[MUD-Dev2] Player Choice - How Much is Too Much?

[John Buehler]

Lachek Butalek writes:

> The crux: the moment you try to add multiple premises to a game, you
> muddle the idea of what the game is about. This causes friction within
> the community, which now have differing goals within the game.

I completely agree, but there is an element of the gaming community that
believes quite strongly that the very friction that we implicitly declare as
undesirable is a good and necessary thing.  They enjoy the times when
agendas conflict.  From what I recall of Nick Yee's research, players who
really enjoy PvP constitute perhaps a quarter of the MMO player population.
And I don't think they care if the character that they're acting against is
a PvP enthusiast or not.

> So for my 2c, if it wasn't obvious - I'm looking forward to seeing a
> plethora of MMOs with smaller subscriber bases and tighter, better
> defined game play. Anything less, when you're dealing with a largely
> computer moderated community of people, is simply too much to bite off
> for anyone but the biggest players, and I pity those community
> managers.

I look forward to a proper partitioning of game experiences.  It may be that
a large number of small MMOs is the way to go, but I hold out hope that an
MMO can become like a theme park, with many activities available that
clearly communicate the entertainment that a player will find in them.

I wonder how much of the difficulty is the graphics.  The graphics display
the MMO environment as a virtual world.  There are animals walking around
the forests, there are lamp posts, lights in the windows, birds singing and
so on.  What player wouldn't assume that they could do anything?  And then
there's the attempt to create dynamics of interaction between various
systems such as crafting, socializing and killing.  That interdependence
actively brings together conflicting agendas.

JB