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Old 08-14-2007, 08:32 PM   #3
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

We were just discussing this today too. Is it better to keep someone as long as possible with shiny graphical goodness in the hopes that they will come to like or tolerate the text interface and suffer losing the ones who feel misled or is it better to drive home up front (and lose a bunch of people by doing so...but you very probably would have lost those people anyway) that it's a text game so that you're not creating false expectations?

I really don't know frankly. We may create two similar versions of the portal - one that pushes that the games are text and another that doesn't - and run split-tests on them to see which works better.

One of the big problems with telling them it's text is that it is very hard to effectively to communicate that text MUDs offer things graphical ones do not, especially because you only have a couple of sentences to do it before most people lose interest. You can say all the obvious things (greater depth, roleplaying, immense worlds, systems the big guys don't implement, etc) but it's hard to be convincing. It's so much easier to communicate 'coolness' graphically.

Random thought that someone had today was to stick a little flash movie on the front page that shows text flying across the screen "Matrix-style" with a label below it letting the viewer know that he's watching the intense speed of combat (this only works for MUDs whose combat is very fast/spammy), and then freeze the text (with some nice Flash effects of course) on a line indicating you just killed another player. "You reach down and rip still-beating heart out of your victim." (or whatever). As I said, random idea for trying to show that text MUDs can be 'cool' as opposed to telling people, which is rarely as convincing.

--natt
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