[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] MMO's are for Newbies

[John Buehler]

Nicholas Koranda writes:

> This post was written by Richard Bartle and posted on another forum. I
> found it very compelling and wanted to share it in this group.

[generously snipped in many places]

> It's not just permanent death, it's not just instancing: it's
> teleportation, it's banks, it's non-drop objects - it's everything that
> makes sense in some contexts but not in all (or even most) contexts.
>
> Player: You don't have teleporting! How can I rejoin my group if I miss
> a session?
> Designer: Well gee, maybe by omitting teleportation I'm kinda dropping a
> hint that you can have a meaningful gaming experience, without always
> having to group with the same people of the same level and run a
> treadmill the whole time?
> Player: Are you NUTS? I want to play with my friends, and I want to play
> with them RIGHT NOW!
> Designer: But how are you ever going to make new friends? How -
> Player: Are you listening? RIGHT NOW!
> Designer: (Sigh)

I believe I understand your points, but ultimately I think that you're
flogging a dead horse.  Based on your logic and your use of terms such as
"virtual world", I get the impression that you want to be able to wander
around Middle Earth for real.  Or some other fantasy environment that
someone could build, complete with every bit of reality that can be
produced.  Reality is energizing, entertaining and satisfying.
Accomplishments mean something there, and the experiences are just more
viscerally satisfying.

The problem is that there are no guarantees that you'll get the
entertainment that you're after.  The vast majority of people only have a
certain amount of time to spend pursuing entertainment, so they want to be
sure that they're going to be able to get to it.  Push button, be
entertained.  That's the majority of folks out there.

There's a reason that we have chess.  It permits two people to come
together, lock horns in battle, then part company.  The virtual world
treatment is a realistic battle between two kingdoms.  It just takes too
long.  Sure, it would be far more subtle, involved and detailed, but it just
doesn't fit the lives of most people.  Further, it takes more skill to deal
with a real battle than it does to understand the constrained moves of the
chess pieces.

Chess is a distillation of a real world experience, just as current games
are a distillation of a fantasy experience.

> In virtual worlds, the hardcore either wanders from one to the next,
> trying to recapture the experience of their first experience or they
> never left in the first place. Furthermore, in today's flat-fee
> universe, the hardcore spends the same amount of money as everyone else:
> developers aren't rewarded for appealing to the cognoscenti, except
> maybe through word of mouth that always comes with caveats (because of
> point #3).

Note that the cognoscenti are a small fraction of the population, possessing
a correspondingly small portion of the wealth.  I think it's as simple as
that; it takes money to run a virtual world.  The cognoscenti have got to
pay for it because they're the only ones who enjoy such things.  That limits
the scale of cognoscenti-serving experiences to text MUDs for the most part.

> Conclusion
>
> Virtual worlds are under evolutionary pressure to promote design
> features that, while not exactly bad, are nevertheless poor. Each
> succeeding generation absorbs these into the virtual world paradigm, and
> introduces new poor features for the next generation to take on board.
> The result is that virtual world design follows a downward path of
> not-quite-good-enough, leading ultimately to an erosion of what virtual
> worlds are.

My summary response is that the reason that current games are so frustrating
to the virtual world enthusiasts is because the current games cater to the
masses - who are not drawn to virtual worlds.  The enthusiasts keep looking
to the current crop of games for the traits of virtual worlds, just as I
look to them for the special concoction that I am an enthusiast of.  In the
meantime, we both continue to play what's out there, complaining all the
while.

JB