MMORPGs; totally alien from P&PRPGs??
Marshall Burns:
Dan, and DWeird, I believe you might be interested Max Higley's breakdown of player motivations & preferences. There's some discussion of it somewhere on Story Games, but I can't find it at the moment, and there's also a little bit at Cultures of Play over here: http://culturesofplay.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=123&page=1#Item_0
The chart by itself is certainly worth looking at.
-Marshall
Marshall Burns:
Oh, spoke to soon, here's the post from Story Games:
http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=7550
DWeird:
Fancy.
I'll try to keep this both kosher and yummy, Ron.
Anyhoo.
Dan: My own major interest isn't as much increasing possible participation, though that may be a good goal to aim for. My reason for this is: I'm fairly sure that if you state your goal like *that*, you'll end up trying to cram up as many games running parallel as you can. Some degree of "parallelism" is probably unavoidable when players aren't absolutelly in sync, but if *all* that a game is several games running side-by-side, you may as well be playing different games.
Like... I don't care as much for blockbusters. Try to please everyone, if you try to smoothen *every corner* so that no one would get a cut - you get a sphere. And sphere's ain't got no edge, man.
Marshall: Thanks! The threads you linked me to made me break up some of the concepts I've been using in my head and look at what pieces of those remain useful.
For one, I no longer want to talk in terms of player typology (uh, I never really did, but I didn't have the sort of language to talk about what I want before... Still don't in full, but it's still good). I want to see what aspects of a player get active in play and how they change. Like... what if the process of getting a player who's not really interested in a game to that "Oh!" moment isn't about, uh, teaching him how to 'accept the game', but rather about finding a certain aspect of a certain player which could snap into a position currently occupied by an aspect that doesn't really fit in?
[My immediate interest in the "Oh!" moment may seem, to you guys, to be an issue that, while important, is something altogether different from the design of the actual game... Now, my game is a community game, meaning that there is a flux of players going in and out. The 'in' is almost always of people who aren't really sure what they're doing, meaning that there's always some people in the game who don't know what they're doing. Trying to distinguish between "new, needs some help" and "new, likely won't ever find this game interesting in a way that's productive to the rest of us" is therefore crucial.]
Another thing Max Higley's thread made me do is make me look at certain advice given at the Forge differently... More specifically - interweaving "game as rules text", "game as set of procedures", "game as group-constructed imagination". Which means basically that several people that have the managerial "wait, is that in the rules?", strategist "how do I play [in the naughty sense] these rules?" and radical "so why don't we just make a story?" aspects active could very well be playing the same game, "being different people", and having fun at the same time.
Do you think that ever actually happens? Because that's exactly the sort of experience that I'm looking for. I mean - the problem that up to now (to my knowledge) makes people construct player typologies is basically: 'my current game is dysfunctional. I talked to my players and their attitudes are different! I'll try and make my games account for that from now on. Puppies and rainbows, whee!'
Has anybody asked their players if (and how?) their attitudes are different when the game they're playing is fun(ctional)? I think they should.
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