FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Disappearing Players

Just as players can appear at any time, they can log off at any time, or lose their connection to the game for technical reasons. If possible, your game should deal with this neatly and with minimal disruption to other players. In many games, such as racing games, players compete against one another in a free-for-all. If one player disappears, it doesn't make that much difference—his car vanishes from the track, and that's all. In effect, the player forfeits the race and the others continue. On the other hand, if the game requires players to work in teams, the disappear­ance of one player could put his team at a serious disadvantage. In games that

require a fixed number of participants, your only options are to give the person a chance to reconnect, assuming the disappearance was a mistake, to include an AI element that can take over for the missing player, or to shut down the game.

Tournaments require special consideration. If players compete to get the best win - loss ratio, one might deliberately choose to log out rather than lose the game— which can deny the other person victory. Should the vanishing player be forced to forfeit? What if the disconnection was an accident, caused by a bad line? Unfortunately, there's no sure way to tell if it was.

You may find that one of the following suggestions solves the problem of vanishing players for your game:

■ The vanishing player forfeits the game. This solution may unfairly penalize players who are disconnected by accident. It's only a good solution if the network connections are extremely reliable, such as a local area network. If the players run the risk of being disconnected accidentally and you are offering something valu­able to the winner (such as a cash prize in a tournament), then you should not require vanishing players to forfeit the game. Online gambling games do not require the player to forfeit; they implement mechanisms for allowing a player to restart a game in the event of a disconnection.

■ Institute a penalty for disconnections that is less severe than forfeiture. If a

player disconnects in the middle of combat during an EverQuest session, the avatar remains in the game for a minute, taking additional damage. Unfortunately, the avatar doesn't fight very well by itself. On the MSN network, players who get dis­connected once have 10 minutes to reconnect and resume the game; if they fail to do so, they forfeit or, in some games, an artificial player managed by the server takes over for them. If they get disconnected twice, they forfeit automatically. In many games, the game tries to reconnect to the player for a limited amount of time. In a turn-based game, such as poker, this has a minimal impact on the other players who have to wait for their turn anyway. Ultimately, the player is assumed to be away from his computer, and play continues without him until he reconnects.

■ Award victory to whomever is ahead in the game at the time of the discon­nection. This solution seems fair but means that the moment someone goes ahead, she can disconnect to deny her opponent a chance to catch up. Again, you should consider this only in circumstances in which it is difficult or impossible to discon­nect intentionally.

■ Record it as a tie. While this solution might motivate a losing player to discon­nect intentionally, it still makes a fairly neutral solution.

■ Record it as a "disconnected game." You then have to decide exactly what this means in the context of a tournament. If other players can view the records, they can tell when someone racks up a suspiciously high number of disconnections and avoid playing with that person. Or the server can determine that a player is being disconnected too often and prevent him from playing for a period of time.

■ Abandon the game entirely. This is the fairest solution in the case of accidental disconnections, but it is unfair to whomever is leading if the player who is behind pulls the plug.

■ Use referees. The World Cyber Games, a large gaming tournament, keeps a log file during play, and in the event of disconnection, a referee can examine the file to adjudicate victory. If the players agree, they can also restart the match. This requires a human referee to be available, however, which adds to the operating costs.

There's no one right answer to this problem; it depends too much on the nature of the individual game. It's up to you as the designer to think about the problem and try to decide what's fair.