[MUD-Dev] The changing nature of fun

[Amanda Walker]

On 12/19/02 2:11 PM, Ted L. Chen <tedlchen at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I quite agree with you.  I don't even think it is possible to fix
> any system when you take in account people's behavior over time.
> The graph has a nasty tendency to move left.

Depends on the system.  For a simple system, yes.

However, the best games, and the social systems with the broadest
appeal, are not simple.  They are multivalent--they have appeal at
multiple levels of skill and understanding.

Take chess.  Chess has rules so simple a kid can learn them in a
week.  But chess is fun across a huge range of skill levels.
Politics can be approached at a simple level: "us" vs "them",
"conservative" vs "liberal", etc.  But as your skill and
understanding expand, nuances and complexity unfold before you.

Note, however, that this unfolding wasn't explicitly "designed in".
Trying to design in different levels of appeal usually ends up being
clumsy--the "level treadmill," for example, is only a rough
simulation of it.  Level-restricted content is another example, and
it's one of the reasons it pales quickly--often more quickly than it
can be produced.

Good FPS games, interestingly, *do* have this quality.  You can
enjoy them at a "run around shooting everything that moves" level,
but as your skill improves, your experience of the game becomes more
complex: hearing respawn sounds, building a mental model of a
particular level so that you can better tell where other players
are, etc.  Games (and even individual levels) that get good ratings
have this kind of appeal.

I would argue that "staying power" is directly related to how well
the same content appeals to players at different skill levels.  The
common approach of "newbie area / low level area / high level area /
etc." linearizes and separates gameplay that might be more engaging
if it overlapped.

Mobs, for example.  Hunters are not indiscriminate--if someone's out
hunting deer, they're going to ignore the squirrels.  Nothing says a
high level mob should immediately squash flat a low level character
than happens to come into view, unless that character does something
to provoke it.  There's less reason to separate high and low level
play if every mob doesn't aggro every player in range.

Amanda Walker


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