[MUD-Dev] Fun vs Realism [ Was: OT: Sid Meier ]

[Leach]

Greg <s001gmu at nova.wright.edu> wrote:
>
> Gamespot has a lovely article about the man.  A retrospective on as
> shining of a career in game programming as one could hope for.
> 
>   URL http://gamespot.com/features/sidlegacy/
> 
> IT's fairly long, but very interesting.  Make sure to read Sid's
> comments
> as well.  He talks about what he feels makes a game good, and what is
> important in game design.
> 

The article raised a few points that interested me. 'Sid's philosophy of
"when fun and realism clash, fun wins."' 
<URL:http://gamespot.com/features/sidlegacy/ss.html>
I am wondering how relevent that is to muds. It seems most of us
are striving for increased realism with our designs - Is this at the
cost
of fun? Maybe Sid's philosophy can explain why the older diku/lp/etc
muds have been so successful? They were (by today's standard), 
fairly simple, but yet they were fun. (for me at least :-) ).I
personally
 am going back to my design to check how much fun my "game" is.

Another point that was raised is known as the "Covert Action Rule" -
"Don't try to do too many games in one package."
<URL:http://gamespot.com/features/sidlegacy/interview12.html>
Are we putting too much into muds, at the cost of gameplay itself?
Where do we draw the line of what is neccessary versus un-necessary?
I have recently envisioned the "ultimate" mud as something that allows
you to interact with everything... every brick in that wall, every grain
of dirt in that mound, etc. If that complexity is indeed added in the 
future (as I dont think the average Joe/Mary has that sort of 
storage/computing power now), will it actually detract from the game 
itself?

This leads to another point - if you dont have more and more detail, how
do you make the world challenging (assuming challenging = fun) to the 
seasoned mud'er?

Cheers,
-Brad

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