[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play

[Paolo Piselli]

--- cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:

> After this wonderfully long discussion of the motivations behind
> game-playing and the such, I've yet to see any firm
> conclusions. Different people have their own pet theories, but we
> seems to be lacking a general consensus for the fundemental
> reasons our entire industry exists.

> Anyone else find that faintly disturbing?

Nah, so long as enough game mutations are produced in a given
generation, an evolutionary process will help us continue to select
good design features.  The thing to be worried about is therefore
things that reduce variation, such as barriers to creating games and
getting them out into the wild.

> Here we are, merrily coding or designing away, with scarce more
> rationale behind our decisions than "I think it's cool." And
> sometimes people agree with us, sometimes they don't.

IMO that is great, because people have so many different ideas about
what is cool that some of them are bound to stick (assuming they see
the light of day).

> Surely a good understanding of what is actually wanted is the
> first step of any design process? Or is that perhaps what
> seperates business from art? An artist creates something, then
> other people like it. In a business, people like something, and so
> you provide it.

Not every buisness venture that must design something has the
advantage of market research.  With a startup, just as with an
independant game or movie, someone just has a guess at what people
might like.  Think about the dot-coms: lots of people with lots of
ideas, most of which didn't stick, but the few fittest survived and
even thrived.  Was it because their leadership had market research,
a scientific theory for understanding what people like, or was it
because they made a better initial guess?  I'd bet there are alot of
cases of "lucky guesses" or survival-of-the-fittest-ideas preceding
an actual deep understanding of a market.  IMO it would be a
dangerous ego-trap to fall into to mistake a lucky guess for a deep
understanding (see: Wachowski Brothers).

> The list seems to be divided pretty equally between the two (if
> we're going to apply another of those artificial dichotomies that
> are so very useful) - some want to make games that appeal to the
> people, others want to show the people what is so appealing about
> games.

IMO the latter is better for the evolutionary process of selecting
new design ideas, the former is just inertia.  From a buisness
standpoint, you can't ignore either one, because if you abandon what
people are known to like, then you are riding entirely on your
guess, but on the other hand if you stagnate, it leaves room for the
innovator to swoop in and grab your market.

> Either way, grokking what is fun to play and what isn't must be of
> use to anyone. But we're a long way off a Standard Model of Gaming
> Mechanics.

> Is such a thing even possible?

I think the difficulty is that there are so many different likes and
dislikes out there, that no model could give you more than a fuzzy
statistical idea of what a certain type of person would probably
like, and aiming at the center of such a target would likely land
you in bland-ville (see: Hollywood).

-Paolo


Paolo Piselli
ppiselli at yahoo.com
www.piselli.com
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