[SPAM] RE: [MUD-Dev] Removing the almighty experience point...

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:12:39 -0500
Dana V Baldwin <dbaldwin at playnet.com> wrote:
> Matt Mihaly wrote:
>> Travis Casey wrote:

> All (okay most, bad absolute) of the most popular games in the
> history of the world have a winner and a loser.

ie are part of the class of "zero sum games".

> Building a game that has losers isn't bad, building a game where
> losing is intolerable is bad.

In what manner is losing special in this equation?  Is building a
game where FOO is intolerable somehow necessarily better than
building a game where losing is intolerable?  Surely having
intolerable aspects in your game which occur with reasonable
frequency, no matter their type, is unlikely to be a good Game
Design.

> A game without challenge is a passive recreation, and a pretty
> poor one at that.

Where would the more social/Talker-oriented games fit in this space,
such as say the classical MUSHes (even the fully consensual RP
ones), or more glitzy commercial versions like Second Life?  In
general the challenges with them are not explicitly defined by the
game, but are implicitly among the players or their inter-relations.

--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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