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

[Jeff Freeman]

At 12:48 PM 1/16/01 -0600, Dr. Cat wrote:

>> From: Jeff Freeman <skeptack at antisocial.com>

>> 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.

What I mean is, it just sounds like a different sort of game.  A majority
of the people playing it are meeting offline *to play the game* - it just
seems like a different sort of thing, different type of game, different
online world, whatever you want to call it, than the sort of thing that
you'd make for, say, a US audience.

> 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.

Well, just speaking of MUDs, say: wouldn't you do anything differently if
you knew the players were going to be playing your game mostly by gathering
in cybercafe's, versus by meeting online (and *maybe* having get-togethers
offline sometime after that).

For example, it seems like any sort of in-game guild or
player-association or other community-building mechanisms would be a
whole lot less important - in fact all the socialization aspects of
the game would be less important - if the community is basically going
to form completely offline anyway.

In other words, if you're going to get a group of people that hang-out
in a cyber cafe to play your game, then they're going to have to be
able to do a lot more than just chat with each other - because they
are already doing that.

> 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.

But it's a social game, moreso than most MUDs.  But in an environment
where in-game socialization takes a back-seat to everything else
(because most of the people are socializing off-line, and playing the
game is just one of things they do when they get together to socialize
with one another), it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would
be very popular.

And you could design something that would be very popular there, but
then would it also be popular in the States?

> 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.

Geez, all this time I thought that was the main draw the internet,
period. :P

--
  http://home.swbell.net/skeptack/

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