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

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "Sasha Hart" <Sasha.Hart at directory.reed.edu>
> [Caliban]

>> 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.

> That old game Simlife comes to mind. So does mud development :)

Have to disagree on both counts.

SimLife fails on rule 2: while you may produce something
aesthetically pleasing, your actual goal is to produce something
that "works". Virtually nothing is available in terms of making your
creation look good. This is where most potential ACGs will fall
down; there are a lot of games that provide flexible and robust
construction with upgrade and modify options later, but if it
doesn't give you the tools to make that construction look the way
*you* want it to look it's not an ACG. Most of the Sim games fall
over here; SimAnt and SimEarth, for example, don't really provide
any aesthetic options.

MUD development fails miserably on rule 1: you have a large number
of options, but it's HARD to learn -- there's little to no
documentation and nobody who knows what they're doing has any time
to help you. Largely, MUD development appeals to developers and
wannabe developers, since it favors the technically astute
self-teacher who can reliably assemble sparse documentation into a
coherent understanding of the underlying system.  Developers think
this is fun. Normal people think we're nuts. (It might also be
argued that there are NO options in MUD development on most servers
-- you can only tell it to type text on a limited number of
available events, but no matter what you do it will only ever type
text.)

Dissenting opinions are welcome, of course.


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