[MUD-Dev] Time Limited MUDs and Dead Horses Revived (was: WhyVirtual Worlds are Designed by Newbies)

[John Buehler]

Peter Keeler writes:
> Quoting Mike Rozak <Mike at mxac.com.au>:

>> The time limit would be on invidivual players, and it wouldn't
>> really be a limit. Basically, when the player finished the
>> 100-hours of content, they'd be told they can stick around and be
>> bored, or leave and go try virtual world X by the same
>> author/company. (It could be more drastic; the game could start
>> scrolling the games credits, but this is a bit harsh and will
>> cause some players to put off killing the evil overlord forever.)

> 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. At that point, you're done. You
> could create a new character, but you'd have to start from the
> beginning again.

The model presented by Mike Rozak is predicated in 'finishing'
content.  It has been said a number of times that creating content
is labor intensive and, therefore, expensive.  In contrast, there
was a recent post about accidents and how they can be entertaining.
For my money, accidents are the very best entertainment that these
'multiplayer venues' provide (there's my stab at naming these
software packages).

Accidents are pure entertainment because they are a complete
spectrum.  They can be either manufactured wholly, partly or not at
all.  When they are not manufactured at all, they are most treasured
by players.  Those are the things that players talk about amongst
themselves.  Those are the things that build community.  Compare the
length of stories involved with "I did the Hoodoo quest" versus the
story of how somebody's character slipped down a slope, landed right
in a bunch of bad guys, and the group had to fight their way in and
then out in order to save the klutz.  In the latter case, nothing
happened of true consequence - but it's far more entertainment than
doing the Hoodoo quest.  If the players actually learn something
about a game fiction by that accidental encounter, so much the
better.

I wonder if games are grindy, consumable things because of the fact
that designers insist on controlling the experience of the player to
the Nth degree.  That the belief is that if the entertainment
doesn't walk a player from step to step, there will be no
entertainment.  Instead of providing 100 hours of content that the
player will consume and then leave behind, is there greater bang for
the buck available by providing 100 hours of canned content, and
permit 1000 hours of unplanned, accidental content to be sneaking
around?

But how to plan unplanned content?  The foremost technique is to
make sure that the players don't have control.  Control is the
source of the grind, the source of the ability to know that it would
take 100 hours to consume a game's content, etc.  If players
imprecisely control their own characters, and if the content of the
world is not operating according to fixed, simplistic rules, then
players cannot predict outcomes.  Accidents will happen.

Note that when entertainment is derived from the unplanned and
unexpected, the grind model is immediately broken.  Or, if you're a
fan of the grind, the model is frustrated.  Those who are extremely
goal oriented will hate the unexpected because they DON'T have
control.  How many players despised corpse retrieval in EverQuest
because of the delay to experience grinding?  How many players
wouldn't group with a player who did the unexpected?  They were
considered loose cannons, fouling up the smoooth operating procedure
of the monster killing machine.

I wonder if content can be made 10% planned and 90% variation, such
that content can be easily manufactured as very simpleminded
constructs - but where the meat of the experience lies in the 90%
variations, which are never the same way twice.  That would mean
that anyone could come up with a simpleton quest to go somewhere and
get something.  But getting there, finding the something and getting
back is the real entertainment.  The quest is just an excuse for
moving a character around in the world.

That would make goals something to motivate players, but those goals
would not dominate their gameplay.  They would easily abandon a
'quest' goal if some ad hoc goal popped up - such as helping
somebody else with their 'quest' goal because it just looked to be
more fun.  I may well be simply tuning the experience of gameplay
for what I'd like to see.  But I do know that I'd like to see less
formulaic content and more surprises.

JB
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev