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

[Paul Boyle]

"Marian Griffith"

> But players already accept loss.  They know that they risk losing
> some gold, equipment or experience when they fail in a fight. They
> just expect to be able to recoup those losses, and that they are
> not too frequent (or can be avoided if they so desire).

I think the poster knew that players accept small losses like that.
The poster also, correctly in my opinion, identifies the loss in
something as big as a PA war as a much bigger deal.  Especially if
PA wars are done, not as volunatry guild wars in something like EQ,
but as part of the gameplay.

> I did not read it like that.  At least not that strongly. To me it
> was first a complaint towards the game staff, who strive to remove
> any non-fun (i.e. possibility of losing) activity from the game in
> an attempt to keep as many players as possible.  The original
> poster said that encouraged the players to behave like spoiled
> four year olds.  At no point did I read that he believed this to
> be the be all and end all of online games. Quite the contrary, I
> read it as a plea for more possibility of conflict within the
> game.  You only need to look at quake, half-life or counterstrike
> to see that there is indeed a large market for games that focus on
> direct confrontation between players.

I don't know if holding up FPS twitch games as the model of maturity
makes your point that well.  I don't think it was a dig at the game
devs either, so much as it was an indirect dig at the desires of a
vocal population in that forum.  I participate in that forum
occaisionally, and lately a large number of the posts have been a
flame war between PvP posters and anti-PvPs.  I think that was just
one of the most sophisticated shots in that war.

While the points it brings up are in part valid, I don't think that
the point it esposes, that all higher level social interaction is
founded on player conflict, is valid whatsoever.  Isn't the idea
behind human development, as a species, that we seek win/win
situations, and that cultures that follow win/lose strategies,
though potentially succesful in the short term, change or die in the
long run?  For example, the Vikings, the Golden Horde, Nazi Germany,
Sparta.

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