[MUD-Dev] Girl appeal (was: Boys and Girls)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com>

> I'll offer that girls want to relate or to facilitate relating.
> Building works only when people are involved.  Rollercoaster
> Tycoon is interesting because of the people that are using the
> park.

This is what I would term the Aesthetic Construction Game, or
ACG. An ACG is a genre of game in which a major goal is to build
things other people -- real or virtual -- find pleasant. The three
major qualities of an ACG apparently have strong appeal to female
gamers, although it's certainly not the case that it appeals to ALL
female gamers or to ONLY female gamers:

  1. Construction is simple to learn but provides a large number of
  options.

  2. A major purpose of construction is to produce aesthetically
  pleasing objects, whether according to peer reaction or a series
  of contextual metrics applied by the game engine.

  3. Constructed objects can be further modified at a later date,
  and there is normally a method of saving individual objects for
  later reuse or sharing with others.

The ACG can be either the primary genre of a game, or a subgenre of
a game with other aspects. The biggest difficulty is that common
game objectives often conflict with the ACG qualities.

I'm going to pretty much leave it at that, so we can discuss the
matter more freely; sometimes my thirty-page elaborations get in the
way of creative discourse. ;)


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