Citizens of Egypt,

Just a short newsletter about a new “social experiment” that we’re about to try. But first, I need to talk to you about “Dunbar’s Number.”
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar hypothesized that there are certain stable sizes that groups of humans tend to naturally form. Depending on the type of group (extended families, cultural lineage groups, tribes), the numbers cluster around 50, 150, and 2500 (upper limit.)
We’re toward the end of our fourth Tale in the Desert (preparations are underway for ATITD V!), but I’ve noticed a pattern in each Tale: Our peak subscriber count has ranged from 1750 to 2500, always about 30 days in, and regardless of the peak, we settle down to a population of around 1100 subscribers (slightly lower this Tale, slightly higher in Tale 2) where we remain for most of the Tale.
Could there be a “Dunbar’s Number” for A Tale in the Desert? If there is – if the game design itself leads to a population of around 1100 subscribers, then growing “the” ATITD community may be the wrong approach – we should try to create a second ATITD community! And if this experiment succeeds, a third and more.
So to test that theory, we’re going to start a second ATITD IV shard, beginning on February 20. I’ll have more details about “Shard Bastet” next week, but if you’ve always wanted to get in on the beginning of a Tale, this is a great opportunity to do just that.
I’d be most interested to hear thoughts on this from those that have been away from ATITD for a while.

On the Nile,
Teppy

The same is true in our gaming genre built on communal interaction.  We might be “IRL” anonymous, but we really aren’t in an MMO.  We are just known by different names.

When I first started playing A Tale in the Desert, there was a big discussion on what names should be allowed in our little Egypt.  We had names with sexual innuendos, 20th century technologies, and even l33t speak (e.g., ]-[@xin8trrr).  The lead developer stepped in and said ‘anything goes.’  His MMO, he explained, was built squarely on the foundation of community.  If a person wanted an unpronounceable or ridiculous name, then that person would have more to overcome when trying to create the necessary social connections.

Things are not so different in a mainstream MMO, such as World of Warcraft of Lord of the Rings Online.  Guilds, players, and sometimes even areas (like the Prancing Pony) gain reputations.  With guild tags flying above our names, all it takes is one rotten apple spouting racial, sexist, or sexual obscenities in a pick-up-group to ruin the reputation of a reputable guild.  Sure the rotten apple might get booted, and the guild leaders might make public, persistent apologies.  But, the damage was done.

I think this is something most of us know.  When looking for a new guild or inviting new members, we are more careful in MMOs because something is immediately at stake. 

The effect compounds itself with the big brotherly punishment of exile.  One drunken tirade against a culture on public chat might cause a player’s entire reputation to vanish as his or her account is banned.  All the time and energy spent in creating a persistent online imago is stripped away because ultimately our games are a privilege.  And, the rules are simple ones we have known since pre-school:  play nice and play fair.

This post so far is pretty negative, but the negatives, in my humble opinion, are a good thing. It leads me to believe that our little gaming sub-culture stands above the uncouth hordes of gamers, if only a little.  It makes me believe that MMOs can be a breeding ground for social tolerance, friendships, and ultimately a real affect on those we game with because our reputations (and accounts) are vulnerably persistent.

–Ravious
this little light of mine

The problem is non-trivial. The seasons change as you cross onto a new map, but few comment on the walk from the perpetual winter of Dun Morogh to the perpetual spring of Loch Modan. You must have noticed at some point, but did you notice when the transition happened?

Some of this is gamer suspension of disbelief: we are used to having everything change when we get to a new level of the game, and moving to a new zone is the MMO equivalent. The game environment also facilitates this the same way it keeps you on the theme park quest path: channelization. How many zones have wide-open borders that you can traverse, rather than walls of impassable mountains with narrow openings?

Those openings can become rather like tunnels for about a draw distance, so that you see big rocks covering the transition point. The transitions to and from Loch Modan really are tunnels, enclosing you so that you cannot see the set being swapped, like taking an elevator in Portal. In other zones, see bridges and rivers serving a similar purpose. You may note this as a problem at the border of Westfall: river and bridges, yes, but it is brief enough for you to see the transition. On the way in, there are quest-givers to distract you, but Duskwood makes it look like the world ends across the river.

