[MUD-Dev] Expected value and standard deviation.

[Katie Lukas]

Matt Mihaly wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Katie Lukas wrote:

>>  "No way to get rid of the 'boring' way."  If I believed that, I
>>  would be neither playing nor designing games - what could the
>>  reason to do so possibly be?

> Well, I don't see how it affects you as a player. If you're not
> interested in the 'boring' (I have a problem with that word since
> it means something different to everybody. What's boring to you
> may be fun to me.) part of the gameplay, just don't play that part
> of it.

First, I must say that I'm not just responding as a player.  But
even regardless of that fact, my initial email was positing two
statements, namely, that player definitions of "boring" actually
tend to be fairly consistent (repetitive actions and obvious
outcomes - largely interpreted in MUDs and MOGs as the level grind
and imbalance), and, that there is not enough variation in the ways
to play existing games to *provide* the options to begin with.  It
affects me as a player, however, by making the games that are
available to me less good (often by a lot) than I, personally,
believe they could be.  Perhaps you would propose that I play ten
different games to serve ten different personal playstyles - to that
I would respond that that idea is fundamentally contrary to the
ideas behind developing MUDs.

I am absolutely a believer in the one-man's-meat concept, which is
why I am so focused on providing player choice to begin with.  While
I do think that the idea of boring remains, at least in the abstract
sense, pretty consistent, I also strongly believe that games as
complex as MUDs and MOGs need to start looking at providing a
variety of choices within the same game, and that, in fact, the
alternative to doing so is to face a larger number of niche-oriented
games that each have minimal market share, as opposed to several
deep *and* broad games that can serve a number of different player
needs.

-k
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