By Jim Rossignol on August 27th, 2009 at 10:35 am.
As academic projects go, Emergence is a corker: a science fiction MMO of the 22nd century, based on global diplomacy on the wake of robot apocalypse. It’s an idea being developed by a small team of students and professors at Duke University NC, in the wake of a conference about the effects new media might have on politics and diplomacy in the 21st century. Having been ravaged by robots it’s time to rebuild the Earth, and you’ll do so via game mechanisms which “allow players to negotiate and enter into contractually binding agreements, alliances, and associations.” While they’re not quite on the ball by claiming that it will be “the first massively multiplayer online game to encourage cooperation and diplomacy over violence,” the principles are sound, and it’ll be fun to see if the small academic team can pull it off. You can read about their plans via a blog post here, or watch their trailer below. I don’t know if this project will get beyond the conceptual stages, but I hope it does.
Couldn’t make it past the I, Robot trailer.
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Diplomacy is only meaningful in a world where other methods have merits. If make friends with everyone win is the right way broking deals won’t be so meaningful. Consider a game of defcon where you “win” by having your people not killed. And then draw it out, and the escalation of the defcon is a response to real world conflict. Large groups effect the defcon more, but they also have more to lose. So small states can bicker while the larger states try and hold together stability, all the while amassing nukes, missile defence bases and bunkers. But, unlike defcon a nuclear exchange is not inevitable.
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“While they’re not quite on the ball by claiming that it will be “the first massively multiplayer online game to encourage cooperation and diplomacy over violence,””
Thinking of A Tale in the Desert?
Shame Seed sucked.
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I thought this would be an article about SiN Emergence.
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Well, they did say the focus wasn’t violence, not that there was no combat/violence at all. While ATITD, Seed, and The Sims Online (which they mention themselves on their site) have no combat whatsoever, they instead said:
Is it new? Might be. There are old “MMOs”, probably lots of them, that have had combat as a secondary thing but usually as a sort of unnecessary deathmatch game inside a social world as an additional social activity, instead of a secondary element that acts as a part of the core game premise. In an almost-nearly way, there’s NationStates which might count but I don’t think it either counts as an MMO, nor a game where war is a core element. My MMO history isn’t that great though.
Will it work? Probably not. Heliocentric pretty much touched on it – can’t have peace without war, can’t have peace with war. It’s an interesting direction though, sounds sort of like a reverse Eve Online.
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I guess the focus is really that there are in-game mechanics for diplomacy and contractual agreement. Much of Eve’s politicking was done out of game, or in chat, at least, without formal constraint.
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Formal constraints are fine. As long as things like tiny “terrorists” states can still bully large economic powers. Just like they do in real life. Also, you’ll need to allow treachery, but punish it in a meta way, because as you know from eve. Mmo players are vicious bastards.
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That has to be one of the worst video’s ever.
Boring voice over, meh backstory. Will not be following this one.
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Finally something different…
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Joinn: bear in mind that these are a handful of university types, not game developers.
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Intrigued by this aim from their own article: “the gameplay advances the stages of the story as soon as players collectively complete certain objectives”. I will be interested to see if they can achieve this and if it will have a profound effect on the experience of those playing the game. A lot of work to do before they get that far, though.
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Jim:
Well, I was a bit harsh (posted before first coffee & cigarette combo of the day) but I still think the backstory feels like a generic apocalypse scenario.
Will give them time to flesh it out though before I write it off completely o_O
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Well I think the point of the game is to try out these different mechanics, and it will be interesting for that.
I wouldn’t expect an amazing story unless they can rope someone in from the literature department.
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And the first thing I see are Chris Cunningham robots. Which isn’t a bad thing at all…
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Since I am playing eR (a game that is much like this, but withouth sci-fi) I am looking forward for the result.
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This. Coincidentally, this is related to the best defense of capitalism — that success can only exist if failure is an option. I don’t see what the appeal is in this type of game. Can you have diplomacy without the possibility of violence or uncooperative behavior? Aren’t diplomacy and discord dependent on each other?
Warning: below here is random contemplative nonsense!
I’m not one to decry the violence of modern games. Mankind is a forward-thinking combative creature at heart. We’re not necessarily bellicose, but whenever we make decisions that influence social groups we always create conflicts of interest, and we naturally tend to identify with local and personal interests much more strongly than with those of outsiders. Whether these conflicts of interest lead to trivial misunderstandings or war is of no consequence regards storytelling — surely the peculiarities of the circumstances are what matter! If a story is good and happens to involve violence, fine. If it’s good and doesn’t, fine. I don’t give two shits either way.
