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General: LARP & Player Generated Content
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In this week's column, MMORPG.com writer Angie Webb tackles LARP, or Live Action Role Playing and the tie-in with MMOs. Angie calls "LARPers" the "geekiest of the geeks in the gamer world". She's got some fascinating thoughts about LARP, MMOs and player generated content. Check it out!
Live-Action Role-Players (LARPers) have a bad rap. If anyone has ever told you that you were weird for playing an MMO, just try saying you LARP. LARPers are known for their weapon-making parties, late-night meetings at the Waffle House, and, for some, a severe lack of grooming during events. LARPers are pretty much the geekiest of the geeks in the gamer world.
Read Angie Webb: In Her Opinion.
Comments
Yeah, that would be pretty awesome. As a bonus, player controlled enemies would drop better loot. Imagine, you and your guild becoming every monster in a certain area, like a cave or something, and just locking that place down, killing everyone that came there to try the quest.
It would be so hard to complete that quest...but also very rewarding for the people who finish it. It would be a lot of fun. It's also a very cool way to bring PvP into a PvE game, especially when you don't have to worry about things like class balancing.
I'm very much interested in what the WoD MMO will bring to the table.
Currently Playing: Nothing...I'm developing.
Looking Forward To:
Your second paragraph defines much of what is flawed about the idea for the majority of MMO gamers. In a controlled evironment, where the people playing mobs can only affect those who expect such a mob to exist, it would probably be a great feature to add.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The only thing the LARP could contribute to an MMO is the ability to play monsters. In all other respects though they are both role playing games, the platforms are too different to realistically expect anything more.
That being said, playing monsters could be rather fun. Imagine instead of filling downtime hanging out at the bank chatting players could logon as any one random monster, gather together a troop of NPC monsters, and if lucky (and not stopped by other players) create a siege at the location of their choosing!
There would have to be limitations -- like the monsters dont get to loot other players, etc, and its a 1 time only role that is randomized each time the player logs on to the monster service.
Instant quest for the developers. PvP pleasure for gamers without crying about griefers and loot. Not so bad.
Laudanum - Romance. Revenge. Revolution.
Crappy, petty people breed and raise crappy, petty kids.
"However, LARP developers get their players to do the lion’s share of this type of work (for example, being monsters, NPCs, and vendors), and they still pay to play the game. If players in LARPs are prepared to “be” the content, why haven’t MMO developers tapped into this?"
Angie m' dear, you have never been involved in writing a script for a LARP game. As an IFGS player (international fantasy game system) we had a 100 page rules bible.. that had to be modified and edited every year by a 12 man committee. Each script had to be written, then vetted through a 6 man committee.
Then of course you had the prop and set design, all as elaborate as what you would see on any play's stage, but of course sturdy enough to handle wilderness, weather, and of course giant dudes beating on it with a foam sword. The only work the NPCs would be responsible for was memorizing their character and their game lore, dialogue, and come up with improv responses to character interaction for each encounter with a team. They also were responsible for creating a costume for themselves. GMs were also responsible for being the "human interface" between the game environment and the NPCs, if necessary, as well as creating any visual effects that were not replicated in actual production (aka asking us to use our imaginations
I don't know what LARP system you were involved in - if there was one at all - but there was a substantial amount of coordination, organization, and work that went into each and every game I worked in or played in on part of the developers and support staff. The only fee that was required went towards covering the cost of the production, and food and drink for the NPCs.
All in all, the only game that has come close to this was the Everquest guide system - before someone bitched about not getting paid to do volunteer work and they canned it. Guides got to take on the roles of NPCs and engage players in heavily scripted events, similar to what I had written or produced in IFGS. It was really wonderful. If I can ever find a game that has the same system, I would volunteer in a heartbeat - it was more engaging than the actual game for me.
As to LARPs, they just don't exist in Florida near me. I don't imagine anyone wants to dress up in a costume and run through foliage dense enough to require a machete for some reason...
There are options for this first of all players could get tools ingame to create player ran events.
For example player gets widget either on maxium level or when he makes char. He can activate the widget at any time to obtain widget experience & widget gold by killing monsters. He can use that experience to create monsters and items needed to run storyline or simply hack and slash experience for his friends. Developers could make "rooms" basically enviorments for player to rent for widget gold that would work in instanced enviorment with several rulesets to pick from or customize. Players taking part would recieve experience for things they do in such enviorment. But that would be up for the widget user to decide as he would contribute the experience in end of the event by raiting player success in the event. So players could with their own time obtain tools to give others fun time... Fun other than raiding, pvp or instancing. Such system could be also used for creating pvp events, pvp ladder games, even pokemon style monster fighting events. Possibilities are basically limiltess.
