[MUD-Dev] Re: Time limited worlds (was: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed by Newbies)

[Mike Rozak]

Peter Keeler wrote:

> This sounds like a fantastic argument for perm-death of
> characters. You level your guy up a bunch, join a guild, make some
> friends, maybe defeat the mega-evil overlord... but sooner or
> later your character bites the dust and that's that. It could be
> you fall in combat, die from a disease or a poison, get
> assassinated, or die of old age.

I suppose you'd call a virtual world that ended with the PC's death
a "tragedy" and a VW that ended with the PC's surviving the final
battle a "comedy", as per Shakespere. It would certainly make for a
non-standard ending. I think one of the Infocom games ended with the
player finding the ultimate treasure in a pyramid and then dying as
his greed brings the pyramid down on top of him. (From what I read,
players weren't too happy. Maybe if the player died heroicly, as
opposed to greedily, they wouldn't have minded.)

> I think the point of all this is that the fundamental paradigm of
> the game could change: you're no longer trying to entertain
> someone indefinitely. You just want to keep them around long
> enough to play through the lives of n characters, at x hours per
> character. You only need that much content. I believe this affects
> the business plan of the company, the design of the game, and the
> structure of the business in all sorts of interesting ways. It
> should also change the expectations of the players right from the
> start, or it wouldn't work.

Correct, as far as I can tell. Everything about the experience (and
business model) changes radically once the author decides that the
player will be kicked out when the content is used up. It no longer
fits the standard model for a MUD, since most MUDs try to keeping
players around as long as possible.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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