[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #282 - 18 msgs

[Dr. Cat]

> From: Neeby <neeby at sheergenius.com>
 
>   http://uo.stratics.com/news/Editorials.shtml#newsitem975938658,92476,
 
> Here's a snippet:
 
> "10. Help us diversify. If every baker in your game is exactly the
> same we'll be bored, and the things we make will be viewed as
> commodities. Those things will cause us to quit playing your game
> sooner. We would rather be able to strive to be one of a few who are
> the best at baking a particular cuisine than to be among hundreds
> who are all equally "the best" at baking everything. We're okay with
> having limits on what we can make, or the quality of what we make
> based on our choices in the game. We don't necessarily like it, but
> we'll put up with it, because the alternative is worse. "

This was a very interesting article to me.  There were a few different
reactions I had.  One is that whether the author realizes it or not,
some of those suggestions aren't really aimed at "all multiplayer
online game developers" so much as at "people making Ultima Online and
any other game that does crafting skills in a highly similar manner,
so as to have the same likely problems and need advice on how to avoid
them".  Points 13 and 15 for instance, are problems that might not
arise at all in a system where production by the bakers was limited by
scarcity of ingredients, with no skill system or a skill system that
didn't provide motivation to do excess production of unwanted goods.
More insightful are the points on how things should work, not how
things shouldn't work.  Anyway a narrow perspective is normal even for
most game developers, let alone most game players, and doesn't detract
from the fact that she's expressing her and her fellow players desire
for something that's not being adequately fulfilled by existing games.

A more important reaction is my thought that some of these individual
balance issues she wants solved are quite hard on their own, but
accomplishing it all would be like having a mysterious black box, with
success level at each of those separate goals indicated by one dial in
a row of 17...  And there's a row of input knobs, twiddling any one or
several of would tend to make some of the success indicators rise, but
others, maddeningly, dropping off at the same time.  Then after you've
been fiddling with it for about twenty minutes the whole thing starts
to belch steam out of the cracks in the box!

Still, succeeding to some extent at some of those goals would satisfy
a lot of these players, at least enough to draw them into a new game
and keep them there.  Which leads me to think about whether this tribe
of "bakers" would be happy with my game, if they knew about it.  We do
offer a lot of opportunity to create, and intend to keep expanding
that.  But it's the wrong kind of creating.  It's like giving a Sim
City fan the "Sim City Construction Set", where the game is all about
defining a set of rules for a Sim City-like game, how the traffic will
move, what the equations are for production and pollution, making art
for the different kinds of buildings, etc.  I think this would be of
interest only to a tiny subset of this "baker tribe".

Granted, adding that kind of customizability to a game with
fleshed-out mechanics that people enjoy can extend its life and
playability very nicely.  But we don't have much in the way of default
behaviors and mechanics for people who come to just play with it
without making their own.

Should we?

To some extent, yes.  People will make more use of a toolkit if some
examples are there to show them how good a result is possible, and to
suggest some directions for their creativity.  But it is interesting
to keep things vaguely sketched out, and see what unexpected avenues
people go down if you don't give them too much initial bias.  While
the built-in maps always gave people the evidence that pretty,
carefully landscaped places were possible, I deliberately made the
default map that popped up in the editor when we launched be a crude
simple one that I sketched out in a few minutes.  I wanted it to give
almost everybody the feeling, "Oh, I could do better than THAT".

Anyway, regardless of how much in the form of initial content and game
mechanics is provided, where will the bulk of it come from?  From the
players, in my opinion.  But of course, most of the bakers don't want
to be doing that.  I think there's a three-tiered model that's going
to work best.  There's the baking-game-players, such as the writer of
that essay is describing.  There's the baking-game-rulemakers, a small
minority of players who use the tools in the environment to make
interesting things for the rest to do.  And then there's the
toolmaking professional game developers (and some gifted hobbyists
too, perhaps), who make the whole system and provide some occasional
bits of content to prime the pumps.

Given her request for balance in a number of the seperate points
listed, and the comment towards the end: "We generally think it's more
important to tweak things to make them both balanced and useful than
it is to add new things", I think a large amount of labor is called
for to even come anywhere close to providing the type of economy she
hopes for.  To make this cost effective, or even POSSIBLE, I think it
requires a bunch of people from the playerbase tinkering with
different ideas and letting the system "evolve", rather than having
the much smaller number of official game developers and staff try to
do the job.  Anyone who's been involved in maintaining a large
commercial game knows this is an endless, overwhelming, and thankless
task, where you can only ever accomplish some small percentage of what
all the players are constantly asking you for.  Do they put up with
your efforts and keep paying to play?  Yes - but only because nobody's
invented a better, more responsive system yet.  The better mousetrap
will raise the stakes for everyone, our current mousetraps are still
pretty crude and clunky.

