[MUD-Dev] Expected value and standard deviation.

[Pat Ditterline]

From:	"Dr. Cat" <cat at realtime.net>

> 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?

Well, yes.. but wasn't this thread discussing boring forms of
advancement, thus assuming that advancement was present?  Removing
the "food pellets" is clearly a goal, but as several people noted,
it's not always clear what those food pellets are.  Many people like
advancement, and so most large-scale games are going to have some
form of it, most likely.  Even if they don't, people may invent
methods of ranking themselves that create a form of advancement.

> 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.

Isn't the game of catch, in some form, a way to practice catching?
And in that sense, isn't it an easier (and arguably more boring)
method of improving your catching skills than playing something else
(like baseball, for example)?  If catch was implemented in a
massive-multiplayer-baseball-game, I bet we'd have people who play
catch all day rather than play baseball to advance their catching
skills. :) Of course, this comment is referring to catch as a game
by itself, but that may not be fair... if people engage in the
activity to improve or practice their ability to catch, they are
engaging in advancement of some kind.  Not everyone may have that
goal in mind when they play, but some might.

Advancement can exist in games like cops and robbers by people who
seek to "advance" by winning the game... by beating the other team
or moving ahead of them in some fashion.  Advancement can take a
number of forms, even without numbers to distinctly qualify it.
Again, people may simply enjoy the game in different ways.  Some
people play to win, others play for the enjoyment of the game and
don't really care if they win or lose.
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