[MUD-Dev2] Specialization

[Sean Howard]

"cruise" <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:

> I'd qualify it - I'd say all players (in fact I'd say all characters)
> should be free to /try/ anything and everything.
>
> Success should be a rarer commidity.

Why?

No seriously, why?

It's just a game. It's entertainment. Success is something you expect from
all other types of entertainment (how many times have you failed to finish
a movie?), and in single player games, success is a requirement for most
players. How many people have you met that have actively liked a game that
they could not win of their own accord? Most players consider a failure of
the designer, not themselves - and they are right.

Just because you introduce other players into the mix does not mean that
competition and failure must also be included. I've never understood that.
Why you can have a perfectly playable single player game, but the second
you jump online, everything you do and can do is judged by some sort of
competitive ranking.

It's the same thing with things like education. Nobody cares about how
schools are enriching the lives of the children, how they are making them
more creative, curious, or yes, even smarter. They don't care what the
child's experience is in school, even if he is miserable or develops a
life long hatred of learning, so long as he scores competitively with
other schools in his district, state, country, and world.

MMORPGs are like that. So what if gamers are being turned away, insulted,
oppressed, and put upon? Doesn't the gamer who puts the effort in want it
more? Doesn't he DESERVE it more? No. He doesn't. And I'll tell you why.

For reasons completely beyond my understanding, the gamers who fail are
somehow blamed for it. They are actively PUNISHED for it. In the eyes of
the designer, it's not HIS fault that a solo player can't do raids. At the
same time, the player who is cognitively pre-built for such things is
rewarded for behavior which is as natural as breathing and, frankly,
destructive to the community and usually to the game. You say to them,
congrats for minmaxing the boss, but when they minmax environmental
geometry, they are cheating. You say that grinding gold as a player is
fine, but grinding gold as a bot is not? Why not? It's a simple and
obvious extension of the way the designer wants them to play. You want
them to succeed by grinding? What grinds better than a machine? But no,
that's too far. Gotta bring the player back to this nonexistent ideal,
through force if necessary.

It's not the designer's fault. It's never the designer's fault. Always the
player's. Well, I disagree. It's ALWAYS the designer's fault.

Online gaming becomes this giant Skinner Box where the designer is trying
to turn every player into his personal ideal player. Obviously, some
players are more put out than others, but players will always find a way
to exist. If you remove the ability to curse, they'll use odd spellings.
If you take out chat, they'll push blocks around to spell things. If you
make an economy based on mind numbing grinding, bots and gold sellers will
show up to ease the burden. If you only allow one class per character,
you'll have players using a dozen alts instead of settling into a single
person.

To quote Jurassic Park, "life finds a way". No matter what obstacle you
place in front of someone, they will find a way around it. All "failure"
does is create an obstacle that someone, somewhere will have to break your
game to get around.

So how about a new motto? All players, no matter what, can explore any
game system they'd like, as often as they'd like to the extent that they'd
like, with success guaranteed (if they want it). Let's shorten it a bit:

"All players can succeed at all things."

... It is, after all, just a game. Stop blaming the player for wanting to
win it.

-- 
Sean Howard