Touring through some other games of my acquaintance: City of Heroes does the same thing, complete with loading screens. Asheron’s Call never does, since you can run everywhere from anywhere, and there are large areas over which you can watch the land change. The Lord of the Rings Online™ Volume One: Shadows of Angmar™ is mostly open, with channelization into the lategame zones and the ones added post-release. The Lord of the Rings Online™ Volume Two: Mines of Moria™ channels everything, but it is set in caverns anyway. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates has separate islands, with boats as loading screens (WoW does the same at points). A Tale in the Desert takes the same approach as Asheron’s Call, with some really impressive geography reflecting years of effort from volunteer world-builders.

: Zubon

Impassable hills are also good for hiding the Potemkin village nature of most of the landmass. Cataclysm needs to re-do the whole landmass anyway so flying mounts cannot show that there is nothing behind the backdrops.

: Zubon

Developers: why do you not have multiple guilds? This is not even innovation; A Tale in the Desert launched in 2003, and most of that game was two coders. Doing so could have solved the guild problems that Burning Crusade created through something like this, which is how all major projects are done in A Tale in the Desert.

One guild might leave all at once for a new game. If you are in seven guilds, and at least four are staying, you have far more reasons to stick around.

: Zubon

: Zubon

My thanks to our commenters who pointed out my ignorance and cited other games doing something along these lines. Please consider this your report-out on games that have aspects of player-run, -built, or -defended cities. Add more to the comments if you think of any.

Unsurprisingly, EVE is the next closest in a major game. Almost everything is player-run in 0.0 space, and player-owned outposts have almost everything that starbases do back in empire space. Is anyone running shipments of Quafe for pirates in the far reaches of the ‘verse?

I should have mentioned A Tale in the Desert. Again, almost everything is player-built, although we did not think of them as cities when I played. Large guild bases could house dozens and take minutes to run across, but we still thought of them as bases, not cities. There seems to have been more population concentration since I last played.

Wurm Online is another one that has everything player-built, complete with guard NPCs for your structures. I don’t really have much to say here, however, since I had not heard of it before seeing that comment.

Wish was going to have something along these lines, but it never made it out of beta.

Star Wars Galaxies had a lot along these lines. Has? I have no idea what survived NGE, and people seemed to stop talking about it a month after NGE. I heard something about ghost towns from departed players. No idea, sorry.

And all my previous citations still apply: Shadowbane, Horizons, town attacks Asheron’s Call, and moments in City of Heroes/Villains. If you want to discuss these or have more, comments are open. If you have tried more than one, which implementation did you prefer?

: Zubon

If you see it as a fancy trade skills game with a lot of cooperation, you are missing the point. Egypt exists to cause strife and conduct evil sociological experiments, and if the players are not generating enough drama the developers will cheerfully provide new ways to strike at your neighbor. What Pharaoh considers the most perfect part of the game is a test that encourages bribery, pandering, manipulation, backstabbing, and wasteful ostentation, and it requires that many lose for anyone to win.

You see a lack of violence and think there is no PvP. I see a game with every other way to hurt someone and make his life miserable, but you can never kill your tormentor. Oh wait, you can take your case to the ballot box or the right test-winner and have your enemy exiled or executed. You blew up someone’s spaceship and little egg? Big deal. Egypt has permadeath. There is no respawning.

When your players have a chance to destroy all life and end the game, come back and tell me how hardcore you are.

: Zubon

It may or may not make sense to speak of A Tale in the Desert, as the third telling of the tale approaches. ATitD is designed to work in cycles: the tale starts, it winds to its conclusion, and it ends. After the end of the world, the world is reborn again. You bring into the new Egypt your experiences and your connections but not your previous wealth. It is a land where knowledge and networks are worth more than gold or blood.

I will be speaking mostly from the First Telling of A Tale in the Desert, since that is the one I played through. I saw little of the Second, and I have no idea what is happening into the Third. This is your chance to educate us all in the comments!

Trade Skills Unleashed

A Tale in the Desert is best known as the crafter’s paradise. Check out the tech tree sometime; there are as many objects in this little game as you might find in any of the larger MMOs, and they all work with some sort of building.

Most of your time in the sand is spent building Things. You collect slate and wood to build a plane to make boards from wood, then use those boards to make a frame for bricks. You collect grass, dry it into straw, and collect mud and sand to mix with the straw in the brick racks to make bricks, which you can collect after they dry. Learning to do that is more or less the tutorial for the game. If you love a rich economic game with manipulation of resources, you can see how this could work well for you.

There are skill-based trade skills. The more cerebral ones I will mention later, but there are real-time activities like keeping your charcoal oven running efficiently; if you are good, you can use less wood and run multiple ovens at once, and if you are bad, you will burn a lot of wood learning. A blacksmith gets a hunk of metal and a hammer: make the best axe head you can!

