[MUD-Dev] When will new MMORPGs that are coming out get originalwiththe gameplay?

[Sasha Hart]

[David Kennerly]

> More to my original point: players teach developers. The smart
> developers are attentive students to player behavior.  It's not
> what the player says that smart developers learn from.  It's what
> the players do.  That includes their decision to not play or pay.

...

> Each time I see players' reaction to an original or unoriginal
> gameplay feature inclusion, that's a lesson to me.

Yes. Another way to say the same thing is that players have an
overwhelming influence on the fitness function (much like the
locations of food set the fitness function the rat you mention is
dealing with in the maze.) Of course, it is set by other parameters
too.

I also agree that the most robust way to learn about the fitness
function is probably from the fitness function and certainly not
just in what people say about it. (Though with some 'fitness
functions' like how good everything is to eat for lunch, using smell
and discoloration as signals is loads better than waiting until
lunch goes awry; but it's just our luck that these signals are good
for anything, and we can still get salmonella poisoning anyway.)

When you are deciding 'Do I do this game?' or alternately 'Which
game do I do?' you are usually asking a question which would ideally
be dictated by information about games which have not been tried, at
least not on the part of the fitness function this game is to be
tested by. You have to generalize from what you have or collect more
information. When the latter is prohibitively expensive, you do your
best with the information available. In this case, judging by
similarity, judging by unspecified but probably good intuitions
about how good it would be, maybe doing some playtesting and
changing before (even post) release, and for the rest - taking some
chances.

If this seems reasonable to you, then I am not sure what you meant
by concluding that the games will get original when the players pay
for original games. A literal interpretation suggests that when the
players do this, it will be straightforwardly detected by the
producers, and they will begin to sign off on novel games. The
intuition I drove towards with the initial story about Dairy Tycoon
Online was that they would never really begin to approve novel games
because novel, only games which were copying novel games. To someone
who hadn't seen the originals, this might look like 'new MMORPGs
getting original with the gameplay' but they wouldn't really be
original.

Maybe this will point up the trouble. Consider a simple evolutionary
mechanism based on mutation and mitosis-like copying. Some mutation
results in a dramatically novel phenotype, and that there are
selection pressures for novelty of phenotype. Naturally this means
that there is a high probability that this new genotype will do well
and be copied. But as soon as this happens it is no longer novel,
even though the fitness function still explicitly selects for
novelty, gives it a very strong advantage, has millions of
generations to work, etc. So the only ways we get more strictly
novel phenotypes, it seems, are (A) by higher rates of mutation or
(B) if a genotype is selected which which will consistently result
in novel phenotypes (perhaps it looks at the colors of all the rest
in development, and grows up to be something unlike those.)
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