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Lately I've been considering the topic of character creation.
It strikes me that this is a "big deal" because when you get a new player, this is usually the first few minutes of what they will experience with regards to your game. And your game is not worth the hassle -- not yet. They don't know if its any fun, or worth thinking about and making all sorts of decisions they don't know anything about yet. I've read studies before saying that websites have about 2 seconds to capture the attention of a new reader, or many people will navigate away from the site. I suspect the same is true for MUDs.
However, obviously the traditional way for MUDs to work is to have multiple "decisions" made up front. What's your name, gender, race, do you want to see color, what's your e-mail address, what's your hometown, etc. Stuff a new player probably doesn't care about, and can't really decide well anyway. It's problematic especially with regards to an issue like race. I consider it bad design to have race chosen up front, because race is something with the potential to be a really interesting choice with long term consequences. So either you force your new player to do a bunch of boring research from step 1 if they want to be optimal, or you stick them with a long term decision that they made with insufficient information. But on the other hand... how can you decide race *except* at the beginning? You can't really start as a raceless, genderless, nameless hero, without some sort of silly rationalization that would probably look pretty lame.
So I was wondering, has anyone thought of any interesting solutions to get new players into the action quickly, by slimming down or eliminating the "character creation" barrier-to-entry? If so, how has it worked for you?
Also, I wonder if anyone has kept data on what percent of character creation processes are terminated before they are finished -- as in, a potential new player who gets bored and gives up. Any thoughts?
-T
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