You can brew beer, collect herbs, grow vegetables, mass-produce bricks, create fine tools, cultivate flowers, design fireworks, blow glass, prospect for minerals, mine for ore, raise silkworms, weave cloth, drill for petroleum, hunt wild animals, cut gems, design sculptures, mint your own currency, contribute to university research, pollute the watershed, and fish. You can do a lot.

A Social Game

Once you get a grip on the mechanics, you come back to the main point: this is a social game. Working with others is a key to success. You can solo, and you can accomplish most goals eventually soloing for a few hours per week, but the social aspects are where much of the meat of the game is.

The Wealth of Nations book one, chapter one, page one, first sentence: division of labor is what increases productivity and wealth. If you specialize and become good at something, you can trade with others. Most people want to be self-sufficient, so they learn to be at least okay at everything, so they need not trade much. Other people exist almost entirely as traders and bankers. A few specialists produce things that are difficult or tedious, and they trade well (Quizzical was famous for this in the First Telling, as one of Egypt’s great producers of glass). Why make everything yourself if you can trade for it? Of course, this is a game, so you may want to try all the mini-games, but if someone else is a fan of one you dislike, trade with him for that stuff.

There is an entire Discipline of Leadership, which at times is better called politics or backstabbing. You are explicitly encouraged to get ahead by getting others to do what you want. Can you find mutual interests? Can you bribe them? Can you threaten them? Do you have any friends at all?

Worship tests were collective activities, things you worked together to do. Find six friends or strangers and take a Pilgrimage around Egypt. Spot the mystic altar and get two people to perform a complex ritual. Work together to keep your sacrificial fire burning with the gods’ increasingly demanding fuels.

At the simplest level, why build every building? Unless it blows up, there is little harm in letting someone else use yours. If you can trust them with it, permit them to use it. Some people spent a great many resources setting up public camps where anyone could go to use expensive or just introductory buildings.

Multiple Guilds

There is one specific element from the social game that every game should replicate: membership in multiple guilds. You can sign up for as many guilds as will take you or found as many as you like. Anyone can see who is in which guild. Each has its own chat channel, which is organized through built-in tabs that light up when a new message is sent.

Do you keep tabs on multiple guilds through shared chat channels, voice chat, message boards, whatever? If you regularly play with several groups of people, why not be allowed to attach yourself to all of them? If they are comfortable with your shared loyalties, no problem. Make a neighboring guild’s leader an initiate in your group for easy contact. Set up a regional communication guild. End guild monogamy!

This is a great example of emergent gameplay. When multiple guild-membership was proposed, the expectation was that people would sign up with a few groups. Aren’t you suspicious about new people, people with two masters, etc.? As it turns out, no. Instead, people formed and joined hundreds of guilds. It was like de Tocqueville all over again as a new guild was formed for any activity. Guild halls were cheap, so why not form a separate guild for running a Pilgrimage, building a Megalopolis, setting up a café? Your list of guilds was like your credentials. Some people had to quit guilds because they ran out of screen space from having too many tabs. Given the chance to form associations, people did.

It is the one feature of A Tale in the Desert that I miss most in many many games. Why can’t I be a member of the king’s knights and the armorsmiths’ union and the travelers’ society and the sisterhood of the traveling pants? I guess I can, but that is an entirely out-of-game arrangement or an in-character affair that the game does not help. When people run out of friends to play with they quit. I understand that people quit in groups to go onto the New New Thing, and more groups gives me more chances for that, but is there more risk from that or from my leaving because 80% of my supergroup quit to play WoW and EQ2? The more I have access to people in-game, the more chances I have to form bonds that will keep me paying another month. A guild is just a chat channel and a guild logo in most games anyway; give me more of those channels and a way to handle them.

One Character

A Tale in the Desert did one character well. There are games that do it badly, but in ATitD, the only reason you would want more than one is because you want to be in more than one place at a time (or want to do something inappropriate without getting caught).

Having just one character removes many design issues. You can let things happen while players are offline without worrying about how they will exploit it across multiple characters. You can link all the guilds and chat channels to one spot. You reduce aberrant behavior by tying all the consequences to one persona.

You are you. It creates more of a sense of “you” when it is just you and not “Hey, I will get my healer.” This does contribute to a reduced sense of immersion, as you think of yourself as yourself rather than as Zoltar the Cobbler, but it does make everything a bit more personal.

Player Control

It is Teppy’s sandbox, but you can carve out your corner of it. In Egypt, the players are given tools and allowed to go nuts. Have you not heard about this?

