[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[Justin Hooper]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Travis Casey wrote:

> Thursday, February 22, 2001, 2:29:52 PM, Justin Hooper
> <jhooper at uiuc.edu> wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, John Buehler wrote:

>> Realism != entertainment.  Sustainable disbelief of reality (IMO)
>> == entertainment.  If I want realism, I'll shut the computer off
>> and go pay my bills.
 
> I should know better than to comment, but:
> 
>   realism != reality
> 
> I have to agree with John that uncertainty adds to entertainment --
> a game where everything is predictable will very quickly become
> boring.

Well, a lot of this is a semantics argument.  Realism obviously
implies to me something different than it does to you.  What it seems
to me you're implying is something I would call "logical consistency".

And I too agree that uncertainty adds to entertainment, but there's a
fine line between uncertainty and frustration.  If you teach a player
that pursuing a quest line will often lead to no palpable reward (or,
more importantly, will not lead to the expected/promised reward), many
will eventually lose interest.

Of course, I suppose I should mention that this becomes a problem of
scale at some point.  At the scale of Everquest, where 98% of the
population is pretty much assured that someone before them has been
there, done that, it begins to fail miserably.  For smaller systems,
it might be perfectly okay.

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