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

[cruise]

Damien Neil spake thusly...

> Regarding enjoyability, players will generally seek the simplest,
> most reliable, and fastest form of advancement, regardless of how
> much they like it.  If they can advance farther by spending eight
> hours camping a single spawn than by going on a four-hour raid,
> they'll never raid--and they'll tell you that your game is boring,
> even if the raid content that they never play is wildly
> entertaining.

> This leads to a vicious cycle where developers make raid rewards
> uber enough to attract players, which forces them to make the
> raids difficult enough to keep the power economy in balance.

So why do people play these type of games?

  a) Advancement and character power.
  b) Strategic challenge of in-game profession (ie. combat, mostly).
  c) Escapism.
  d) Socialising.
  e) Anything else I've forgotten...

None of those are exclusive, obviously - personally I'm c,b,a,d (in
order of importance).

It seems the general attitude on this list, and from the various
respective boards for each game, is that 'a' is becoming the
dominant, if not exclusive, reason.

Can this be down entirely to game design? It seems that xp has
become like money - intended as a representation of something
(ability or work done, respectively), but has become the ultimate
goal.

Do we need to perhaps think about re-educating players somehow,
rather than forcibly removing or hiding the xp/levelling? Current
game-fashion seems to be favouring sandbox-style games, yet might it
be necessary in some situations to enforce certain gameplay on
players? It's well known that players make bad game designers - but
can we say players make bad game /players/ in that they don't always
know what they'd enjoy when given the option?

--
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / transference.org ]
  "quantam sufficit"
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