[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN} Who to design for?

[John MacQueen]

Sean Howard wrote:

>
>Because there is no such thing as a finished thought. You can ALWAYS look
>at something from a different perspective and see something new and
>worthwhile. Common wisdom is a finished thought. It's a bumper sticker
>slogan's worth of "deep thought" that is anything but. Common wisdom
>prevents people from looking outside the box, or worse, trying to get
>others to look outside the box. They will always retort with "If it
>weren't true, it wouldn't be common wisdom" - which is, itself, common
>wisdom, and I should add, wrong.
>  
>
I take issue as well. Common wisdom says fire burns you, electricity 
shocks you, falling down hurts,
smoking isn't good for you, unprotected sex is dangerous, running with a 
sharp object in your hand is dangerous,
money can't buy hapiness etc. etc. etc.

Common wisdom can and is wrong at times, but I would take exception to 
always or even more often than not.

Wisdom is defined as learned experience either from practice or 
discussion. Common wisdom is simply the learned
experience that many agree is correct. Yes it is found to be wrong or 
incomplete but considering all the common wisdom out there
that isn't the majority of the time.

>The ONLY thing important is the discussion. The debate. The back and forth
>of ideas. The devil's advocate. Common wisdom is biased intelligence. It
>comes to you under the guise that it is true. Truth is never that simple.
>Life is never that simple. Nothing important is simple enough to fit on a
>bumper sticker. There are always ifs, ands, or buts. And if you adhere too
>tightly to this absurd idea that somehow, people must be right some of the
>time, you don't spend enough time thinking whether or not they are right
>THIS TIME. Start with the negative and work backwards until you've run out
>of ways to disprove it.
>  
>
Of course Common wisdom is biased intelligence, but when I say "if you 
stick your hand in that fire it'll burn you" truth IS that simple and
there really isn't much room for debate, debating it isn't important at 
all. If you constantly question every little fact you
never get anything done. You have to accept some things as true at some 
point at least in some context without labored debate simply for
practicality.

Of course that's a simple analogy and bringing discussion into MMOG 
games takes things to multiple layers of complexity.
There is common knowledge to games, but much to be learned. I fnd it 
fascinating that so much in the debate of games seems
to focus on the relatively tiny amoung of gaming we have done on 
computers spanning just a blip in time, when humans have
been making up and playing games for thousands of years, mostly all PvP 
games and making PvP games by far the most
popular type of games throughout the history of mankind. A bit of common 
wisdom perhaps...but why do MMOG games
seem to only have PvP as a sideline or afterthought.

MMOG games haven't been around long enough for common wisdom to really 
develop yet, one of the purposes of the discussions
here is precisely to find that common wisdom that can be established as 
such and used. This discussion is only a means to that end,
to establish that common wisdom and is not more important than the 
wisdom it is meant to arrive at only equally as important and as often
as not simply futile.