[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #281 - 18 msgs

[Dr. Cat]

> on 1/14/01 11:40 AM, Matthew Mihaly at the_logos at achaea.com wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 14 Jan 2001, Dr. Cat wrote:
> > 
> >> By the way, that Korean market sounds very promising.  If anybody over
> >> there wants to license some of our product or contract our team to
> >> develop something, give me a shout.  :X) And regardless I'm glad to
> >> see other parts of the world besides the US able to develop successful
> >> online gaming.  Europe is still hamstrung by their outrageously high
> >> metered telephone rates, but we'll make our steps towards global
> >> harmony someday in spite of 'em!
> > 
> > Grin, except that Koreans are outrageous power gamers and player killers
> > from what I understand. Not exactly your cup o' tea!
> > --matt
> > 

Woah, typecast again!  Do you know in the last 18 years I've done action
games, strategy games, real video slot machines for casinos where people
lose real money, an adults-only shareware title, games for 3-10 year old
kids, and of course worked on lots of the Ultima titles.  I was assigned
to be in charge of the second attempt at making Ultima Online that never
happened, in 1990.  The actual product out there was the third attempt. :X)

I will admit 'Manda and I switched from DragonSpires, your classic type
of graphic combat oriented MUD we started on in 1994, over to Furcadia
because we were tired of doing that same old genre yet again.  But we're
professionals (read "whores" (something that's actually respectable in some
societies)), we do what we can get paid to do.  My latest obsession to play
is actually Knights And Merchants (well, that and Dance Dance Revolution),
just been trying to do something that's more novel and "out there" for our
personal magnum opus.

We actually did get contacted a couple years back from someplace in the far
east that wanted to license the Java version of Dragonspires my young
apprentice out in Seattle coded.  I didn't pursue that too vigorously
because I figured it'd be a lot of effort to close a deal in a tiny market
that couldn't afford to pay very much.  Purrhaps I was mistaken.

> From: Jeff Freeman <skeptack at antisocial.com>
> 
> From: "Dr. Cat" <cat at realtime.net>
> 
> > By the way, that Korean market sounds very promising.
> 
> Funny, the impression I got was that it wasn't very promising at all.
> Whereas you (and most of the people on this list) are all about that
> "online community" thing, the market in Korea sounds like it is almost
> entirely composed of offline communities.  Dave Rickey said maybe he
> was missing out on something in Lineage because he didn't speak
> Korean, but I think it was because he didn't play Lineage from a
> cybercafe in Korea.  Where the community was.

Maybe your definitions are different than mine.  When I hear someone's
generating a few million dollars in revenues a month, that sounds both
promising and suprisingly large to me, for a country with an economy
not nearly as huge as the US economy.  That their top online hit can
generate the same kind of money as the big games here is pretty phenomenal.
And I don't care if they're playing at home, at cybercafes, or from a
handheld PDA in a fishing boat, they're connecting to an online game and
playing it online, that's the kinda stuff I make.  If the people that meet
on the game also spend more time socializing in real life I say good for
them, it's probably a lot healthier than the reclusive lifestyles some
online junkies have.  And if they're paying the same subscription fee it's
just as good a market - better if I'd make the same profit and be a more
socially redeeming product at the same time.  Though I do wonder with their
smaller market they're already close to saturating it just to get one game
to be that successful.  They have a much smaller population than the US,
and I imagine a smaller percentage of people that spend any time using
computers, even ones they don't own personally.

> What strikes me as being a big draw for Furcadia is the anonymity of
> it - but when you're playing in a public place, I think, the thing
> would feel a whole lot less anonymous all of a sudden.  Pretending to
> be a squirrel having sex with someone pretending to be a bunny just
> isn't something I'd want to do with the potential for people to peek
> over my shoulder and see what I'm up to.

I think your description there fits better with assumptions and stereotypes
about A) early (say pre-1994) internet users and B) the "furry fandom".
Furcadia draws, as it was intended to, much more on members of the
"average" general public at large.  Which you have to in order to get
really big and popular, groups like those two tend to be a lot smaller.
The anonymity is something I think early Internet people (and MUD players)
wanted a lot more, on Furcadia we see a lot more "light" roleplayers or
chatters who don't roleplay at all (beyond "I'm sitting at a bar chatting
with my online friends while wearing a cat costume", which is about how I
think they perceive it).  Also I think we see more exchanging of real
life information and arrangements to meet in person than on a lot of the
text muds I've frequented.  Check out http://home.europa.com/~knute/furc/
for an example.  It may well be that the text mud community still leans
much more towards people who fit the "Internet old-timer" stereotype, even
if they're new to the net, and they want to be very anonymous.  But that's
not our core constituency.  Not that anything inherent to our server or the
world we've built on it forces people away from or towards anonymity...  I
imagine if we ran it someplace where 99% of the people wanted to be very
secretive, they'd find it quite workable for their needs as well.

As for squirrels having sex with bunnies - well that sort of thing
certainly happens, but it's not the main draw or the purpose of the
place.  We have an R-rated area for suggestive stuff, and one for the
"dark" stuff (violence, vampires, werewolves, and apparently there's
a goth crowd that hangs out there).  Both of them get traffic, but
neither is anywhere near as crowded as the main social and roleplaying
areas.  I'm sure some of the couples that've ended up getting married
in real life have done some of that sort of thing along the way, but
that's really none of my business.  We just ask them to keep it in private
where it won't, um, well I guess I can't use the cliche "frighten the
horses".  You know what I mean, anyway.  :X)

*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* 
   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
*-------------------------------------------**   http://www.furcadia.com
    Furcadia - a graphic mud for PCs!       ||  Let your imagination soar!
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
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