[MUD-Dev] Boys and Girls - was (Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #163 - 25 msgs)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sellers, Mike" <msellers at origin.ea.com>
> Caliban wrote:

>> Boys like to win. Girls like to play.

> As a capsule statement, that's pretty good.

I thought so, too. Reminds me of the sort of things I admire when
other people say them. Not that I think it's particularly admirable
or anything, but I think it was pretty much the most elegant way I
could have said what I was trying to say. A close runner-up was "Men
want to have things, women want to do things."

Another way I've thought about the boy/girl game question is in
terms of journeys; boys care where they're going, girls care how
they get there. Most men I know would like to drive to the mountains
and camp, but seem a little confused when their wives or girlfriends
would rather drive to the mountains and then just turn around and
come home. The men have subjectively done nothing except waste time
and gas, since they would have reached their destination much more
efficiently by just staying there. The women, on the other hand,
have had an experience -- which they would *not* have had without
the drive.

Personal anecdote: my wife and I go to the video store, and the only
movie she wants to rent is "Planet of the Apes". I observe that it's
coming on pay per view in a week, so we could just wait. She gets
annoyed, and we don't rent anything. Later, I came to the
speculative conclusion that her goal was "to rent a movie" and mine
was "to see a movie" -- while my goal would have been reached by
either renting or watching on cable, hers could only have been
reached by renting. Classic destination/journey and have/do
dichotomy.  I've been noticing this sort of thing a lot since the
subject came up here and I started really thinking about it, in the
way I relate both to my wife and to other women in the past.

> One thing women (and some men, particularly non-gamers) have
> complained about in computer games for years is the lack of
> context and relationship: nothing means anything.

I think some of this is probably due to the customary economy of
computer games. When games had to fit in a 32K ROM or 584K of DOS
memory, there just plain wasn't room for much of anything. After a
certain point, whenever you added something to the game, you had to
take something else out -- so you only had what was absolutely
necessary. But that sort of spartan design isn't very immersive; an
immersive environment almost by nature contains a vast number of
irrelevant and unnecessary things you can manipulate.  Ideally, when
I walk into a game world kitchen, I can open all the cabinets and
find all sorts of interesting things. In the average game, however,
I can only open a cabinet if it has something in it that I'll
need. My wife was terribly annoyed at Silent Hill when so many doors
were jammed and impossible to open; she wanted to open all the
doors, and saw no good reason why she couldn't. After all, she had a
chainsaw, so whether the door was jammed or not was really rather
academic. Of course, the game wouldn't let her break through the
door with a chainsaw even if she *could* normally open it -- which
was yet another complaint.

I'm going to pause for a moment here and reflect on how lucky I am
to have a wife who not only plays games like Silent Hill, but
complains about how stupid it is when she can't saw through doors
like a rampaging maniac. ;)

Anyway, now that we've got all this extra disk space and core memory
and CPU cycles in which to store our games, we don't seem to know
what to do with it. We use it to make bigger levels and more
monsters and smarter AI and more detailed cut scenes and higher
resolution graphics, but we aren't really using it to make the games
*themselves* better. We use it to make better engines, but not
better games.

> A few games, OTOH, provide their own context (e.g. Myst),

I hated Myst. Just for the record. It looked great, but I thought
the game sucked; I wandered around and said "wow" a little, then I
uninstalled the damn thing. That's pretty much what I do when a game
looks good but doesn't play well, as a rule. I have no clue why
anyone else liked it. My wife loved it. I keep asking why, and she
doesn't know either.

> Overall, we're still doing a lousy job of providing much for those
> who are not highly enamored of linear, goal-directed play

I might observe that the nonlinear players are both harder to
satisfy and less likely to purchase multiple games. People like
myself are interested in games that provide hundreds of hours of
gameplay AND high replayability -- in short, we'd like to buy and
play one or two games a year. I will personally pay through the nose
for a great game (I've paid upwards of $300 for out of print games I
deemed worthy), but I'm not sure how many other people are so
inclined.

> we just don't seem to be doing a good job of providing vivid
> context, real meaning, and tangible relationships for attracting
> even a sliver of those -- again, particularly women -- who find
> games like The Sims and RCT so engaging.

I could propose an explanation of why.

In The Sims and RCT, once you build something, nobody else is going
to come along and tear it down.

That strikes me as a rather important distinction, since MUDs all
seem to revolve around protecting what you have from the people who
are trying to take it from you -- and if they don't have any use for
it, they'll take it anyway just out of sheer meanness. ;)


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