[MUD-Dev] Expected value and standard deviation.

[Dr. Cat]

From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at soe.sony.com>

> I must say that the fact that players prefer to play a boring way
> that gives them advancement over a fun way that gives slower
> advancement seems to be well-proven over decades of online games.

> Here are the assumptions I am operating under: players seeking
> advancement will be driving towards optimal advancement. Optimal
> advancement will include making the activity as predictable as
> possible. Predictable activities become less fun over time.

I always try to take one step (or more) further back, and ask myself
what are the unquestioned assumptions that people in a field don't
even realize they're making?  I see a lot of the word "advancement"
here.  Certainly I've observed before that MUD-DEV seems to be
dominated by people who assume a "discussion about muds" is the same
thing as a "discussion about combat muds", and you rarely see people
talking about any other kind here.  Hand in hand with that is what's
been one of the key elements of the combat muds since their dawn on
Plato in the mid 70s, borrowed of course from Dungeons and
Dragons...  Highly tangible advancement, usually measured in
numbers.

Online games don't HAVE to have "advancement", or "numbers players
strive to maximize".  Furcadia doesn't.  This debate strikes me
something like scientists who experiment with laboratory mice
getting together and saying "It doesn't matter what process we make
the mice do to trigger the food pellet dispenser, they always get
conditioned to perform that process".  How about the whole world of
white mice experiments with no food pellet dispensers in them that
one could conceive?

Certainly we need more experiments WITH food pellet dispensers too.
They produce useful results, and we haven't learned all that we can
learn about them.  But we need some more experiments in other types
of areas, different types of games.  Some human play is centered
around advancement (Monopoly) or score (Scrabble, most team sports,
etc.)  Other play doesn't involve that at all - the simple and ever
popular game of "catch", for one example.  One could argue similarly
for playing house, cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, doctor, or
post office.  Hide and go seek and tag are competitive, but don't
really have advancement or scoring in points.

The question of whether one could be so terribly clever as to make
an advancement-oriented game that doesn't make people do the
"boring" things is a mildly interesting challenge to me, since
people brought up the whole subject.  But "what can one accomplish
in the design of a non-advancement oriented game" is more
interesting to me.  I will note that "boring" seems to be defined as
"boring to the developer" to some extent - if somebody is paying $13
a month to do something or other for 60 hours a week, one presumes
that many of them have decided this is "fun" enough for them to
continue doing.

Of course some quit after a while, and many lament even while doing
it that they're doing something so repetitive and uninteresting.
But they do it.  Maybe we should class it amongst the "guilty
pleasures", like fattening foods, cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs.
(Though for somewhat different reasons).  Then the question might
become one of whether you want to try to re-engineer the experience
to keep most of the pleasure while getting rid of some or all of
what people feel bad about (the typical goal of the game designer),
or just convince people to consider the downside of the pleasure to
be not so bad after all (the typical goal of the marketing guy).

I will note that when we added cookies to Furcadia, we gave people a
number they could pump up, try to get the highest number, etc.  We
didn't run into much of a problem with it though - I think largely
because of our game mechanic of having them all vanish at 5AM every
day.  The kinds of relentless optimization of cookie acquisition and
"playing in a boring way" one sees in Diku-style games didn't happen
very much.  (We also made them very easy to get, which probably
helped on that score as well.)

> You can define fun as being the process of discovering new areas
> in a possibility space. Once the possibility space is explored, it
> ceases to be fun.

I have to agree with that - if not an exhaustive definition of fun,
it's certainly a very major category of "what causes fun".  I'd say
it's based on the fundamental brain mechanism of "forming new neural
pattern recognition networks (aka 'learning') is fun".  The other
main thing being that "re-stimulating and reinforcing past pattern
recognition networks is pleasurable".  Older organisms shift over
time more from the first kind of pleasure to the second - as they
have less and less uncomitted resources for forming new circuits,
and more and more old patterns in them to trigger recognition and
familiarity.

Anyway this is a big part of why I opted to focus primarily on user
created content.  The possibility space in a game made by 50 people
can only get so large.  With large numbers of players creating
content, you get a lot more, and in a way that's a lot more
affordable, and more scalable.

Exploring data gets boring fast.  Exploring a process stays
interesting longer.  Exploring the possibility space of interacting
with other humans (even if only through conversation) can remain
interesting for a lifetime.

> I don't think you're going to succeed at rewriting the human brain
> and finding game designs that don't have a boring way to play them
> unless you design games with infinite possibility spaces. There
> aren't many games like that. Some of the ones I can think of:

>   - player vs player activities (assuming a playfield of
>   sufficient complexity. The human body makes for a nicely complex
>   playfield, for example, hence sports--simple games like tennis
>   still having big possibility spaces).

Cooperative interaction between humans can fall into the "infinite"
category just as surely as competition can.  All it needs is a rich
enough set of things to cooperate on.

*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free download!
*-------------------------------------------**   http://www.furcadia.com
  Supporting user-created graphical worlds. ||  Let your imagination soar!
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
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