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

[Miroslav Silovic]

Christopher Lloyd wrote:
>
>> Players do not know what will be fun. That's why game-design is hard.
>> A good game designer /does/ know better than the players what they 
>> will enjoy - if he didn't he wouldn't be a good game designer.
>>     
>
> Players seem to know what will be fun -for the immediate short term-.
> Players (and sometimes administrators) might think up something cool
> that works at the time, but detracts from the game experience further
> down the line.
>
> An example that I've experienced: Take a fairly narrow themed world
> (Star Wars or WoW). It's the end of October in real life, what are
> people are thinking about? Halloween. And... y'know what would be
> really cool? If we could have pumpkins in the game. Yeah! And... ghost
> costumes and stuff. Lets make some of those! And we can have witches
> hats (for the female spellcaster types), broomstick and cobweb objects
> that we can put up in houses and stuff. Yeah. How cool is THIS?
>   

Actually Guild Wars does exactly this. Well, they do it as a weeklong 
event, with cities redecorated extra-dark, and the arrival of the Mad 
King that forces players to do things (and insta-kills those that fails,
 with a resurrect a few seconds later). And pumpkins, and witch-hats,
and  holiday drinks.

And it works for Guild Wars. Holiday events became something that 
players like and expect. They also have in-game lore that translates 
real-life events into the game-world equivalents (Halloween -> Return of
 the Mad King, New Year -> Wintersday, Chinese New Year -> Canthan New
Year).

I think cruise here overstated his argument, because in my opinion, 
certain game design decisions simply don't matter. In this example, 
doing holiday events works. But not doing holiday events also works - it
 will just change the subculture that forms around your game, but will 
probably not affect the core issues, the principal being the amount of 
fun your players have. So I'd say that certain -parts- of the game 
design are hard, and the designers should try to identify those and 
retain control. For everything else, listening to the players is the 
obvious thing to do.

    Miro