[MUD-Dev] Schubert's law of player expections

[John Szeder]

I was at one of the roundtables at the GDC this past week and got to
thinking about one of the laws of online game design that was
brought up for discussion.

I think this law would be better restated as: 

  "A new player's expectations of a virtual world are driven by its
  presentation to the player. The presentation of the game includes
  its marketing as well as its user interface."

Because most games today are presented in a similar fashion single
player games, the expectation of player's who have experience with
single player games are set accordingly. This includes packaging,
placement, as well as what the game screen looks like and how it
plays.

The current law does not address the expectations of people who: 

  1) have not played any games
  2) have played online only games 

It also does not address the expections of people who join the game
as a result of peer/family influence who fall into one of the
previous two categories.

I would be interested in knowing what empirical data suggests about
this last group of people. My belief is that a lot of people in the
world fall into this group and they are hardly insignificant.
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