Housing and Realism

I recently found out that Wograld current housing tool requires you to buy building materials, unlike the housing tool in Ultima Online that just required you to have the gold in your bank box to create the ready made additions. While Wogralds current version of the housing tool could be considered more realistic and true to life, Ultima Online's housing tool could be said to be designed to maximize fun in the game. How much fun it is to have to remember how many boards or ingots you need to finish off your dwelling? Sure it is more realistic, but the reality is people don't play these games for realism. If it was realistic, we would have a housing mortgage crisis. Players would no longer be able to afford their in game houses anymore, and would have to move back into thier bank boxes.

Even Ultima Onlines housing tool had limits however. Some of them were well deserved, such as limited the creation of houses to certain tiles already existing in the game. This makes sense, otherwise the new houses would take too much time to load on screen, making for a laggy experience. The other, unessarly limitation is that Ultima Online's houses had to be physically possiable. Since crossfire as a whole does not really support this notion (what with buildings that have maps inside maps inside maps) It does not seem that Wograld nessarly has to follow in the footsteps of the idea that the world has to obey the same physical laws of the universe. For instance, why not have housing that is an inverted pyramidal shape? Maybe that is too wierd for most people however, but the idea that it is wierd and alien would probably draw people into the game because they would see stuff they have never seen before. Too many games, once you have seen a little bit of the world, you feel you have seen it all. You feel like it is just like every other game you ever played. The world is the same, it fits the same genre of sword and sorcerey, or some poorly written sci-fi.

Even Ultima, a pretty classic medieval style world had some science fiction elements. Once players get imersed in a world however, the worldlore becomes less important and the gameplay more important. It doesn't matter if the orcs are supposed to be at war with the humans, if game mechanics make it easier for them to work together, then they will do so. These kinds of things are set more by how the hard coded programming rules of the game are writen rather than what some talentless hack of a writer threw up on the website in her spare time.

Given that Wograld is not trying to be an emulated clone of your real life (if your so called real life was so wonderful you probably would not waste hours upon hours of your time on Wograld anyway,) it makes little sense to emulate the parts of reality that you dislike. The functionality of a game mechanic to achieve a certain goal, a certain feel for the game, trumps up the nagging voice of trying to be realistic in the sense of emulating real life.