Curse

nrvllrgrs · Aug 03, 2007, 02:17 AM // 02:17

With the addition of a persistent world and the continuation of no monthly fees for GW2, there is an increased likelihood of visible griefers activity. PvE griefers will no longer be limited to outposts and, dare I say, ignorant players inviting them into parties. To deal with these possibly problems I suggest the following, as pulled from one of my papers:

Much of the literature has concluded that players’ “virtual identities and experiences are not separate from our identities and experiences in the material world. They co-evolve as they shape each other” (Yee). If this conclusion is true, then it is possible to use the players’ established social identities (how individuals identify with, and behave as part of, social groups) from the material world in the virtual world if the layer of anonymity were removed, or became transparent. Artificial intelligences (AI) and artificial emotions (AE) are used in computer games to increase the immersive quality of play. As an extension to this reason and players’ real and virtual identities are interchangeable, AIs and AEs could be used further in MMORPGs to cause the disappearance of the player anonymity layer. A similar effect can be seen in a variant of the Milgram experiment. As the subjects become physically closer to those that they requested to harm, fewer individuals are willing to inflict that pain. But because physical locality is impossible in online environments, AIs and AEs heighten the emotional investment and thus draw the players closer.

Artificial Intelligence and Emotion
As the industry has focused on how to create autonomous characters, artificial life has become sufficiently powerful to dodge and aim due to its focus towards first-person shooters. However, there have been serious strides towards applying the technology to stand-alone RPGs, such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The developers created Radiant AI, whose goal is to create virtual life, giving every non-player character (NPC) has a set of “needs” that they would need to realize instead of relying on a set of scripts. This application of drive theory provides a more NPC aware environment, thus creating a more socially intuitive environment.

A variant of AIs is AEs, attempting to create more of the subtle nuances of human expression. This technology has been researched and attempted in the game Ouroboros, which focuses on the dramatic interaction and character immersion (Eladhari and Lindley, 2003). The idea is that the character psyche is comprised of three different layers: momentary emotion, mood, and personality. The layers represent its rate of decay and priority. That is to say, momentary emotion has a higher order than mood or emotion and hence is the displayed behavior, however, it is also the most short-lived and will decay quickly. Players can more easily identify with characters when implicit non-verbal behaviors, such as expressions and gestures, are present.

What AEs aim to accomplish is to create an additional dimension of social interactions between the player and virtual characters. Imagine encountering an elderly man stooped over the dead body of a young woman. His gaze calmly drifts upward to reveal an empty expression. How would you react? If he were to appear mournful, you may respond with a feeling of sympathy. If he were to appear relieved, you may respond with a mood of nervous caution. If he were to appear gleeful, you may respond with a sense of fear. The reaction is dependent upon the expressed emotion; and under the existing medium, players are left blind to this extra dimension of interaction.

Further Uses for Artificial Technologies
However, these AEs have the ability to increase the emotional investment of the players, and shorten the emotional distance between the real and virtual identities. That is, by creating a stronger emotional connection to the virtual world the line between real and virtual identities become more blurred causing the line between real and virtual interactions to become more blurred. Once these lines have become sufficiently blurred, players may use natural world social cues to communicate (Cowell and Stanney, 2005).

What would instead occur in game is that characters would no longer maintain a neutral expression but would instead express their emotions due to game stimuli. The character would be actively created and passively maintained throughout the game to form a virtual person. For example, a character, Alice, has had several traumatic experiences involving dwarves, thus she is more apt to emote negatively in the presence of dwarves. Another example, Alice has grown familiar with Bob, another character; however, while adventuring with him, Bob get himself killed. Alice’s emotive response is that of sadness towards Bob and anger towards the monster that killed him. The natural emotive response is given to the character instead of the player.

This engenders the ability to more easily recognize the humanity, or lack there of, in other characters because the cues are occurring implicitly. With the ability to identify humanity in another, it is assumed that players will become less apt to grief; furthermore, with the ability to identify inhumanity in another, players will be less apt to be griefed.

Using traditional role-playing games as a basis for the role-playing experience, some literature suggests that the emotional investment involved in such games is higher than in computer roleplaying games. Not only do players have a higher investment in traditional role-playing with their character but also with other player characters (Tosca, 2001). Because of this higher emotional investment, again players are less apt to participate in grief play.

An example of a play element to heighten emotional investment is Humanity from White Wolf’s Vampire: The Requiem. This element dictates the morality of the player character, and as the character losses Humanity through immoral acts, such as stealing or killing, the character suffers accordingly, possibly gaining derangements. More importantly, the character’s appearance alters to coincide with the morality of the character. Low-Humanity characters constitute a more corpselike appearance whereas high-Humanity characters appear “more human than human”. This element not only prevents the act of griefing but also the act of being griefed. Although similar elements have been employed in previous MMORPGs, such as Ultima Online’s character flagging system (labeling a character as “innocent”, “criminal”, or “murderer”), these systems tended to oversimplify character interactions and fundamentally removed any emotional investment that is required in these interactions.

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Please seriously consider these ideas as possibilities. I believe that such features (specifically idea of Humanity morphing) as solutions to griefing and as an extension of the gameplay.

Faer · Aug 03, 2007, 03:01 AM // 03:01

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10135261