• There are almost no rules. The code of conduct when you enter is that “start” button. Instead, everything is run through player-written laws. Think things are getting to cluttered? Write some zoning restrictions. Need to remove eyesore sculptures? Your new law says that anyone can vote on a sculpture and anyone can tear it down if there are 20 more “bad” than “good.” Should the communist revolution start now? Propose making all mines available for unrestricted public use. Want Bob banned? Put it up for vote.
• Let’s talk about banning Bob. Every month or so we have a Demi-Pharaoh election. You pass a test if you can get Egypt to elect you Demi-Pharaoh, and your reward is the unrestricted ability to ban seven people. Game over, bye bye, it’s good to be the king. Of course, if you upset Egypt, you can be legislatively banned as well. Until then, you get to hold onto those bans in case you ever need them. Oh, and every time there is an election, someone is going to become Demi-Pharaoh, so this is a test of all Egypt, not just you.
• Want to set up a camp? Go ahead. No one sells you a deed to property (unless you have a law that says that). Build as large a camp as you want. Trouble with the neighbors? You’d better work that out amongst yourselves, since no GM is going to stop your squabbling.
• Griefing? I hope someone wrote a law about that. You can legislative prevent certain behaviors, since a ban on a particular action makes it physically impossible to perform, not just illegal to do. Maybe you can call a Demi-Pharaoh to threaten the griefer.
• All currency is player-created. There are no gold pieces. Anyone can set up a mint and print things, and society decides when they have value. Counterfeiting was physically impossible

Player control did not become to onerous, significantly because laws and code restricted behavior absolutely. No one can break into your chest and steal things — the chest only opens if you have permission to open it. No one can stab you. No one can pull monsters on you. There is no tyrannical enforcement because it is impossible to break the law. One reason for the periodic reset through multiple Tellings was that Pharaoh expected problem laws to accumulate gradually into something that needed to be wiped clean. In practice, very few people have been banned, and Teppy has needed to shake the ant farm himself to keep the ants fighting.

Willing to Take Risks

And shake it he does. Teppy and eGenesis are nothing if not willing to take risks and piss people off. “What happens if we do this?” Why not try out a gameplay innovation, when you are going to re-start everything within the year? Why not indulge your whims in social experimentation, if you can keep enough players going to keep the company afloat? What is the point of being god-king of your own little world if you never indulge a bit?

The first risk is going to be setting up your own MMO that caters to an audience smaller than a WoW server. Egypt’s population in the First Telling and early Second followed a fairly consistent downward trend after the initial spike. You could chart on any given day “I have this many days until the servers stop showing a profit unless I can find a way to re-excite people.” Oh, and the game will have no combat whatsoever.

How about giving players complete control over the laws and economy?

How about a new skill that lets someone clearcut any tree he can find? That one went through quite a few legislative restrictions.

Want to play with drugs or addiction? If you drink enough beer and wine, you get better at finding minerals. Hookahs were added in the Second Telling to let you smoke whatever herbs you gather. The First Telling gave us the serpent’s cocktail, which gave you some teleportation time but required you to drink an antidote every so often or die, permanently and forever. You could drink and benefit from more than one, but each reduced the amount of time between antidotes. The body count gradually increased over time, as people quit, forgot, or committed suicide. I recall someone’s dying at least three times due to a bug.

How does in-game marriage work in your game? In Egypt, Marriage is one of the easier tests to pass, and you receive this reward: you can access anything your spouse can and you can log on as him/her. There is no divorce, so you better pick someone you can trust until the end of the world. There were high profile bad marriages. There was at least one attempted murder via serpent’s cocktail.

What happens if you send in a dishonest trader selling previously unknown items, expensive but worthless upon investigation? Let’s give him offensive beliefs, too, and have him refuse to deal with women, who he refers to as slaves. Wow, that lit up the forums.

If you give people the chance to hurt one another and benefit from it, will they? How about with no benefit? What if we structure incentives this way… or that way…

Even if you hate the latest experiment in Teppy’s sandbox, you must give some respect to someone willing to experiment with new ideas in gameplay, and he is literally betting his livelihood that it will work.

The Community

ATitD has had a great community. The entire thing would have died a horrid death without a group of people willing to work with each other and the game’s limitations to make a great experience.

There has always been someone to help a new player. If you really and truly need something that you cannot get or make on your own, someone will help you or just give it to you. Some people spend all of their time helping others. Others do so indirectly, by developing the game’s economy so that all this trading and helping can go on.

