this sounds a lot like the question of whether playing games is art; in both instances you are concerned with the stylistic choices that the player makes, not the game per se. However, the journey in MMORPGs is generally neglected for the goal.

obviously, if the game is detailed enough, people will have no choice but to role-play. the question is, what advantage is their to play in role when the mechanics of the game just don''t deal with personal character? manners were primarily developed in the days of king and court when behaviour was the only way to influence the king; nothing like this exists in MMORPGs. in life, how you behave is important because you form habits which are hard to break; nothing like this exists in MMORPGs either.

there is another side to the issue as well: audience. It is a lot easier to play a role if someone is watching you play and you want to keep their attention; when you have an audience, peeking around the corner first, rather than running around, makes a lot more sense, it creates mood; no recognition of this exists in MMORPGs. in life, playing a role has the advantage of ultimately making you famous; once again, no such thing like this exists in MMORPGs.

how do you solve this? simple, modify that stats to account for emotional states and build cinemas (machinimas) into the gameworld.

The idea of an audience is very interesting to me. It would not work well in some situations though. In any game that is PvP based, the observer could be gathering information that they should not know about the enemy and the enemies plans. In an exploration game, the observer should not be able to explore the world ahead of time to figure out all the tricks.

I am of the opinion that it is impossible to force 100% roleplay. As long as characters are allowed to speak freely, some players will vary greatly in how they choose to communicate. The age differences in the players and the difference in RP skills will be sizable. Where does the the RP start and end? It is different for each player.

I don''t create a fictional history. I don''t try to speak in old accents and terminology. There is something to be said for concise statements, especially in games where players depend on each other. If using acrinyms or abreviated words will speed typing, it is often the choice players take.

Immaturaty runs rampant in online games. It really disgusts me some of the time. One of the biggest deterants to this is to force integrity in the character that is played. Don''t allow the player to make temporary characters that he will be able to wreak havok on friendly players with just for personal deranged entertainment. Make all characters that a player has traceable to each other. If he is out of hand, allow the players to take action against him.

Recently I have been playing Warcraft III custom games. That is the rudest of all online communities that I have encountered. There are so many semi-experienced players that utterly berate anyone that makes mistakes (noob-shouting), which is doubly stupid when there are so many varitions to the maps that a strategy that was used on one would not neccessarily work in another that looks identical--and the difference between being a noob and not being a noob is a matter of jumping in and trying a map a couple times. Some of this is because all players are also observers, overlooking each other. Since the game is very strategy-based and pretty rigid about what is a good and a bad strategy, the players have very little patience for each other.

you know, in current society highly repetitive behaviour that is in any way threating to other people is considered mental illness

maybe what you need to do is introduce institutionalization as part of the game dynamic: including reports, legal arrest, detainment and chemical subjugation. To make things interesting, you could make the system fallible or vincible in some fashion so that you occasionally had breakouts or revenge vendettas against the institution.

i don''t see why you can''t process problem behaviour in some way...

quote: Original post by Gumpngreen
If you have bookmarked some of those threads then could you post a link to them since search isn''t working?

I have no bookmarks, but I assure you that some of the subject lines should be helpful. A half-hour spent browsing this forum would turn up quite a bit of stuff, I expect.

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DeClavier, that is rich! It deals with strong out-of-character players in a very rp way. Reminds me of npcs in a few rpgs that talk about: "Some crazy god that is controlling our every move" etc in referal to the player. Instead of: "We have dealt with the other players who have been running around talking completely out of character destroying the game for everyone", you have "IMANOOB520 has been caught. Who knows how he got such a name, but he is most certainly mad, and has been roaming the countryside blabbering about very odd things. He wont be bothering anyone anymore. You can get on with your lives. Watch out for those Dragons."

I like the idea.

As for encouraging roleplaying, it seems to me that the richer the world, and more importantly the richer the experience, the more people will roleplay without even trying. They can say, "I went down into the crypt because I heard someone calling for help. The walls really creeped me out, and then suddenly a werewolf jumped out at me from around the corner. I ran as fast as I could, but I kept slowing down, and then I accidentally ran into the wall! THe werewolf was right on me, so I whipped out my longknife and jammed it up into his stomach. He wasn''t dead, but he was hurt enough that I could get out of there before he came after me. It''s too bad I couldn''t help whoever was in there, but I made it out with my life."

because it really happened that way.

And I don''t really like games that enforce roleplaying, because they have a tendancy to make me feel like I''m not wanted, and like I have to try REALLY HARD to roleplay.