Plus sides:
Fun & creativity factor.
Game doesn't get old by doing all the same things.
More revenue for companies due less time spent creating new content.
With less created content company could get more fun factor than they would for example an expanission pack that costs a lot of money to make.
More player involvement and opinnions on game directions.
More gamestyles.
Minus sides
Exploitation factor.
Time spent balancing the system
Increased need of monitoring due arguing, fighting and flaming. (This all could be avoided quite far with creation of rules, restrictions etc.
More forced restrictions due human nature of arguing, exploitation, fighting, flaming
High need for admins.
Possible need to create variable monster skins to suit the moods?
The concept itself is working. Systems like I suggested above just requires new kind off midset for developers. Understanding for balance, understanding for human nature & desire to create something brand new.
Anyway the alternative systems are something i write in my blog about... HOWEVER I am still in midst of writing it.
Kindest regards,
DKW
Monsters play could be one of the comfortable uses of perma death. Roll a monster, level up until you have earned enough ire from the local town, and a mob of 'hero' players comes to hunt you.
I tried to LARP once. I got kicked out for hitting too hard. I mean, those weapons were the foam padded? And the guys that complained about me had 50-75 pounds on me. Lame.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
In my honest personall opinnion, me and my friends did a lot of boffer/foam weapon fighting on our young days, we also took part of many larps. I did often hit people way too hard, never did i got kicked out. And due my physicall appearance (Big, red haired, rowdy, mean looking) I usually got a 2 hander to use and role of barbarian.
Kindest regards,
DKW
It wouldn't be as hard to implement as you think. The EQ guide system had scripts that were written and then vetted by admins. You had to follow the script exactly as a guide, and you usually ran several events with a GM or senior guide assisting and monitoring your performance and behavior.
If you broke the rules, you were out, simple as that. And players would be certain to tattle on you if say you took your big ass dragon NPC and ran to newbie ville and ganked everyone in sight.
So the reporting system worked well. We were all unpaid volunteers, you see, and the monitoring was done by volunteers who had been working in the system for a very long time. It worked very well.
As to flaming? I never had a player get upset in any event I ran. They all had a blast, even if they didn't get anything from the NPC. I created dynamic lore that engaged the roleplayers in roleplay scripts. In combat encounters I was usually a raid quality NPC (we were flagged to not cause exp loss upon death, and to be immune to damage from people outside our allowed encounter level engagement range).
If I knew a lick of programming, I would develop this for a game and give it to em for free, just because it would be simply amazing to have as a free feature in a game.
I certainly didn't think that would be true of all LARPers. Just raging on the lame-asses in my home town. Some of them still do it and now on a much more organized level and it seems pretty cool. I'd probably be more interested if I could stand to leave the house in the summer here.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
That much player freedom/control leads to griefing or exploiting every single time. That is why games don't do it.
If you make special benefits come from player controlled monsters for example, a guild will farm themselves all day for the bonuses. If you allow anyone to become monsters anywhere, guilds will band together for the sole purpose of griefing/ganking the newbies.
Original out of the box UO had the mindset of complete player freedom. If you maxed out lockpick, you had a tiny chance of being able to pick someone's house and rob them. That got changed a couple weeks in as people cried about losing their stuff (you could still steal their house key though, which due to how pick pocketing worked it was one of the easiest things to steal because it was so light weight). You could kill or be killed anytime outside of a town and fully looted. No consequences to anyone involved. At first this worked, and worked well. There would be a bunch of people hanging out in the graveyard, one person (usually me) would hide and then pick pocket someone. That person would inevitably get angry and attack me, the amazing part is it would never turn into a gank fest, everyone would watch on and let the two people fight it out. Over time this degraded as different types of people tried out the game which lead the developers to implement the red blue grey system to help reduce the gank fests that began popping up. More systems were put in place over time.
