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

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Raph Koster wrote:
> > You know, Raph and the rest of you, this guy is an aberration.
> > He's not the normal MUD or MMOG player.
> 
> The normal MMORPG player is online 20 hours a week. What else do you do for
> 20 hours a week? I bet there aren't very many single activities. And this is
> the average. Being crude with the stats here, that means half of MMORPG
> players are playing MORE than that.

>From every statistic I've ever heard, most Americans spend at least that
much time watching TV every week.  I consider online gaming to be a MUCH
more productive passtime than that.

That said, I very much agree that most online games require far too much
time from players.  I basically gave up mudding "for real" because it took
far too much time that I wanted to spend on other things.  I very much
want to play, but I just don't have the time to spend.

> > To get upset over one person's addiction is
> > silly.  If it wasn't UO it would be something else for this guy.  There
> > isn't anything you could have done to prevent it.
> 
> "If it wasn't me pushing heroin, he'd be a drunk instead." :)

This analogy is apt, but not for the reason that (I suspect) you were
suggesting.

Heroin is a *far* safer drug (both in terms of short- and long-term physical
effects, and the behavior of the user) than alcohol.  It also has extremely
high medical value, which is why medical professionals lament its high
scheduling by the DEA.  If you managed to keep someone away from alcoholism by
providing them heroin, I believe you would be doing them a favor.

I say the analogy is apt because if you take someone who previously spent
30+ hours a week watching TV and obsessing over the lives of the characters
on soap operas, you're doing them a favor by providing them another, more
interactive, form of entertainment.

Either way I have to agree with the original poster.  It is not our
responsbility to police people "having lives" outside of our entertainment,
any more than it is a car manufacture's responbility to install something
in your car to keep you from running down pedestrians in a fit of rage.

However, there's a middle ground, and I think this was touched in in the
bit about character archiving - trying to create the game such that we
cater to the kind of player that we want (a normal, healthy adult who wants
to spend 3 to 20 hours a week playing an online game) rather than the kind
that we don't (the freak described in the article).

> I know full well that the number of people who get seriously addicted to
> online games is not large. Heck, when I was in graduate school and first got
> intop online games, both Kristen and I EASILY played over 50 hours a week
> each. Our schedules got completely out of whack--we'd pull all-nighters
> multiple nights a week. But you know what? It was a GOOD experience, because
> it helped us get past the fact that we were utterly miserable in Tuscaloosa,
> Alabama, not a town I recommend anyone live in.

Agreed.  I went through a "heavy mudding" stage where it was the main
activity in my life.  It lasted about a year, and I think back to those days
with great fondness.  I probably won't ever do anything like that again,
but I'm very glad that my mudding friends and I had access to games that
allowed us to play that way, if we so chose.

I don't think the argument here is that we should do away with games that
require heavy time commitments.  Rather I think it's that there's a very
large audience for games with much lower time requirements - an audience
that I, personally, would like to tap into.  Because they are (I think)
people like myself.

Adam





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