[MUD-Dev] Birthday Cake (or Why Large Scale Sometimes Sucks) (long)

[Matthew Mihaly]

On 6 Jun 2000, Miroslav Silovic wrote:

> Brian Green <brian at psychochild.org> writes:
> 
> > Raph's statement about the market is true, *if you are building a large
> > scale, mass-market product.*  When you water your content down to please
> > the masses, you should not expect soul-searching introspection aspects
> > of the content to remain intact.  At best, thinking you can is naive; at
> > worst, there is nothing more dangerous than a creative person with a
> > message and a medium that cannot sufficiently express the message.
> 
> While I agree with most of your post, the implication of this
> paragraph is not true.
> 
> You *DO NOT* have to water down the content to appeal to the
> masses. It is one way to attract the crowd - but one we all despise,
> and most definitely not the only way.
> 
> Just remember that one of the most popular books written in this
> century (soon to be 'previous century') was Lord of the Rings. There's
> still hope. :)

I'm a huge Tolkien fan (surprise), but I also don't consider The Lord of
the Rings to be great literature, except insofar as it basically founded a
genre (and genre literature is pulp nearly by definition).

 
> And then, White Wolf have published a bunch of roleplaying games that
> got VERY popular... while their games do get angsty or even downright
> silly in spots, their writers always at least -try- to make their
> games profound.

White Wolf? Who the hell are they? Go out onto the street and ask 100
people if they have any idea who White Wolf is. 99 of them will look at
you funny. Go out and ask them if they are familiar with the movie Titanic
and compare the results. 

White Wolf most definitely does not even come close to appealing to the
mass market.

--matt




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