[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviors spawnedfrom...]

[Sean Howard]

"Damien Neil" <damien.neil at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's not at all coincidental that players don't have an avatar in
> The Sims.  There's a disconnect between them and the characters.
> When a Sim gets a promotion, it's the Sim--not the player--that
> has a new job.  The fun of the game comes not from advancing the
> lives of the Sims, but from manipulating them.

But YOU do advance in the Sims. As the family gains more money and
becomes more successful, you gain access to more furniture to
buy. When they have a kid, you have a new toy to play with. It's the
same with something like Warcraft. When the Orcs overrun the human
base and destroy the keep, THEY didn't win. YOU did. You could say
the same thing about team sports - even though the football team did
it completely without your involvement, WE won! Yay!

> I never played The Sims Online, but from what I've been told about
> it, the designers completely misunderstood this aspect of the
> game--they gave the player an avatar, putting them in the game
> rather than watching it from above.  And the players then
> proceeded to focus on leveling up and acquiring loot just as they
> do in other MMOGs.

The problem with the Sims Online was that it was an unstructured
social experience. It was a forum without moderators. And in forums
without moderators, it's only a matter of time before someone posts
goatse and ruins everybody's fun. If you read about SO, you'll find
stories of a 13 year old girl playing a prostitute and a mafia that
would extort protection money from other players using annoying, but
ultimately non-violent meathods.

These kinds of things could go on in something like WoW, but
generally speaking, the people who would be responsible for these
kinds of things are far too consumed with the rat race of reaching
level 60 before everyone else. Then, when they reach 60 and lose
that structure, they tend to rush to the other island and kill level
10 Horde characters for giggles. SO does have something of unfocused
treadmill, but since it is rather uninteresting to watch your avatar
play chess without you, acquiring loot is next to meaningless. So
people play the end game in So early on. If the focus of SO, to hit
a target demographic that has never been on a MMORPG, succeeded,
then you've got a mix of people who are jerk and a mix of people who
have never encountered such behavior before. They would leave
quickly. And let's face it, SO may just have been a boring
experience.

Cyberbullying (got that word from Time Magazne, but I think it
sounds moronic) is a major problem with virtual societies that has
become that much worse now that these societies are not built
exactly on common interests. Something like EQ2 appeals to a whole
bunch of different types of gamers, and these interests frequently
lead to harassment and social domination of lesser exterted social
circles, especially when dealing with the developers. It is easy to
see why raid seem so damn important when that group is quite pushy
and demanding while the roleplayers are generally quite and self
contained. In SWG, the merchants have the ear of the devs rather
than the consumers, leading to server monopolies, price fixing,
resource mafias, and all sorts of business practices that would get
you thrown in jail in a controlled capitalist society, and
frequently, they do this with the help of the developers.

Developers need to start listening to the silent majority in these
games.  Failure to do so is creating negative experiences for gamers
and sending them away. There's plenty of "achievers" and "griefers"
out there to keep something like World of Warcaft in business, but
the Sims Online is certain proof that we need to revise our social
models if we want to target, involve, and KEEP a different audience
on any scale above a small cliquish group.

- Sean
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