So a game which started with near complete player freedom in a huge sandbox had to restrict more and more of what players could and couldn't do, because in the end the certain types of people who grief/exploit all day long fill up the game world and freedom can't be allowed. You can't make a game mimic the real world because there aren't the consequences that exist in the real world. If you tried to rob someone in real life you might end up in jail, you might even end up dead. That is a big enough risk to stop the majority of the population from trying it. In game if it was allowed, you could rob people all day and it doesn't matter so why not do it? Why not gank the newbie, or kill everyone in sight in a game, it's just pixels. Why not exploit in a game, at most your pixels get banned and you start over. There's no real consequences to doing the wrong thing in a game.
I know players want to create content for game, but just read player suggestions posted here and on official forums. They are often poorly thought out and are full of possible exploits, balance issues, and a lack of long term fun. Players THINK they know what they want, but they often truly don't. A game that gave a lot of power to the players would be a disaster, or would need so much oversight that it would actually be more expensive for a company to do it.
A free system, yes. But a structured and self-regulated system such as the EQ guide system had no major exploits, greifing, or any of the other ills you listed as coming from UO. The oversight was free for the company, because it was all based on volunteers. (Well , it cost the company a lack of a subscription for the volunteers, we played for free if we worked as guides.)
All it took of their resources was a programmer to create the NPCS, which as far as I can tell took very little time, since it used existing character models and meshes, and gave us access to particular powers that already existed. Often they just cloned an NPC from another part of the game.
In my opinnion you posses great understanding of functionality, you simply some vision my friend. It could work, it would work. You just understand the ogrinall post as most people whom have read it seem to understand. Taking bits and pieces that seems to please. People are coming up with why it doesn't work. Also a lot comments pop up about how much fun if they would get to play monster and get exp and super powerful items and such from player ran events.. Jesus christ the amount of chaos..... However visionary mind can change things, it can really make things work. I can even explain how it could work, and what kind of system would achieve ballance, harmony and functionality all on the same stroke.
I know players want to create content for game, but just read player suggestions posted here and on official forums. They are often poorly thought out and are full of possible exploits, balance issues, and a lack of long term fun. Players THINK they know what they want, but they often truly don't. A game that gave a lot of power to the players would be a disaster, or would need so much oversight that it would actually be more expensive for a company to do it.
with above comments I do fully agree, with suggestions I seen on mostly any forums it seems players poorly do understand ballance, restrictions. rules and why do they excist. Things could never work in anarchistic manner.
I do not mean to offend you in any way, however I really think that there are ways to get player ran sytem to work.
Kindest regards,
DKW
What's the point of an MMORPG in the first place? Isn't it essentialy entertainment? Then the simple question becomes what is a greater detriment to entertainment... A high level of freedom that has the possibility of being exploited..... or a rule-set that is highly restrictive of freedom but has minimal possibility of being exploited? I don't believe you'll get a uniform answer to that across the board...simply because people have different ideas of FUN and look for different things in MMO's.
Right now I do believe you have 1 market segment (the highly restricted experience) which is oversaturated and another which is very underseved.
In general, I think the MUD'a have the answer to this. You have different gradations of users that have different levels of priviledge. In order for a user to be trusted with a specific priviledge they have to build-up enough trust to be granted it (mostly by using lesser impacting priviledges in a responsible manner). The motivation to not exploit the system is the priviledge has enough value to them to not want to risk loosing it. You see similar systems employed on E-bay and on social sites with thier rating/ranking systems.... and while not fool-proof they seem to work reasonably well....and that's for applications where exploitation has alot more serious consequences then simply getting an imaginary +6 sword of ultimate doom (i.e. like the transfer of real goods and services.)
It's still possible to exploit such systems to a certain degree, but it's also possible to exploit bugs in game code. The answer to that is not... Don't write code....or Don't write code with bugs in it (impossible even for NASA).... It's realize that the cost of providing a good quality product for your customers includes resources to police the code that you write to catch the bugs you WILL find, when you find them, correct them and handle whatever exploitations have occured because of them.
That isn't all that tough to understand. I think part of the issue centers on the fact that MMO's tend to be big budget productions these days...they've moved into mainstream entertainment. The people running them, really aren't gamers anymore....and don't understand alot of what the appeal of thier products are to the people who are....mostly thier corporate boardroom and hollywood media entertainment types.... and those type of people are religiously allergic to loosening even the tiniest level of control over thier product expereience.
