[MUD-Dev] RE: [adv-mud] What good is a hero when nobody knows?

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2000 21:13:08 -0800 
J C Lawrence <claw at kanga.nu> wrote:

>   Community -- they are a part of a society or social group, and
> are needed by and valuable to that group.

>   Investment -- they have invested effort and expertise with gains
> that might be lost without attention.

>   Involvement -- they are an implicit and functional part of the
> world, such that both they, and the game world, are mutually
> dependent and will change (possibly for the worse) without their
> continued involvement.

>   Participation -- they are involved in group and game-world
> activities such that they are a "member" to an observable (to
> them) extent, and thus feel a pleasant sense of obligation and
> duty toward those activities.

>   Value -- they value their role, its impact, and their
> participation in in-game activities and the other people there.

Adding:

  Future -- the player must have and be able to sustain the idea
that he has a future in the game, and that that future can or will
be be sufficiently interesting and different from what has done
already ("more of the same" is a death knell).

  Mystery -- The game must retain things that are unknown but which
the player feels are knowable.  More simply, the player must feel
that there things he can still learn in the game, and that he will
like what he will learn.  The game must never become "solved" from
the view of the player.  Mystery is the thing that sticks people to
things.

My purpose in this list, and the reason I'd like to see them beat on
and discussed here is an effort to develop a logical tool.  I'd like
to try and arrive at something of a checklist such that a game
feature or idea can be held up against these items and weighed as to
how it benefits the basic structural purposes of the game.  I'm not
looking for recipes or formulae here, just some basic
characteristics that we can use as tools in judgement.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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