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

[Lee Sheldon]

Please pardon the following ruminative digression. Put it down to my
having a birthday today...

Richard A. Bartle replied: > Ola Fosheim Grostad wrote:

>> maybe what people consider to be their first MUD is the first
>> where they had a good experience that matched their
>> preferences...

> I did say "the first virtual world that someone gets into" rather
> than "the first virtual > world that someone plays". Some people
> make aborted attempts to play before they're really ready.

> I see your point about predisposition, but although it's a factor
> I don't believe it's the main one. The sheer magic, delight and
> wonder of their initial experiences is what does it.

I bought myself a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner for my birthday this
week.  It's hard to take my eyes off of it as it chugs energetically
across the floor, under tables and beds, gobbling up dust bunnies
that thought they'd live forever; bouncing off virtual walls I set
up like mini-museum security systems, then trundling back into its
homebase on its own to recharge when its battery runs low. There is
sheer magic, delight and wonder in my recently acquired Roomba.

The first MMO (a tine of the perfectly fine umbrella of "virtual
worlds") I experienced was EQ. And without a doubt I felt all those
things in the first few weeks. Ten MMOs later that excitement is
barely the ghost of a memory, never repeated. The first one is easy.

No MMO since has come close to recapturing that initial
experience. It's as if once the sheer magic, delight and wonder of
seeing "The Great Train Robbery" projected on that sheet at the
local church back in 1912 was experienced, movie makers kept
improving the projector without making a new movie, assuming that
watching flickering images produced by hand-cranked nitrate
snickering past a light bulb would be enough. Initial experiences
are fleeting... one offs... frozen moments of time... They do not
remain; only their shadows.

Why is it so hard to realize that just as building better projectors
is not the way to rediscover the sheer magic, delight and wonder of
film; building prettier more responsive worlds is not enough to
recapture the same kind of initial experiences we get each time we
plunk down our money at a box office or open a new book? Why can't
the same excitement of discovery that drives an initial experience
occur even more than once over the life of a single world, let alone
infuse the opening land with that magic, delight and wonder?

One might say that all a virtual world has to do is provide tools to
build a community. But a community stays put only as long as the
river flows or the crops grow or the mine produces silver. Until a
more navigatable river or more fertile soil or a bigger mother lode
is discovered, we can convince ourselves that our home will last
forever. But once one of those discoveries has been made, the
community will migrate. Loyalty is fickle and at the mercy of
geography. It fades like an expedient friendship.

What happens if there is no better river or soil or vein? When our
projectors are computerized, but the same film stock is scratched
and torn from being played over and over? What happens after we've
throttled the golden goose while we raked in its last few eggs? What
will we have created really except ghost towns?

Going downstairs to blow out a lot of candles...

Lee

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