I really like the monster play idea! It would be cool if you could pergress your monster or make them tougher to fight somehow but then have perma death. Actually that sounds more fun than some actual game play, but I just like pvp. The monsters would have to be on some sort of a "leash" though or players like me will use monsters to go after other players we don't like 8)
On a side note those guys costumes would be really cool for Burning Man!
http://www.burningman.com/
On one trip to the man, people gave out thousands of lightsabers on oppsite sides of the circle. At dusk we all ran out and had the biggest lightsaber battle ever. It was complete chaos and I looked more like an ewok with all the fake fur but lots of fun
* I read most of what Jon Wood writes
* He needs more bullet points though
Larps dont give you the magic ability to change sex
I greatly approve of this, have had similar thoughts for a long time but sadly I don't own my own MMO to implement any ideas in :P
I was organising (and playing) LARPs between 20 and 500 people. The ones around 20-50 tend to be more int he region of what we called Amient LARPs. We had a system, we had NPC players and we had a rough plot, but we (as a Orga of 3-4 ppl) let the event flow and only pitched in little things and reacted to content that came up. They where very nice and relaxing. Then there where the mid since events 80-200 ppl. Mostly planed through a lot of work. Lead GMs, 2 or 3 Plot GMS and to two Meetings a Day for coordiantion. These where like normal work. Then there was our one 600 ppl event. 4 Month of planing. 4 Lead GMs, total GM team of 30 ppl. total orga Crew of additional 45 ppl and about 150 NPCs. We had a 24h rotation on GMs and on a dungon crew. This was horror for the 7 days it went, but in retrospect very much fun.
All where played with the same system (german DragonSys) but as said very different amounts of work and style.
I worked as a guide too. The Events where the best thing I encountered too. Being able to play Firiona Vie and even running a scripted Event was just great. And later when we had a book of live events we where allowed to run this was the best time in MMOs for me. I would also instantly join to run the same stuff again. Oh yes .. there where the Zone crashes and such, but I think the events where worth it every minute.
wow ... i never heard of larping before ... these guys are wonky!
that said, I'm totally in favour of player made content! Please free us from the drip of content we keep waiting for from current MMOs
I actually attended a LARPing event with Angie many years ago. Although it wasn't exactly MY idea of a Friday night with the crew, it was theirs. So, LARP on, LARPers! I might not join you, but rrrraaaa! You go!
That being said, how cool would it be to be the monster in an MMO!!! Somehow the idea of torturing poor innocent characters with whatever monster skill I can muster while they're just trying to complete their missions and level up just sounds sadistically intriguing!
So the only possible solution is to put chains on the players and force them along approved courses of action? Of course a game that enables asshattery w/o consequences turns into a gankfest and griefing. There is a perfectly natural solution to this "problem" (the problem being caused by the artificial _removal_ of consequences). Permadeath. I knife in the back of an asshat should _end_ him. Simple and perfectly natural.
Indeed. The content in Eve is almost entirely player generated (although mostly just warfare). CCP has shown they aren't afraid to push the limits of the genre so I have high hopes for WoD.
I was talking with some friends at length about how cool it would be to be able to play as monsters. It could definitely be more fun than anything, raid-wise, that any games out there are offering but the problems that can arise from a setup like that are nearly numerous enough to make it impractical. The one reason most raids in games work is that they are practical. If you fail, just remember what happened up to that point and try again. A raid where everything changes, every single time you play through would be fun from the replayability factor, but could end up being a nightmare if its unbeatable due to not being done correctly.
Playing every single mob would be really hard unless everyone of them is elite. Taking control of boss mobs (that could buff/give orders to game controlled average mobs) would be awesome tho.
666
Awesome article. Whenever I think of players playing as monsters I think of what potential games like World of Warcraft and Horizons have. In WoW, when you are playing a human, there are other players playing orcs and undead. They are the monsters. If you are playing an Orc, then then humans and elves are the monsters. You level up as a monster (in theory.) Of course it really doesn't feel like that to most players, the potential there for player generated content is enourmous. Many other games in the same vein possess this potential, such as Warhammer, and LotR as mentioned in the OP.
Horizons was supposed to be such a game with multiple factions consisting of exotic races such as demons, vampires, and giants. All with thier factional counterpart. I believe there were even some neutral races that were not inherently "good" nor "evil." Ever since I first heard about that game I have envisioned what MMORPGs could be. I'm not willing to point fingers as to why it has not happened, but I still have hope that the communities in MMORPGs can (again) become as good or better than those who participate in LARP.
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