Forums → Games → Beauty ZOO (a MMOG Whose Winning Condition is Purely Aesthetical)

Hi,

Most MMOGs that I know have goals like "Join a tribe that eliminates all others" or "Achive better score than others by quests, wars and/or empire building". All these share one in common: The goal is objectively defined and one must seek strategies to achieve it.

I want to propose something radically different: Beauty. The *only* goal in this game would be to achieve a good score because other players will consider your empire more beautiful than those of other players.

If some games like that already exist, please tell me.

And what kind of "empire" do I have in mind? I would try a ZOO.

I dream about game where the players will try to make an aesthetically pleasing ZOO with paved paths, trees and cages with the most unique animals with witty descriptions.

A game where the player can fully unleash his or her creativity - and the other players will be the only judges.

It might be nice if roaming through zoo could be done both as first person and in bird's perspective as in ZOO Tycoon.

Animal Creation Process

I imagine that players will create both beautiful immitations of real animals and the most bizarre monsters. There will be a few basic types (bird, mammal, reptile) and the ZOO creators will have a very rich palette to give them darker skin, fatter legs, thorns etc. etc.

Witty description of there "bizarre monsters" will be an important source of entertainment.

Animal behavior

I cannot exactly imagine how to make the UI defining animal behavior, but it would be nice if the user could influence the behavior of the animals, the way they play, the way the drink, react on nearby visitors etc...

I think there should be more than one level. The "highest" level will be easy for the user to define (run 3 seconds, turn left 45 degrees, roar...), but of course, at the expense of accurancy: the animal cannot be controlled to the detail. It is like programming in Java versus Assembler.

I don't know exactly how low to make the lower level which can control the animal more precisely at the expense of more labor and more required programming skill... I don't even know whether the players would use it...

I don't know.

Borrowing Products of Other Users

I suppose that there should be some kind of "inheritance" known from Object programming: If I have made a "Lion", then "African lion" can be defined as "Lion with longer jaws and lighter fur". If I then make the legs of Lion more narrow, the African lion will also be affected because it is defined as Lion with some modifications. This will make improving species easier - and everyone has a choice whether to use this "inheritance" or not.

I think that the game should be done flexibly enough: One will not be restricted to the trees that the game offers, but can create his own ones using the appropriate graphics technology. He or she would not be restricted to the three kinds of thorns to cover the animals with, but if he or she is a skilled graphician, he or she can add more kinds.

I also suggest that both these "Graphical products" and the animals (elaboratedly defined with default or user-created graphical products), when published, may be used by other users. So if you define an African lion, I can place a few individuals into my Zoo and I can even make "South Africa lion" by inheriting from your African Lion. In both cases, whoever sees them in my Zoo, he will be notified that they are based on you work.

And you will get credit for it - something like "Reuse rating", which is absolutely unrelated to the "Beauty rating" scoring system described bellow; it simply says how many times users have reused you work - perhaps prefering reuses in popular (well rated) ZOO's. It will be prestigeous to have a high "reuse rating", because it means that you works are so good that many people use them in their own ZOO.

Versions

Upon improving a ZOO, the owner can declare (publish) a new version. This will (if he does not publish versions too often) increase his ZOO's chance to be chosen for forced browsing (see bellow) and the chance to appear in "Recommended ZOO's" for voluntary browsing. And each version will be rated (more or less) independently - newer versions can get a better rating because they are more beautiful, or worse rating because the competition is higher.

Scoring system

Whoever wants (even without building own ZOO) can voluntarily attend any ZOO that (s)he wishes - and browse it as long as (s)he wishes. But each ZOO-builder continually needs money for expanding his ZOO - and he can earn this money by browsing and rating other ZOO's - those chosen by the computer. I will call this forced browsing. It is an exchange - you want to expand your ZOO and when it is done, you will surely want people to look at it and rate it - so now you must browse other people's ZOO's to close the cycle which benefits all parties.

If a ZOO-builder clicks "Earn money by forced browsing", the computer takes him into a randomly selected ZOO - slightly preferring newly created ZOO's, most popular ZOO's etc. (pretty much the same system as I suggest here for Recommended Games section).

