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

[Sean Howard]

"Amanda Walker" <amanda at alfar.com> wrote:

>> For the record, Japanese doesn't really have anything different
>> from English.

> Actually, the example I was thinking of was the particle, which
> English doesn't have ("wa", "ga", "o", "no", etc.).  English has
> the same functions, but accomplished via very different
> structures.

Those are basicly prepositions. Nothing particularly different or
fancy - though the difference between wa and ga drives me nuts.

> However, both are examples where once acquired, it's not
> changeable, which gets to one of my points...

I think you mean difficult to change. You can learn a new language,
and large life events can impact your personality and belief systems
fundamentally (ask a born against Christian). There are some things
you can't change, but I believe these to be at the brain level and
nothing specific to gender or anything like that.

> Or, in this case, whether you're trying to build games that
> appeal/ sell to one or both communities.

My wife used to get makeup for her birthday every year from an aunt
- she doesn't wear make up. Never has. Her aunt got her makeup
because all little girls like makeup, not because she knew anything
about my wife.  With a poor model, we end up making offensive
predictions. The model we have now makes offensive predictions that
are easily proven wrong. The fact that somethings like World of
Warcraft can have such a huge female audience, and we still can't
agree on what that means, says that we aren't anywhere close to
understanding videogames.

Right now, I'm interested in finding a better model. It makes better
games, and it will ultimately be easier to sell it to someone based
on this fact alone. I think we can both agree that a good game is a
good game regardless of whether it has My Little Pony in.

> "We're all the same at a fundamental level" is a fine philosophy,
> and one one with which I strongly agree, but it doesn't really
> answer questions like "why are FPS players mostly men, social and
> puzzle gamers mostly women, and why do men and women in general
> play MMO games with different goals and styles?"

I don't think "gender differences" does either. I'm not saying there
isn't an answer, just that girls aren't boys isn't it.

> I think these latter questions are interesting (as are cultural
> differences--why is Lineage popular in Korea and China but not the
> US?).  I think that delving into these questions can teach us
> useful things about gaming and MMO/MUD/VW participation.

The Korean thing would likely be a good discussion. I'm not sure
that Koreans (which play MMORPGs because of easily accessable
internet cafes) are because of Korean culture so much as a highly
concentrated population that doesn't own computers. The same thing
could happen here under the same circumstances.

> Ah, but madness is *interesting*. :-)

That's not what the internet told me...

- Sean
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