[MUD-Dev] Player malleable worlds (was Expected value and sta ndard deviation)

[Matt]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003 10:12:31 +0100,
<Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com> wrote:
> From: Kerry Fraser-Robinson [mailto:kfr at redbedlam.com]

>> Well plenty of games have auto generated content - Anarchy
>> Online's or SW:G's missions are the first that come to mind but
>> there are plenty of examples.  As for compelling player-generated
>> content - that's really not quite the holy grail people make it
>> out to be either.  Counter-Strike was player-generated content -
>> as, by definition, are all the other 'mods' out there.  I believe
>> that the biggest hurdle in front of players generating good
>> content is a lack of quality tools - and this applies to MUG's
>> and MMORPG's as much as it applies to online shooters etc.

> As John Buehler made a good argument on the tools front, and you
> may both be right. Having said that NWN did give easier tools, and
> I'm sad to say, but I've seen precious little player content
> that's any good.

I'm hurt :)

I think one reason there are few amazing NWN projects is the EULA,
and relates to the topic a long way back about charging.  Simply put
the EULA prohibits charging for anything created with the toolset,
so we have to rely on donations.  Also with the toolset being so
easy to use, anyone can make a bad module with it.  Before you had
to be somewhat technically inclined to make a bad level,
eg. UnrealEd, so there were fewer.

We've been lucky (or very skilful) and managed to create a team of 4
or so committed talented people who work 5+ hours a day, and several
people interested in helping out part time that we use as
contractors.  Arguably this is better for us than charging, if we
charged people would want to be paid for their work and with the
size of our user base we couldn't afford to pay everybody.  But
other projects with tighter teams and less player created content
would really get a boost by charging just a small amount.

In a sense player generated content is a bad name, the players
building things for our world certainly don't see us as players of
NWN.  But to Bioware that's exactly what we are.  When talking about
user generated content I think we need to be a little clearer, the
best stuff is usually created by people that behave in almost all
respects as a company and in the end spend more time creating than
they do playing.

Little player generated content in the classic sense of the term is
created in game.  While identikit houses and pvp action could fall
under "player generated content", often what people mean are things
like extra graphics for The Sims and levels for fps games.  It seems
these can be divided into two clear types of content, things made
offline (player generated, levels, models), and things made online
(character generated, books, swords, guilds).  I think this is a
useful distinction to make?

cya

--
Matt ((Ex) Coder on Daggerford / Haze NWN PW)
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