FrankyFaster 1 Posted January 4, 2019 (edited) Video games and (social) darwinism----------------------------------To start off with this essay I want to recall the definition of social darwinism:A theory that inherent dynamic forces allow only the fittest persons or organizations to prosper in a competitive environment or situationWhile this is true for reality and competetive games in the genres of rts, moba, fps and others, where the only point of the whole game is to compete and perhaps best the enemies, this shouldn't be the case for many other genres, in this case speaking of (massive multiplayer) open world games.The biggest problem with unrestriced darwinism in such titles is the discrepancy of player types. You will find the hyper casual gamer, playing an average of 10 to 20 hours a month but you will also find very dedicated, or flippantly said hardcore, gamers with the same amount of playtime in just a few days and of course, everything inbetween. The biggest problem that arises by this is the makes gradient between those players. The person investing more time will naturally progress faster and in fact will be way more powerfull and have more knowledge about the game overall compared to a player with a much lower playtime. This for itself is no problem at all but it becomes a problem in the moment where any player at any state of the game can unrestrictedly engage every other player at their current state. But why is this a problem? In fact such an environment creates a prey-predator relationship between competing players with a rapid expansion in the gap between those players/groups. When you can (and will) lose almost everything you accomplished in the previous hours of gameplay the level of frustration in those players on the losing side will rise very fast to a point where they just won't continue playing the game due to the lack of positive reinforcement. Lack of prey, as observed in reality, leads to death of predators who cannot maintain to nourish themselves. Transferred to a videogame it's the boredom of the 'predator player' that will starve their interest to play to death due to the lack of (interesting) enemies. In other words, the joy of winning will become meaningless if the fight was decided all along. Of course this could lead to a balance at some point, but as this point is reached the overall playerbase might have decreased to a point where people won't find other people in a reasonable time and therefor get bored and finally quit the game aswell.Current gameplay and player interaction in 'ATLAS' (v8.56)----------------------------------------------------------The world of atlas is vast. Still it's at an estimated minimum of 80% water, some zones you cannot build in, or if you can, your buildings will persih in a short amount of time (96h of real life time at maximum). There are areas where you can claim a patch of land and build up a base that won't perish, yet there is no restriction for a single player in this claiming system. A single company (the name for a player formed faction) could be able to dominate the whole map with close to 0 chance for another group or soloplayer to ever place a foot in the playworld and become a 'worthy oponent'. Of course those claims can be contested, but only on a pvp server. On a pve server as a new player starting on a server that is running for even a short amount of time it will be impossible to claim land and build a base other than waiting for a whole company to become deserted (and still you would need to wait a pretty long time before their claims will perish by simply not logging in). In fact a relatively small amount of players will live like kings, while the others will play in a constant 'fear' of losing everything they played for over days in just some minutes due to the simple lack of some space they could retreat to. Conclusion----------In the current design of the main elements of the game, a server with an aimed population of ~20-30k players is completely utopian since the environment can't maintain those playercounts. Real social darwinism is for a world where people can face real loss and therefor are more cautios with their personal decisions. In a world where a 'life' is worthless, because you just respawn. You face no real moral downside of acting like a complete moron. Ultimately you don't have to live with your decision. This is good. This is what games are for, but still a game designer can create a system which almost feels fair. Life isn't fair, but our games, which most of us spend our freetime on, for amusement and recreation, could and should be.But this trick is to be done by the developers and designers. Discuss! and of course feel free to debunk my ideas on possbile changes for core game mechanics https://www.playatlas.com/index.php?/forums/topic/21804-two-wrongs-aint-make-a-right-various-suggestion-on-obviously-broken-mechanics/ Edited January 4, 2019 by FrankyFaster Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
