There's also a worthwhile case study in the Neopets economy, which as far as I know didn't really adapt in these ways. You could grind on puzzle games for the local currency, but it stopped being about the puzzles and started being about trying to make in-game money. And then, what happened is that non-casual gamers would know all of the shop-inventory respawn times and would camp them, to buy up all of the commodities that the shops contained -- especially medicines and such. They would then resell them for much more money in their own user-defined shops. So it became the exact opposite: at first things were really easy to obtain, and they were mostly going after kids -- casual gamers. But their surge in popularity seemed to create a change in focus towards hardcore gamers eager to camp the spawn points and use multiple accounts to get freebies. At one point I even remember putting all of my money in the stock market just so that I could feed my Neopets with free soup from the in-game welfare department, because getting food was such a nuisance otherwise.
There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, I feel -- and unfortunately for me it has deep ties with questions of meaning and purpose and thus gets bound up in my religion, which I do not want to talk too much about here. But the question is, "what makes a game worthwhile? why do you keep playing?" My Neopets were not very worthwhile and, since they're immortal, I imagine they've been starving in a cold computer database for the last way-too-many years. I obviously got bored with the grind necessary to take care of them, but why? Why did I complete all of Morrowind and yet found Oblivion impossible to play? What is it in my human quest that I am looking to create in a game, and are games unreal or real or hyper-real or something else? If we don't enjoy "having it all handed to us" but yet we also don't enjoy "working for it", what exactly do we want?
I for one want to be rewarded for the time I play, while still not being completely left out of the social part of the game because I simply cannot put in the longer and longer grind hours they keep recquiring of players.
I want to feel like I'm discovering things, achieving things e participate in the game story. Why is that so incompatible with an mmo without having me staring at a screen for hours on end and alienating my family from my presence?
I want to put in an hour or half a day or everyother day without doing repetitive tasks. I want to earn stuff yes, but not work for it. By work I mean doing something boring and repetitive that has nothing to do with the game itself (how many tons of ore it takes to make a sword again?). We already have to work hard in life, why they want us to do work more in exchange for entertainment (if you can call it that).
In the end, all they want is addicted players (hence the lottery reward model) to keep the money coming.
You sound like someone who would end up enjoying dwarf fortress.
I posted this earlier, on another forum and its valid here -
Your talking about being interesting. And no one had an interesting life by remaining safe and within their comfort zone.
At least thats my 2 c.\
Morrowind also had the uncanny valley going for it, you could fill in a lot of gaps with your own imagination. Oblivion added far too many guard rails and bread crumb paths - it became disney land.
Sorry. When I say "case study" I mean "case to be studied," in the future tense, as opposed to in the past tense. I do not know whether anyone has ever done an academic user-economy study of Neopets.
Comments
There's also a worthwhile case study in the Neopets economy, which as far as I know didn't really adapt in these ways. You could grind on puzzle games for the local currency, but it stopped being about the puzzles and started being about trying to make in-game money. And then, what happened is that non-casual gamers would know all of the shop-inventory respawn times and would camp them, to buy up all of the commodities that the shops contained -- especially medicines and such. They would then resell them for much more money in their own user-defined shops. So it became the exact opposite: at first things were really easy to obtain, and they were mostly going after kids -- casual gamers. But their surge in popularity seemed to create a change in focus towards hardcore gamers eager to camp the spawn points and use multiple accounts to get freebies. At one point I even remember putting all of my money in the stock market just so that I could feed my Neopets with free soup from the in-game welfare department, because getting food was such a nuisance otherwise.
There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, I feel -- and unfortunately for me it has deep ties with questions of meaning and purpose and thus gets bound up in my religion, which I do not want to talk too much about here. But the question is, "what makes a game worthwhile? why do you keep playing?" My Neopets were not very worthwhile and, since they're immortal, I imagine they've been starving in a cold computer database for the last way-too-many years. I obviously got bored with the grind necessary to take care of them, but why? Why did I complete all of Morrowind and yet found Oblivion impossible to play? What is it in my human quest that I am looking to create in a game, and are games unreal or real or hyper-real or something else? If we don't enjoy "having it all handed to us" but yet we also don't enjoy "working for it", what exactly do we want?
I for one want to be rewarded for the time I play, while still not being completely left out of the social part of the game because I simply cannot put in the longer and longer grind hours they keep recquiring of players.
I want to feel like I'm discovering things, achieving things e participate in the game story. Why is that so incompatible with an mmo without having me staring at a screen for hours on end and alienating my family from my presence?
I want to put in an hour or half a day or everyother day without doing repetitive tasks. I want to earn stuff yes, but not work for it. By work I mean doing something boring and repetitive that has nothing to do with the game itself (how many tons of ore it takes to make a sword again?). We already have to work hard in life, why they want us to do work more in exchange for entertainment (if you can call it that).
In the end, all they want is addicted players (hence the lottery reward model) to keep the money coming.
I got stung by them before, now I choose to live.
You sound like someone who would end up enjoying dwarf fortress.
I posted this earlier, on another forum and its valid here -
Your talking about being interesting. And no one had an interesting life by remaining safe and within their comfort zone.
At least thats my 2 c.\
Morrowind also had the uncanny valley going for it, you could fill in a lot of gaps with your own imagination. Oblivion added far too many guard rails and bread crumb paths - it became disney land.
Flow?! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Sounds interesting, got a link to that study?
Sorry. When I say "case study" I mean "case to be studied," in the future tense, as opposed to in the past tense. I do not know whether anyone has ever done an academic user-economy study of Neopets.