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Comments: 167 +- Games: Experimental Video Game Evolves Its Own Content on Wednesday July 08 2009, @10:09AM
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Soulskill
on Wednesday July 08 2009, @10:09AM
from the ontogeny-recapitulates-giant-lasers dept.
from the ontogeny-recapitulates-giant-lasers dept.
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Ken Stanley writes "Just as interest in user-generated content in video games is heating up, a team of researchers at the University of Central Florida has released an experimental multiplayer game in which content items compete with each other in an evolutionary arms race to satisfy the players. As a result, particle system-based weapons, which are the evolving class of content, continually invent their own new behaviors based on what users liked in the past. Does the resulting experience in this game, called Galactic Arms Race, suggest that evolutionary algorithms may be the key to automated content generation in future multiplayer gaming and MMOs?"
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Dynamic world (Score:4, Interesting)
This is actually what I've wished for long time that MMO's would have. For example in WoW, once you've seen one place it will always be like that.
It would be great to have kind of an ecosystem which would evolve on its own and when players help (or destroy) it. For example, there would be two or three independent towns controlled by NPC's living closely that you could build relationships with. Once one of the towns needs more resources, likes to expand or for whatever reason, it would go in war with another town. Player couldn't directly control it, but you could influence it indirectly. Taking it further, when you could really succesfully frame the other town for hostile act's, you could cause a war between them if they see so.
I know it makes it easier to design and create content when everything is static, but in this case some of the content and the actual gameplay would be created by itself. It would also be *a lot* more interesting when you could directly or indirectly affect the world. Doing a run against some giant badass boss dragon and decided to quit it and run away? Now no, that badass boss dragon wouldn't just get back to its place once you've just a little bit out of its attack range. It would actually be *pissed* at your group and follow you, tearing apart the environment when you try to run away from it. This creates even more tension, as other players and NPC controlled towns would be pissed at you for causing that.
I've always also thought that why there's no king's or province leaders in WoW or other MMORPG's. Other players could elect you into it or you could steal it from existing king. Obviously the other faction would first need to break thru the provinces to capitol city like Stormwind, fight your way thru the guards and other players finally to the king's castle and then have a huge fight there. If you succeeded with that, you would still need to defence the place and continue gaining control over it. Or you could take the spy approach, gaining trust and getting in ranks to work with the king, finally to just to backstab him when its the perfect moment to do so.
There's so much you could do with dynamic content or world where player actions actually matter. Now everything is just pretty static, grinding to kill enemies that just pop up back 5 mins later or doing mindless quests. I would really welcome some MMO where it would be more like a sandbox for players and the world. EVE Online actually works a bit like this and that's why its always interest me, even tho I'm not really into space genre. Would be great to see such fantasy MMORPG, or even modern day MMORPG.
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Insightful)
"This is actually what I've wished for long time that MMO's would have. For example in WoW, once you've seen one place it will always be like that."
Actually for some games this is a good thing, we already have algorithmically generated content creation in random maps, and it's hit and miss depending on the genre of game, i.e. you wouldn't want crappy lopsided distribution of resources in an RTS for example.
The problem with evolutionary algorithms that I can see that is that games are the result of a "vision" I doubt a vision would remain cohesive under a competitive process.
For instance in many games that have player created content, one could consider that an evolutionary algorithm (the players) in their own right, and then other players pick the best levels from among the community and assemble them in level packs. The problem becomes though that some levels that are downright shit become popular, as we've seen with summer blockbusters like Transformers: Most people have mediocre tastes, and I'm not sure a player driven world of clueless players would produce anything anyone would want to visit.
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the best way to do dynamic content in an MMO is to build a static framework (e.g. a world) and allow people to expand and create content from there.
Now, in my world, it would go like this: Your class, relative wealth, and profession would all have attendant properties and buildings. Some of them you could purchase for limited money generation: you're a smith, you need a smithy and a mine. You build the smithy, because you have to have one to make items, and then you prospect until you find a good spot, and you buy/build a mine, because it's cheaper than buying all your own ore.
Now, obviously, these buildings are vulnerable. You put the smithy and a shop (to sell your wares) in a big player-run city, where everyone who has buildings pays taxes that pay for NPC guards and defenses, so that's taken care of, but what about the mine? The mine is (obviously) outside the city, and not protected by the city guards. So you skim off some of your mining profits to pay NPC mercenaries to defend it.
