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

[Caliban Darklock]

On 5/21/07, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
>
> I think everyone can get all sorts of themes.

I think it's a little different when you get success and failure
involved. You can't fail at a movie; you just don't like it, which is
a form of success. The success conditions of a movie are "see the
movie and grasp the plot", which are accessible to anyone and everyone
of reasonable intelligence. Indeed, they're inevitable, if you just
walk into the theatre and sit down.

> We see something LIKE Star Trek come out and bomb, and then we jump
> to this conclusion that normal people just don't "get it".

I think what's missing there is the examination of what makes
something unlike Star Trek. You can watch and enjoy Star Trek with
absolutely NO CLUE what a dilithium matrix is or what a jeffreys tube
is for or how phasers differ from disruptors or even the difference
between warp drive and impulse drive. Many Star Trek viewers are
effectively translating the conversation into Pakled. They see Geordi
come out and say something like this:

"Captain, the dilithium matrix is destabilised, and we can't use warp
drive for several hours. We're limited to impulse engines while I
climb through the jeffreys tube and reinitialise the system."

And the filters kick in:

"Captain, IT IS BROKEN, and we can't GO FAST for several hours. We're
limited to GOING SLOW while I climb through THAT and FIX IT."

The same thing happens when you get the detailed examination of
disruptor and phaser fire during an investigation. "It was disruptor
fire! See, look at this CONVINCING EVIDENCE." The viewer doesn't have
to understand the convincing evidence, he just needs to see that the
people looking at it understand it, and that they regard it as
convincing. That's good enough.

But in a game context, you can't make that translation, because you're
expected to give the command to fix it. So when someone in the game
says "the dilithium matrix is destabilised" you're sitting there lost
in this quagmire of jargon and unable to make a rational decision. You
don't have any cues about what this means. "WTF is dilithium? My
sister takes lithium. Is my crew going off their medication?"

> Normal people can get WoW because the things don't need to get aren't
> really that important.

Um, yeah. More or less. I just rambled a lot more. ;)

> I don't think the casual gamer is against learning something new.

I think what worries the casual gamer isn't the idea that it's
something new, but that it's something which - once learned - will
provide advantage. This is, of course, an incentive to learn... until
you factor in the percentage of the playerbase that already knows it.
Nobody likes to feel stupid, and if the crowd around you knows
something you don't, you feel stupid.

I think there's a big fat part of a game's life cycle where you've
already locked in your core player base, and until they move far
enough along that they're a fringe element, the mainstream won't touch
the game. The game has three important stages - one at the beginning
where everyone who joins will be a "playa" simply because competition
is minimal, one in the middle where only the elite get to succeed
because competition is massive, and then one at the end where
competition is reasonable because the elite have either moved on or
are now playing a whole different type of game. Only "regular folk"
are signing on and playing the main game, and most of them are
comparable. That's where the game needs to be sustainable, in the end.

> Again, I don't think complexity has anything to do with it. Blizzard games
> are generally on the upper end of complexity for your average game.

But the learning curve - while admittedly long - is shallow. Starcraft
builds, mission after mission, so that you initially work with limited
units and limited ideas. Over time, you become accustomed to the
gameplay. Diablo has early levels where stats are largely irrelevant,
and it's only as you get much deeper into the game that you need to
track stats.

It's the bite-sized pieces that do it. You simply can't play level 9
without going through level 5, so level 9 can assume with reasonable
certainty that you must know how to beat level 5. The only time that
really misleads is when friends or siblings are switching off playing
the game, and the guy who beat level 5 has gone home or is at softball
practice.

> I don't think it works that way. Being a hardcore gamer isn't something
> you can learn to do.

Agreed. There is something fundamentally different in the mindset; I'm
playing Dead Rising over and over this week, not because I'm having so
much fun with it, but because I'm convinced that I can accomplish a
particular goal within 24 hours of game time. Every time I hit that 24
hour mark and haven't accomplished it, no matter how close I am, I
start over. That's hardcore gaming behavior.

Most people don't get it. You accomplished the goal, right? Why do you
need to do it in 24 hours? What will that give you? Well, nothing.
I'll just know I did it in 24 hours. And to the hardcore gamer, that's
enough.

But the fear of failure part still kicks in. I don't want to say what
the goal is, because I'd really rather not risk other people on the
list saying "THAT takes you more than 24 hours?! I did it in twelve!"
and making me feel like a loser. ;)