[MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the Ugly.

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Phillip Lenhardt <philen at monkey.org>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Monday, June 05, 2000 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the Ugly.


>On Mon, Jun 05, 2000 at 11:18:01AM -0400, Dave Rickey wrote:
>> cares about, anyway.  My opinion on macroing in games is simply this: If
a
>> major portion of your gameplay is so repetitive it can be performed by
>> simply looping the same mouse-clicks over and over, you already screwed
up.
>
>I couldn't agree more. There is nothing gamelike about repetitive actions.
>But as far as I can tell, no successful commercial game contains a major
>portion of repetitive gameplay. It's just that players tend to focus on
>whatever repetitive gameplay there is, provided that that gameplay results
>in large in-game rewards.

    Hmm....  More that players like *very* predictable risk/reward ratios,
and always gravitate to actions with the highest risk/reward ratio (how they
define reward can vary).  6 hours of making cotton to thread, thread to
cloth, cloth to skullcaps may not be the highest reward in UO, but it is
almost completely safe.  3 hours of recall mining/refining/tinkering
carpentry hammers gives as much reward, but brings in the risk of being
killed occasionally.  Many people in UO made skullcaps, few recall-mined in
the early days when a player standing in one place outdoors was essentially
putting a bullseye on his forehead.

    By the same token, killing the same mobs repeatedly may not be the
absolutely fastest way to advance in EQ (it's close), but it is much less
risk than more mobile operations.
>
>> Sword of Lambada, is *not* fun.  Deliberately including things that are
not
>> fun in your game is stupid.
>
>I couldn't agree less. I see no problem with including things that the
>designers feel the majority of the players will not find fun. For one
>thing, players are perverse and often find fun in the wierdest activities.
>For another, unfun activities can serve as a mild form of negative
>reinforcement.
>
    Okay, however these are not optional play modes.  In the early days of
UO, the only "legitimate" (non-duping, non-PK'ing) way to earn enough money
to be a master-level Mage type was to skull-cap for hours on end, or work
another money pump.  For anyone wanting to engage in magery, generating cash
was a *requirement* (it took more than 250,000 gold to reach GM mage, and
that was considered a lot of money), and the tedium of doing so was a
"negative reinforcement" intended to control the Mage population.  Barring
the guy I knew who played the game by repeatedly creating GM smiths
*without* macroing, few people found that process fun.  By the same token, a
Melee character in EQ *cannot* survive without the proper equipment, for
which he has to wait in line.

    It isn't that all players will define the activity as "non-fun", it is
that the game system requires those that do to participate in activity they
do not enjoy for large amounts of time.  Using "negative reinforcement" in
this fashion essentially means that you are going to make a tedium level
high enough that many will not tolerate it and instead will do something
else.  That *is* stupid.  There's supposed to be a game in there somewhere,
right?  What about all the guys who aren't quite bored enough to stop doing
it, but still aren't having "fun"?
>
>Bringing the term "fun" into the discussion muddies that waters, in my
opinion.
>When we stick to talking about repetitive actions and lengths of play
sessions
>we are talking about measureable quantities. The neat thing is that
reducing
>the number of repetitive actions and lengths of play sessions seems to also
>increase the fun of the game. So, at least until repetitive actions stop
>dominating gameplay, we have a handy way of judging how fun our games are.
>
    I don't find "fun" a muddy concept at all.  That different players will
find different things "fun" is self-evident.  The question is whether large
numbers of players are being forced to spend large amount of their time
doing things that *particular* player finds to be "not-fun".

    Okay, we agree that reducing the number of repetitive actions is good.
I can agree (in theory) that reducing the number of repetitive actions *may*
reduce per-session time (on the principle that if players log in to do
certain specific things, doing them quickly will let them log out quickly).
We agree that making the game more fun for more people through multiple
play-modes is good.  What are we arguing about again?  That making
time-wasters an integral part of gameplay as a "negative reinforcement" is a
good way to design a game?  I ain't going to buy into that.  "Negative
Reinforcement" is how you tell a player he's doing something *wrong*.  If he
can't escape them, he's liable to think the "wrong" thing he did was logging
on.

--Dave Rickey




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev