[MUD-Dev] Mass customization in MM***s

[Ted L. Chen]

Ron Gabbard writes a lengthy, albeit insightful analogy to grocery shopping.

> In short, they are both grocery stores but one is designed to
> serve the needs of the massively multi-shopper market while the
> other is designed for a more personal experience for a couple
> hundred regular customers.  The supermarket just can't offer the
> same level of personal experience as the owner-operated grocery
> store while maintaining their economies of scale and the corner
> grocery store can't profitably offer the low price, wide variety
> of products, nor support as heavy of traffic as the supermarket
> while maintaining a 'personal' experience.

<snippage>

> The latest trend has been towards 'mass customization'.  That is,
> giving each customer the ability to purchase the product/service
> they specifically desire while still maintaining the benefit of
> economies of scale.  This is true of almost every industry -- golf
> clubs, computers, automobiles, supermarkets, and now MMOGs.
> However, while mass customization may try to emulate the personal
> experience of the 'corner market', the best it can do is to
> provide the customized tangible product... not the experience.
> Having a last name that is not intuitively pronounced, I get to
> experience this failure first-hand almost every day as sales
> clerks hand me my debit card and say "Thank you for shopping with
> us, Mr. <Enter bastardized version of my last name>.  Come again."
> The clerk doesn't know me from Adam yet they are trying to emulate
> a level of intimacy that was pretty standard in the days of the
> 'corner markets'... the personalized shopping experience.

Have you considered data-mining as an option?  Drawing further on
the analogy between MMOGs and commerce, let's take a look at
Amazon.com (it's just the more prominent one).  You mentioned the
truely personalized aspect of corner stores, but just as
Mr. McDonald might tell me that the blueberries I usually buy every
season have just arrived fresh, Amazon's site is recommending the
Harry Potter DVD to me (based on my past purchases).  Both human and
computer use exactly the same insightful information about my
persona in order to further my experience.

Could a MMOG travel along these same lines?  Say the player spends
most of his time in a specific location on the world, the system
might notify him/her that a small local event is happening there.
These need not be BIG system-wide events, but could merely be
"Mr. McDonald from the corner market has just been kidnapped!"  To
most, this would be meaningless.  But because the player has spent a
good deal of time there, it may be reasoned that he/she has at least
met Mr. McDonald.  And because of the scope of these mini-events,
the player can be as significant as he/she desires.

Now the only problem comes from the fact that the resources behind
these 'personalized' events are finite.  There's only one
Mr. McDonald, otherwise it becomes meaningless (or does it really?).
You can have a Mrs. McDonald that gets kidnapped for the next player
but that only delays the inevitable.

This comes down to the slight problem with the store analogy in that
brick/mortar stores (or even Amazon.com) deal in mass produced
goods, each being exactly the same as the others.  The only
differential is in the 'service' (price, personalization, etc) of
the store.  In MMOGs, our service IS our goods and everytime you try
to improve service, you dwindle your stocks.  This industry is more
akin to limited art prints than it is to grocery commodities.

Maybe the key is to arrest all the apraisers so the consumer doesn't
know that print is being used more than stated.  Nah, I'm just
kidding ;)


TLC

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