In reply to this post over at keiron gillen's blog:

Okay. We have a freeform game with lots of room for player expression. A Deus Ex, an Oblivion, a Planescape or whatever. That sort of game. As I knew before Cassandra, a huge amount of your scripting time is based around working out how players may want to screw with the system to break the illusion. Trying to pre-empt someone being an asshole, so it doesn't break the illusion - so making the world more stable. In the end, we decided we'd rather spend our time making interesting stuff rather than completely and utterly fool proofing it (Though anyone who went on a rampage in the bar with your guns will discover we enjoyed such things).

What I wonder is... well, what about if someone didn't bother at all. Make a freeform world like Oblivion and didn't bother trying to build anything to prevent people breaking it. It makes it an open expression at the start of the game that you enter the world with the acceptance that you'll be acting in a manner as you would in the real world. That is, you wouldn't treat it as a game. Now the budget that a developer would have spent on trying to cover people acting in reality-broaching fashions, they concentrate entirely on improving the actual world.

Dungard on Cassandra, in his Neverwinter mod Maugeter, did something similar, if less so. Most of the buildings in the town you weren't able to open. If you did, it said "Why would you want to open that?". It's true. How often do you go and open a random door in town? It's absolutely unreal. So, the logic goes, if you by your actions are breaking reality... well, screw reality. You walk up to the first person in the street and shoot them in the head? You'd never do that. Ever. Let the world not respond, as you're not treating it with the proper seriousness.

Of course, I'm fully aware that part of the fun of games is acting in ways you never would normally. Hell - maybe most of it. But I'm wondering what a game could be like if rather than designing a game based around people who wanted to screw with the game, they designed the game based around the people who actively wanted to play it - how much *more* stuff in terms of things to do could you have? How more realistic AIs could you have when you knew the player wasn't just going to shoot someone on a whim? And so on.

So put it like this: a hypothetical game has a 1 million development budget in terms of level designers. At the moment, about half of the work - as in 500,000 pounds - is spent on basic "Let's stop this breaking" design. Would you be interested in playing a game that made no attempt at all to stop you breaking it if it would have twice as much effort on making an interesting, credible and more developed world?

I think the question is pretty much moot, because on a fundamental level, the way we make choices in a game world is totally identical to the way we do in the real world. In both situations, the choices we make are dictated by the perceived consequences of our actions.

For example, if I wander into someone's garden in real life, pick up all their pots and smash them to pieces, not only would I gain nothing, but it's also likely that I'd get into trouble. The harmless and friendly old people living there would complain, I would feel bad about them having to buy new pots, and they might well call the police - so I don't do it.

However, I know that if I were to do this in the Zelda world, not only will I not get into any trouble at all, but there's also a good chance that I'll find some money, or healing potions, that the level designers decided to hide inside the pots. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to lose, and everything to gain, so I do it every time.

Players will never act in a game world like they would in the real world, until the perceived consequences of actions reflect reality first - and for many kinds of games, this will never happen. Very, very few people want to play a Gran Turismo arcade that crumples up and crushes the player to death when they speed into a wall, or a GTA game where we are taken away to a real jail for running over a virtual pimp.

Most of the time, it really isn't an issue of the player not taking the game world seriously enough - it's other way round. We only appear to behave ridiculously in games because as far as the consequences are concerned, game worlds can be ridiculous places to be in.