[MUD-Dev] Kaczynski's Law

[Michael Sellers]

Jeff Freeman wrote:

> Everyone is familiar with Bartle's Essay

>   http://www.brandeis.edu/pubs/jove/HTML/v1/bartle.html

> so I won't go there. Basically the theory is that some people are
> more socializers and less achievers, other people are more killers
> and less explorers.

> Somewhat less well known is Nick Yee's Player Motivations study

>   http://www.nickyee.com/facets/home.html

> which failed to find any reliable method of putting players in
> boxes, defining them as 'player-types'. Rather, he found five
> distinct motivations for playing games that people possessed to
> lesser or greater degree.

Along these lines, I highly recommend Nicole Lazzaro's extended
abstract "Why We Play Games," available at her site
(http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames) as a PDF.  For those of
you with the GDC proceedings, the longer version is even better.

In brief, she cites four overlapping "keys" to strong gameplay (you
can think of these as motivational triggers too):

  - "hard fun" -- goal-oriented play

  - "soft fun" -- sandbox and emergent play

  - "altered states" -- reactions to visceral, cognitive, and social
  situations

  - "the people factor" -- games used as catalysts for social
  experiences

Lazzaro has actual research to back all this up, and while I might
quibble a bit with some of her theory, this is well worth reading
and internalizing.

> Here's someone taking a slightly different approach. It is closer
> to Nick Yee's study, in that it doesn't assign people to
> mutually-exclusive 'types', but still quite different in which
> motivations are deemed important. This begins with what I like to
> call Kaczynski's Law:

>   "a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and
>   he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his
>   goals."

An excellent pithy and still general quote.  Goes right along with
Costikyan's statement years ago that a game is "a form of art in
which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to
manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal."

  For those who don't know this classic essay, see

    http://www.costik.com/nowords.html

But whom are you quoting with Kaczynski's Law? I didn't see a link
or reference in your post.

Mike Sellers
Online Alchemy
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