[MUD-Dev2] Risk vs Reward [was: Value]

[cruise]

Thus spake Sean Howard...
> I prefer "interesting choices". Meaningful implies something that I just
> don't think is true for all games. I mean, if I select the flower
> wallpaper over the polkadot wallpaper, that's not even meaningful to
> myself. I don't really care, so I'll just select one until such time that
> I might care (ie I get tired of wallpaper A or it suddenly becomes an
> eyesore next to my neon green couch). However, the choice is interesting
> because the options are quite different. I'm not choosing between three
> barely different granite patterns. The options have been selected by the
> designer (or the player through mods) to be different enough that the
> decision is not dominated or confusing or insignificant.
> 
> I wouldn't call it meaningful, though I guess you could say that if a
> choice were interesting, that would be meaningful. I just prefer a
> different implication other than it means something to the player, because
> that's not always true - I mean, if you can play through Mortal Kombat by
> just jump kicking in a corner, does that make all the other available
> options to you meaningful?

Well, there's the challenge of the game design, and one of the reasons I 
like the use of "meaningful." Different things have different meaning to 
different people. A lot of people use the auto-generation feature for 
their characters in CoH, for example, because the look isn't meaningful 
to them, whereas I can spend hours agonising over the choices.

Some people skip all cutscenes because they don't care about a game's 
storyline, others may use walkthroughs to get from one plot-point to the 
next as quickly as possible. Some people will strictly role-play a 
character, even if that makes them less effective, others will try and 
exploit the game mechanics as much as possible.

Again, the two contexts of meaning: player-supplied (how can I most 
abuse the game rules), or game-supplied (how can I act as the best Paladin).

Naturally, each person lies along the continuum between those two 
extremes, and I'd say one of the goals of a game designer would be to 
find the balance that includes the majority of players along that line.