[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Sasha Hart]

This may be a silly idea, but try it on. Could the sparsity of real
decisions (or even other enjoyable stuff) contribute to the rap MUDs
are getting for being addictive? Would it help to watch how stingy
we are?

Back of the napkin estimates: 10000 xp per level, 100 xp per kill, 2
minutes per kill, ~3 simultaneous decisions per level... We may
spend 200 minutes (conservatively) powerleveling just to get to 2
minutes of enjoyable decisions. Often we will be content enough to
spend those minutes - that seems at least not too unhealthy. But it
seems more unhealthy when we are basically unhappy for 200 minutes
and only pleased for 2, yet continue to engage in the activity.

Maybe the problem is not the enjoyment, the enjoyability, the pull
and attractiveness and 'addictiveness' of the game itself, but
rather the fact that we are wasting so much time and are (basically)
not enjoying it. We are doing the boring stuff because we *do* enjoy
the little dribbles of fun that we get (or, even worse, we only
expect to enjoy something).  So, perhaps, we can say that we enjoy
it overall.  But the fact remains that we are really wasting a lot
of time and maybe not even getting the degree of enjoyment we'd get
out of reading some silly potboiler for the same duration. And that
itself, even in a completely healthy person in a game whose playing
is actually justified and in which it is reasonable to say that it
is the player's choice to play as long as he does, may still be
enough to make the player's life worse.

Take dessert. Dessert is supposed to be delicious, that's the point.
However, desserts can have some associated problems. People might
eat dessert first and then not have a proper dinner. People might
eat desserts constantly and get fat, or drop out of school after
spending a semester eating them. But these things, even though they
are in some sense causally dependent on the deliciousness of dessert
(people in general wouldn't eat them so much if they were lumps of
flour), are not the kind of thing we usually hold dessert
manufacturers responsible for. Neither are we comfortable
eliminating them just because they are causally involved. If
cupcakes are outlawed, only outlaws will eat cupcakes.

If you simply added the time involved with MUDs - if cupcakes took
hours to eat, and if people complained and got grumpy while eating
them for hours, and if while they were doing it they were losing
time on homework, but still nonetheless if the cupcakes were just
barely worth working that time for... we might well complain that
cupcakes were bothersome in that they made us behave as if compelled
or addicted, even though there was nothing especially addictive
about them other than being delicious. The raison d'etre of
cupcakes, and of MUDs, is simply to be enjoyable. Not to take
time. Consider that the issue of addictiveness might not really have
anything to do with enjoyability or tendency to play per se, but
more with pointlessness (perhaps as an opportunity cost) over time.

It would be reasonable at this point to say "wonderful, you have
landed where everyone was two years ago or before - that is, talking
about ways of limiting the amount of time people spend on the game;
you know, things like logout limits, or diminishing returns on time
spent."  But that's not the whole thought. Because the idea is that
it isn't just the amount of time spent that is important, but how
worthwhile the time is. Say, in interesting decisions per unit time
(which, holding the first constant, will still vary as a function of
time). I think that's where other games (e.g., single player games)
are usually moderate, and MUDs are usually insane. Leave aside the
problems of content creation for the moment and consider that simply
making the time more worthwhile may be a way of accommodating casual
players better, letting players satiate, leaving less to complain
about and more to show for playing, etc. THEN tell me I'm wrong and
that the game won't be any fun or will be too expensive to do if the
players aren't showing serious ratio strain ;) Besides, there are
ways to approach this other than "generate more content."

Sasha



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