Interesting Quote
This came from MUD-Dev today and it sums up the PvP space fairly well.
I'm certainly interested in worlds dominated by players but there is a good underlying opint here. It is much easier to manage the experience of entertainment when you design it specifically and much harder to manage the entertainment when you leave it to the players. Yeah, earth shattering right. While this can be used as a simple metaphor for "player content sucks" which is oft bandied about it interests me because a PURE PVP game basically starts with the premise that the players will be if not generate, the majority of the content and we then have to design systems to reduce the suckiness of that original sin. There in my fellows lies the rub.If you change "no AI will ever match" to "no AI in existence matches", I'll agree with this. Academically, however, there is a critical difference between software opponents and human opponents: the software opponents exist to entertain you. The human opponents are only interested in their own entertainment, usually meaning your defeat. It is this notion that underlies my disinterest in worlds dominated by player actions. - JB
2 Comments:
To the extent that this kind of philosophical musing is important, it's worth noting that customer orientation is a simultaneous variable. Those customers who are grognard/simulation types will be much less susceptible to this design problem than shooter/action/RPG types, because the grognard/simulation types have a very different definition of "fun" and a different expectation of what a game should be and do.
Of course, it's possible that there's been a fundamental biological/intellectual shift in the populace that has made it impossible to re-constitute the post-WWII grognard wargamer market. Thus there never could be enough such customers to support games such as this. But, however many there are, it's worth noting how, if handled correctly, they are exceptions to fundamental problems such as the one discussed here.
I don't think there's technically a shift. The number of people who play poker is going to be more than the number that play chess I would imagine. Still, bridge is pretty hardcore and pretty popular, not sure it would fall into the sub catagory of grognardy.
Grognards themselves are an interesting group. I'd go so far as to say the grouop is basically self sustaining while at the same time I can't point to many instances where they were industry sustaining, outside the collectors and reenactors which is a pretty solid industry including a lot of magazines and books, some of which we have recently begun advertising with.
I also am not sure about the grognard / simulation link. Take a look at Civilization. It is often called a simulation but it isn;t really it's a god game. I'd argue that it is very grognardy though. Many Avalon Hill games are the same way. They are no more a simulation than monopoly is, they are an abstraction yet they are very grognardy. Is there over lap? Yes. I think the grognard and more importantly the simulation types need content systems just as much as any gamer. I do think they tend to appreciate the simulation system as a form of content more than many straight gamers do. I might not be a fantasy simulation freak and I don't care about the story as much as many but I damn sure munchkin the character and combat systems to death and to me, that's grognard in a different setting.
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