I was wondering if anyone would be able to comment on a couple of musings I´ve been having regarding sandbox style games. Basically the premise is this: games such as EVE Online while offering a type of sand boxed environment have not taken the idea to its ultimate conclusion. They still offer quests and missions for the player to complete rather than just having the game be the environment and the players. Ultimately in my idea the player is dropped into a galactic / universal area with a set of tools such as the ability to research and to convert raw materials into other useful goods and then let loose. What they decide to do is entirely up to them. There are no non-player characters, no missions, no quests, no levels, no artificial game mechanics of any kind. They can spend their time talking with other players and as such make alliances (there would be no in game concept of an alliance though, they would be purely handled by in game communication so if a player wanted to break an alliance all they would need to do would be to attack the player or to negotiate an alliance with another player behind their back). Or they can be an aggressive player and attack other players for no reason. Or another strategy would be a player who dedicated themselves to technology. Other players would not attack as that player has a resource that they want to continue to be able to purchase. Thus really the game is extremely simple. Once the virtual world has been created there is really nothing to it. The players create the world through diplomatic and social means in much the same way as they do in the real world by protecting their interests and by expanding their influence with other players either by being a force of knowledge or just purely a militaristic power. Any comments on this rather short description? I have some blog posts I´ve been making over the last couple of months if anyone wants a more detailed description of my ideas. [Edited by - Cromulent on November 21, 2009 7:51:53 AM]

The difficulty may be having and enforce proper consequences for actions or players will simply find the loopholes which give them the most payoff for the least risk (or just act insane out of boredome and too easily destroy what other players worked hard to build up).

When you depend on players to enforce the 'consequences' (ie- a posse to go get a miscreant who's been robbing everone blind) the players often arent around or are busy and you cannot organize a group responses (which is important factor in the 'social contract' that is the bedrock of civilization -- when your real life and livelyhood are on the line then people will seriously act to reinforce stability and normalcy).

Automatic mechanism are likely needed to do enforcement when its not practical for players to do whats needed, AND THEN you have to nake sure that THOSE mechanisms are not subject to abuse (for which there needs to be another set of consequences). Game mechanics complexity goes up to support mechanism like these, but players are real good at finding and exploiting loopholes, so design/implementation of the mechanisms have to be thorough and complete.

Fun game play is all about accomplishing goals. Sandbox play is fun because it lets players set their own goals, i.e, "I'm going to build a spaceship totally based on defense and see how it survives against the toughest enemy in the game."

Until players have learned the game universe, they don't know what are good goals to set for themselves-- goals that are achievable but still challenging given the rules of the game.

In a multi-player 4x game, the player will need to be taught that they can build things, what these things do, that they can explore and conquer other areas, research technologies, etc. Missions are one way of dressing up the game tutorial.

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Original post by wodinoneeye The difficulty may be having and enforce proper consequences for actions or players will simply find the loopholes which give them the most payoff for the least risk (or just act insane out of boredome and too easily destroy what other players worked hard to build up). When you depend on players to enforce the 'consequences' (ie- a posse to go get a miscreant who's been robbing everone blind) the players often arent around or are busy and you cannot organize a group responses (which is important factor in the 'social contract' that is the bedrock of civilization -- when your real life and livelyhood are on the line then people will seriously act to reinforce stability and normalcy). Automatic mechanism are likely needed to do enforcement when its not practical for players to do whats needed, AND THEN you have to nake sure that THOSE mechanisms are not subject to abuse (for which there needs to be another set of consequences). Game mechanics complexity goes up to support mechanism like these, but players are real good at finding and exploiting loopholes, so design/implementation of the mechanisms have to be thorough and complete.

That's a good point, although when there is effectively nothing for a player to do other than get involved in the games politics then I feel that they are more likely to stick up for their in game friends and thus respond if someone is griefing or being otherwise antisocial.

A point which I forgot to add in my original post was that it would have to limit each player to one character only so that reputations had a much more meaningful impact on the game. Likewise you would have to make it impossible for players to rename their characters, or if you did make it possible you would need to let other players see what their original name was so that they couldn't grief people and then simply change their characters name to avoid any retribution.

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Original post by justkevin Fun game play is all about accomplishing goals. Sandbox play is fun because it lets players set their own goals, i.e, "I'm going to build a spaceship totally based on defense and see how it survives against the toughest enemy in the game." Until players have learned the game universe, they don't know what are good goals to set for themselves-- goals that are achievable but still challenging given the rules of the game. In a multi-player 4x game, the player will need to be taught that they can build things, what these things do, that they can explore and conquer other areas, research technologies, etc. Missions are one way of dressing up the game tutorial.

I was half considering a sort of single player mini game to act as a tutorial before the player started the game proper. That would allow the player a chance to learn the game in safety whilst also preventing the pollution of the "real" game from non-player characters and the like.