# The Ecology of Game Systems and Virology

The recent [PR proposing to remove virology](https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/79849) and [its attendant HackMD doc](https://hackmd.io/br9pmyp3Q3yWn4_VSnm8jg) basically argue that virology as a system in SS13 currently sucks.

A lot of the statements about why it sucks, and that in some ways it absolutely does, are correct.
However, I think there's been a fundamental misapprehension of where virology (and many other systems and roles) fit into the game. In explaining that, I hope to make the following case:

Systems which are in the first instance one-sided are valuable stores of depth and gameplay to the extent that they can involve an ongoing effort by all sides involved to make them apply to all sides involved.

Because of this, virology is a fundamentally fine system, and all that needs to be done to improve it is to expand the extent to which it requires ongoing participation from all sides involved to keep it in play.

The lack of access and participation with virology for the vast majority of people affected by it is the source of a lot of the discontent around it; however, improving this on the side for which it is currently lacking (the crew) will actually make it better as both a site of competition and cooperation for people engaging with the system as virologists.

This is a lot of abstract, theoretical shit up top. I'm going to chapter this off to skip ahead if you don't care as much about the theory as the concrete changes, but I think it's important that we're clear about how systems operate at different places in the game. This not only gets us to making virology a more fun and engaging system now - one against which crew have a reasonable array of options - but potentially towards making long-term virology gameplay a lot more fun even in the first instance.

To explain this from the top-down, we're going to need some ecology.

*What?*

---

## Ecology, Symbiosis, and Game Systems

**Ecology** is the study of how living things interact with each other and their environment.
**Symbiosis** as a concept in ecology describes the particular relationships of those living things with one another.
**Virology** is a game system - not unlike mining, science, captaincy, cargo, medical, etc. People inhabiting and performing the role of 'virologist' at any one instance - or even just the game spitting out an RNG virus - are in this way 'living things' interacting with the crew at large.

A basic table of **symbiotic relationships** below can help us visualize this with some examples
*(9000 hrs in paint, 5 hrs on the current draft PR.)*


The above picture demonstrates four kinds of relationships based on **directionality** and the **valence**:

| TYPE | DIRECTION | VALENCE |
| --------- | --------- | ------- |
| MUTUALISM | TWO-WAY | GOOD |
| COMMENSALISM |ONE-WAY |GOOD |
| AMENSALISM |ONE-WAY |BAD |
| COMPETITION |TWO-WAY |BAD |

SS13 is a **social game.**
**Social interaction** is not always *necessarily good or mutual in the game-world.* If it had to be, we wouldn't have conflict, allow people to do anything that might harm each other, or provide anything less than a common standard of what people are told they can expect.

*this probably sounds like shit, though, right? so why is that?*

Because this is a **game, a series of interesting choices and challenges,** we can **cooperate through conflict.**

Choices are made interesting by their payoff relative to posited or chosen goals - like staying alive, completing your objectives, running a gimmick, messing around with your friends, or doing some dumb project that you're really passionate about seeing come to life in spite of all danger.

In order for there to be a challenge, there must be some question of skill, or doubt, or drama - even random chance - which creates a fundamental 'will x succeed or fail at y' question. **This is fundamentally competitive - whether with randomness, premade mechanical challenge, AI, or other people.**

Totally random systems don't reward your choices, even if they might make it very challenging to reach an outcome. AI- or NPC-based systems get old if they aren't constantly improved-upon or massively proceduralized, and even then, tend to lose their luster. Generally, this is why it's more fun - and genuinely challenging - to play against and with other people. They make mistakes and come up with things no model might. They have objectives that you can't imagine up front, and they might mis(read) any situation as a matter of their own skill in a way a sufficiently well-trained AI might not ([watching openAI play DotA 2 is a good example of this.](https://youtu.be/pkGa8ICQJS8))

And more importantly: computers don't have fun. We're leaving a lot on the table if we surrender fields for competition.
**However, for this competition to be fundamentally cooperative, it needs to be two-sided. It needs to be a matter of choice and challenge for everyone involved.**

