the game, you can play it “online” on Stardock.net. But you play against the AI instead of against other people. Your score and games are recorded and put into the “Metaverse”, a vast network database. You can visit the Metaverse as a website to see how you're doing. A galactic map is displayed showing your position. You can even read an account of your glorious wars that includes any major events that occurred.

There is a good side benefit. By recording the events, the game can see what strategies are the most effective and have the AI use them. What technologies are best to research and in what order? What ships are most effective and in what quantities? Is winning through outright warfare better than becoming an economic super power or vice versa? What is the best tax rate to have? What are the best spending ratios to have? What are the best players doing? This isn’t anything fancy like a neural net; it’s just statistical analysis. The AI can simply download these stats and use them as its own strategy.

So when you play against the computer, you can choose a difficulty level that matches your skill level. It’ll be as if you’re playing against a polite, infinitely patient human player of the skill level of your choice. Playing it on easy level? What do other novice players tend to do? Playing it on toughest level? What do experts tend to do? The system could easily be expanded to where users who give us permission could be provided as synthetic opponents. So you could play a simulated version of me or your friend down the street. The game could simply use the strategies that player used when they played online, doing the same basic things (it wouldn’t be exact, of course, but it would be remarkably similar).

What’s particularly cool in the case of Galactic Civilizations is that it has the concepts of good and evil as a game mechanic. Events occur that allow the player to choose various options on how to handle them. Their choices slowly determines whether a civilization is “good” or “evil”. So if Bob the expert player is always evil when he plays, when you play simulated Bob, he’s going to be evil, too. His simulated ambassador's dialogue will be based on how Bob answered the same situations when he played.

In this case, the game plays like it’s multiplayer but is actually single player. It’s not the same as playing friends at a LAN party, but for those of us who play anonymous strangers online, this is certainly preferable. I play online because game AI tends not to be challenging enough. If we can solve that problem, then direct multiplayer become less of a requested feature.

And in our case, the other benefits – ladders, scores, galactic empire maps, etc. are all available. We hope to have the galactic map done by the November beta of GalCiv. Eventually, players will actually see their empire on a map growing or shrinking as they play.

Conclusions

Any survey done on multiplayer strategy gaming will show that most people prefer good single player AI to multiplayer features. It’s not that they don’t like multiplayer per se. They just don’t like the hassle that comes with it, such as having some vile 15-year-old swearing at you. For most people, a good single player AI will do the trick. And for those like me who do love multiplayer, a karma system would help. Even a flawed karma system would provide an incentive for people to try to be a little…nicer.

What do you think?

Brad Wardell was the designer of Entrepreneur and The Corporate Machine at Stardock. He is currently the Project Manager of Galactic Civilizations, which is expected to be released in the Fall of 2002. His columns are archived here.