[MUD-Dev] NEWS: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really (By R. Bartle)

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 09:25:48 -0700
Morris Cox <morriscox at gmail.com> wrote:

> What if games were interconnected in a way (via some standard that
> used XML and compression, for example)...

cf InterMUD

> that allowed players to travel among them?

cf UberMUD portals and NWN.

> Not only would that expose players to more
> possibilities/experiences, it would be easier to encourage them to
> try virtual world X or Y or Z, etc.

I love the idea, always have, but I doubt we'll ever see much
support for it.  From a marketing perspective this creates problems.
First up it becomes far more difficult to create value
differentiation when you're operating merely a node in a mesh, and
that's exacerbated by the ease with which any value you do create
will be aped and copied by surrounding nodes attempting their own
value grab.  These factors in turn make establishing any sort of
identity, let alone a recognisable brand even more difficult.  And,
worse, both these problems would seem to apply equally to both the
$FREE and commercial services.  The $Free services have the exact
problems above, and the commercials are forced to attempt to curtail
and constrain the problem through tight partnership agreements --
but that only works while those services are the underdogs.  As soon
as one becomes particularly successful the partnership contract
becomes more of a drain and a burden than a benefit to them.

> A multiverse of games would also offer more value and
> playability. (A book of spells hidden in a nonmagical world that
> you must retrieve for a quest).

Getting object portability right among competing and frequently
unfriendly systems without fundamentally breaking those systems is
Very Hard (tm).  There have been numerous attempts ranging from the
simple callback schema in CoolMUD on up to full object brokering
implementations.  The only success has been in migration among
tightly bound systems.  The problem: what prevents the
world-breaking objects being imported?  Logically inconsistent
systems are, well, just that, and even more especially when neither
side can trust the other.

--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev