Events Outside The Game's Context

[Llava]

So let's say you develop for or even own a MMOG that runs events every so often.

Someone has an idea for the next event, taking a page from hack.sign or .hack or whatever it's called.

You will install an artificial player in your community and give them an ability that is quite powerful, and quite flashy, and quite unavailable to anyone else currently playing the game.  This "player" will be created by your story developers, his or her personality fleshed out, and this new ability will have custom art created for it.  In the case of more servers or a DAoC-style realm split, you would have one per realm per server.  You will have existing employees or new employees play this "player's" character and act as this imaginary player for a few hours each day.  They will interact with the community and generally have the personality of an average player, except for one quirk (let's say, they never refer to life outside the game- they will talk about the game and things related directly to the game, but nothing outside of that) and their unique ability.

Players will inevitably create a forum thread accusing these players of hacking.  Your company's response to this is, "We have investigated this issue and determined that no hacking or other violation of the EULA has occurred."

These imaginary players stay within their communities for two to four weeks.

Would you do this, given the opportunity?  Where would you take it from there (do the players vanish, do they become NPCs, do their actions unlock new quests)?  Would you eventually unlock these abilities (though in a less game-breaking version) to the general community?

More importantly- upon learning it was all an event, that these players were never real, how do you suspect your player base would react?  Anger?  Amusement?  Do they decide they don't trust you anymore and quit?  Did they figure it out beforehand or, because you've never done anything like this before, did the thought even cross their minds?

Do you continue to perform events that are self-aware (i.e. events that don't take place within the context of the MMOG's story, but rather acknowledge that they take place in a MMOG)?

Does adding real life drama and confusion to your game enhance it or ruin it?  By putting hoax conspiracies and intrigues in the game, by blurring the line between reality and the game, are you piercing a barrier that's better left alone or are you adding the sense of drama and importance at which so many MMOGs have unsuccessfully grasped?

Switch it around, you're a player and this happens.  What then?

[Pococurante]

It's a provocative idea and was tried at least once.

[Xilren's Twin]

Interesting concept, sorta like viral marketing inside a game.  But the question du jour would be how on earth would even 1 player get noticed in the sea of closed clique communities that is your typical mmorpg these days?  Having 1 player out of a server pop of 3000 get noticed, even with flaming monkeys shooting out of their butt, is non trivial.  You could try to approach some the larger guilds to get notice and hopefully acceptance, but considering the majority of guild management and communication takes place external to the game itself would make that not work with your proposed hook.

Maybe approaching it from the standpoint of a approaching a random group in game with whats clearly an NPC character, only one that obviously acts differently than a typical one, could get some rumors flowing.  Say approach a group as large white wolf and the follow and assist them in battle for a while.  No communication other than by emotes, but when it's time to go, do flashy spell effect, transform into a hooded figure and then teleport away, perhaps leaving a trinket or two behind.  Do this in say maybe one zone for some period of days, then move on and see if you can locate people you've seen before for a repeat visit if you want to lead a story line.  

Something different to get people talking.

That being said, as much as I like the idea, it's really only effective with smaller communities else the ROI just isn't large enough to justify paying the actor to do it.

Xilren

[Llava]

Random grouping would have to be the key, and it'd take a few days at least before the player was even noticed undoubtedly.

But you join a group and go into a mission in, let's say, CoH.  Someone in there summons, to use your example, a giant white wolf that goes apeshit and rips up an entire group of enemies, and they do it right in front of the rest of the group.  Next time he does it, SOMEONE is going to take a screenshot.  And this player with this weird ability keeps joining groups, and more people see it, more screenshots collected.  Eventually someone on the forum will start a thread and say, "What the hell was that?"  Someone might post a screenshot.  Failing that, you could create "someone" to create this thread and post a screenshot.  Wouldn't take much to make a new board name.  A developer posts in the thread saying something like "Something very strange is going on here..."  Because of the Developer's Digest, a lot of people see the post and, therefore, the screenshot.  And from there, it grows.  And that's one person in the entire MMOG of CoH, not even one per server.

It requires very careful orchestration of events, but something like this, I think, would gather attention.  If not, you can manufacture that attention and let it snowball.

[Roac]

I don't think that it would have much impact.  Even for players who notice, they wouldn't get what the point was - and from the way you described it, I'm not sure I see what the point is either (other than to watch for reactions).  The question that the players who witness this player will have on their mind is, "so what can I DO with this?" So you see a guy with a neat ability - so what?  What can it do aside from confuse?

If I had to guess anyway, that would be the reaction.  Now if you tweaked it just a bit to give hints as to what they should do or otherwise gave them something to interract with, they would probably enjoy it.

[Hoax]

You have to watch the show he's getting this from to see the genius of the idea, think about it.  Your basically creating an interesting personality within the game that acts more or less like a regular player.  PC's are constantly following GM characters around, asking them dumb questions, posing for ss's ect    People eat that shit up.

[schild]

I'll say this simply.

Ever since I started playing MMOGs, I've continually noticed that games are ruined by trying to make them fair. Life isn't fair and a virtual world shouldn't be either.

Obviously, this is why I found .hack//sign's premise brilliant.

[Llava]

Roac does have a point:
Why WOULD you bother with all this?

I'll outline a couple points, and I'm just going completely on conjecture here so keep that in mind:

1)  To introduce a new set of powers.  As I said originally, maybe players could unlock a less powerful version of these abilities for themselves?

2)  As a prelude to a new storyline, maybe for an expansion or just a new set of quests.  This would be a good way to hype your own upcoming product, much like Halo has done, and maybe even avoid the usual fustercluck that occurs when devs resort to making the new stuff better than the old stuff in a feeble attempt to attract people to it.

3)  To give the game a sense of gravity and importance.  Doing something like this essentially brings the game outside of the boundaries of its world and into reality, even if only a little bit.  Doing something like that can make players feel all that more attached and invested in the game.  To use the above example of Majestic: what if you suddenly got a cryptic email from a well-known NPC in your chosen MMOG, and it contained a clue about something in game, and when you went to check it out the email was actually correct, but for some reason you're one out of maybe a hundred people who got this email.  What if you received another email from the same source, and this had a cryptic warning about some sort of impending disaster in the game world... I don't know about you, but I'd start spreading the word (read: hype) and could foresee a lot of people getting pretty psyched.


I should point out that what I'm talking about in my first post is just an example- I'm really asking if you all think players would actually prefer a self-aware game, one that operates both within its own context and outside of it, within its own boundaries and outside in ways people didn't expect when they bought the game.  Or would it be too much for most people?  Too creepy for some?  Too cerebral for others?  Too involved for the rest?

Me, personally, I think it'd kick ass.  But then, I'm very much looking for that sense of intrigue that has just faded out of games for me over the years.  Maybe, in the end, it wouldn't be healthy.  After all, people already take games too far as it is.

[lamaros]

As has been said already there are many reasons not to do it with a PC but instead with a NPC. Making it a player character doesn't make it more able to realise the goals you have in mind, and has a list of problems to go with it.

Achaea/Imperian/Etc (yes...) does stuff like this pretty regulary; where they have these types of roles played out by the game Gods or new NPCs intorduced specificly for the event. For example one time there was this NPC found wandering in town all of a sudden, players noticed this and watched the new NPC. A few days leter he "came to life" and provoked some storyline movement and unlocked a new area.

This worked quite well in the above MUDs, people would get involved, people would have fun, it would affect the game world in some way, no one would feel like it was "unfair", and it gave the world a little colour.

The MUDs also had a system where the players could act out role playing world events with the help of the game Gods too. You'd submit your event idea and they'd overview it, and if they went ahead with it you'd act the event out in the game world with the help of a GM. I did this myself and had a NPC character made and played out by a GM to further my characters role playing. It worked wonderfuly, giving some scope to interact with the world outside the norm (only through the scripting of the event, I was limited to playing my character and using the same skills as always), as well as bringing in a whole group of other players who got caught up in the 'action'.

(The event in question was the trial of my characters uncle. First I stole all this money from a city, using existing game mechanics, on the basis that I was being mind controled by my uncle. The uncle, a NPC character, was found and brought to trial in a neutral city. All these people came to watch while me, the NPC, and the players of the city leadership carried out the tiral. Me and the Gm controling the NPC talked OOC about where to take the event while acting it out. In the end I got the uncle to escape into the countryside. It was great to see all the other players offering to chase him down and talking about the event for the next few days. I know it made the game more exciting for them as I know how I had felt when interacting with a NPC in a game event a little earlier that month.)

Server populations/event sizes/event frequency are things you want to keep in mind too, because if there's the effort expended to make these things happen you dont want it to only mean something to a small part of your playerbase.

[AOFanboi]

The "Favor of the Gods" meta-game between America, Europe and Korea in Guild Wars is also something of a "game outside the game yet inside".

[ajax34i]

So, uh, the MMOG version of Punk'd?

[WindupAtheist]

To use the above example of Majestic: what if you suddenly got a cryptic email from a well-known NPC in your chosen MMOG, and it contained a clue about something in game

I'd think it was a mediocre marketing/story tie-in, ala Majestic, which by all accounts sucked.

[Kail]

Roac does have a point:
Why WOULD you bother with all this?

Personally, I think it would be a mistake for most games.  .Hack wasn't a fantasy roleplaying game, it was a game about a kid playing a (very, very bad) fantasy roleplaying game.  If you put in all these meta-game elements, then you're breaking whatever immersion you tried to put in to the world originally.  Every time you bring up this event, you're going to be taking all the work you've done on setting and backstory and chucking it out the window.  Just about every MMORPG has a pretty fair amount of effort put into the feel of the "game world," in the form of cinematics (like Guild Wars, Final Fantasy, I think), in-game plot lines (City of Heroes, among many others), cohesive settings, or even prequels (like Everquest 2, Asherons Call 2, World of Warcraft).  Most designers would feel a bit leery about junking all of that.

If you look at .Hack, it's pretty obvious that it has absolutely none of that, at all.  The setting of "The World" is almost totally blank; there is no "In the year 1136 the great King Azzewhoop rode forth" backstory.  There is also very little to do in the game that's intrinsic to this world, either; everything the players do is centred around the meta-plot (the character trapped in the game or trying to wake up his friend or deal with his sister), and without those elements (which are beyond the scope of the designer to implement, unless you want to hire thugs to go around the country kidnapping players friends or something), there is jack shit to do in the game.  The World is a series of tiny, pointless villages with portals to randomly generated fields; what the hell these villages are, who built them, why some of them are floating in the sky while others are built on mountaintops, this stuff is never explained.  I can see that some players might not really think that having a backstory affects the game that much (especially with all the l33t d00dz running around), but regardless, most companies have invested a significant amount of time into it, and are going to be reluctant to throw it out just for one event.  Now, granted, you could design a game from the ground up to run this kind of event, but during the times that the event is not running (and for any player who's not participating in the event) the world is going to seem really dry.

On the other hand, I've always thought that the concept behind .Hack was one of it's strongest points.  The idea that "Hey, all those hours I wasted killing bears in Darkshore actually MEAN something kind of important to real life" is something that I think appeals to a lot of MMORPG players (certainly it's something that I dream about; that one day, my M4D ST34LTH skillz will actually mean something outside of Tribes 2).  Problem is, when it comes out that it's just an event, that feeling is gone (and unless it's really, really well managed, it's likely to be found out before the event is even finished), and some players might react very negatively to loosing that.

(edit: spelling)

[Llava]

I don't think you'd necessarily have to ditch your world's story/immersion to do something like this.

Let's take CoH for example- there are already multiple dimensions.  Why couldn't their exploits carry over into a dimension that lacks magic, or aliens, or the most advanced technology?  Why couldn't they enter our dimension?  Hell, why WOULDN'T a villain enter our dimension and become the single most powerful creature here?

Though, in all fairness, CoH is probably the MMOG most likely to get away with an explanation like that.

[Xilren's Twin]

You know after some noodling on this, I did come up with a method to utilize something like you are describing that could be neat.  You mentioned introducing a new set of powers or quests, i think you could run with that into new areas.