Voila. You have player cities with guards, and dungeons with mobs, all at once. Make the shops able to be stolen from, and you have room for thieves, and let the players put in traps, fancy locks, etc. There is tons of stuff you can do. Obviously you're going to want to strike a balance. No fun to be a shopkeeper if you get cleaned out all the time. No fun to be a thief if it's too hard to break into a shop, and then there is nothing worth stealing...But that's just fine tuning.
See how logical and easy that is? And the person who built the buildings has a vested interest in keeping them going, paying for upgrades, replacing guards, etc. Everything can expand from that. Different types of buildings for different types of benefits to different groups. Military buildings for military bonuses, commercial buildings for commercial bonuses, etc, etc. You can throw in some PVE content: military group builds a building on the border with a non-human race, and kicks off a war with the orcs, or whatever.
Limitless possibilities, and everything that you do in the game matters. You clear a dungeon, it's gone, or empty, until someone rebuilds it, and then it won't be exactly the same...Depending on who builds it it could be completely different. You'll have done something unique, and how often does that happen in an MMO?
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Funny)
Being a smith in that world sounds incredibly boring. Does he have a computer in his smithy that he can play Tetris on?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sod Tetris, I'm bored with that. Does he have a computer he can play World of Warcraft on, and be something more interesting than a smith?
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'cuz Bejeweled is, like, a million times better than Tetris.
Re:Dynamic world (Score:5, Interesting)
Shrug. Some people like playing crafters, and you can add a frickton of strategy stuff to it.
I'd love to see a crafting system than was complex and open-ended. Hell, make it so that you have some sort of skill-based mini game (like Tetris?) that effects the quality of things you're trying to craft, so it's not just about the level of grinding you've done on the skill, but also on actual skill.
On top of that, you have the whole "defend my stuff" part of the game, which moves toward traditional strategy elements. You're recruiting and training units, you're building defenses. You're making alliances with other players to defend each others stuff.
That sounds a hell of a lot more fun to me than just another MMO level/loot grind, where crafting is something you do when you're tired of killing stuff, and has very little actual effect on the game. I'm so tired of that I can't even convey it.
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with an open-ended system is that it is always unbalanced. At some point, the system evolves to the point where it makes more sense to be a smithy than to be a baker, or whatever. One profession/class/rank/item always tops out and becomes unbeatable. The only way to balance this is to either a) have mods who arbitrary slap people down by pushing the values this way or that or b) introduce a changing ruleset to balance things out through game events or some other "magic" process.
Either way, the players will find these changes "unfair". "I put all this effort into making this high ranking person, and your changes made me lesser!" is the basic gist of it. The problem of it is that they're correct, the changes did make that person lesser, in order to balance out the game.
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Informative)
Balance is absolutely the challenge, but that's the case with every game.
Fricking WoW has been trying to balance it's handful of character classes for years now, and they're not getting anywhere. There is always a "most powerful" class/spec combo which all the hardcore people are using, and every major patch sees some class get nerfed or buffed.
Does that mean WoW isn't a successful game?
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to real life
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
. Hell, make it so that you have some sort of skill-based mini game (like Tetris?) that effects the quality of things you're trying to craft, so it's not just about the level of grinding you've done on the skill, but also on actual skill.
On top of that, you have the whole "defend my stuff" part of the game, which moves toward traditional strategy elements. You're recruiting and training units, you're building defenses. You're making alliances with other players to defend each others stuff.
That is beginning to sound a little bit like Puzzle Pirates...
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Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Interesting)
It's amusing, because when I first wrote that rant, it was in reaction to the utter cock-up that CoH made of the player generated content thing.
In CoH they let people generate their own missions, and they rewarded people based on how well OTHER PEOPLE liked their missions! What the fuck? What was the cost to the player when 100 people ripped through their level-farming mission like a fat guy through a door made of bacon? They were rewarded.
Oh god, could you do anything worse than that? What content did they think was going to be created?
In my system, the player gets benefits from building buildings/dungeons/whatever, and loses benefits when other players run roughshod over their stuff. The player would have a strong motivation to protect his stuff, and make it as hard as possible to beat.
It's not just about crafting either. Say you want to set up a dungeon full of bandits who raid nearby player junk. Why not? Player housing that gives bonuses based on the junk you've got in your house. You raid someones mine and trash it, and the miner gets pissed of and pays some thieves to loot your house, killing your bonuses.
It's about making the content created a needed and good thing for the character, and giving them bonuses/money/skills/whatever based on what they've got, so that they have an incentive to expand it and protect it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually thought about your dungeon suggestion in the context of Gnomeregan in WoW: a level 80 can wipe every single mob in there at once, but the gnomes still don't take their city back. Would be fun if that could happen... of course, the problem would be that a very specific leveling and gearing point is gone from the game. And Gnomeregan is the only close dungeon in that range for gnomes and dwarves.
