[MUD-Dev] Finding What a Gamer Lacks in Their Day

[Sasha Hart]

[John Buehler]
>[Sasha]

>> Let me try a few:

To review, I made a lot of vague, pretty much useless comments, some
of which contradict each other, and provided no evidential support
for any of them.

>>   - Choice of entertainment follows what's worked before and what
>>   is familiar.

> So they have a desire for a prior stimulus.  I see this as pretty
> much a non sequitor.

It's amazing that this of all of them is a non sequitur, given that
it's the law of effect.  Are you familiar with the law of effect? 
What do you even mean by the word "stimulus"? Why even bother?

As nice as being vague is for expressing opinions, for someone who
is adopting the cloak of psychological authority by using big words
like "stimulus," you are terribly unwilling to bring it down to even
specific assertions, let alone observation (i.e., that thing which
academic psychologists are engaged in or at least consume.)

> If drugs such as cocaine were made legal, I suspect that an entire
> generation would be destroyed by them.  That would be our means of
> learning about the true dangers of legal, highly addictive drugs.

When this analogy comes back to earth, it is an analogy about game
features. I know I am terrified that remorts and customizable player
houses will destroy a generation, if not two. Get real.

> Nope, because the people who are coming up with the features are
> just as ignorant about human psychology as the folks who are
> currently cranking out the games.  Less so, in fact.

Who is ignorant about human psychology? Without trial-and-error or
other sources of real information on what is useful or ethical or
whatever you are trying for, your guesses had better be good, or
they will certainly be worse than what is reached by a darwinian
environment like the user-programming game, just because you have
not been sensitive to conditions and it has (however blindly.)

Take all the work produced by the commercial market for MUDs
together with the work produced not-for-pay (which is effectively
the "user programmer") and you will have an awful lot; take all the
MUD work produced by the psychology genius and you have very little.

As it stands, you (and I for that matter) don't have the
psychological authority in this area that would justify taking the
high-handed attitude that developers are doing it all wrong and
probably unethically. You have an untested, probably untestable
thought-experiment version of the naive needs-wants psychology that
has been floating around since god knows when. And have not given
any reason for anyone to buy into it, other than that it gives a
pleasing illusion of knowledge.

Why should we expect developers or anyone to use psychology if they
have no reason to believe what we say? Why should we expect anyone
to listen if we are just going to talk down to them, without
authority?

This thread is going absolutely nowhere for a while now, and I'm
done.
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