DGN: Emergent Behaviors spawned from - Re: [MUD-Dev] SOC: Will company sanctioned cheating hurt theMMOcommunity?

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 25 May 2005 14:17:21 -0400
Otis Viles <otis.viles at gmail.com> wrote:

> As a geeky coder since the age of 13 and a MUD coder for the past
> decade, the idea sounds awesome to me and the kind of project I might
> like to tackle if I had a bit more free time on my hands. I'm not
> convinced it would make any difference to players, however, for the
> reason stated above; players are really going to just see the end
> result (unless they're a very special kind of player that most games
> don't support) so the mechanics might as well be a random die roll
> against a table of "what kind of orc band do I encounter?"

Many of these very cool ideas require an awareness of a larger picture
by the player.  They require that the player understand a context and a
set of fairly complex and subtle inter-relations that is far larger than
they can fit on their screen at any one time.  That's hard, most
especially since it generally doesn't support a positive value feedback
loop for any but a tiny percentage of players.[1] As such it is
uneconomic for commercials, and so engaged in only by the labourers of
love.

Then again, I prefer labours of love.

  [1] cf UO1's carefully crafted ecology, which players happily went and
  slaughtered willy nilly in a classic tragedy of the commons.

--
J C Lawrence                        They said, "You have a blue guitar,
---------(*)                        You do not play things as they are."
claw at kanga.nu                       The man replied, "Things as they are
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/          Are changed upon the blue guitar."

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