nu.kanga.list.mud-dev

21814: RE: [MUD-Dev] Geometric content generation

On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, John Buehler wrote:
> Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt writes:
 
>> In my opinion, some balance is found if you make most skill
>> combinations equally interresting to play. This way you will not
>> have a shortage of other players with different skill
>> combinations to cooperate with. (who want to be a barge pilot, if
>> you can be a crack-shot fighter ace?).
 
> Given a maze with one piece of cheese, all the mice will work to
> figure out the most efficient way to it.  Given a maze with many
> different pieces of cheese, different mice will value the
> different pieces of cheese for reasons known only to them.  The
> infinitely flexible character is intended to let a player
> efficiently pursue as many different pieces of cheese as they care
> to over time, or less-than-efficiently pursue multiple pieces of
> cheese simultaneously.
 
> Games that provide one form of entertainment will get one response
> from the players.  They will consider it as a single stimulus with
> a single response.  If players are presented with multiple
> stimuli, they will produce varied responses.

To formulate my concerns in the cheese-analogy;

If you design the maze, so that all the pieces of cheese type A is 5
times bigger that all the pieces of cheese type B, you may give the
players a stimulus that drives them toward a given response (not
wanting to sample cheese B). This may not be a concious nor wanted
design point in the game. Especially if the game is designed to
cater achiever-type players (and a trade/shoot space game certainly
seems to be).


Hans Henrik Stærfeldt   |    bombman@diku.dk    | work:  hhs@cbs.dtu.dk      |
Address:                |___  +45 40383492    __|__       +45 45252425     __|
DTU, Kemitorvet,        | Scientific programmer at Center for Biological     |
bygn 208, CBS.          |  Sequence Analysis, Technical University of Denmark|

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