[MUD-Dev] The Casual-Player Killer: Time? (was Re: MMO Communities)

[Will Jennings]

Yannick Jean wrote:

> The question facing future MMORPGs is: can you [encourage
> cooperative play] without alienating the "30-45 mins. session"
> players ?

> Cooperative/team play 'requirment' is fine for player retention,
> but it's also the casual player killer. The paradigm of 'required'
> Cooperative/team play must change if you ever want to break the
> mass market barrier.

I hear: the time commitment of MMOs is what's keeping the mass
market out.  It's a common refrain (especially in press for games
that try to fix the problem), but I'm skeptical.  I would expect
most mass market players to leave most games before they get to the
point where the length of a fruitful session becomes an issue.

>>From anecdotal experience introducing people to these games*, the
biggest barrier to their enjoyment is the interface.  Simply moving
around in a third person view is frustrating for them -- an object
comes between the camera and the avatar and they don't know how to
see themselves again, or they get stuck on things.  And they have as
many controls and instruments to worry about as a shuttle pilot.

These people aren't ignoramuses, and most of them play video games
on a regular basis, and buy them occasionally.  These are gamers,
but they don't have the experience necessary to play many of these
games.

I recently read a paper that backs this up (albeit with not much
more data than my anecdotal experience): "The Usability of MMORPGs",
by Steve Cornett of Indiana University.

Other issues I'd expect to come into play before time commitment
include the behaviour of other players, the lack of good
documentation, and complexity.

These are some of the things that might keep mass market players
from enjoying MMOs.  But even these probably aren't the real
barriers to _selling_ MMOs to the mass market in the first place.

Subscription costs are one problem (since, even if these games are
produced like services and not goods, they still look like goods on
the shelf).  Another barrier: among hard-core gamers, any given MMO
is competing for their MMO dollars.  Among mass market gamers, any
given MMO is competing for their entertainment dollars, and there
are a lot more options there.

This is not to say that allowing shorter time commitments won't help
your numbers.  There are folks (like me, for instance), that will
play something that lets them do shortish sessions a few times a
week.  But that's experienced-gamers-with-time-constraints, not the
mass market -- the mass market is a couple hundred million people
bigger than that.

-Will Jennings

  [*: Except for Puzzle Pirates -- that's been an easy sell.  The
  biggest barrier there is when someone's just not into pirates.  Or
  puzzles.  I've also had success hooking people on Clan Lord, a
  smallish, 2-D game for the Macintosh with a very simple interface
  (elegant, really: you just run into something to interact with
  it).]

  [Disclaimer to all this: I'm just an interested, inexperienced
  observer, so add a grain of salt.]
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