[MUD-Dev] facist marketers / content controllers

[msew]

At 23:58 11/11/2000 -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
>On Wed, 8 Nov 2000 12:01:54 -0800
>Koster, Raph <rkoster at verant.com> wrote:
>
> > As far as putting up stories--there is a very large concern with
> > user-generated content and liability there, even for hobbyist
> > muds. It's very easy for this to outpace your ability to vet the
> > submitted content, leading to your website hosting material that
> > you may well not want on there.
>
>Talk to a marketing or PR person about products which allow their
>users to arbitrarily define and create the product's visible
>presences and they start to look very uncomfortable.  In a world
>where image is a controlled an metered item, such laissez faire
>operations don't fly well.  Given that the marketing image of an
>item is usually intended to be the product of corporate millions and
>the gimlet eyes of defensive lawyers and some of the problems become
>apparent.


While I see that this is the status quo right now, doesn't this strike 
anyone else as fundamentally flawed?


0) it does not scale  (your BEST marketer is your community). The marketers 
at the company only really do the base case of getting the product into the 
first pioneer-esque people's hand. From then on out the marketer's job 
should just be to keep the product on the radar of magazines and creating 
content for community to point to or leverage. (ie when I can hand a friend 
a magazine with a well written article that is helpful.)

1) you are restricting the creative juices of the players in huge 
ways.  (this is different than directing the player's creativeness)

2) it does not scale


I firmly believe that the people playing the game, whom are spending hours 
and hours and hours of time are going to be the more effective sales 
people.  And letting them own a part of the game is going to make them want 
to get more people to see their creations.



The next generation of MMP games (and even this generation) are more than 
just a typical product.  It is not as if we are talking about Microsoft 
Word here.  Playing these games is a HUGE part of your recreational time 
and also becomes part of your life.  Your social life is there (or at least 
a chunk of it).  I really don't believe the marketers and the 
administration folks understand this at all, nor understand that the 
community is their most powerful resource to leverage.   Marketing 101 
doesn't really work here.


Further, I don't think the game designers are doing enough to allow user 
generated content to be easily created and imported into the 
game.   Certainly, there are technical issues to resolve that take time an 
resources to complete.  But the gains you get are just incredible.


I just don't buy the current crop of excuses that people keep using; 
"offensive content", loss of control, technical hurdles, too hard to define 
what kind of game this is then.



It seems that if you want to differentiate your game from the others, you 
need to make it not a game but a never ending experience that is self 
supporting.  And the only way to get self supporting is to allow the 
community to create things or to have a DIRECT say in what the development 
team spends their time on (ie something like the old java bucks program 
(they use votes right now which has a bad connotation imo as it somewhat 
implies that the max votes will win) where the issues that people care 
about most are moved up on the priority queue for the dev team).




msew





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