[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #301 - 15 msgs

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu 
> [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Baron, Jonathan
> Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2001 5:01 PM
> To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu'
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #301 - 15 msgs


> Dr. Cat speculated:

>> You did mention The Sims - Raph told me thursday night he thinks
>> the online Sims game will beat both of us to the one million user
>> mark, and I think he's probably right.

> I have to disagree with you both on that one, I'm afraid.  No, not
> simply because I found the Sims, as a stand-alone game, to be much
> like real life, only infinitely more depressing.  And, no, I'm not
> discounting its prospects by imagining it as it is, only with
> hundreds of thousands of others present.  Clever things can be done
> to make frequent contact among players mutually beneficial.

Will & co are paying quite a lot of attention to social dynamics,
actually.  For example, they're codifying "six degrees of separation"
using an interface much like The Brain (http://www.thebrain.com).

> My concerns are two....well....three:

>   1. EA is betting the farm on it, which means they'll be watching
>   it closely.  I am not convinced that their executives can yet
>   assess value in the MMOG medium.  UO succeeded because it was left
>   alone, far from their radar.  Sony was so convinced that EQ would
>   fail that they cut 969 loose prior to its launch, only to come
>   crawling back later.  Simply put, there is little understanding of
>   this medium by top execs in the games industry, nor is there
>   abundant willingness to trust medium veterans.

This is true. On the other hand, at the moment I suspect they trust
Will Wright. They will keep trusting him somewhat until two flops in a
row. :)

>   2. The great assumption in the online game's initial design is
>   that people will care about the glory boards: most popular, best
>   house, nicest furnishings, etc.  The vast majority of customers
>   for the original game were non-gamers, and the bulk of these did
>   not view the game in a competitive light.  Rather it was brilliant
>   for its ability to deliver a remarkably individual, absorbing
>   meditation to a wide variety of people, most of whom ceased
>   playing when the level of challenge diminished - not when they
>   attained the upper limits of the designed achievement spectrum.
>   Thus, I'm not confident, based on the details released to-date,
>   that they know their audience terribly well.

I don't think they are planning on surrendering the aspects of the
original game that made it so appealing. Rather, they are trying to
encourage the mechanic of "showing off" the meditations/creativity
even further.

>   3. An online gaming world must offer a departure from the physical
>   one.  No, it needn't be pre-Christian medieval fantasy, the air
>   war in the 1940s, or adventures in imaginary realms of imaginary
>   galaxies.  The very extremes of our game worlds to-date may well
>   have limited our audiences.  Nonetheless, there must be a
>   departure.

Two things there--one, you could argue that the interestingly
selective sanitization that The Sims world represents is already a
sufficiently escapist departure. Two, there's all that user-generated
content that pays no respects to thge bounds of intellectual
property. The Sims had plenty of Star Trek, Buffy, X Files, and
superhero skins made, for example.

-Raph
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