[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[shren]

On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Wes Connell wrote:
> Freeman, Jeff wrote:

> Actually, the fishing, catching insects, chatting, etc. tend to
> increase gameplay dramatically. My best friend and his girlfriend
> (who avidly NEVER played a video game until Animal Crossing) play
> this game all day long. Once they have exhausted all the 'daily
> goodies', they spend the rest of the day/night fishing and
> catching bugs. The majority of their bells (Animal Crossing
> currency) come from the sale of fish to the local market. Without
> the hours of fishing, they would still have the stock single story
> house with ugly wall paper.
 
> Bells can still be earned by selling other stuff or running
> errands for people, but the bulk of the money still comes from the
> repetitive fishing motions. IIRC, my friend can pull in 50k bells
> in a few hours from fishing. Obviously, this is a mechanic that
> can be abused (I consider it abuse anyways).
 
> An allowance of sorts would have been a better method of supplying
> bells to a player. Perhaps a salary for a steady job?

I've never played Animal whatzit, but all of this is starting to
remind me of Grand Theft Auto.  When you sit down to play GTA or
it's sequel, there are about a dozen different things you can do.
You can do plot missions, or subplot missions, or go on a random
killing spree, or drive around at random like a normal car game, or
look for hidden stuff.  Talking about all of the moral aspects of
the game ignores why the game is actually popular - like this Animal
Crossing game, it's popular because there's oodles of stuff to do,
and almost always something that fits your mood.

I think the "hundred little things instead of one big thing"
attitude of feature design, made possible by flexible game engines,
is probably going to change gaming a lot over the coming years.
Every game built on the principle seems to be a rabid success.


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