Granted this specifics of it would depend alot of your games setting and archictecture, but having either rigged pc's or npc's be able to lead small groups of players to a hidden portal/gate/cave entrace to a new area could be a very cool experience for those lucky ones.  We've kind of become accustomed to every new zones/spell/mob etc being annouced in the patch notes and suddenly bam!, there it is.  Doesn't have to be that way.  Perhaps follow this random players get access via said pc/ncpc for a play session, then later one you can make the entrance to the new area a permanent part of the landscape in a known area.  Almost like a sneak preview.

Course,this runs counter to the nothing is hidden/unknown for long on the internet and makes things like external beta testing of said new areas problematic, but if you were looking to add some unique play experiences people would remember, thats one way you could approach it.

(Personally, i'd love to see a setting which makes dimension crossing a common place thing where each "dimension" can have it's own rules, themese and differences. A multiverse approach to a game.  If you already have portals between dimenons, dropping in some random access points to a new one should be easy to do...)

Xilren 

[HaemishM]

Tabula Rasa was supposed to be trying the multiverse idea. Not so sure how much of that remains, however.

As for using paid event people as undercover PC's, I think Shadowbane tried that with little success. The lack of success could be tied to the absolutely shitty game engine. But I don't think that hiring event coordinator people is the way to go. It's expensive, first off. If your game is not meant to be modular, to be changed on the fly (such as Guild Wars is), then it's a lot of effort for nothing. You won't get nearly enough players to see it, and those that do not get to experience it but do hear about it will feel slighted. Those who don't hear about it, i.e. the vast majority of players, won't give a shit because it never touches them. Plus, the event person has to have the ability to change the world on the fly, which none of the game engines allow.

However, instancing CAN use this idea and run with it, because you can reuse the same type of thing for many players. Just have an NPC that approaches players, pulls them into an instance, and run with it. You could randomly email the players in-game with rumors of something or other. They could choose to follow the NPC or not. The NPC takes them on an event/story that changes something in the world.

Oddly, the best event teams at introducing new stuff were from EQ1 and AC1. EQ1's events suffered from the "spawn thousands of higher-level mobs and drop them in a newbie zone" syndrome, and AC1's didn't allow players to change the script.

[Kail]

I don't think you'd necessarily have to ditch your world's story/immersion to do something like this.

See, to me, that sounds like the whole point.  No, you don't have to ditch the story, but if you're going to try the whole "game about a game" idea, the in-game story becomes entirely superfluous (while the "outside" of the game story becomes the focus).  That was what I was trying to say about .Hack; not that it's some mistake of the writers of .Hack that the game within the game ("The World") has no story, I was trying to say that it really doesn't need one.  If you're going to try to convince players that there's "Something very strange" going on here, then that strange thing becomes the "interesting" point of the game, and if that "strange thing" is outside the scope of your game, then most of  what's inside the game (especially story elements) is completely unrelated to it, and therefore uninteresting.  No, it doesn't hurt to have a backstory, but nobody will pay attention to it if something like this is going on, so the question becomes "Why did we pay X amount of money for people to write a story/cinematics/whatever that we're going to make completely uninteresting."

I'm not sure I see where you're going with the CoH example, though, so maybe I'm just over-fixating on the few elements of this idea that I think I can grasp.

[Llava]

I'll be a bit more clear with my example:

Again, City of Heroes has set the precedent that there are multiple realities and ways to reach those realities.

Why, then, could they not reach our own reality?  For example, let's say that there's suddenly a big riot among the Freakshow, the cyberpunk anarchists that litter the streets of Paragon.  Investigating heroes learn that there's an unheaval in their higher ranks, because their leader, Dreck, has disappeared.  You could maybe even make a task force for this.

Then, after the community has time to learn that Dreck is gone seemingly from the face of the Earth, the City of Heroes website gets hacked for, let's say, a day.  When things return to normal, developers start posting weird things.  The Freakshow in the game start appearing in areas they normally can't be found, and they seem to be taking over the city.

What if Dreck found his way to this world, and found out about the City of Heroes game and how it reflects his reality?  What if he decided to test a theory- that altering the state of this game would affect his reality?

Of course, the question then becomes- how do players stop him?  A new task force that actually takes place within the offices of Cryptic Studios and involves saving Jack Emmert and Co. as Dreck's hostages?  Does the problem fix itself outside of player view, maybe by the Freedom Phalanx coming to our world?  Course, the first option would be more fun.

