[MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?

[Samantha LeCraft]

"Sean Howard" wrote:

> I doubt the pendulum will swing back. Gone are the days when
> interesting minds from the MUD world are hired for the sake of a
> new field. MMORPGs are an old field with lots of books written on
> them - so all the designers are going to come from traditional
> game industry sources.

That, and we now have young people entering the industry who grew up
playing MMOs, and who have never worked on anything besides MMOs,
myself included.  People who grew up playing MMOs, but have never
really played a MUD, much less worked on one, and who have never
worked on a single-player game, will create different sorts of MMOs
than those who grew up playing arcade games and MUDs, and moved on
to work on MUDs or traditional games, and from there moved to
working on MMOs.

At 23 years old, and having been in the industry professionally for
five years now, I think I'm right on the edge of this generation
gap.  There are members of my family who are in the industry who
came to MMOs from MUD experience, and I think this gives them a
different perspective on MMOs than I have.  Then I look at my
younger siblings, who have grown up playing MMOs even more so than I
did, and I think they will have a different point of view than I
have, should they ever decide to enter the industry.  (These being
the same younger siblings who asked me "What's that noise?!" when I
was using a dial up connection a few years ago.)

I'm not saying that either point of view is better than the other,
just different.  And as this next generation starts to get into
design and development of MMOs, I think MMOs will go in new
directions, rather than pendulum-swinging back to what they have
been.  We're still a fairly young industry -- both computer games in
general and MMOs specifically -- and I think we're a long way off
from being able to say we've discovered everything there is to
discover about this form of entertainment, and we'll now just swing
back and forth between two extremes.

-Samantha LeCraft
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