[nasredin]

scandum >
I think what ruins WoW for explorers ... a 4 year old can figure everything out ... there's no challenge

Milawe >
Yeah. I ... could easily be classified as a power-leveler. However, that means that I hit max level pretty quickly. After that, I need something else to do because I can't keep pounding mobs for nothing. It's far too boring for me then.
... WoW ... nothing really interesting to do along the way, so leveling occupies me until I can't do it anymore.
... I then hit a dead end and have nothing to do ...


Well, CHALLENGE may be another important keyword in our discussion. I'm an explorer type - a mathematician by education and an IT specialist at the time - and solving logical puzzles is my favourite occupation (mathematics and programming count as logical puzzles, too). Doing min/max is exactly what brings me the greatest satisfaction, especially when some odd restrictions and limitations are in place. If you ever played nethack and know their concept of 'voluntary challenges', that's exactly what I mean.

On the other hand, there is little social aspect in logical puzzles. Even if I'm not doing it all alone and it's a teamwork, we exhange data rather than emotions. The few exceptions that come to mind are:

- boasting (Hey, I have just killed a dragon bare-handed and while wearing a blindfold! Can you repeat that achievement?)
The expected reaction must prove that the task was actually challenging. (It must be impossible! How did you do that?)

- creative excitement (Hey, do you know how exactly did I kill that dragon? It looked absolutely impossible at the first sight and took 157 carefully planned steps in the end. First, ...)
Here, the expected reaction must prove the acknowledge the stroke of genious. (How creative! Hell, how did the idea to do X _before_ Y come to your mind?)

Thus, ArcticMUD was a natural choice for me. Challenge is the motto of the game design there - the pkill is unrestricted, the quests are obscure (there is a ban on making the game information available to public. If a certain quest or puzzle becomes too widely known, it gets re-designed), the items are limited and decay over time, not to mention a pkill will leave you naked in the blink of an eye. Certainly, the intense and violent environment leaves little time for roleplay and the majority of our players are male; not sure if we ever had a female imm.

Once again, the genders seem to tend to look for different things in search of excitement:

Milawe >
when we were both asked to draw a bike just from memory ...
my bike wouldn't have been able to go anywhere since I didn't have the chain connected to pedals.
His bike, while insanely ugly, would have been operable.

That's exactly where the difference is clearly seen. For me, a beautiful bike is the one with a superior design; in fact, the bike IS the design!

The lines that look pleasing are usually the result of functionality and ergonomics requirements. To be good, it must ride good! The bike that can't ride is an ugly, useless pile of scrap metal parts attached together. It's a means of transportation and only then then something else, say, a piece of decorative art.

From what you say, a beautiful bike must be aesthetically pleasing first of all. To be good, it must look good! In other words, it's an object of fine art, and only then a means of transportation, if at all.

Certainly, the art-vs-science factors have been covered elsewhere, but it's still interesting to see how clearly they manifest in us, the participants of this thread.