So in the City of Heroes universe/multiverse/whatever, you could actually maintain the story of the game and have it step into reality for a while.  My example isn't the most subtle or intriguing, of course, because I just came up with it on the fly, but there are any number of insidious villains who could creep into our reality and have the means and will to screw with the world as we know it.  It's just a matter of making it look real-ish, while not so real that people start hurling themselves off buildings or welcoming our new insect overlords and volunteering their services as charismatic leaders to supervise the slaves that will toil in subterrenean sugar mines.

[Kail]

What if Dreck found his way to this world, and found out about the City of Heroes game and how it reflects his reality?  What if he decided to test a theory- that altering the state of this game would affect his reality?

Aaah, <light_bulb := on> I get it now.  I think I was getting confused.  According to the way I was thinking about this, this example doesn't leave the "game world."  Nobody, on reading "Apparently, one of our video game characters has escaped from the game world into the real world" is going to believe that it's something real, so it wouldn't really take anything away from the story.  So, yeah, I think that could be an interesting gimmick.  Some games, like Matrix Online, are practically screaming for something like this.

I thought you were talking about something where the players are tricked into believing that there's something that's actually real (like, in the real world, I mean) going on.  Going with your City of Heroes example, you'd probably want something very believable (some overzealous code monkey accidentally writes an AI routine for this "Dreck" character that... I dunno... locks out server/GM commands or something.. obviously, you'd need something better put together than this) that has real life-ramifications (probably limited to the game itself, to make it believable, but still real consequences, like the game server permanently crashing or something), but that the players can somehow "fight" in-game.  That, I think, you wouldn't be able to do without trivializing your game story, because it wouldn't be "Dreck" per se that was the problem, it would be the real world element, the specific code or whatever other abberant actor is causing the problems. All the backstory of the game world (like who the character of Dreck is) would be ignored as people tried to deal with the problem directly.  Everybody would be worried about fighting the AI (the "real" conflict) while nobody would give a rat's ass about any other ("fictional") aspect of the game.  You could literally turn an entire zone upside down with no in-game reason, and people wouldn't bat an eye, except to think of how it could possibly be related to the AI.

So, yeah, that's what I was talking about, anyway.  Just so that I don't look completely insane.

[WindupAtheist]

Am I the only one who would look at "OMG OUR AI HAXED THE GAME! ONLY YOU PLAYERS CAN STOP HIM!" and respond "Quit wasting my time, fags.  More real content plzthx."

[Kail]

Am I the only one who would look at "OMG OUR AI HAXED THE GAME! ONLY YOU PLAYERS CAN STOP HIM!" and respond "Quit wasting my time, fags.  More real content plzthx."

Yeah, that's why you'd have to make it something believable.  If the players believe it's real, it could be an exciting thing for them (at least, temporarily).  If they don't believe it's real, it's yet another marketing gimmick.  Making it believable would be extremely difficult on it's own; trying to make it believable within the context of the (obviously fictoinal) game setting would be just about impossible.

(edit: spelling again...)

[WindupAtheist]

Doing this both believably and in a way that's going to reach a proportion of the playerbase large enough to justify the trouble is, yeah, pretty much an impossibly tall order.  You might fool the idjits, but those with half a brain will see through it and say so.  And you can only do it once, after that the players are aware of the depths of your gimmickry.

[Llava]

And here I thought events were content.

When the Rikti invaded Paragon at the end of beta, people were pretty pleased.  When the Rularuu did the same a few months after release, people had fun.  When it was Halloween and suddenly there was a giant pumpkin monster rampaging through each of the zones in CoH and clicking on doors either gave you a "treat" (an inspiration or temporary power) or a "trick" (werewolves, vampires, ghosts, zombies, or witches would pop out and attack you) people had an absolute blast.

Hell, when they changed all the water to slippery ice for the winter event, people loved it.

I have a hard time seeing why something like this would receive anything less than a positive reaction.

[WindupAtheist]

Patching in holiday event junk is a far cry from pseudo-Majestic shenanigans.