Is changing the game fair?

Ah, fairness. 🙂 What fairness really seems to mean is the status quo, in many ways. Sometimes it means an even more elusive beast, the player’s IDEA of the status quo.

I’m with Marian [Griffith]–when a player screams that something “isn’t fair,” I approach it with a large degree of skepticism. As a rule of thumb, the average player is seeking to get their own position ahead, and will not have much perspective on the issue as it applies to other players, much less the game as a whole. There’s also the curious notion that a virtual world must be “fairer” than the real world, which ties back into the fact that players have higher expectations of virtual society than they do of the real world, on the grounds that they are spending their leisure time on it and therefore it should serve as an escape from the pressures of real life. These expectations manifest is all sorts of ways–I think I have commented before on the players in UO who had the expectation that expended labor would always result in profit, despite the many problems that such an odd idea creates.

In the real world, things do change overnight. Hula Hoops fall out of fashion. An amendment to the Constitution creates income tax. Social Security is created. It’s not fair that the first settlers to a new continent get all the prime land, either. It’s not fair that when a property tax gets instituted, those who buy land after the tax is put in place will have a higher overall expenditure for their land over a given period of time than people who purchased before the tax was in effect… but as designers we have to make changes in systems sometimes, either because a flaw in the system was found (schools aren’t getting enough funding, so we need property taxes to provide revenue) or (our prerogative as designers) because we wanna try something different…

We’re just fortunate that in the online genre, we can actually change it in an existing system rather than making a new game from scratch.