[MUD-Dev] Goals and directions (was the gender thing)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 10:37 PM 6/9/99 -0500, I personally witnessed Koster, Raph jumping up to
say:
>
>My experience has been that players ASK to be allowed to make up their own
>goals, but then find the game lacking in direction if they are actually
>given that. They complain that the game doesn't offer enough to do in a
>structured format. Ultimately, I think the right answer is to give the
>freedom to make up your own goals, and to also offer as many different
>ladders of achievement as you can, so that there are multiple types of
>structured goals to reach for.

This is exactly what I'm going for in UU, although the documentation
currently states that there are two goals: kill the enemy, and conquer the
universe. There are really a lot more goals, but keeping the list of goals
small allows players to discover other ones on their own. Potentially goals
we've never seen or heard of before. 

On the BBS version of Ultimate Universe, one player on my board (Vlad, if I
remember right, although he might have been the one who turned himself into
a self-proclaimed spy and broadcast the location and type of everyone's
defenses to everyone else... both goals were just as annoying) made it his
mission in life to attach a homing device to each and every other ship in
the galaxy. Not for any particular purpose, per se, but just to see if he
could. The rest of us, obviously, made it one of our goals in life to keep
this guy from putting homing signals on our ships. He was rather obnoxious
about it, too -- posting each success in frequently-traveled areas so
everyone knew when he'd nailed you. Not that we were any less obnoxious --
we set extremely lethal traps for him and were much, much crueler than he
was to us. 

On balance, it would have been a good deal less challenging for all of us
if he had just decided to kill everyone else in the galaxy... but his
creativity, while it bothered the hell out of us, was admirable. 

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
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