[MUD-Dev2] Players are shallow [was: The Future of Quests]

[John Buehler]

Cruise writes:

> Players do not know what will be fun.
> People naturally prefer easy and shallow over complex and rewarding.
> Unfortunately, things are worth what you pay for them, and so the
> easier something is to get, the less satisfying it will be.
> This is a problem for anyone trying to produce a "popular" game, and
> hence we see the trend towards the grind and vending machine NPCs as the
> predominant gameplay element.

A problem here is that game designers seem to think that complex and
rewarding game systems are those that involve the player with the game.  The
complex and rewarding game systems that work best are those that involve the
player with other players.  People are automatically important to us.

I used to be all about the game itself, thinking that if the content of the
game was sufficiently sophisticated that players would enjoy it all the more
for the lookitthat moments.  The current discussion of sophisticated NPCs
that know how to hand out quests and such is an example of that.

The players in the first two standard deviations of the bell curve are
pretty ambivalent about the quests and NPCs.  They're playing an MMO so that
in some way, shape or form they will be doing things in relation to other
players.  Some want that to be a very direct relationship (grouping), some
want a very indirect one (best gear).  But that relationship, not the one
they might have with the NPCs, is the focus of their gaming experience.

So if you're going to have quests and NPCs, do it all such that it gets
players interacting in all the myriad ways that they can.  Eliminate grinds
not by presenting players with different interactions with your NPCs, but by
ensuring that players are experiencing varied interactions with each other.
Get THEM interacting, not your NPCs.

> I too would love a deeper, more engaging world, but I fear such a thing
> will always be doomed to obscurity, simply because most people would
> not be willing to put in the extra effort required to access the content.

Right. Because the purpose of these games is to provide a break from putting
extra effort into things.  The only people who will put extra effort into
your game are the ones who have a definite surplus of effort.  That may be
due to a driven life, or simply a lack of opportunity elsewhere to expend
themselves productively.

Players are shallow because even the ones that are truly deep will spend
their deep time elsewhere.  How many deep people will focus their energies
on playing a game?  We don't really.  We spend them designing the things.

JB