That kind of MMO requires two more things: a complete de-emphasis of PvE for leveling, and a de-emphasis
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Gnomeregen wouldn't be missed honestly. That and Ulduman. They're so un-loved that the Alliance would rather walk to Scarlet Monastry, across a lake and through Horde territory, rather than do the two instances within 2 minutes of Ironforge.
A point I've always made about WoW was how static it was. They've been rebuilding Redridge for 4 years now.
WOTLK went some way to address this using 'phasing' - in that your progression through quests changed the landscape (the biggest, most obvious change being the Wrat
Re:Dynamic world (Score:5, Informative)
This is something Guild Wars tried to address in their approach. By making gaming areas instanced and meet-up areas MMO, a player's actions can effect the game world on a slightly grander scale. The state of the instance is decided based upon the previous actions of those entering it.
The thing is, I feel they didn't capitalize on this opportunity nearly enough...
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Interesting)
Make the shops able to be stolen from, and you have room for thieves, and let the players put in traps, fancy locks, etc.
The only problem I see there (and I don't think it's necessarily a deal breaker) is that the designers have competing interests: the thieves have to be able to max out a skill, but if a thief can always steal from the shop then there's no incentive to open the shop in the first place. Either the shop is impossible to steal from, thus making the thief feel slighted, or the thief can steal from the shop, which means that all thieves which max out their skills can steal from the shops. And if you make it a progression, where lower-level shop owners are more easily stolen from than more senior shop owners, then you have a situation where thieves always steal from lower level shops, making it so that the only workable levels for owning a shop are extremely high.
I would probably resolve that issue through making it so that either the shops can't be stolen from at all, or else there's a limited scope in what can be stolen. For instance, there's a certain amount of gold on hand from items being bought and sold. Only half of that gold can be stolen, thus ensuring that there's something to steal but the shop owner can't lose everything. Or maybe shops earn latent income through the assumed purchases made by NPCs, and it's only this income which can be stolen from. Or maybe it's only custom made weapons, and the regular stock can't be stolen from, etc. Because anyone and everyone can get to the highest levels of thievery, there has to be an artificial barrier when it comes to thievery between PCs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was thinking limited scope myself: the thief can break in, but they can't clean the entire place out (for whatever reason). If they could clean the entire place out, right to the ground, then it would completely suck to be a crafter. Or, as a crafter, maybe you could pay for theft insurance? I also think there needs to be some kind of diminishing return, so that it doesn't make sense for an upper level thief to grief the lower level shopkeepers.
There are a couple of ways it could be done, but I think the
How to achieve this: Dynamic world (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been thinking along these lines quite a bit. Here's what I've come up with:
Let your players design their own ships. (For the Space games. Armor/Mounts/Minions for the others.) The appearance of the items will determine the stats according to some simple geometric rules. (Examples: A part of the hull which is angled back will have more armor resistance from certain directions. The larger your ship is in any direction, the slower it can turn, etc.) There will also be "design points" players can spend. The player will then submit the design by spending the in-game money for a "research project." During this time, the item will be submitted to a user-driven forum much like /. or reddit, and the top vote-getters during their "research period" will succeed in their research projects and actually get prototyped. Players are rewarded for designing cool ships by being given the opportunity to license their designs for a royalty.
Now here's the kicker -- the stats of ships of a certain design will shrink over time. So players who want the best ships will constantly have to seek out new designs. (All items would be temporary in this scheme. Nothing would ever be permanently bound to any player.)
I'd also like to see opportunities for players to legitimately program their own bots/minions. The code could run on a specialized VM only on the servers, so you could sandbox them and enforce DRM. Then the scripts could again be licensed. Balance this out by having genetic algorithms constantly evolving the monsters. Also, this would co-opt farming and macros, and make them a part of the game. (And subject to game balance by he devs.)
Don't try to fight the forces of evolution and economics and the scheming of crowds. CO-OPT them!
Parent
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with you and also would like to see more games with automatically created and evolving content. Unfortunately, game studios still seem to shy away from dynamic content because the behavior of dynamic systems is generally hard to predict. Some might fear that the game world suddenly becomes unstable and drops into chaos. But the game studios could hire more people with a strong physics/dynamic systems modeling background to deal with these problems.
