My cheating heart

I spend a bit of my time with Conny playing Clan Lord. We generally play sitting side by side, the benefit of using laptops. It's a lot of fun, because when we are both in the same area, we can split up, and glance at the other's screen, and have a sense of what's going on. When we hunt in 'noids, for instance, I often roam around below, looking to find something to lead up. Conny will stay in the entrance with the rest of the group. With a glance, I can still participate in the chatter going on, and I often yell up my wise-ass comments. It's great because I still feel included in the social aspect.

But initially, this usually spooks the hell out of people.

"How does he know what we're talking about?" Keep in mind they can't see me, but I can see them on Conny's screen. Sometimes they a player will jump to the extreme conclusions that I must be a GM. It's like doing the old remove-your-own-thumb magic trick, and having people want to take you to the hospital. People often overlook simple explanations for things.

When the Rat Bastards did Dun'ilsar, Conny and I were once again playing side by side. It was useful, because we could split up, yet have a larger perspective of what was going on. It was a lot of fun.

Is this "cheating?"

Wordsmyth has two relevant definitions of cheating. We can ignore the one about sexual infidelity in this case, and look at the first two

1. to practice deceit or fraud
2. to violate rules by deceitful means.

Am I being deceitful or breaking rules when I can see Conny's monitor? Nope. We're pretty open about it, and I don't know of a rule that says what were doing is in violation of Delta Tao's terms of service. So, I don't think we're cheating in the strictest sense.

I think the word "cheating" is often used by Clan Lord people on any behavior they feel offers an "unfair" or "improper" advantage. To them, two people playing in the same room is cheating. But using that logic, kids who can play 4-6 hours a day to rank whore because they don't have jobs are cheating too, since they are exploiting an "unfair" advantage over those of us who can't work.

I pay for more than one serial number. Sometime I have both characters on. Is that unfair? Anyone can do it if they want to, assuming they have the cash.

People who are in Europe can make a lot more coins than those in the US, because the spawns relative to the amount of people playing are much greater. I know this first hand, since I made tons of coins while at Conny's in Munich. Is that cheating?

I don't think any of these things are. Unfair they may be, but they aren't cheating.

To me, cheating in a game like Clan Lord is more like using an exploit. If a player capitalizes on an "unseen design consequence", a.k.a. a bug, to gain some advantage, that's cheating. If you can tell a GM about how you got a benefit of some kind, and that GM does not, or cannot engineer the game to prevent the benefit from occurring, you are not cheating. The rules of Clan Lord are a product of how the game is engineered, that's simply the reality of how computer games work.

A great example of this is the "night" feature in Clan Lord. The reason it's an option in Clan Lord is probably the same reason it's an option in Ultima Online, because players can easily circumvent it, because of how the client is engineered. So instead of issuing an edict like "players found to circumvent night will be terminated" (which is impossible to detect anyway), the GMs and game designers concede, and allow the feature to be optional.

Thus the "rules" of Clan Lord arise from it's engineering.

Clan Lord is not played in a vacuum, there are tons of out-of-game channels of communication that enhance and extend the game. Most Clan Lord community infrastructure depends on out-of-game tools like email lists and web sites. Clan Lord is a multi-player game that exists on the Internet, so a game designer should take that into account, right?

When you design a competitive multi-player game, it's pretty obvious that players will guard the information on their computers. To not do so is a tactical disadvantage.

So the inverse of this should be true as well. When you design a cooperative multi-player game, it's pretty obvious that players will share as much information as possible. It's a hell of a lot of fun for a group of people to be able to play Clan Lord all in one room. More fun is a good thing in designing a game.

So why would anyone design game mechanics that assume that players won't communicate? Why have challenges in the game that can easily be circumvented by something as basic as being in the same room?

What is a cooperative game if it isn't about communication and sharing information? Yet there are game design elements in Clan Lord directly pegged to the premise of restricted communication. Maybe there are some people who find 20 question share-toggling deeply engaging (when it's really a design artifact in the first place; arguably it's an exploit that Delta Tao can't reasonable engineer around) or feel voluntary compliance of a weak design element helps add meaning to a weakly conceived character class. Neither of these things add to my fun, frankly. I come to play Clan Lord to interact and communicate with my fellow players in a way that is more engaging and fulfilling than going to a chat room. When Clan Lord shuts down the communication to worse than a chat room, I'm going to route around it.

Whether I do it by just looking at Conny's screen, or by saying something over the phone, or by using ICQ, it's no different. What you cannot engineer to prevent, you must accept. That's really an axiom of online game design. So why not embrace and include it?

Chum frequently talks about "strict play," where you have no other applications other than Clan Lord, you sit alone in a soundproof, windowless closet, and you turn on night to 100%. To him, playing any other way isn't "Clan Lord," but a different game.

It's nice to see Chum realize that Clan Lord is more than one game, and I'm glad I don't play his version. And I know the version of Clan Lord I play is just that: my version. But if, in the persuit of maxmizing my fun, while staying within the constraints of Clan Lord as it is engineered, I am adversely effecting the game as whole, it's a fault of the design of the game. After all, how ridiculous is it to assert that two people in the same room should not talk to each other while they play a game together?

I'm not asserting that anything you can do in Clan Lord is allowed either. There are, and always will be, design defects, like duping bugs. But these can be fixed within the game itself. That's why using a duping bug exploit is a cheat, and being in the same room as another person is not.

So, I have no qualms about using ICQ to arrange a rescue. To me, doing the rescue is the fun part.

"Unrealistic!" some might cry. "You ruin the game!"

Thought experiment:

Imagine mystics did not have skristals.
Imagine you can use a sunstone while fallen.

Question: Is Clan Lord now better or worse?

For all but mystics who use skristals, a tiny minority, I think the game would not be one bit different. Actually, I think it would be better, because there would be less sunstone chatter. And anyone who gets in a lather about using a sunstone while fallen being unrealistic, I think you need to get out more often.

I don't begrudge mystics. I wish they had a more meanful contribution to the game, really. But, that's not my fault. I'll always need a healer to raise me, no matter how many emails I write, how many ICQs messages I send, or how many people are clanning in the same room as me. Healing is an in-game only thing, you can't heal me by looking at my monitor. You can, however, replace a skristal with just that. Or just one ICQ message.

It is not cheating to communicate.
posted 6:09 PM | link |