[MUD-Dev] Our player's keepers? (long)

[Zak Jarvis]

As I see it, our responsibility as designers is *not* to prevent players
from pathologically playing our games.

It's to not design games that specifically appeal to and encourage
pathology. If I refuse to take responsibility for any harm my game might
cause, there is no reason for me to not create designs to completely
maximize the effect of habituation. This makes me a bad person.

I'll give a really simple example of what I consider to be Wrong.

I create a quest for the Ultimate Noun of Verbing which requires that an
individual remain continuously online and active for 30 hours. He'll be
inundated through the whole time with unpredictable activities which he
must complete to succeed. Better still, he has to pay $100 to begin the
quest. After all, he's eating my bandwidth.

Now I have to ask, who can complete this quest without some real *personal*
cost?

It's a reprehensible dodge to say "Well, no one has to play the quest". I
didn't design the damn thing if I didn't expect someone to play it, and if
I expected someone to play it, then I *knew* what I was doing to them.
Further, I think we all know that this isn't something that no player would
do if it were there.

-Zak Jarvis
 http://www.voidmonster.com





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