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Re: A player's perspective
You're comparing apples and oranges. Someone who is already aware of the existence of books and is into books doesn't need pretty pictures to hook them, although even there cover art influences book sales.
If we were only looking to target existing MUD players then the impetus to prettify the experience would be less important. It'd be more along the lines of pretty cover art on a book.
The problem here is that these adults are not interested in textual game worlds. They're usually not aware they exist at all to begin with and the interface is immediately unfamiliar and frankly, not very friendly compared to GUI. The idea is to keep their interest as long as possible to increase their comfort with the interface. We all know that at a certain point the text interface stops becoming a barrier and becomes quite natural. It's about trying to keep people around that long.
Most of those people aren't textually challenged. They're not illiterate or unwilling to read. When you've never seen a game/world whose interface is dominated by text input/output you may not even recognize what it is you're playing since the interface is so unfamiliar for a game.
And on a practical note, retaining even 4% extra of the people who finish character generation means we just cut the cost of obtaining a registered player in half. Small increases can lead to big results.
--matt
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