[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Marian Griffith wrote:

> Downtime is psychologically necessary for players. If the
> experience is sufficiently intense players need time to reorient
> themselves.

[...]

> right.  While I am aware that most of the time the game experience
> is not quite so stressfull, it still sets (should set) the
> adrenaline flowing, and a player needs to recover from that.

You're onto something here, although not the intense part I think,
MUDs can be quite boring, even hardcore players say so.  My guess is
that the intent behind having downtime is to stretch content and
support social stickyness (diversify roles, increase greatfulness
towards the healer for saving them from some downtime-suffering).
People have enough downtime when they are offline to any stress, the
majority anyway.

IMO, the most effective thing with downtime is actually the buildup
of tension and expectation, which is necessary in order to
experience catharsis, release, excitement... Humans are relative,
contrast amplify experience. There are more entertaining ways to do
this than looking at a healthbar though. Hunting down the prey,
scouting, having more fully developed activities in addition to the
butchering...

--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/
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