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

[Sasha Hart]

[John Buehler]

>  Entertainment is chosen because it provides a stimulus that is
>  otherwise missing or lacking in the person's life.

Let me try a few:

  - Choice of entertainment follows novelty.

  - Choice of entertainment follows what's worked before and what is
  familiar.

  - Choice of entertainment is driven by systematic cost/benefit
  analysis of some kind (e.g. a weighing of pros and cons to
  playing.)

  - Choice of entertainment is driven by perceived prospect.

  - Choice of entertainment is impulsive and unpredictable.

> So I need to find somebody who doesn't play computer games, get to
> know them really well and then predict what games they will play
> when exposed to a broad range of them?  That seems to be the
> requirement for you to begin to believe my assertion.  I don't see
> that happening anytime soon.

The standard I was trying to convey was that, if you want a strongly
stated theory like that to pass muster, *even as a thought
experiment*, it ought to be potentially testable (a different
proposition from actually being tested, or even
practically-doable-by-you.) In other words, I'm not satisfied by a
post-hoc explanatory device, but you are welcome to be.

Although, with a running game it isn't too hard to find out a lot of
useful things about what does motivate play.  Change areas/systems
in a way you have a hunch about and watch the difference and change
in their traffic.

> Perhaps all I'm really after is the goal of game designers paying
> more attention to the psychological profile of their target
> market.  At a deeper level than just 'they like to blow things
> up'.

This makes sense, even if the target market isn't any different from
the market being served by "blow things up"!  In other words, I
wonder to what extent we don't even have a satisfying
one-size-fits-all, let alone games which are well tailored to types
of people, whatever they are. To be terribly critical, many
entertainments are hardly worth anyone's time, let alone worthy of
worrying about whether they're worth some specific kind of person's
time.

This stuff is at least superficially already addressed with things
like surveys, and of course a keen eye on the bottom line - what
people actually buy and play gives the most directly useful
information for "profiling" the market. But I think that
non-commercial entertainment (and art for that matter) often shows
us how the selective processes there are in some ways less
permissive than we would like, and in other ways more permissive.

User-programmable games seem to plumb the design-space a little.
For example, I think you'll find that MUSH as a platform gets taken
in a number of directions which have more or less differentiated and
developed themselves highly over time to functions which serve
distinct populations. Is this kind of self-managing approach to
design an efficient way of getting at the same problem you are
talking about, John?
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