[MUD-Dev] Are gratification-based (online) societies doomed to being immature?

[Paul Schwanz]

From:  "Derek Licciardi" <kressilac at insightBB.com>
> From: Koster, Raph (who is quoting an SWG thread)

> As the post above states, MMOGs will be many things to many
> people.  That's a significant design challenge.  Perhaps the idea
> centers around giving players the tools they need to interact with
> their world and enforce the social normals that arise from their
> interaction.  Given that power over the world, it seems to me that
> it is possible to create a world that delivers a significantly
> more mature experience where emotions such as loss, trajedy, and
> failure actually enhance the experience rather than detract from
> it.  As these games mature, I believe we will have to learn how to
> utilize these emotions from our players to effectively enhance the
> experience they have while in the game, otherwise we might as well
> shut the book and write the thread's assessments on Raph's law
> pages.

I hate to say it, but I think this goes back to the 'fun in games'
thread.

It seems to me that we have opened a resturant and decided to put
candy (an immediate, self-gratifying form of food) on our menu.
Next, we've discovered that our clientelle seems to be a bit
immature (i.e.  interested in immediate self-gratification).  Big
surprise, huh?  Now we feel we must continue to sell candy either
because we believe that sweeter cuisine equals better cuisine or
because we insist that this is what our current 'client base' likes.
If we put salads on the menu, we may lose 50% of our subscribers,
right?

It isn't just that online games serve gratification so much as that
they seem to serve a candy-like form of it.  I believe along with
Derek that deeper forms of entertainment are available that can
enhance the entertainment experience.  Perhaps they are still
gratification-based to a certain degree (after all, they may still
be about entertaining people and not about curing cancer), but at
least they offer something more satisfying than a sugar rush to the
mature palate.  The online world that discovers how to offer, "a
significantly more mature experience where emotions such as loss,
trajedy, and failure actually enhance the experience rather than
detract from it," like the resturant that expertly combines the
bitter, the sour, the salty, and the sweet, in my humble opinion, is
poised to enjoy a tremendous amount of success.  This despite the
fits that some of the immature may have about the fudge, chocolate,
carmel, brownie, ice-cream sundae being replaced by a sirloin steak.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle in all of this stems from being quite
uncomfortable when receiving something other than what I ordered
from the menu.  Resturants seem much better at avoiding this
unpleasant occurence than do MMORPGs at the moment.  One way to
handle this is to have a very limited menu with cuisine that is
quite similar in each resturant.  This way, the customers won't be
too upset about not getting exactly the experience they wanted,
since the experience will be similar.  If they wanted something
different, they'd go to a different resturant, right?

Of course, the other more difficult solution involves helping very
different players "get what they ordered" in your resturant.
Personally, I think that this involves giving players a lot more
control over their gameplay experience in the context of communities
and societies.  (From Derek's comments above, I think he'd agree
with me.)  They need to have the tools and the freedom to put in
place the sort of society that results in the kind of experience
they seek.  They need to be able to exert some form of control, not
necessarily over all parts of gameplay (i.e. physics or other basic
game mechanics), but especially over those parts that strongly
affect social atmosphere.  So, one town may decide (based on
whatever form of government they've chosen for themselves) that mild
harassment will get you banned from the town, stealing will mean you
get a 'thief' flag, and killing another citizen will get you a
summary permadeath execution.  If you don't particularly like this,
then you don't become a citizen of that town and are not put under
the authority of its government.  You find another town that is more
to your liking.  Why should the developers undertake to make all
such decisions up front for everyone and then be accountable for it?
Developers still have to set up the laws for the virtual world at
large, but let players customize parts of that world to their own
tastes and let them be accountable for its defense, growth, etc.

One interesting point is that by making citizenship/population a key
to advancement from town to city (and to touch on other threads as
well, the focus on community advancement instead of personal
advancement and community items instead of personal items is one way
to get you players to play with each other and not just next to each
other, moving from a single-player experience to the sort of
experience that can only be had in a MMOG), you give online
societies the incentive to work together to come up with the most
effective solutions to the social problems that plague players.
This gets your players very interested in the newbie experience,
retention, and all sorts of other issues that interest you as the
developer.

If done right, I think it can allow you to offer more than just a
single flavor to your players.

--Phinehas

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