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

[John Buehler]

Raph Koster writes:

>> Another way of looking at this is to say that, in current games,
>> players are building a house of cards in a windy area.  The house
>> of cards is their plans for entertainment, and the windy area is
>> the multiplayer environment.  Other players are liable to ruin a
>> player's entertainment completely by accident.  Often, it's just a
>> side-effect of the game design that nobody saw coming.  In this
>> analogy, the height of the house of cards is the rope that the game
>> gives the player.  I want players building houses of cards, but I
>> only want them going one or two layers.  Existing games offer the
>> possibility of creating a house of cards that is many more layers
>> high.

> This is interesting because it goes so strongly against conventional
> wisdom in the mud community, which says that most muds don't let
> players DO anything other than narrowly prescribed activities such
> as hacking and slashing monsters endlessly. In what ways do you feel
> that muds have offered the ability to build a really tall house of
> cards?

In that they permit players to pursue ambitious goals, investing of
themselves in their character.  As you seem to desire, that produces
the emotional ties to the game that brings the player back over and
over again.  The presence of other players means that a given player's
ability to pursue those ambitious goals is more or less hindered.  The
more I hear about the desire for PvP and permanent character death in
the world, the more I assume that we're trying to introduce more wind
and to stack the cards higher.  Greater risks (wind) and greater
rewards (cards).

> I ask because I agree with the conventional wisdom--muds usually
> only recognize a very narrow subset of human activity--and even
> human entertainment. And in fact in your other posts, you have
> argued for being more entertaining to a larger group of people, not
> less.

I'm not trying to promise players the exhiliration of amassing power,
wealth, items or anything else.  I'm trying to come up with lighter,
less compelling entertainment, but covering a large spectrum of
activities.  It is geared towards the socializer and explorer, with a
lesser emphasis on satisfying the killer and achiever.  The pace of
the world is slower, with more entertainment being available in the
little things.  I'd like to attract a certain number of tourists who
just hop into the world with their character that has remained at
newbie level of achievements for months.  I want friends arguing over
whether they want to don armor and head off to the front lines or
whether they want to don climbing gear and go spelunking.

As I claimed in another reply to one of your posts, single player
games (like books or movies) are well-suited to intense experiences,
while multiplayer games - particularly those where you don't know who
you'll be interacting with - are less capable of reliably providing
such experiences.  Because I can't guarantee the way that my players
will interact with each other, I'm trying to lessen their belief that
they will become mayors, barons and kings.  Only one guy gets to be a
king, and he's the most extreme player in the game.

My joke is that Simutronics is talking about creating a game called
"Hero's Journey".  My game is "Peasant's Journey".  Because I figure I
can have 10,000 peasant players, but not 10,000 hero players.  Not in
any true sense of the word.  I don't believe that a game world can
actually deliver on the 'hero' promise.

JB

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