[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Dinosaurs evolve to chickens, MMOs evolve to massively single-player games

[Mike Sellers]

John Bertoglio wrote: 
> ...
> I expect that the dynamic I describe above is still with us. 
> Complex time schedules make most planned interaction tricky 
> if the numbers expand beyond a few. Ad hoc teaming has long 
> been a feature of non-Massive online games like 
> CounterStrike. Team play is not mandatory but in-game 
> mechanisms exist to make it possible for players to enforce 
> some degree of cooperation. 
> 
> I suspect a game that made grouping and cooperation a natural 
> extension of the design would find a good audience but that 
> this design goal would be a major challenge. 

It's been done, and extremley successfully.  Games that make grouping and
cooperation natural are the hottest part of gaming right now, IMO.  They do
this by making grouping mostly asynchronous and highly attractive, along
with gameplay that is simple at first with increasing depth as you go on.
They rely more on prior social relations than ad hoc groupings, but this is
changing. 

There are many examples (in some cases, clones) of this, but see for example
Mafia Wars.  Unbelievably successful by any measure -- it has about as many
players as WoW, cost a pittance to make, and earns tens of millions of
dollars per year in revenue -- and it essentially requires various kinds of
grouping and cooperation to get anywhere in the game. 

Mike Sellers