*Many systems in SS13 are not - let's consider a few examples of each relationship.*

| MUTUALISM | COMMENSALISM | AMENSALISM | COMPETITION |
| --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Mining collects minerals for research, research gets better mining tech. | Bitrunning collects minerals for the station, the bar/kitchen get upgrades, the gamers just order themselves Donk Pockets. | A cargo tech sells all the mats to buy a bike and rides off into the sunset. | Pirates attack the station trying to take the materials to satisfy their objectives. The crew fight back using guns bought by selling some of the materials. |
| Medical provides healing for engineering, engineering fixes medical. | Medical leaves public healing supplies out. Traitors and security both use them. **this is amensalistic for whoever doesn't use them* | Medical leaves methpills and space lube out. The clown uses them to grief security. **this is commensalistic for the clown* | Medical produce chems to help fight the war ops including grenades and deathchems; war ops bomb medical. |
| The Captain orders things for the crew to do their jobs better and have fun, the crew support the Captain. |The Captain calls the shuttle when the crew are having a bad time or buys a cool one. Or somebody with their ID does, who knows - who cares? | The Captain recalls the shuttle when the crew are having a bad time, buys a shuttle people hate, refuses to pay pirates when the crew are already struggling with other threats and cargo has a full budget, etc... |The Captain tries to powertrip on the crew and gets mutinied. **or they picked that one shuttle. you know the one.* |
| Botany grows food for the kitchen, the kitchen provides botany with good food, and the broader crew help keep botany powered/protected. | Botany grows food for the kitchen but never visits the kitchen. Nobody visits botany. | Botany uses all the station's power on trays and plumbing to grow weed. | Botany makes holymelons, deathnettles, durathread armor, and shields to kick the shit out of a cult. |
Virology makes a healing virus but needs synaptizine. They get some extra from the chemist who later gets the healing virus.| Virology makes a healing virus and tosses it out into the world at 15m before becoming a regular doctor for the rest of the round. | Virology makes a deathvirus and tosses it out into the world at 15m before getting a cakewalk antag run as medical (or anyone really) tries to deal with curing the virus (or several) strictly through chemistry. | Virology makes a deathvirus (or several,) shoots the chemist/blows up the pharmacy, and walks away. | |

### What these examples hopefully highlight is this:

#### One-sided relationships and interactions at one point are fine and good as long as they can be moved to two-way interactions at another.

A lot of player freedom - a lot of the degrees of freedom of the game in general - are wrapped up in people being able to do something one-sided at one point. After that, it should be a matter of choice and ability for people on the other side how they interact.

In the case of comensalistic interactions - this should be the move to mutualism. I scratch your back, you scratch mine, we each have something to give each other besides asspats and nice words - this is the whole thrust of the 'interdepartmental cooperation' idea.

In the case of amensalistic interactions - this should be the move to competition. You fuck with me, I should be in some way able to contest it. This is why untouchable, escaping, always-avoiding antagonists are some of the most frustrating to deal with; enemies without counters who you can't swing back at suck.

Enemies you **can** swing back at are integral to the game. Having things you **can** compete with are key to there being meaningful challenge and meaningful choice.

### There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a system that is at one point one-sided as long as it doesn't have to stay that way.

---
## How does this connect to virology?

### While I largely agree with what was written in the other hackMD and PR, I'm going to put it a bit differently. Virology is:
1. Almost entirely amensal and commensal in the first instance.
2. Almost impossible to move to being mutalistic or competitive for the vast majority of people who interact with it.
3. Almost entirely unnecessary for the virologist to interact with in a mutualistic or competitive way.

I wrote
[several large](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTfuZLe2_7xkutTiF7xJyzb5bITb5A3aJPBRfCfYYXYx-P_HMURD8jjnbl5stzeCYZwUOPhAnnE3ube/pub)
[goofy-ass in-character](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS__XDJ7NasLJAJYgQ9UFxaOvBZwEQhhlSMR0HzhrMAMGUQtjNxeICzrCDvDulKpl54W2A1vqKpqWSc/pub)
[documents with a lot of modelling](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSndl2mceFSA7nElOajrDoyl2NBx8e5u48b92ct0fdVeA8FMHLoMJVAvb7u9AvBavxZ49bASLXr8-PE/pub)
that you can see above based on gaming out how virology works, how it is basically probabilistic, and how it can easily be done with wet tissue paper and curdled milk from the bin out back if you know what you're doing and understand the numbers involved.

I'd like to think I know the system fairly well.

With that bit of credentialism out of the way, I'd like to expand this to several common examples of what people find most frustrating about virology connected to the points above.

1. For both virologists and everyone else: **you do your job and it's pretty much done.** If you've released a healing virus, you become a regular doctor. If you've released a death virus, everyone wants your head, and if you've done it right, they're probably...
2. ...dying in front of chemistry, in the halls, wherever, with your healing or your death virus, having had very little say in avoiding or curing it after they got it - and very little way to help or thank you for having made it unless they happen to pull your fat out of the fire later because your virus kept them alive. **For the vast majority of crew who catch a contagious virus (or even a noncontagious death virus,) you cannot interact directly with the virologist, or even indirectly through the virus itself, in either a positive or negative manner.**
3. On the other side: **for the virologist, you have very little need to interact with the crew positively to make a good virus effective, and very little way to be competed with by people who have your bad virus.**

This sucks. It violates the ecology of good game design we laid out above because, even if you want to, you either can't move it to being mutalistic or competitive, or there's no reason for you to do so.

