[MUD-Dev] Geometric content generation

[John Buehler]

Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt writes:

> The problems that might arise from 'single, flexible character'
> design is that every character in the game ends up exactly the
> same.

[deleted]

> In my opinion, some balance is found if you make most skill
> combinations equally interresting to play. This way you will not
> have a shortage of other players with different skill combinations
> to cooperate with. (who want to be a barge pilot, if you can be a
> crack-shot fighter ace?).

Given a maze with one piece of cheese, all the mice will work to
figure out the most efficient way to it.  Given a maze with many
different pieces of cheese, different mice will value the different
pieces of cheese for reasons known only to them.  The infinitely
flexible character is intended to let a player efficiently pursue as
many different pieces of cheese as they care to over time, or
less-than-efficiently pursue multiple pieces of cheese
simultaneously.

Games that provide one form of entertainment will get one response
from the players.  They will consider it as a single stimulus with a
single response.  If players are presented with multiple stimuli,
they will produce varied responses.  Note that I argue against the
achiever-centric formulation of games, reducing the desire by the
resulting player base to speed through the maze.  There's cheese all
over the maze, and you can sample whatever bits and pieces that are
near, or spend the time to move elsewhere in the maze.  When you're
fed up with cheese, you leave the game and do something else.  As is
the case with most forms of entertainment that people engage in.

JB

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