I am very interested in methods of marketing to this type of customer,
too.  Existing games have been marketed mainly to the classic hardcore
gamer - as they should be, since they're very much hardcore games, for
the most part.  This is one particularly valuable segment on the
casual gaming audience, in my opinion - just as the rulemaker players
make the game interesting for the craftsman players, the craftsman
players can hold the game together and make it richer for the even
more casual players, who might just want to shop for those goods a
little and socialize.

Food for thought.  (Pun intended.)

> From: Jeff Freeman <skeptack at antisocial.com>

> What I mean is, it just sounds like a different sort of game.  A
> majority of the people playing it are meeting offline *to play the
> game* - it just seems like a different sort of thing, different type
> of game, different online world, whatever you want to call it, than
> the sort of thing that you'd make for, say, a US audience.

I don't think "different sort of game" has any bearing on whether
something is an attractive market to me.  I create all sorts of games,
and have always been fascinated by every type of game, starting long
before I was even exposed to any computer games.  I'll make what the
market demands and find it interesting, I don't just stick to my
favorite genres (or my favorite computer or videogame system either -
I always found that rather unprofessional of some of my colleagues).

Still, I'm not convinced this is really that different a market, yet.
Nor would it be a big concern to me if they do want or need a
different type of game than the US market.  I've made dozens of games,
I don't need to dedicate the rest of my career to a "one size fits
all" approach.  I am, admittedly, hoping our engine will be flexible
enough that I can use it to build worlds for a variety of different
markets, licensed properties, etc. rather than having to build a new
world engine each time out.  But I don't see that as a problem.
There's nothing in the core communications or graphics code that
forces it to be good or bad for social games, combat games, or clubs
for online Checkers players.

Anyway the whole cybercafe-centered aspect sounds a lot to me like
SFNet, the chat-BBS based online community people had going in the bay
area in California in the early 90s.  I was out there in 1992 for a
month, and adopted them as my social circle while I was there.  Lots
of them would gather at the Horshoe Cafe on Haight Street, which I
made my main hangout.  It had TWO SFNet terminals, not just one like
most cofeehouses would have!  It was also accessible via dialup for
people who had a computer and modem.

Anyway I don't see why you would say people "meet offline to play the
game".  They play the game online, they meet offline to meet offline,
which is an end in and of itself.  The two supplement each other, they
don't compete with each other.  A game's more desirable to many
(probably most) people if they can also make new real-life friends
from it.  I'd think that would apply the more so to a social game as
opposed to a hack-and-slash game.

I also think, if people are replacing some of their online hours with
offline interaction, whether they're chatting in a coffeehouse instead
of chatting online, or playing a paper RPG instead of fighting
monsters online, that's reducing your overhead per player - as long as
they don't quit the game totally because of the offline activity.
Unless you have an advertising based model that benefits from them
spending more time online (or an hourly fee, which almost everyone has
abandoned at this point), reducing your cost per play sounds like a
good thing.

> Well, just speaking of MUDs, say: wouldn't you do anything
> differently if you knew the players were going to be playing your
> game mostly by gathering in cybercafe's, versus by meeting online
> (and *maybe* having get-togethers offline sometime after that).

Maybe, a bit.  But I'd rather do a different style of game design than
abandon a market over it.  And in this particular case, maybe what I'd
want to do is shift from a more goal/combat oriented game to a more
socially oriented game - which is what I already have, so I wouldn't
necessarily change that at all.  I'd look more towards storing
player's colors and text description on the server, presuming they
wouldn't always be using the same PC to connect, but I'm heading that
way anyway for the US market.  Offline get-togethers are something I
want to do more to promote for our US players too.

> For example, it seems like any sort of in-game guild or
> player-association or other community-building mechanisms would be a
> whole lot less important - in fact all the socialization aspects of
> the game would be less important - if the community is basically
> going to form completely offline anyway.

If a big focus of the people is forming a community (not that I'd leap
to that conclusion just because they're playing in cafes, by the way -
they might be staring at the screen and ignoring each other), it's not
going to happen "completely offline".  It's going to happen partly
offline and partly online, and they're going to continue to use the
online game as a handy place to arrange or discuss or announce
upcoming get-togethers, maybe find out at the last minute "Oh, ten of
us are at the cafe right now, why don't you log off and come on
over!", etc. etc.  Again, I think the social aspects of the game are
more important if they're supplemented with real world contact, not
less so.

