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

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 11 November 2004, Eric Random wrote:

> In his article, he says "Virtual worlds live or die by their
> ability to attract newbies."  Although this is true, it is not
> complete. Virtual worlds succeed by their ability to attract new
> players and maintain existing ones.

Yes, but unless they can attract new players it doesn't matter that
they can maintain existing ones. Retention is important, clearly,
but you have to have newbies coming in or there's no-one to retain.

> I present a caveat such that they will play a virtual world that
> has a major feature they don't like, given it has another feature
> which effectively overrides it.

I agree. If there's a big enough draw, players will set aside their
doubts about other features. Your example about graphics is a good
one because it covers two points: people were prepared to put up
with less finesse in gameplay because they liked the eye candy;
people who played regular computer games and who already had an idea
of what a computer game looked like wouldn't touch textual worlds,
but they would touch graphical worlds (in their hundreds of
thousands).

		Richard
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