[MUD-Dev] Re:(fwd) Re: Multiple currencies

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <199806092109.OAA05605 at under.engr.sgi.com>
             J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com> writes:
>On Fri, 5 Jun 1998 16:39:15 -0500 
>Michael Willey<Michael.Willey at abnamro.com> wrote:
>
>> Our goal never has been to simulate a complete and closed world in
>> any aspect, but to run a game.  
>
>Are the two necessarily different?

Not necessarily, but I find that it's a very useful distinction.
The purpose of a game is for the players to have fun.  The purpose
of a complete and closed world simulation is internal consistency.
Personally, I think that consistency (of any sort, not just internal)
reduces the likelyhood of frustrating surprise, but it does not
contribute directly to fun.  (It can contribute directly to
intellectual appreciation, but that's an entirely different beast
altogether.)

I find it somewhat disturbing that some of the most lauded ideas
on this list are ones where the common reaction is "That's really
cool.  If I ever have to actually play in it, though, I'll just
hide in my box.".  It seems that we're not interested in designing
games we'd want to play on this list, but instead ones that we'd
only want to look at from godlike perspective.

Another poster commented on the dearth of posts regarding requirements.
To help remedy this, I'll try to give some of the requirements for
a game that I'd like to build:

  1. It must be a game the I would enjoy playing.  (FWIW, I'm
     a Spade with a helping of Diamond, by Bartle's definitions,
     and I write robots which are Diamonds with a helping of
     (positive) Club.)

  2. It must have an interface which is not prone to aggravating
     my RSI (so low mouse usage, please).

  3. My memory is particularly bad, so I need to be able to log
     just about everything I do in the game, in such a way that
     the hundreds of megabytes of data can be searched and processed
     effectively.

  4. The game must have noticable amounts of inter-human interaction.
     At least some of this interaction must be conversational, and
     at least some must be non-conversational.  It helps if the
     interaction is beneficial to gameplay.

  5. The game must have sufficient breadth to make replay (or
     continued play past any pre-defined goals) entertaining.

There are a lot of other requirements that I'd tack on, but they're
sufficiently domain-specific that I don't think I'll list them here.

- Alex