[MUD-Dev] [STORY] Story and population size

[Matt Mihaly]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, John Buehler wrote:
> Matt Mihaly writes:

>> Erm, you make it sound as if people haven't been taking those
>> steps for the past 20+ years. It's not as if someone woke up in
>> 1975 and said "Hey, there are no online multiplayer games
>> around. Let's go whole-hog and make a 3d graphical one!" There's
>> 20+ years of history in the MUD industry.
 
> I think you misunderstand the point of my post.  It was to suggest
> that the current crop of games tend towards doing many things
> poorly instead of a few things well.  The disparity between the
> marketing and the reality of the games is a constant point of
> discontent among player bases.  That is, player expectations are
> set high, only to be fed by weak implementations.

Yes, that's probably true.
 
> I'm refering to something with a higher 'entertainment density'
> than current games.  Current games suffer from the model of being
> open 24 hours, being carefully structured for combat 'balance',
> for solo play, attempting to derive all their entertainment from
> simple animated combat sequences leading to the death of sprites.

Well, it's got a high entertainment density if your thing is bashing
monsters, don't you think? I mean, some people, such as you and I,
might not enjoy it, but there's an awful lot of people out there for
whom monster bashing is a lot of fun.
 
> To contrast, chess is quite complicated, but it has a high
> entertainment density because of all the thought involved in a
> fairly short period of time.  The same can be said of the game of
> go.  I haven't hashed this out yet, but I'm wondering if there is
> are treatments of game content and player interaction that will
> give a higher entertainment density - more to do in a shorter
> period of time.  Players should be deciding to step away from a
> game because they've had enough, not pounding on the developers
> for more.

Well, in my case at least, I am more interested in worlds than
games, so I'm not that concerned with high entertainment
densities. I like it when my players live in my world rather than
just play it. I know that's not your thing.
 
--matt

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