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

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, Zak Jarvis wrote:

> 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.

In your opinion, that makes you bad. In my opinion, it has no bearing on
your status as a 'good' or 'bad' person.

 
> 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?

Since you can't do anything at all without some real personal cost, I
hardly see the relevance of this question. Reading this e-mail has a real
personal cost to you, in time. 

 
> 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.

Of course people would do it, and I laud the game designer for it. If you
create experiences that people choose to take, then I think you deserve
congratulations as you are an excellent capitalist, and that is worthy of
adulation, to me. I applaud drug dealers for the same reason. Taking
personal risks to their health and welfare in the pursuit of bringing to
market what the market asks for (though I doubt most of them look at it
quite in that light). 

I really think this thread is pointless. Ethics and morality are
completely subjective (something many posters seem to forget in their
eagerness to impose their particular ethics or morality on the rest of
us), and so this discussion becomes utterly useless. You believe you know
better than your customers what they want and what is good for them.
That's fine. Maybe you do. I am not that enlightened and if someone wants
to do something that looks very stupid to me, well, if it benefits me, I'm
not going to stop him or her. Perhaps he or she has reasons I'm not aware
of or am unable to appreciate. 

--matt




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