[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[S. Patrick Gallaty]

-----Original Message-----
From: Koster, Raph <rkoster at origin.ea.com>
To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu' <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Wednesday, September 30, 1998 3:52 PM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions 
[ ]

>UO actually had very little marketing, in that we ran a few ads (I think
>there were five) prior to release, and had no online ads. We had a
>website two and a half years in advance of release, of course. The
>magazine coverage we got was just about all initiated by the press
>themselves, rather than by our aggressively pursuing it.


UO had many very dedicated fans who administered IRC channels,
ran websites, recruited playerbases (by actively going to other 
multiplayer games and telling people about UO) etc.

Origin has never understood the impact that the fan base had on the
proliferation of the UO fever, and perhaps never will.

>I think, though, that what caught the initial fan base's attention was a
>combination of the name, and the approach to the design: basically, a
>simulationist world. People thought the idea of living in a virtual


That's a distortion of the game-maker, I believe.
We always like to think that people (gamers and players) appreciate our 
works based on their merits, and based on our efforts - but in truth they 
do not.  They appreciate 'our work' only in a tertiary sense - insofar as they
perceive their experiences through the distortion of fitting it to their
existential template.
So no, I will wager 5 bucks that the average player doesn't give a rat's anus
if a monster spawns or a monster is born from a monster mommy and
monster daddy so long as there are monsters to fight.
The basic failure of simulations is that the player will generally interact
with only the superficial.  So you have 100% effort going into only the 15% 
that the player sees.  That's not a great payoff unless you are culling some
experimental data from the great experiment.
What benefit is massive simulation if we can shorthand all that with clever
emulation?  The player can't see the man behind the curtains in either
case.