[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 11:16 PM 7/26/98 -0500, I personally witnessed Damion Schubert jumping
up to say:
>
>In my experience, mud *designers* (i.e. freaks like us) care about these 
>things.  Mud *players*, on the other hand, are relatively quick to accept
>the physics of the world around them.

Wanted to add a little more to the thought process I have on this. 

It seems a lot of the time that most of the amateur (i.e. noncommercial)
game designers out there are operating from the standpoint of wanting to
make a game they would want to play. This is quite a good position to have,
except for one thing: most of them -- most of *us* -- tend to think that
the vast majority of the games out there SUCK. So when we make games we
would want to play, our own dream games, they almost invariably differ so
DRASTICALLY from the rest of the games out there, the learning curve is
incredible. And since they're hard to play, people don't understand them,
and therefore don't like them. And we all look at these aberrant people who
don't like the coolest damn game ever written, and say "the majority of the
population has bad taste in games". 

Well, maybe they do, but if you're designing a game for YOU, then it should
fit your taste... but if you're designing a game for other people, it
should fit theirs. I think we spend far too much time looking at games as
designers, administrators, and theorists... but little or none looking at
them as players. 

As an example, I've never been bothered by a sun that rose at 6 AM and set
at 6 PM year round. Not as a player, anyway. As a designer, I want the sun
to rise and set in a realistic fashion, and I want the seasons to change
during the game, and I want people to have to change their clothes
appropriately as time goes by or suffer penalties. Because as a designer, I
see that as a challenge. 

As a player, I would see it as... a royal pain in the ass. And the first
couple times I played, I would think it was cool, but then it would get old
and start to piss me off to no end, and in no time at all I'd stop playing
the game because all of that was just such a NUISANCE. So, as a designer, I
don't do that. Because I would like it for a while, and then I would hate
it. The novelty would wear off. And I think it's smarter to avoid the
problem than it would be to write the season-changing code.

Although I still have that sunrise and sunset calculator. ;)