[MUD-Dev] NEWS: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really! (By R. Bartle)

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 6th November 2004, neild-mud at misago.org wrote:

> I personally believe that players will give other styles of
> gameplay a chance.

Sure they will, but will the newbies?

> I think that what new players are most likely to demand is a lack
> of misfeatures that they have experienced before, rather than the
> presence of features.

OK, I have two responses to this.

Firstly, they do actually demand the key features that their first
game had but which this one doesn't have. I've seen it in textual
and graphical worlds, and I'm not the only person to have done so
either. At the State of Play conference last week, Celia Pearce
explained how refugees from Uru went to There and reconstructed a
model of Uru in it. As I mentioned before, players from NWN went to
M59 when NWN (the AOL version) closed down, whereupon they asked for
the very features to be added that caused them to leave in the first
place.

Secondly, let's assume that I'm wrong and that the majority of
players select their second virtual world based on its lack of
misfeatures rather than the presence of its features. This still
supports my general induction, because what they think are
misfeatures might actually be features (ie. short-term bad,
long-term good).  Thus, a world with what all its oldbies believe to
be good features would not attract players from other virtual worlds
unless they also thought it was good features (in which case, why
would they be leaving that world?).

> This doesn't mean that a new game must use the same techniques,
> but it does mean that the underlying flaws must be addressed in
> some fashion, for players have lost all willingness to deal with
> them.

I agree that this is what should happen, but how are virtual worlds
that step out of line going to get players?

		Richard
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