[MUD-Dev] Birthday Cake (or Why Large Scale Sometimes Sucks) (long)

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Brian Green wrote:

> Raph's statement about the market is true, *if you are building a large
> scale, mass-market product.*  When you water your content down to please
> the masses, you should not expect soul-searching introspection aspects
> of the content to remain intact.  At best, thinking you can is naive; at
> worst, there is nothing more dangerous than a creative person with a
> message and a medium that cannot sufficiently express the message.

Quite right. Masses=pulp. I don't mean that in a bad way.

 
> We need to customize the game to the players if we hope to touch them in
> the way Raph wants.  This means we have to go back to that dirty word,
> "niche".  Only when the message is customized to the individual will we
> get people contemplating careful introspection.  Mass-consumption
> one-size-fits-all content doesn't pose questions for us to ask
> ourselves, it strokes our egos and tells us to spend more money.

Niches rock. Up with niches.

> Am I arguing that we should abandon all large scale games?  Absolutely
> not!  Just as there are many things you cannot do in a large scale game,
> there are many things you cannot do in a small scale game.  Raph is very
> interested in the social interactions of large scale games.  I just do
> not think we should expect more from the large scale games than we can
> reasonably expect.  We should also not ignore small scale solutions and
> situations merely because they do not scale; these solutions and
> situations are just as viable and interesting as the large scale
> situations that major commercial interests have to face.  I think that
> enough attention has been paid to the large scale games in recent times.

Indeedy, quite right. There is no way you could do some of the things
Achaea does in a large-scale game. It simply does not scale. 

Visual analogy coming up here. No kicking me in the shins if it makes no
sense. Think of the market as a big bowl. The interior surface of the bowl
is cratered, like the moon. Some craters are very big, some are small.
There are craters within craters within craters within craters, etc etc.
The craters represent aggregated interest in X type of game. 

Now, imagine that each game is a ball of a various size. The more general
the game, the bigger the ball. Place the balls in the bowl. Any ball that
is near to the size of the diameter of the bowl will capture a huge
audience (consider the audience to be the space within a crater...the
entire market being the bowl, ie one massive crater), but because its
curvature is so much more gradual than most of the craters, it won't
penetrate those craters very deeply. It takes small, focussed balls to
penetrate the craters.


 
> I think that the current crop of games are in a sorry state of affairs
> because of the focus on large scale.  This focus on scale is
> particularly harmful because it is merely used for bragging rights, not
> for meaningful development of games.  Game X is better than Game Y
> because more people play.  Game Z will blow them all away because it
> will have a million subscribers!  Never mind the fact that the typical
> player will hardly meet, let alone meaningfully interact with even a
> tiny percentage of such a huge population.

Well, the current focus on scale is useful because it makes them money.
That's useful insofar as it allows the game to exist at all. I don't
totally disagree with you of course, just being pragmatic.

I do fully agree that from a player's perspective, aside from the fact
that it allows them to exist, it's mainly irrelevant. As an analogy, think of 
cities. I moved to San Fransico from Chicago about 4 years ago. Chicago is
a significantly larger city, with a much more urban feel about it. I like
San Francisco a lot better though (better weather, more interesting
topography, better weather), and with 800k people in it, of course I'll
never meet any significant percentage of them. I don't really
notice a "lack" of new people past a certain threshold. There are minor
things though that San Francisco, by virtue of its relatively small size,
cannot give. I can't get that feeling I miss from Chicago and NYC of being
in a real urban environment. You gotta be very big to have what feels to
me like a real urban environment.

I'm not sure there are valid parallels with games, and I'm too tired to
thnk about it much right now, but I'm willing to bet some could be thought
of.



> The observation that communities rarely form of greater than roughly 250
> members combined with the focus on advancement which harms socialization
> and interaction (as argued in last week's post) make the truly large
> scale meaningless in terms of posing situations that force players to
> learn about themselves.  If anything, it has shown us the ugly side of
> the human nature, the side that rises up from the teeming crowds to
> commit a wrong, only to slip back into the world as an anonymous face in
> the crowd.  It is no surprise that grief playing seems to get handled
> better in smaller scale games than in larger ones.

Oh, I disagree. I have a local bar that I go to. It's not big, and it
isn't crowded except on weekends. It's not really TOO much different from
the local bars in the small Midwest town I grew up in, except for 1 thing:
New people. You actually see new people there sometimes, instead of the
same old same old. Fresh blood, and lots of it, is just interesting. It
increases your chances of socializing with someone you find interesting.

 
> I am sure people will shake their head and cluck their tongues and tell
> me it's easy to say such things since I am not a business person that
> has to worry about making ends meet.  I would argue that such people
> have not evaluated business models very well.  Smaller games were able
> to make quite handsome profits before the arrival of any of the "big
> three" large scale graphical commercial games.  Most niche suppliers
> will tell you that although you may not find large numbers of people
> willing to participate in the niche, often people will be happy to pay
> more for content that interests them; more than they will pay for lowest
> common denominator content provided at a cheap price for the great
> unwashed masses.  Some people are willing to spend more than McDonald's
> prices if they want to eat a good hamburger.

Damn right. I think it's very funny that most of the game companies seem
to think so little about their business models. That is as important as
programming or design, yet receives nearly no attention. Just generally, I
would encourage anyone out there who wants to do a game to just do it. You
do not need to "sell-out" (I put that in quotes because it's not the word
I'd use. It's just the word others might use.) to the largest possible
audience to make money. 

People _are_ willing to pay more than $10/month for a different
experience. Quite frankly, I'm not willing to claim that Achaea is a
generally higher-quality experince than the big graphical games. But, it
is defintely a MUCH higher-quality experience for some people, and that's
enough. Some people do not think the experience is worth paying much more,
and that's perfectly fine. Those people are not our audience.


> And, that's the problem.  We've focused on becoming the McDonald's of
> the online gaming world.  We've traded our willingness to make
> interesting content for producing bland, generic, non-threatening "fun"
> for the masses.  Where's the focus on becoming the corner bistro that
> connoisseurs  love?  Where's the businesses making the game that can
> touch people in deep and meaningful ways?  Why weren't they actively
> hiring MUD developers with professional experience? :)  (I can think of
> two serious companies trying to make smaller-scale products on this
> group.)

Hear, hear. While my pocketbook would certainly rather own EQ than Achaea,
I suspect I get much more non-financial pleasure out of owning Achaea than
I ever would out of owning EQ, just like I'd rather own the connoisseur's
bistro than the world's largest McDonalds (if finances were no concern).

 
> In the long run, I personally think it will be niche products that grow
> the market more than any of the numerous massively multiplayer
> (especially the dreaded "million subscriber") worlds I've heard about in
> the last few months.  The power of the internet allows us to bring
> specialized content to niche audiences at a reasonable price; the
> problem is that large companies have gotten into the "McDonald's" mode
> of content production that they don't realize that there are meaningful
> small scale games that could be made.  I think these smaller, focused
> worlds will interest the non-hardcore crowd and bring them to our fold.  

One can only hope. Personally, I think the way to bring in the
non-hardcore crowd is, paradoxically, through text muds.

--matt




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev