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

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, John Buehler wrote:
> Matt Mihaly writes:

>> Probably not, but MUDs aren't amusement parks either. The
>> defining aspect of a MUD is that you're playing with other
>> players, not merely playing at the same time as other players
>> (such as in an amusement park), and more to the point, you're
>> playing with other players who remain semi-consistent, such that
>> you can develop relationships with them.

> I suppose I was offering Disneyland as the ultimate in ensuring
> that entertainment would be found, precisely because we barely
> rely on the people that we're with in order to find entertainment
> (I'm thinking in terms of the people I'm with, not particularly
> the people that are around me).  The more we introduce a
> dependency on other players for our entertainment, the greater the
> chance that the entertainment devolves into random chance instead
> of structured encounters.

Hmm, yeah, I hadn't considered the fact that you can go through the
park with a group of people. But here's a question: Given that you
are quite into the idea of MUDs with a more mass-market, and with a
more casual gameplay style, do you think people will actually group
together online to run through this game?

I noticed on Warcraft III on Battle.net that the larger the group,
the faster my side loses. We're all terrible at it, but manage to
get online together because we all 'hang out' in Achaea. Any group
above 2 people on the enemy side, however, seems to be composed
entirely of highly-skilled teenagers with names like HappiMooCow or
mo_murdah. It leads me to speculate that the only people who are
actually getting together in groups online, at established times to
participate together, are hardcore gamers. Being a casual gamer
would seem to preclude setting yourself a gaming schedule.
 
> The observation about consistent contact definitely would have an
> impact on avoiding purely random chance, but I wonder how far away
> from random things would go.  Typically, a group of enthusiasts in
> any field require leaders to keep an organization, well,
> organized.  I put this onus on the game publisher, not on the
> players themselves.  So I look to Disney's parks as a simple model
> of an entertainment service provider.  Perhaps I should be citing
> Westworld.

Right, I see what you're saying. We actually do this to some extent,
insofar as our admins are also in-role Gods that regularly interact
with players, patron various organizations (city-states, guilds,
etc) and provide guidance and that kind of thing. I don't think the
intensity of our God-mortal interaction would scale very well
though, because the extra layers of management you'd need to support
this kind of highly-empowered admin structure would be extremely
expensive. (I don't think using volunteers with the kind of power
ours have would work well at scale either.)

--matt

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