I do have reservations as to whether a totally non-violent diplomatic game would be fun, or even possible to execute realistically. As has been said, diplomacy is only interesting and necessary if failure — that is to say, war or sanctions or whatever — is an option. Is economic exploitation of other peoples an option in this game? Do you get to decide how to tax your own populace? What if you do, and they decide they don’t like you anymore? Will they just come to your seat of power and tell you very gently, “I don’t much like your governance, sir,”?
As a rule, I get pretty disgusted whenever I hear somebody say “violence is bad”. This is pure BS — if for example you have no other option but violence and your life is on the line, then violence is good! Surely violence isn’t something that should be inflicted regularly on people, but it’s not intrinsically bad. There are no absolute truths in this world — anybody who claims otherwise is selling you something!
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this is related to the best defense of capitalism — that success can only exist if failure is an option.
–Jambe
Horseshit ftw. Really, this doesn’t apply to the real world, though it is effective in games. Non-capitalist enterprises and individuals are as vulnerable to failure and being left behind as any. It’s just that other systems consider allowing certain depths of failure to be inhumane. But then again, I should expect this kind of libertarian clap trap in the wake of the Ayn Rand game (not that it wasn’t interesting).
One could argue that this has meaning in a videogame, but it’s still arbitrary: MMOs have gone from games where you lost levels and all your items when you died to having minimal consequences that, while frustrating, are not desperate setbacks. And one cannot really argue that singleplayer games aren’t moving in this direction as well, in particular the single player experience is increasingly forgiving. Do these experience now lack meaning? Or is it just that the upper crust of ability insists of having a negative measure of those below them in order to stroke their already over-large egos? In the end as world with only positive scores is no less competitive, and there is still a bottom. No need to be a dick about it and insist on having ‘failure.’
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* how exactly is that horseshit?
* what Rand game are you referring to?
* the only person being a dick in this thread is yourself
* I never once insisted on “having ‘failure’”
Being inanimate, “systems” do not “consider” anything. If they did, though, do you really think socialism would be more benevolent or caring than capitalism? Do you think the notion of a centralized agency forcibly redistributing means as a form of charity is fundamentally more humane than the notion of individuals giving of their own accord?
A purely capitalist state would devolve into tyranny very quickly, just as surely as a purely socialist state would (I’d argue that the only purely socialist states possible in light of human nature are de facto tyranny, but that’s a bit removed). Every nation has employed a mixed economy to one degree or another. If you were to pin me down and ask me, though, to which side would I prefer government slant — capitalist or socialist — I’d say the former. Damn-near half my paycheck is pissed away by various governors as-is.
Regards how this applies to games, take EVE for example. Somebody mentioned in an Electronic Wireless Show that the “no safety nets” nature of EVE is arguably its most compelling feature — a great deal of effort goes into getting a ship and kitting it out and you lose it all if you get ganked, so taking it into battle is intrinsically exciting. If you could simply restart in the same ship after a lost fight the game would become very boring very quickly, and that is precisely what was related in the podcast.
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That screenshot looks EXACTLY like the opening scene of Appleseed, except a little brighter.
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“It is time for a new era of collective peacezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”
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This is a work in progress, the video was probably done on the fly as a design proof of concept a while back. This game has been in the works for some time and will be for about a year or so. However it promises to be as good as Eve Online or WoW.
There is not much info out ( dev’s requesting radio silence ) but according to a bit of a showcase event at PolyNYU [[ http://tinyurl.com/name4m ]] the game will run on Unreal Engine 4 on the PC and promises to be a bit of a social networking web app, promising to run on the broweser…
Don’t mark it down just yet, at the sight of social networking. The game also promises PvP and PvE components as well, in the form of bounty hunting players that “break the rules” that the UN aka Global sets and reclaiming parts of the earth…
Bit of game history…
This game started out as a simulation to train humanitarians and government negotiators deved by Virtual Heroes with the concept coming out of Duke (I believe) running on Unreal 3. The new system will incorporate many of the old system’s objectives as to teach negotiation skills but will be more geared towards a gaming MMOFPS or perhaps TPS.
So I would definitely keep an eye on this one but for the long term, beta testing probably won’t begin until at least a year from now.
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