I’m sure there will be more socializer games, because there is money to be made there, but for a primarily achiever game (like WoW) or killer/achiever game (like WAR), it just isn’t reasonable to expect them to invest valuable resources in stuff that their main player base isn’t going to make great use of. Development costs enough as is.

I would also like to strongly disagree with Bartle in his assertion that game designers can’t play games because they won’t be interesting or because they’d be biased. They aren’t interesting for Bartle, which is fine, but in no way deserves to be generalized to designers. And as a designer, I’ve had no problem designing systems “for” groups of players to which I don’t belong – as long as you can keep it in mind that your task as a designer is to make a game that is fun for its audience rather than fun for you (it can be both, and indeed the more players who will enjoy it the better) you can do your job well.

[...] I respectfully disagree with some of what Blackguard and Moorgard have said on this Bartle issue, they have my genuine admiration in that they are a rare [...]

[...] internal discussion was further prompted by the recent controversy surrounding Richard Bartle. I forget where I read it, but in one of the many discussions about [...]

If we compare it with music it is as if you need to have a smashing “sound” before your audience even will listen to the full song.

In games it has historically been so difficult to find a popular sound that the one major solution has been to pour money on the problem. This is at least from how I see things one root cause of Mores Wall. ^^

From there on we run into the whole mess with overly large organizations and risk aversion.

WoW does teach you things about the interaction between people…. Such as how to operate a small scale political system with an attached labor economy aka DKP.

Which,m just to bolster Richard’s point, was totally something you could learn in the MUD days. In fact, muds often had far MORE robust political stuff…

Its beyond reach for almost anyone in the game industry, maybe the CEO’s could reach it but I dont think they normally have the headroom to be strategically artistic. The designers on an mmo appear to be segmented into too small pieces of the puzzle to o a individual level be able to worry about much except fun.

Reading between the lines of both of them I put up my own interpretation of guiding feedback which basically says:
– Work a lot on developing a valuable product vision.

I guess I’m either old or easily charmed by mind opening drugs.

I like them too but I tire of the negative pessimistic feedback and lack of positive guiding feedback. It’s like if you’re gonna tell me an idea is bad, you better step up with something that’s better else you’re just a complainer or a trouble maker.

WoW does teach you things about the interaction between people. (Something which wasnt part of the industry back in Crawford days, altho he does mention mmo’s as some kind of unwiedly beast of products which at that time was outside his definition of game.) However these days you can see people actually learning about things which before the day of the mmo was part of relatively high level academia. Such as how to operate a small scale political system with an attached labor economy aka DKP. You can also if you dare to be brave go against the norm and avoid DKP for an alternative political solution, and most likely fail horribly as your population migrates to a DKP network. Yada yada, everyone here knows this. But maybe dosnt make the connection with the actual value of the message and the profit of the project.

Could we expect the world economy to be better or worse if for example the Bush Administration had spent 5 years before the war in Iraq with running some hardcore guilds in PvP enabled mmorpgs?

I’ll put all my bets on the fact that things would be very different if they had, maybe for the worse or the better. (Probably they would have missed out on other important events such as winning the election but in 50 or so years all politicians will have been playing these types of games so the field will be evened out by then.)

Is this line of thought something you would avoid brush against when developing a title, or does it motivate and inspire? At least to me its a type of fundamental inspiration to know that anyone who plays with the game long enough will carry a part of what the game says with them for a very long time. What this message is is the ultimate reason that justifies the product, because without it it will not have much of a chance to make back the money it took to build it in the first place. Somehow there appear to be some developers who get by from a randomly composed message, but thats just because the industry is young still. ^^

I guess I’m either old or easily charmed by mind opening drugs.