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

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:

> I don't really see the relevance of claiming that in an ideal game
> there'd be no metagame methods. I am all for metagame methods as I'm
> interested in entertaining players, not characters. Characters are
> datasets and have no money to give us. Without a metagame, you've
> just got a simulation with no player input.

That's called a movie, and many people find them very entertaining :)

It's simply a question of degree.  Limiting metagaming has nothing to
do with attempting to 'entertain characters'.  It has to do with
entertaining players in a specific way, of setting specific
expectations among the player base.  An extreme form of metagaming is
Quake, where even my real world dexterity skills have an impact on
gameplay.  Typically, graphical genre-specific games assign manual
skills to the characters.  It denies players the entertainment of
using those metagame skills, but affords them the opportunity of
developing their character skills.  The player is entertained, just in
a different way.

> No doubt Achaea would make many people cringe. But like you say, so
> what. It's fun to discuss our preferences here, because we can speak
> as both players and designers. As a player, for example, my
> preferences are much different from those of the designer side of
> me, and Achaea suffers to this day from decisions I made at the
> beginning when I was designing as a player, rather than designing as
> a designer.

Well, this was my point in another post where I was jumped on for
making the statement that game designers need to be able to think as
players - but not be restricted to that mindset.

JB

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