[MUD-Dev] Meta-games (not META list ;))

[Michael Sellers]

Mark Cheverton wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 09:42, ceo wrote:

>> OTOH, there are clearly people who are happy in such an
>> environment.

>> For instance, There. Simple because of it's critical mass (mainly
>> from it's first-mover advantage) it becomes more attractive -
>> several of the questions above are answered positively because it
>> now has a gravity of it's own in attracting and retaining
>> players.

That remains to be seen.  There.com doesn't have a first-mover
advantage except perhaps in this round of market development -- but
they (and Second Life) are following in the footsteps of Habitat,
WorldsChat, Worlds Away, AlphaWorld, The Palace, and OnLive among
others (including perhaps The Sims Online).  The history of
graphical (even 3D) social spaces is one crowded with expensive and
good-looking failures.

>> ... And pretty boring to stay in any particular one for a long
>> time.

Yep, that's the problem.  The hypothesis is that a small but
critical core of people will make things interesting enough for
everyone else.  Back in 1994 we looked at this, and as one guy
summed it up with, "I went into WorldsChat thinking I'd meet all
kinds of cool people from around the world.  But instead it was like
the most boring parties in college.  The only difference here was
that instead of 'what's your major?' the common question was 'where
are you from and what's the weather there?'"

This idea that throwing people together in a purely social
environment will make for persistent relationships has been shown
not to work in previous graphical social environments, but new
groups keep thinking they have cracked the problem with better
graphics or more emotes or houses or charades or something.  Who
knows, maybe one of them will be right.  But personally I doubt it.

> ...  In the online multiplayer arena the most important factor is
> your interaction with others. In many respects the rules of the
> game are secondary.

Well yes and no.  Secondary but not unimportant.  Without an
external set of in-world mechanics, in other words without something
attractive and non-social to do, the whole social scene collapses.
We see this in real life too: churches, bars, smoking lounges,
grocery stores, and gyms are all examples of places built around the
idea of people doing something essentially non-social, and yet which
also act as fertile ground for growing and persistent social
relationships.  My contention is that this non-social core is
necessary (but not sufficient) for building the kind of social
relationships and community that also creates economic value.

> ... I'd be careful about dismissing chatrooms as not important,
> they are in my mind very similar to games in their purposes, use
> and mechanics, supplying what people want but coming at it from
> the community side first rather than the game mechanics, often
> with the result that the users have more freedom and possibilities
> than in a game centred system.

Game-oriented spaces, for all their current niche-ness, have proven
literally orders of magnitude more popular and longer-lived than
pure social spaces like graphical chat rooms, message boards, etc..
And, beyond the mechanics of chatting, game spaces really don't
resemble chat rooms in terms of their use and mechanics.  I don't
think the way we've been creating MMOGs is the way we're going to
keep being able to create them, but neither is going (back) to
chatrooms the answer.  Purely social spaces are, IMO, the past, not
the future.

Mike Sellers
Online Alchemy
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