In other threads I've briefly described the idea of user created content, and the bounties system.
Over the last year, the following plan has evolved. i can certainly evolve further - comments please!
What's the problem?
PTerry has a strong prohibition against licencees "writing Discworld". It's fine for fans (though he refuses to read fanfiction because of the way it would restrict his options), but oe of the things that licensees and other people who're making money out of Discworld aren't allowed to do at all is to write Discworld. To create Discworldian things by making bits up. It's just not permitted. Never, nohow, no way, no. It's OK for them to use fan-created stuff, though, so long as it's clearly marked as such.
Bit of a bugger for a DW MMO. That means that the MMO will most likely only be able to put the stuff from the books into the right places, put the existing characters there, and put their existing words in their mouths. Stuff that's already in the books.
That's a big problem. See, any game that has only "static" content is not very "sticky" - people won't stick at it once they've finished it: they'll go looking for other games.
Anyway, as an Indie, I just couldn't afford to employ enough people to generate enough content to keep people interested.
So whats the solution?
What is allowed to happen is fan created content. This is how Discworld MUD has survived and thrived for more than 16 years without a license. It's "fanstuff". It's allowed. So my "solution" to static content is to close my eyes and chant "player created content" over and over again until I believe it.
Discworld has a lot of stuff about belief, and bubbles of reality, and stuff called narrativium which is an elemental force that means that stuff turns out the way you expect. If you are a nice old lady living in a gingerbread house, you can guarantee that you will end up being baked alive by scheming brats, kinda thing.
So, I proposed player-based reality patches. Players could create mods ("tales"), just like with Oblivion and other popular games, except that they can be added ingame without restarting. Everything from quests and characters to AI and meshes will need to be player-programmable. After being checked over by admins for obvious flaws, they'd be stored ingame and could be downloaded and turned on or off. You would download them by taking a book containing the tale out of a library or bookshop (all bookshops would contain all tales: it's L-space). Tales could be something as simpler as a nicer skin for gold coins, or as complex as a huge branching storyarc. You could turn on or off any tale, but only in the library. Once you left that library, your reality would not be the same as others'.
This is also a nice get-out for lag-based player desynchs: players' realities don't have to be identical to eachother's, since everyone expects to see something slightly different. I don't want to ever have to use that excuse, but it's there.
How does voting work?
If enough players have tried the "prettier coins" story, and enough of them rate it highly, and enough are still using it, and few enough have complained about it, then after a check by admins, it becomes the default reality and all coin textures in the land become nicer.
Voting tends to scale very well (hence democracy and hotornot). It's very easy to count stuff in order to establish a consensus.
The measure of notability will change over time, dynamically, though. Initially, anything that gets a single player lodging a complaint about it would be worth admin time to check it out, for example. Later, it would need at least two complaints to be notable.
Making the voting opaque allows us to make unpopular moves secretly if we must: introducing unpopular modules that are required for game balance, etc, and pretending they were voted in by mysterious crazy people. Personally, I'd rather make all adminstuff transparent though: place a reason for rejection by each rejected item, and a reason for insertion of all unpopular items, along with an appeals process.
Thoughts
While I can create the world, and I can place all the characters and places from the books in, I cannot, in any official category, decree any quests or other quirks of reality. I could submit bits myself as a fan: if, as a fan, I suggest a quest to the other fans, by putting it up as a downloadable "tale", that's fine - the decision to include it is still a fan-community decision, and not made by me. And so it becomes fanstuff. But if I employ people to do that, well that's clearly business, and probably over the line.
Such a system would be a nightmare to produce, a nightmare cubed to code serverside since you'd have to track multiple different realities, and there are clearly more ways to game that system than there are corpses in the Ankh. I am going to have to step in any number of times and decree stuff against the general consensus. People will be furious and hate me and quit.
But I can see no other way I could create enough content to people an MMO, let alone have any kind of ongoing arc, without some system of allowing user-created content.
I am hoping and praying that this will be OK for people. Discworld MUD has grown over the years using entirely player-generated content. So have other text MUDs. I just need really worldclass tools.
It's a good thing I love writing tools.
If we remove static content, what do players do all day long?
To begin with though, there will be no dynamic content. Furcadia (and so far as I can tell, Second Life) so not contain grinding, quests or NPCs. It's all about dynamically making the content - which becomes a static backdrop to dynamic social interaction. If there are *ingame tools* to build and change and program the world, then that will be a huuuge plus.
As well as just sitting around chatting, and building areas together, people RP together, create guilds for the management of their taverns or whatever, and focus on the whole character interaction and player politics thing.
How can we implement dynamic content in mass quantities?
It totally has to be player generated. But does it have to be quests? Who makes quests in Second Life? People do make scripted quest areas in Furcadia: often quite labyrinthine. But the majority just make "places" and "things" rather than "events". Then they provide the events in person.
Dynamic generation of content doesn't normally deserve the name. Random encounters and such. Even if random encounters can include random Fed-Ex quests and such, they're still pretty static. You can't realistically generate story without it getting silly: "Help, my [noun] has been [verbed] by [nouns]! Please kind [title], I need a [complimentary player description] to go to [location] and [deliver $item to/steal $item from/kill/] [NPC/Mob]."
People would play that: but they would quickly realise that this had no ongoing effect on their world. Even if you slipped in little things like shopkeepers occasionally recognising them as "you're the [complimentary player description] who helped [NPC] with the [nouns]! Here, just this once I'll give you 10% off!" people would realise that these are "static randoms" and had no real effect on the world.
How do you make sure people create the right stuff? Or any stuff?
My idea to encourage content - and the right kind of content - is to have bounties. We could set a bounty for, say, a better "mail delivery coach" animated mesh. Players, if they want to see the content, can pledge ingame currency towards existing bounties, or set their own. Need a new inn mesh? Put a bounty on it! Need a new quest? Bounty! Players can change their pledges at any time until the item gets uploaded (and it will automatically reduce if they no longer have enough money). Once the item is uploaded, the money is removed from the pledger's account and placed in escrow. If the content gets voted in, the bounty gets paid. If it gets downvoted, the pledged money gets returned to the pledgers.
It is possible that people could announce a forthcoming product and solicit bounties for that product, saying "I'll release it if the bounty goes over X amount".
It is possible we could eventually make these bounties involve real money as well, and involve products outside the game.
Incidentally, this is a form of the Street Performer Protocol, and is one of the systems that could eventually replace copyright altogether throughout the world. It's nice to be on the cutting edge...
