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

[Mark Mensch]

Sean Howard

> I do feel that I should point out that we've had real live
> communities a lot longer than we've had computers. I doubt that
> the social aspects of virtual worlds will provide any new way to
> game that the thousands of years of written history haven't
> already discovered. However, that is not the case with computers,
> which provide more indepth simulations far beyond our own
> abilities.

Actually, there are couple of aspects that virtual worlds have to
game that haven't been really discovered in the world until their
emergence.

First, there is the huge numbers of people playing a single game.  I
won't go into detail this aspect has as any developer knows what
happens when you get thousands of people together online.  I do not
know of other gaming in the past that had that many active 'real
time' players.

Next is the anonymity.  Everyone is basically an unknown.  You don't
know if you are playing with a 13 or 80 year old, male or female,
etc.  Whereas this is not inherently a problem (if they can play,
let them play) the issues come up when people feel they can take
that anonymity to the edge - using it to grief people, cheat the
game and basically do things that they would never even consider if
they were in a face-to-face game.

These two alone create an gaming environment that is unlike anything
that has been seen until the advent of the computer.
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