[MUD-Dev] Are eBay sales more than just a fad?

[Joe Andrieu]

From: Madman Across the Water

> Brian 'Psychochild' Green wrote:
> >
> > Using the 45-year-old exec and the 14-year-old student
> example above,
> > why would the exec want to play in a game where time
> spent in the game
> > is rewarded, as it is in most commercial MUDs?  The
> student will almost
> > always have more time to dedicate to the game, and will
> therefore always
> > be more powerful than the exec.  Why is this "fair"?
>
> I realize that I am strongly in the minority when it comes to this
> concern, but the reason I find it more "fair", or at least
> acceptable,
> to give the advantage to time over out of game money is
> that it isn't
> fiction breaking. If I am playing Goldenflame the Paladin,
> as I so often
> do (he's had  his share of deaths in both text MUDs and UO :), and I
> devote hours of time and Goldenflame acquires the longsword
> "Ezwilden",
> then _he_ earned it. He spent the time and overcame the
> obstacles and
> earned it.


It all depends on how you define your fiction.

Does the importance of available leisure time over financial resources
"break" the fiction of being an interesting character in a virtual
world?  Why then would the reverse? Or perhaps more to the point,
*both* break the fiction in roughly the same way for different people.
If I'm a poor teenager, I hate rich old guys coming in and getting all
the good stuff. As a professional with a wife and kids, I hate those
damn kids who spend all their time playing the game because I can't
ever be on equal footing with them.

Food for thought: Does the size of my allowance/disposable income
break the fiction of Pokemon or Magic the Gathering?


There are a lot of rules of how not to break the illusion of
disbelief. And they are different for every medium. In fact, different
works in different media have successfully established different
rulesets--and broken the conventions of their genre to desirable
effect.  It is _consistency_ within a given ruleset that is far more
important than maintaining some ideal of "fiction".

So, design the fiction to fit the _larger_ game that people are
playing anyway: a virtual entertainment on the Internet with adopted
personnae and fictitious clothing, housing, monsters, etc., where I
can explore, kill things, kill other players, socialize, torment, hack
the system, farm for cash, establish a reputation, do cool things, see
cool things, be a tyrant, and more.

The real game is not what you design, e.g., the "fiction", it is
whatever your players are doing with your service. The goal isn't to
make Frodo's Middle Earth fiction consistent, it is to make little
Billy's time in the Middle Earth Online Service fun so he'll keep
playing, keep paying, and tell all his friends. Even artistically, the
goal is to make Billy *feel* like he is running around in Middle
Earth, not to recreate the reality of what Middle Earth would be like.
So let Billy spend his allowance to get cool gear and keep the game
mechanics mostly independent of the value of such purchases. See Magic
the Gathering and Pokemon for excellent treatment of a successful
solution--at least for cards.

So perhaps the question is, what is the game mechanic that separates
material wealth from overwhelming advantage, while still being easy to
learn and enjoyable at all levels of expertise and skill?

-j

--
Joe Andrieu
Realtime Drama

joe at andrieu.net
+1 (925) 973-0765





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