[MUD-Dev] Finding What a Gamer Lacks in Their Day

[Sasha Hart]

[John Buehler]:

> Actually, no, I've never been full and then found room for
> dessert. That's because hunger really is what drives me to eat.

My point is that scarcity of "caloric stimulus," although important,
is not the end-all of factors affecting how much time you spend
eating. I doubt you're an exception but nothing turns on it, whether
you are or not. You seem to agree about nourishment, at any rate, as
you say below.

> It doesn't have to be that they still want more nourishment.

> The diner feels a need for the dessert in some way.

How you know that this need exists is important.  It determines
whether or not you are saying something substantial and practically
applicable.

If everyone acts just because they lack things, then every behavior
becomes a new need.  E.g., I observe a woman listening to Elvis, and
infer that she is satisfying her Elvis-need. But when I say that the
woman is satisfying an Elvis-need, this adds no new information; it
makes no predictions, except perhaps that she will listen to more
Elvis as a perfect function of how much Elvis she "has" (I would
assume, has listened to recently.)

And this prediction is almost certainly wrong, because the
performance of many behaviors and the consumption of many goods , in
point of fact, do not vary as a clean function of their scarcity and
scarcity alone.  This is the point made with the ridiculous dessert
example.  _There are other factors_.

Well,that's not a fair example, you might say: she is satisfying her
need for rock and roll, or beautiful singing, or dopamine or
whatever. But even if it were conceded that this difficult problem
were not actually a problem, (e.g., which need is it?)  you would
still be missing the fundamental point that the only way to make
observed behavior a perfect function of "needs" or "lacks" is to
invariably infer needs when behavior occurs.  Then you would lose
empirical testability, and your assertion that needs can be
exploited is practically useless.
 
So... my opinion is that supplying scarce goods does not exhaust the
options designers have.  But if you can really put the idea to the
test - provide analogues to calories, things which you can quantify
and demonstrate that some responding occurs as an orderly (and
exclusive) function of, then you can with some useful meaning say
that those things are needed and that such behavior occurs only
because it is needed.

Even if you can't (which I strongly believe,) the question is still
an interesting one, because there is still no doubt that in some
cases (e.g. eating) scarcity of some definite thing (e.g. caloric
stimulus in the gut) has a big influence on behavior (e.g. time
spent eating and calories eaten.)  And I will grant that this
probably comes into play in some cases in MUDs, maybe for things
like "social interaction" or "success."

The question becomes less useful as we stray into "needs" (i'd
assume this means things which, when scarce, are specifically sought
out) which have no real empirical basis. So my hunch, for example,
that some people play MUDs substantially because they are lonely
isn't so useful (even more since we can hardly experiment with that
ethically, and in any case we don't need to do experiments to find
that social games will attract players.)
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