Another problem is that games with good dynamic content have a very high replay value, whereas it seems that most game studios would prefer people to buy a new game or expansion pack right after they have finished the old one---or even earlier, as one might infer from the sloppiness with which later levels are often designed in comparison to the first few levels.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Too many other players will interfere with things like that.
What happens with other players start interacting with your two towns?
It'll simply boil down to how many people are supporting each town to what degree.
Taking over cities? Considering the number of people with the pvp bear mounts for killing the faction leaders, if there was anything useful to gain you'd have even more raids going into cities to take it over for a brief period before another group comes through.
Most likely that'll just disrupt gam
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dynamic world (Score:4, Funny)
Your idea intrigues me. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I think that unless you continually change the rules, playerbases are smart enough to figure out the formulas behind things and turn it into a grind. My recommendation? A MMO where the rules change monthly. It wouldn't appeal to the hardcore raiders, but I'd sure like it.
I guess that's kinda pulling from the Roguelikes, but I did enjoy those too.
Re: (Score:2)
It all sounds good but in practice will never work because too many people are idiots or dickheads.
If you implement an ecosystem someone will kill every last rabbit and break the food chain so that everything dies.
The dragon in your example would be led to the newbie spawn area about 41 seconds after it appeared.
Every town in the game would be razed.
And so on.
If you stop them from doing so then you haven't really got a world in which the players can affect things so much after all.
EVE online is the closest
Great idea for a business (Score:5, Funny)
It's all fun and games (Score:2)
Logical conclusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you have a system to keep the weapons balanced, like a point system to share between accuracy/recoil/reload time/clip size/damage/etc...
You could imagine that you could have an algorithm that would figure out on its own the right weights to that point system based on the users' preferences.
Re:Logical conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)
And that leads to what we already have in all MMOs: One perfect setup with the rest being crap.
Let's take the average "power gamer". His goal: Becoming stronger. His way: Acquiring equipment that makes him stronger. Which equipment is that? The one that abuses the game bugs and loopholes in the ruleset the best.
In other words, this is not a simulation of evolution, it's a simulation of business.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot that it is a fight for limited resources (and tools?). Which makes it impossible to create something like this, and is the point of the game.
You have to be the most efficient, get the resources faster than anyone else, and then use the results in the best possible way.
Re: (Score:2)
Develop a campaign setting for a Pen and Paper RPG. I figure you get what? 7 hours of your 8 hours of work devoted to 4 chan, so by the end of the day you should have a pretty good concept hammered out.
Coming soon, Google Bombs for MMOs (Score:2)
NEAT (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Good to see more NEAT stuff I worked on NERO while I was at UT.
GAR looks pretty cool glad to see some of the ideas we discussed back then being put into action.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh my... (Score:2)
After a dozen or so generations in the wild trying to please teenage boys, the game will either evolve into:
-Shutting itself up in its room, burning incense, and listening to further down the spiral over and over again
-lolcats
-This: http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e291/bubbatwo420/1203_joust_charge_1280.jpg [photobucket.com]
But, you know, best of luck to the developers. Quick question: If the game evolves disruptive or offensive content, are the developers liable for it?
-b
Top tags (Score:2)
Users can do so much more than just create content (Score:2)
Cool but does anyone remember... (Score:2)
I took a look at this game, and well it looks kind of fun. Sometimes you just want to fly around and shoot stuff. It brought back memories of the late 90's. I worked for as a contractor at a large hospital. In our downtime a few of us would gather and play a space based lan game. It reminded me quite a lot of this game, a top down space shooter. For the life of me I cannot think of the title. Does anyone remember the name of that game?
Re: (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Yes!!! Thanks now I can move on with my day!
Evolution (Score:2)
Having the game auto-evolve the weapons based on user response is very neat, but is it the best way?
Wouldn't have the users be able to make their own decisions about it and set up their own weapon be better? It involves the users in more points, and gives them control over the system instead of hoping the weapon becomes more like they want. It allows for more play-styles as well.
Finally (Score:2)
Generic (Score:2)
The problem is that this will create something that aims to be "the best". It doesn't address the problem of "what I want", it addresses the [non-]problem of "what everyone wants" and so you will still end up with homogeneous sets of things to acquire at the end of the day. Real customization of content should be player generated and not based on a system of pre-teens trying to find the most amusement in how easily they can wtfpwn some other pre-teen.
Magic the Gathering (Score:2)
This reminds me of Magic the Gathering where they issue new cards every year that are better and if your deck doesn't have them (i.e., you don't keep buying more cards) then you lose the arms race.
$0.02USD,
-l
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Jane (Score:2)
I need to start playing this game and hope for the best.