[MUD-Dev] Metrics for assessing game design [was: When will new MMORPGs that are coming out get original with the gameplay?]

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, ceo wrote:
> On Wed, 09 Jul 2003 09:55:00 +0100 ceo  <ceo at grexengine.com> wrote:

>   P.S. About 50% of those who've dismissed this out of hand have
>   been professional games developers who felt that "of course it's
>   not possible to rate fun, and never will be; it's something you
>   feel in your gut, not something you can analyse...[subtext: how
>   dare you imply that my job as a games designer can be pared down
>   to a few simple rules; it's much more complex than that]". I
>   only really mean this as the combination of a metric, plus that
>   the act of evaluating against it generates guidelines for how
>   you can improve a game's score.

Well, I don't think it's a matter of not being able to analyse. I
think it's a matter of there being no such thing as an "ultimately
fun" game.  The very idea of paradise misses the point. There can be
no paradise, no ultimate game, without specifying who the paradise
is for or who will be playing the game. The ultimately fun game for
me is almost surely not the same as for you or for Nancy Reagan. In
the end, I don't think it can be measured simply because there is no
common measuring stick.

--matt
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