On 06/04/2011 09:06 PM, ais523 wrote:
On Sat, 2011-06-04 at 21:03 -0500, Pavitra wrote:
What was it about the AAA specifically that made it successful? Was it
that it was run in the private sector and so mostly insulated from the
rest of the ruleset? Was it that it had several types of assets that
interacted with each other nontrivially? Was it that the rules were
relatively stable over a long enough time for players to usefully engage
in long-term strategy?
I don't know. On paper, it really shouldn't have been as successful as
it was; it was a relatively simple mechanic that could be analysed
mathematically quite easily, it was rather grindy, it wasn't all that
interesting in its own right. Capturing what makes something like that
take hold seems to be the core issue with BlogNomic, which lives for
that sort of minigame. In Agora, it's not so much of an issue as
something like that that's successful can drive play for months, but
obivously you need something like that to start with.
Is it possible that 'grindy' is a virtue here? Maybe we need light,
goofy condiments on a solid, grindy base.