It would be tedious for the player to browse 20 ZOO's consecutively, but if he's forced to do it when he runs out of money, then he will alternate building his own ZOO and forced browsing of other player's ZOO - I think this should be bearable. The rules must be finetuned so that the player is not forced to browse too frequently, but often enough to guarantee a neccessary feedback and assesment to other ZOO owners.

Forced Browsing Process

If one voluntarily browses another ZOO, it is up to him or her whether to look at the owner's "leaflet" (see bellow) or roam through the ZOO freely. But if one wants to fulfill the duty of "forced browsing" (to earn money for own ZOO), then he must browse the "leaflet", which means browsing ca. 2 screens of text & pictures (the "next" button appears after ca. 2 seconds) and see a short video captured (the "Skip" button after ca. 4 seconds). And then he can rate the ZOO; only if he does, his "duty" is considered fulfilled - he gets the in-game money and then any further browsing is voluntary. Or he can click "earn money by (forced) browsing of another ZOO".

I think this system will take only a few seconds for the browsing person and yet it will give the browsed ZOO's owner enough room to advertise his or her ZOO via leaflet - with the intention to invite for closer inspection, amaze the visitor with its wit and beauty, and ultimately receiving a good rating.

Leaflet Creation

Just like the visitors, the ZOO owner can roam through his or her own ZOO in first person and make snaphots and videos to use on the "leaflet". He or she can also downlad the video clip, make any changes (using any video editor etc.) and upload it back - as long as a reasonable portion of leaflet videos contains real snapshot from his ZOO.

He can, for example, combine clips from his ZOO with uncopyrighted videos of real animals, their living environment, their touching stories or anything; this will give room to much wit and creativity.

He can also make several leaflets (a forced browser is shown a random one) and see which of the leaflets lead to
1. Higher percentage of forced browsers to voluntarily roam through the ZOO (and how long)
2. Higher ratings.

He will also know which parts of his ZOO are most often visited by forced and voluntary browsers.

The leaflets can contain hyperlinks leading to a certain location of ZOO. One click and the visitor is there.

Rating

When a user rates a ZOO, the computer converts this rating into a normalized rating 0%-100% (telling how many other ZOO's were rated worse by *this* user).

This ensures that each player can use his own rating system to rate other ZOO's. Higher numbers indicate better rating. One will use scale 1-10, another will use 1-1000 - and the scoring still will be fair because of the normalization. And anyone can extend the scale if he sees an amazing ZOO, much better than what he had been awarding with the best mark (of course, this will worsen the normalized values of previous rating).

The result rating will be a median of all normalized ratings (maybe giving more weight to more recent ones). Median has some advantages over arithmetic average: median is harder to affect by friends of ZOO owners who give a 100% rating to the poor ZOO - just out of friendship.

I'll demonstrate that median is difficult to cheat: If a ZOO gets 70 honest votes and as much as 30 false "very good" votes, then it will earn a rating such that 50 out of 70 honest voters suggested a worse rating. If we further assume that 70=15+40+15 (meaning that 15+15 honest people gave a poor/excellent rating because of their poor judgement or unusual taste, and that 40 honest people gave a fair, reasonable, objective rating), then the ZOO still gets a reasonable rating: votes better than final rating will then be 5+15+30: 5 objective people, 15 people who happen to have the same taste and so they rated it much better than an average honest person would, and 30 dishonest friends.

I cannot predict all ways how to circumvent the system, but I tried to show that countermeasures do exist.

Final Question

I have no idea whether I should offer this idea to a studio/company that has the knowledge and resources to program it.

Do you think this unusual model (beauty is the only rated thing) would be succesfull?

Thanks for any feedback.
Reflame

My posts so far:
Games should have unlimited difficulty and well-designed background story; serves can have attractive "Try also this" section.
Useful mechanisms: teaming units for easier micromanagement.
Suggestion for new games: Warcraft-KingdomRush hybrid.
And last but not least:Are there any 2player strategy (4X) browser games? If not, why?