Understanding Game Design 101c - Competition, Part 3 - Limited Resources

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

Btw, mini-games in MMORPG towns would be a great way to dispense cosmetic trophy items for fun achievements. Another thing to consider is making towns a place where limited resources elsewhere can be affected - i.e. in a dynamic world. You'd want to be careful not to remove player agency or venture into real-world relevance by accidentally creating time-sinks for players, but otherwise it's a good design space not many have explored.

[@danielobenhaus8100]

Hello! Yes, unlimited resources would be ridiculous...especially when people are fighting a boss or try to achieve something else...and winning cosmetic items for participating in mini games that are unique to a certain town/village is a good idea! Also adding a trading function would be nice! Do you think that it is possible to create a "perfect" game? A very complex topic!

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

I don't think you can make a game that is universally perfect in a way that would alienate all other possible games, but it is absolutely possible to make a game - and if it's an actual game then it will be timelessly fun. Once you play a real game you'll never want to play not-games ever again. As a side note, I do think it's plausible that one might design the "perfect" version of their design, i.e. a single game, but I'm not sure how to determine that with the thing itself being the only reference point. I'd have to see something that might qualify before I would have anything useful to say about it. I'm not sure what other ramifications of that there would be beyond just that it might never need to be iterated further in design. Now that I say that last part though, I'm not even sure that's the right way to think about it. That's a curious thought, but I'm not sure there would ever be a way to test that without trying to make the perfect version of something. If you have an idea for that, I would encourage you to try.

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

Another way to think about this though may very well be, and I think this is the more plausible scenario, that every real game is perfect in the fact that it is a game. It perfectly does what it is meant to do: be a game.