[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Brian Hook]

At 08:24 AM 3/15/01 +0000, Daniel wrote:

> So, what you really, really want is a stable but dynamic world with
> story-creation by the volunteers / players?

Well, there's lots of "really, really want", that go from one extreme
to the other depending on how visionary vs. practical I feel.

At one extreme, I want the world -- which means, primarily the content
and the mechanics -- to be frozen so that the developers can move on
to the next project.  The "story-creation" effectively is whatever the
players imagine, i.e. the sandbox analogy that Raph has stated.  It
phases from "game" to "world".

At the other extreme, it would be great if users could somehow
generate meaningful content.  And I'm not talking such trite crap as
clan logos, custom skins or buildings/dungeons, but REAL content.  So
maybe "content" isn't the right word, but more like "experiences".
When you have such a powerful and balanced sandbox that a user can
inadvertently create a powerful, compelling experience for others
without necessarily screwing it for everyone else (i.e. PvP isn't an
option =) ).  This would be my version of a Holy Grail, but I don't
think that is attainable for quite some time.

So for the mean time, an episodic game where players interact with
each other as the story unfolds, eventually replaced with a more
static world where the players interact with each other and fairly
static encounters.  The static world would be no worse than EQ,
really.

> That seems to be a worthy goal, but I'd conjecture that it's best
> served by building it into the design from scratch, rolling out
> developer stories hand-in-hand with your player-driven devices.

Yes, that would be the ideal.

> I'm a fan of the idea of episodic roll-out of over-arching story,
> but I'm not sure that we know how to do it, for the huge audiences
> that we're presumably talking about.

I quite agree.  Because what you want is an episodic roll-out that the
players can be a part of, instead of just watching.  It's relatively
easy to crank out the "This just happened" or "Come watch this
pre-determined event happen over in this zone", but it's much more
difficult to manage and design an event where the players feel
emotionally invested and, even more important, meaningful as the
situation unfolds.  To use an AD&D analogy, even if you're a third
level Drow cleric, you'd still feel like you could make a difference,
however minor, in the great battle between Lolth and the surface
dwellers.

> I wonder if AC's game story efforts have caused any noticeable upset
> in support costs. Anyone care to comment on how successful they've
> been here?

My feeling is that those events are too infrequent to make a real
difference.  While much better scripted and executed than EQ's
"events", they still impacted a small player base.

Brian Hook

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