> In other words, if you're going to get a group of people that
> hang-out in a cyber cafe to play your game, then they're going to
> have to be able to do a lot more than just chat with each other -
> because they are already doing that.

Computers have offered valuable supplemental ways to talk to people
since at least the 1970s, beyond what people can do by physically
sitting around talking.  Talking to someone when they're NOT right
where you are to start - the telephone offers that as well, but chat
systems (or online games) go beyond the phone too.  You can meet new
people to talk and make friends with at a time when they're not in the
same physical place as you.  Phones aren't for making new friends,
they're for contacting people you already know.  Cafes let you make
new friends but only with the people that're there.  Meeting people
online gives you access to a larger pool of potential new friends, and
in some cases allows you ways to find people that ALL share some
particular common interest or interests with you to narrow the
selection to the more likely candidates.  Online communications let
you send email to your friend when he's NOT present, if you want to
leave a message for him to get later, something cafes also don't have
a facility for.  (Some phone users do have voice mail, but not all.)
Online you can have a chat with a larger group of people than can
practically sit close together in hearing range in real life.
Anonymity and disguise are easier options online, for the groups of
people that might prefer to have them.  (Some prefer to NOT have
them.)  You can keep a logfile of your conversation and read it later,
more conveniently and with less social stigma than you could get away
with tape-recording everyone in the cafe.  There's a variety of other
differences and potential advantages too.  The SFNet people didn't
stop chatting online once they'd met a few fellow SFNetters at the
cafes.  The local Real/Time chat BBS crowd never stopped using their
online chat, which is the main place to find out about their parties
in Austin even to this day.  They migrated from an 8 line BBS running
on a 640K PC clone, with software written in Pascal, to an Internet
app one of the gang wrote that has the same user interface and can
(and is) telneted into by people from all over the world who might
want to chat with some Austin folks.  Many of the same people have
been using that chat program since the late 1980s, even though they
see each other in person a lot too.

I really don't think people are going to ditch online socializing
because they see each other in a cafe.  It runs counter to all my past
experience, back to when I got my first modem.  Our gang of weirdos
back in 1980 socialized on and offline back then too.  It's an
addictive medium.

>> As for squirrels having sex with bunnies - well that sort of thing
>> certainly happens, but it's not the main draw or the purpose of the
>> place.
 
> Geez, all this time I thought that was the main draw the internet,
> period. :P

Well yeah, but we have to tell people the Internet is loaded with
news, information, education, and sports scores.  Because America
still hasn't gotten over being very awkward and uncomfortable about
the idea that people have sex.  (Or in some cases, squirrels and
bunnies.)

> From: Tess Snider <malkin at Radix.Net>
 
> On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Koster, Raph wrote:
 
>> My understanding is that most of the women gamers are in fact
>> playing casual games, card games and the like. And my other
>> understanding is that the conversion rate from those games to
>> subscription based games is abysmal (sub 5%). Has anyone on the
>> list seen a spike in female players over the last five years, and
>> does anyone attribute it to increased gender balance on the
>> Internet?
 
> Yeah, that's why I said "put down their cards."  Still, you're
> absolutely right: that number IS pretty darn awful!

Is this an issue about most *women* being unwilling to convert from
free games to subscription games, though?  Or about most *people*
being unwilling to convert?

The wording isn't 100% clear there, but it doesn't strike me as
surprising if 95%+ of all people of both genders are choosing not to
start paying for gaming when they get games they like just fine for
free.  Most people will choose free over paid-for services on the
Internet in general, that's been proven time and time again.  Mplayer
and TEN both had to abandon the pay model, while companies like Engage
Games Online quietly vanished.  Salon Magazine gave up on charging for
access, it seems like of online publications only the Wall Street
Journal can get away with that.

To lure some of the free gamers away to a premium game with a
subscription fee, it has to seem a LOT better to them than what they
currently play.  And given that ALL of the pay-to-play games are
currently catering to a few niche markets (hard core computer gamers
that like to play D&D like games or 3D flight simulators), it's
unlikely that the majority of the population, who have no interest in
those genres, would be whipping out their credit cards.  Make a high
quality game based on something that's popular with fifty million or a
hundred million people, rather than a paltry two million, and you
might start to see some big numbers.

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