I think there's a better way.

---

## How do we fix it?

I've got two prongs about how to change virology - in the short term and over time - as to how to improve this.

I'm going to break it up into two phases, the first of which is already captured in my PR.

### The First Phase: Making It Not Suck

Based on the above, the requirements for virology not sucking as a system are that it can be moved to a two-way relationship from a one-way relationship by more of the people on the receiving (bad) end.

Generally this means making choices accessible to more of the crew more able to compete with virology as a system.

* Because virology as a system (and bioweaponry in real life) is in part so effective because it's self-propagating, delayed, and often very unclear to the people who are exposed, **people need to be able to more easily passively defend against it.**
* This means increasing the ability of regular hygiene and nutrition - things you can get readily on-station and through interacting with other departments (service is basically built for this) - to prevent getting sick in the first place. [done]
* Because currently viruses are basically infinite - they will stay inside you, reach max stage, and continue to trigger until cured, replaced, or you're dead - but rely almost entirely for being cured on a few very finite systems (chemistry, surgery, xenobio) - **people need at least some options or ways of acting outside of these systems to compete with virology through competing with the virus.**
* This means making viruses finite - in that if you survive their direct effects which you can actually fight like damage, stay well-fed, rest, stay in a good mood, *they will go away. You will have won and out-competed virology because of things you did.* [done]
* Because advanced viruses are currently 'spammable' - or much easier for virology to make and send than even to cure under the current PR - **they need to be much quicker and less easily-gated to counteract once cured.**
* This means, at least until a better solution is found - maybe a chemical reaction to make blood into all eligible vaccines? - **vaccinating each other by sharing blood is once again a way of directly curing viruses which can be cured.** A virologist who wants to spam had better be committed to it. [done]
* Because healing viruses are also subject to the same issue as far as mutualism goes, **they need to require at least some maintenance, upkeep, or feedback.**
* This basically means that they self-cure now if you let yourself get hungry or eat like shit, and you might need to go back for a new, modified one if you want to keep the benefits. [done]
* Because the way severity works assigns severity to symptoms based on their level, but many low-level symptoms have high stats which, combined with symptom thresholds, make them incredibly potent - **viruses need to be more finite the more severe they are. The higher your impact, the quicker you burn out, and the actual 'impact' of a virus needs to be reflected by its severity.**
* This means more severe viruses now start to self-cure faster and more sharply after they've reached their max potential. They're allowed to reach their max potential (max_stages) before they start ramping as hard as they can, and most boosted viruses will still probably have to hit their peak before you fully beat them. Weaker viruses can be more readily eaten/rested/antibiotic'd off. [done]

### The Second Phase: Making it Good(er)

Although this all does a lot to make virology not suck, there's a lot left on the table as far as making it gooder.

This is what I want to come back to in the long run:

* Make symptom collection part of the game.
* Why is getting symptoms just a gacha game based on chemical reactions? Ideally, I'd like to make symptom collection behave something like genetics with a lot of 'latent' symptoms floating around in people, mobs, cytology samples (has anyone literally ever used the cytology virus thing) and synthesizable through collection. No more dumb reaction stuff that lets me make a perfect healing/death virus by walking onto public mining - virologist, go out and start scanning people and collecting material. This offers a lot more opportunity for both mutualism and competition - and it stretches out the virologist's actual involvement as a virologist further into the round.
* Make more varied and paradoxical ways of curing diseases.
* Moving away from reagent cures more broadly should invite symptom-based cures or ways of making other oddball 'folk' treatments at least contribute to naturally curing viruses. Fever? Go somewhere cool. Chills? Set yourself on fire. ARDS? Give yourself supportive oxygen care by running high-pressure internals, huffing pluox, or sitting in a pure oxygen box. Et cet. - there's a lot of unexplored variety and funnily intuitive ways to work in new 'cures' outside of the strict chemical/reagent cures we're on now.
* Make transmission less binary and feature some sort of 'microbial load' that you can track and manage. Or, make resistance something that you can have more generally that gets worn down or wanes over time.
* Making satiety a lot more powerful at no-selling infection [done] is a step, but making it something you can progressively track - say, at the medical kiosk - and then affect even when you're not sick is, in my book, a step in the right direction for giving more proactive counterplay than "get inside a spacesuit and never get out."

[WIP from here on, will update with ideas as added, but this is where I'm at right now. The present PR only aims to really address the First Phase stuff.]