[MUD-Dev] believable NPCs (was Natural Language Generation)

[Michael Sellers]

Matt wrote:
> Mike Sellers wrote:

>> And that, in contrast, we in this industry know almost nothing
>> about how to attract and keep that sort of attention.  If we did,
>> we'd be doing it.

> I'm not sure this is true. We are MUCH better at keeping
> customer's attention than Disneyland is. When was the last time
> someone spent 2000 hours at Disney properties? And some of the
> biggest MMOs, like Neopets, appeal to a huge segment of the
> population. According to Alexa, it ranks #142 in total web
> traffic, in the world.

If you measure in people-as-customers, MMOGs are small potatoes
compared to Disney or other similar entertainment businesses.

If you measure as dollars earned, MMOGs are also small potatoes.

If you measure in terms of average hours spent per customer, MMOGs
*might* exceed places like the Disney parks, I'm not sure (2000
hours is a full-time job for a year; yes some folks spend this much
time in MMOGs, but they are the hardest of the hard core).  But I
also think this is an irrelevant number: it's not likely to make
MMOGs more popular (the opposite actually) and it doesn't help
significantly from a business POV (in fact it hurts if the game is
on a flat-rate structure).

To give you an idea of the numbers, Walt Disney World alone has an
estimated average attendance of close to 40,000,000 people per year.
Estimates on average expenditures vary, but $100 per day per person
is conservative given ticket, food, and concession costs.  So that's
roughly four *billion* dollars per year spent on that one theme park
-- happily and repeatedly.  It would take nearly 24,000,000
customers -- more than fifty times EverQuest's customer base --
paying $13.95 per month for a year to equal that amount of revenue.

So sure, we may have a few thousand extremely hardcore players who
spend more than a few hundred hours per year in our games.  But
those are the ones who will be there, whose attention we will have,
almost no matter what we do.  That segment exists for virtually any
context, whether it's online games, four-handed bridge, dog
breeding, or brick collecting.

In terms of attracting a broad base of the populace (and not "broad"
as in "young males who also play shooters"), year after year,
billions of dollars at a time, keeping them happy and satisfied and
engaged and telling their friends about how incredible their time
with us was rather than ragging on us endlessly on message boards --
well, like I said before, I think we have a lot to learn.  To put it
mildly.

Because if we as an industry knew how to do this we'd be doing it
already.  Instead we're rehashing the same games over and over and
hoping for the magic growth we saw during the past ten years to
magically descend again upon the latest derivative game.  Or for
some reason counting ourselves lucky that we have -- and indeed,
depend on -- fanatical players that spend more time in our games
than many people do on their jobs.

Mike Sellers
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