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[Mittens]

I'm trying to brainstorm ways that would encourage players who meet each other for the first time in a multiplayer world to have a civil interaction instead of immediately shooting each other (because that's what you do in games)

Can you think of any ways you could make another human player be discovered in such a way that you are more willing to trust them, not kill them, talk to them, etc?

[starsrift]

Even situations wherein you put players on a team, they are dicks on the internet.

You'd be better served by keeping your design goals at least theoretically achievable, like human-equivalent artificial intelligence.

[Schoq]

Chance of mutual benefit (perhaps trading of things that aren't dropped as loot (I have no idea what kind of game you have in mind))
Attacking gets you wanted by the NPC police. Gets you marked as a bandit to other players?
Don't give people guns??
Fighting drains a lot of valuable resources hard to come by, even if you win?

[s0]

i heard DayZ did this well (in its earlier days at least)

[Mittens]

Yes at first DayZ was good, but that's only because it was mostly played by people committed to roleplaying a survivor. Once DayZ picked up in popularity more and more average gamers entered the scene who would always kill on sight, meaning now the original crowd had no way of knowing who to trust. Then we get to DayZ in its current form where players with guns will hold up players without guns, blindfold them, cuff them, force feed them poisons to make them puke and execute them in various ways for entertainment. I can only asume various youtubers are to thank for this mode of play

[ThemsAllTook]

This may be an overly obvious suggestion, but one way to accomplish this would be not to even include the option of PvP combat in the game, or restrict it to certain situations. If players literally can't kill each other, their first thought (if they don't ignore each other entirely) is probably going to be to take a friendly action. I had plenty of positive interactions with other players in WoW (playing on non-PvP servers, of course - not that alliance could interact much with horde anyway, but I'd imagine that would change the tone of even your own faction).

[Pfotegeist]

the odds are really stacked against you. Civil games are very niche since your average stereotypes and advertisement campaigns reward power, vigilante justice, and irresponsible humor.

[s0]

[Pfotegeist]

ok starting from zero
0 no game
1 make game
2 add social features with visible avatar and locations
3 delete chat
4 delete friend list

from the player's point of view
0 start playing
1 see the same person in the same place about 2 or 3 times
2 wave to see if they recognize you

with a lack of social features or gameplay we only stalk or avoid each other at this point and other locations we may meet in the future.

[Mittens]

Having expensive / rare bullets in the game is a good idea for all the reasons Chris said.
I don't really want to avoid the problem, by removing PvP, even though most games are played and marketed in ways which encourage violent encounters instead of civil ones but that is the challenge.

I feel like it must be possible to design to create civil encounters between players with the capacity to kill each other since we have them all the time in normal life.

So far our ideas combined comes to this;
-Have most players with a gun/weapon, so everyone is respected as equally dangerous (no completely naked/powerless players to be abused for entertainment)
-Have NPC Police to punish crime/murder
-Don't drop anything worth murdering for
-Make bullets very expensive/rare so they won't be wasted on trolling
-Give players the ability to wave and do other gestures for peaceful communication

[s0]

the problem is of course, if you have some sort of ingame economy it means that rich players get to kill poor players at their leisure.

which might be interesting as a neoliberal dystopia simulator but probably not what you're going for.

probably your best bet would be a legal system with harsh consequences, particularly for just outright murdering someone. maybe you could even have stuff like account bans or w/e. but really, you're up against a culture of people who use the internet to be an asshole w/o consequences, so there are bound to be lots of trolls who try to subvert your system in any way possible and youre going to end up with another dayZ type situation. you'd have to try and promote your game in such a way as to create a culture around it that is conducive to the sort of gameplay you're going for. godspeed.

[Mittens]

Yeah, well I am pretty happy with my design for in game justice, I'm just trying to stretch my brain and see if there might not be other design choices that would prevent people even having to go through the justice system before they stop killing.

Like you say, how the game is sold to people will be a big part of how they initially behave. I need to be very careful when showing the action contained in the game not to make the game look like you are supposed to blast every living thing for kicks.
Best case scenario, people will already have seen the benefits of cooperation in the trailer, so they will be looking to have civil encounters from the get-go

[s0]

serious suggestion: read up some stuff on behavioral psychology (i don't know where to start, sorry).

[Schoq]

serious suggestion: read up some stuff on behavioral psychology (i don't know where to start, sorry).

wikipedia game theory

[Pfotegeist]

oh I thought this was more hypothetical. I'm not sure what the setting of this game is.

You could have strong wild animals or monsters that demoralize people worse than other players can. Otherwise I'm not sure why you'd need guns even in a pvp game. You could throw jelly filled doughnuts, they're less dangerous.

[JWK5]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Give them a strong common enemy that makes them need cooperation in order to survive.

Maybe give them different types of characters or tool options that each thwart the enemy in a very specific and necessary manner so that they need the efforts of other players. Add to this options that heal other players or defend other players from common and specific enemy actions and you can appeal to cooperative behavior either through supportive play or collaborative combat.

Make "scoring" revolve around teamwork. Give more points for collaborative attacks than solo attacks. Give treasures a timer and allow them to be picked up once by each player (rather than once at all).

[Alex Higgins]

Generally, you'll probably have to think carefully about the ways in which violent in-game interactions are incentivized, and remove or counterbalance those incentives. For example, in most games, if you kill another character, you usually get to loot the corpse. Either you have to make it impossible to loot dead corpses, OR, even better, make it so that players get better loot if they don't kill others. Make the choice between killing the guy to get his medkit, or having the guy help you lift some nearby debris to split the 4 medkits underneath.

As others have said, this won't help with the trolls, of course - an in-game justice system is needed for that. But it'll help with everyone else.

At the end of the day, the best way to discourage violent interaction is just to remove it. I've tried multiple times to make single player games in which violence is possible but undesirable, but most people who play my games, when given the choice, prefer to kill things. It's hard to do! Best of luck.

[OccamsRazor]

Tie everyone's success to everyone else's success. You need to make a system where there is a mutual benefit to player's success, so that instead of someone's loss being your gain(like DayZ) someone else's gain can provide some kind of gain or benefit to you and the community as a whole.

There was a recently funded kickstarter for Eco which I think captured this really well. I'm excited to see what they do with that.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1037798999/eco-global-survival-game

[DXimenes]

Relying on "mutual benefit" isn't encouraging civility. It's encouraging an utilitarian mindset. Much for the same reason, competitive is different from agressive.

Take the Pokémon community for example: competitive, but civil.
The Bloodborne community is also very competitive, but not at all agressive. More often than not when a player invaded my game for PvP, he waited for me to slay the nearby monsters and heal myself before making a duel bow and starting the fight. I've been lurking the /Bloodborne subreddit and this seems to be the rule, with toxic encounters being the exception.
I kinda disagree from the "mutual benefit" approach on a philosophical level. I bet we can think of something better this :3

Also: I've stumbled upon some headlines of articles about the MGS V: The Phantom Pain online community - which I have dodged, because I haven't been able to play it and don't want any spoilers - and it seems to be flourishing nicely as a very friendly community. You should look it up, see how they're doing, how Kojima made it happen and if this is just a coincidence or if the mechanics collaborated with it.

(P.S.: I've written about community mechanics in a blog post a while back. I certainly don't have any answers, but maybe it can get some fire started for your brainstorm - here: http://devblog.kimericlabs.com/en/wishlist-social-game/)

[s0]

tbh i think those games are better because they aren't popular with the average "core gamer" demographic lol. when people talk about online games being horrible theyre mostly talking about shooters and mobas, because those types of gams attract those types of "core gamers".