FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Persistent World Economies
If the players in a persistent world can collect and trade things of value, then the world includes an economy. Chapter 18, "Construction and Management Simulations," discussed economies in some detail. Economies are much easier to design and tune in a single-player game than they are in a persistent world. You can control the actions of a single person fairly strictly; in a persistent world, thousands of people interact within your game in ways that you might not have anticipated.
The original Ultima Online had a completely self-contained, closed economy with a fixed number of resources flowing around and around. You could mine iron ore, smelt it into iron, and forge the iron into weapons. Using the weapons would cause them to deteriorate, and when worn, they would return to the pool of raw iron ore available for mining. This last step wasn't strictly realistic, but it did close the loop.
The designers, however, didn't anticipate that players would hoard objects without using them. Because unused objects didn't go back into the pool, the iron ore quickly ran out, and as resources dwindled, inflation ran rampant. The players
with hoards of iron had cornered the market and could charge extortionate fees for iron objects. Eventually, Ultima Online's proprietor could do nothing but adopt an open economy in which servers add new resources at intervals. One of Ultima Online's designers, Zack Simpson, discussed this at the 2000 Game Developers' Conference in a very informative lecture called "The In-Game Economics of Ultima Online" (Simpson, 2000).
SECRETS TO SUCCESSFUL PERSISTENT WORLDS
Here are the secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, persistent world of wide appeal:
• Have multiple paths of advancement (individual features are nice, but setting them up as growth paths is better).
• Make it easy to switch between paths of advancement (ideally, without having to start over).
• Make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant (having 600 meaningless milestones doesn't help).
• Ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones (try to make your ladder not feel finite).
Ownership is key: You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay—it is a “barrier to departure.” Social bonds are not enough because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, and feel a sense of responsibility for something that cannot be removed from the game —then you have ownership.
ч__________________________________________________________________________ -
Multiplayer games are harder to design than single-player ones, online games are harder still, and persistent worlds are the hardest of all. It's a bit like the difference between cooking for yourself and planning a dinner party. When you're cooking for yourself, you decide what you want, make it, and eat it. When you're planning a dinner party, you have to take into account more variables: who likes what food, who gets along with whom, and what entertainment should you offer in addition to the food. A dinner party requires more work ahead of time—but it's a lot more fun than eating by yourself, too. The flexibility and power of online gaming enables you to create entertainment experiences that you simply can't produce in other forms.
