[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Rewards

[cruise]

Thus spake Sean Howard...
> "Mike Sellers" <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:
>> As above, the question is do we reward them extrinsically for
>> fundamentally un-fun behaviors ("oooh, watch me press the 1 key over and
>> over to 'attack' this thing"), or do we find ways to create situations
>> and player behaviors that are intrinsically rewarding?
> 
> There's that word again... "fun". Is that the only kind of rewarding you
> know? Because I've felt plenty rewarded for simply hanging out with my
> friends watching bad movies and eating pizza, exploring my neighborhood on
> foot, or writing an email. Give me a wall and I'll paint on it. Give me a
> mountain and I'll climb it. Give me a door, and I'll go through it. Give
> me a friend...
> 
> The designer doesn't have to make these things "fun". In fact, any effort
> to do so will fundamentally unbalance the nature of what makes these
> things rewarding in the first place.

Ironically, "fun" is one of those words that I'm not going to try and 
argue semantics with - for me, "fun" includes all those activities 
listed. It's getting damn close to "nice" as so overused as to be 
meaningless.

Mike's original question still stands: how do we create situations that 
players find intrinsically rewarding, rather than having to bribe 
players with extrinsic rewards?

It is possible, because this is what game designers have been doing for 
years, long before the current fad for *ding*-led repetition in many 
games. For MMOG's, the trick is to do it for longer, for more people, 
than ever before.