People get together to hold festivals, work out the game’s problems, or just to chat. If you have a spare spot at the wine-tasting table, you throw it open to any random person you can find, giving away several weeks’ worth of work on wine.

Some parts of the game are structured to encourage this. Some are neutral and it arises anyway. Some are downright hostile to cooperation but much cooperation still arises in the face of problems.

It is a self-policing community in a game that probably bore anyone likely to go around making trouble, anyway. You can see some of the things the community does at the ATitD wiki or on the boards.

Real Math Puzzles

Ending on a quick note, many aspects are a thinking man’s game. Designing gearboxes was a mix of math and spatial design within strict limitations. Discovering how wine flavors worked, along with the details of fermentation, required months of careful testing. Stressed breeding allowed folks to design better seeds for more productive plants. Paint-mixing was one of my specialties, working out how to make various shades of off-white or to make things more cheaply. I can now easily tell the difference between Alice White and Ghost Blue, between Salmon and Clay.

Have you spent any time in the desert? What did you enjoy while you were there?

: Zubon

(Please remember, comments may be moderated for Shiny Happy Week posts. This is a festival of joy, not complaints.)

No, I have no idea how ATitD is these days. I stopped keeping track after the Events team mostly dissolved early in the Second Telling.

Citizens of Egypt,

Thanks to all those that participated in the first Beta of A Tale in the Desert III. I’d like to give my thoughts and observations on the beta, and then announce our final, 3-week Beta. BTW, I want to get into some detailed ATITD 3 game design stuff with this newsletter, so if you just want to find out when Beta 2 starts, skip down to the bottom.

Technically this first Beta went very well. There were no server crashes. Some of the new content had bugs, but I was able to fix all the significant ones within minutes-to-hours of their being reported.

Progress in the beta was not as fast as I had estimated. The server was open for almost 6 days exactly, and in that time, the highest level attained was level 6. If I had been asked beforehand how far I thought we would progress in 6 days, I’d have figured the top players would have hit level 10. Here are the first 15 ways to gain levels, as configured for Beta 1:

Level 0: Citizenship
Level 1: Principles of Architecture, Principles of the Human Body, Principles of Leadership
Level 2: Principles of Worship, Principles of Art and Music, Principles of Thought
Level 3: Principles of the Obelisk, Principles of the Demi-Pharaoh
Level 4: Principles of Harmony, Principles of the Acrobat,
Level 5: Principles of the Vigil, Principles of the Prophet
Level 6: Principles of Khefrey’s Children, Principles of the Pathmaker

The column at the left is the level required to attempt each Principle. Passing any Principle increases your level by one. Principles are always fixed-goals, and are intended to be something that a veteran ATITD player would find pretty easy.

So if my math is right, the players that did reach Level 6 had 9 choices on how to reach Level 7. That seems like about the right “bushiness”, so why the (from my perspective at least) slow progress? I think the answer lies in the Level 2 Principles: Worship requires several kinds of items that Egypt can not create right away, including Camel Milk and Grilled Fish, and Thought does also. So even though you’ve gained a post-Citizen level, you don’t *really* have a lot more choices of what to do next at Level 2. Perhaps compacting the above schedule just slightly around Level 2 would relieve this bottleneck, which would have the side effect of making an umber of early skills much faster to get. I’m going to try this for Beta 2.

The final item from the Beta that I want to discuss is the Events system. We ran two events, both of which I was able to code during the beta. The first was a “dig” event with some interesting scoring features. The second was a Tug tournament in the Wepwawet Spirit Arena. Technically both worked well, but I thought that each needed to provide more information after the event on how Egypt did, as a whole. For instance, as a player I would have liked to know who won the Tug tournament, what rank they reached, how many participated in total, that sort of thing. As developer I could retrieve that information, but really it needs to be accessible to the Events team that will run many such things during live. So, that’s something I’ll work on in Beta 2. Which brings me to the announcement. A Tale in the Desert III, Beta 2 will begin:

Friday, May 5, at 12:00 Noon EST (GMT-0500)

I expect the Beta to last for about 3 weeks, and I’m going to set a goal. Let’s see how many of us can reach Level 7. It’s an individual goal, but it’s also an Egypt-wide goal because the Principles and Technologies needed to *easily* let others reach Level 7 must be unlocked as a community. Keep in mind that nobody in Beta 1 would have attained this. Does anyone have a prediction for Beta 2 on how many will?

On the Nile,
Pharaoh (Teppy)