Players play an MORTS. They build units; deploy them; strategize about conquest. Wars ensue. This is a slow game. Players only make a few decisions per night. Things slowly evolve. The state of their game at any one time is the state of their Multiplyaer Realtime Strategy Game (MORTS). This state is passed into the function MMORPG(). Players play in their RPG world. The world they play in is alive with conflict, battle, and war. Is this "Game as Language"? [edited by - bishop_pass on May 12, 2002 1:20:06 PM]

Why keep the RTS and RPG elements separate?

Allow the RPG characters to become Generals. Make it difficult to become one so that not everyone and their brother is a General, but make it so that everyone who wants to can become involved in the RTS elements of the game.

Let the general hire Player or NPC units, equip them with armor and weapons made by player blacksmiths or technicians and buy them horses or vehicles.

Take away the God-like overhead view...restrict their view to what their character would actually see (I'd prefer 1st Person or 3rd Person Over-The-Shoulder Cam, but a limited range Isometric view would work as well).

Generals must work with player Rogues/Spies to recon terrain and get information on the movements and doings of enemy troups. Generals must also work with player Captains/Officers who are responsible for moving squads of NPC units and handling micromanagement.

Admitedly it misses out on that table-top strategy feel, but I think that this could add a lot of dimension to the Strategy and RPG genres.

EDIT: Oops, I just read the "Game as Language" post and may have misinterpreted the intent of your post. Sorry if my reply has missed the theme of the thread.

[edited by - SuperSpy on May 12, 2002 3:10:02 PM]

Right on, SuperSpy. I''ve thought about that kind of thing before, too. That kind of a game would rock. A modern setting would be great, with squads of Army Rangers scouting, Squad Captains leading infantry platoons/tanks/helicopters/etc. and Generals organizing the whole thing, with the use of a radio system and satellite images.

Shadowbane ?

Yes, Shadowbane looks like it could be very good as a Strategy-MMORPG. However (and this is only from what I''ve casually gathered from reading the info at the game''s website), it looks to me like it''s going to be dominated by PK-Guilds from UO and Uber-Guilds from EQ the moment it goes live. Since I''m not currently a member of any guild or clan much less an Uber one, would I be able to really experience that aspect of the game? If I were coming to this game as an avid RTS fan, without MMORPG experience, how would I get involved? Would I ever have a chance at becoming a successful general myself?

That said, I guess the same critisism could be applied to the idea I outline above.

quote: Original post by bishop_pass
Is this "Game as Language"?

Perhaps in some ways, but in general I would say not. The question ''what is language'' is just as involved as ''what is a game'' - and so asking for ''game as language'' could be considered exponentially more involved. The notion of ''state'' viz language is a difficult one as well. Language can be so much more fluid... one terse description of language that I recall from my undergrad days - and this phrase lends itself to many fields - ''a rolling system of reclassification''.

For a game to verge on language, I think that it would have to have the ability to reclassify all objects on the fly, as well as to acknowledge objects in places where they were not previously acknowledged - not that they didn''t exist - but that they were not recognized by the classification scheme. That presents a barrier for design, because one would expect that in a designed game there would be no objects in the game that existed prior to the design - or unrecognized by the designer.

I''m not certain if that explanation suffices, but the analogy is that in the ''real world'', there are things that exist that go unnoticed, unrecognized, ''unnamed'' - until they are given a name and ''come into being'' so to speak. For example, you or I might look at a patch of snow and say ''a look a patch of snow'', but an eskimo would have dozens for words for that patch of snow, words that would convey subtleties about the snow that ''do not exist'' for someone from warmer climes. ("If it''s not in the phone book it doesn''t exist")

There doesn''t appear to be away around this considering the notion of design - but at the very least, a game would have to be open to innovation in objects, additions to the game that were unforeseen by the designers - the game would have to be designed to accomodate this inevitability.

I don''t know... but I do know that as always bishop_pass you have a fantastic way with language. You said in three lines what most people would take a page to say.

I am not really sure what you are asking. Language for who? Developer? Player? I am missing something...

It would be interesting to see if the two parts were created seperatly, by seperate groups of people, the ''language'' (communications) that would have to be created to pass in, as it were, the parameter to the function. Sort of reminds me of the mini games as modules, sharing game state information between each other.

quote: Original post by bishop_pass
Players play an MORTS. They build units; deploy them; strategize about conquest. Wars ensue. This is a slow game. Players only make a few decisions per night. Things slowly evolve. The state of their game at any one time is the state of their Multiplyaer Realtime Strategy Game (MORTS).

This state is passed into the function MMORPG(). Players play in their RPG world. The world they play in is alive with conflict, battle, and war.

I start up a shop, but another player''s 300 man strong army comes into my village and levels it and everything around me. Because we''re dealing with humans, we can''t necessarily prevent this from happening.

I like the pure concept of the idea, but in implementation it sounds like it would have some problems. IRL, it sucks to live in a warzone. I also get the impression that RTS players delight in destroying one another, while cRPG players delight in building themselves up and destroying NPCs (monsters and such). So somehow this conflict would have to be resolved.

btw, some of this sounds *vaguely* like a game you might want to look for reviews for called Shattered Galaxy.




--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

So, the idea sounds cool, but I''m unsure of how the two levels would interact. Would the troop movements, and guard locations and production, and such be suggestions from the MMORTS people, or would they actually have computer controlled units that handle this?

The MMORPG to MORTS loop definately represents a feedback loop in which the player's syntagmatic exploration (a sentence is a syntagm) of the world is both informed by and a response to a paradigmatic (a set of associated words is a paradigm) restructuring of that world.

Less Bread made a strong argument. 'Reclassification on the fly' _is_ antithetical to the formulation of recognizable functions within the game. But, as Bishop_Pass points out, complimentary forms of role reversal are not impossible to conceive within game design. You have to have a little faith that if you simply provide enough semi-functional components (like lego pieces) gameness will emerge (child play with lego sets). The trick is to design the game in a way that facilitates this top-down (player solution sets/representations) as opposed to bottom up (Programming objects/protocols). I don't think its impossible. Dawning examples might be Never Winter Nights and Morrowind (although various "role gaps"/unclosed feedback loops remain to be bridged and representation is limited).

None of the previous paragraph is a concrete example. A concrete example of "reclassification on the fly" might be: a) dynamic texture alteration (paradigmatic choice), b) npcs evaluating pc route proposals using time (syntagmatic choice), eg. a player says instead of "dest x, dest y, dest z" try "dest y, dest z, dest a" and npc evaluates with a practical test (where equivalence is a function of time). I admit coming up with type b examples is much more difficult (its the equivalence test that is difficult), but again, I don't think its impossible.

PS. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that what I was suggesting was the aggregation of random rule orientated behaviour, which is only given a representation after the fact, ie. instead of thinking "I know, we'll create an ogre, what does an ogre do?" you say "here's a collection of possible movement/attack rules, how shall we cluster them as an object?". Bestial self-aquisition of identity would be the ultimate implementation of this.

[edited by - deClavier on May 21, 2002 4:12:11 AM]