Hmm. My math skilz are rusty — would zero players make for infinitely good role-playing? Or would it just be impossible because we would need to divide by zero?

Even if the roleplaying was of infinitely good quality, I don’t know if the human nervous system could handle infinitely good quality — but I guess it wouldn’t have to! :-)

For instance:

J. C. Lawrence’s “do it everywhere” law
If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don’t find them.

Along with “If something can be abused, it will be” and “No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want more” and others.

Then there are some laws that could apply to single-player games, but don’t seem to, e.g., “No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.”

By the way, this fine law:

Koster’s Law (Mike Sellers was actually the one to dub it thus)
The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing.

Means that for quality role-playing, we shouldn’t have MMOs at all – single-player interactive fiction is best! Doesn’t it?

(Okay, the obvious counterargument is that no, zero players are actually best…)

The Laws are gathered by going through writings on MUDs and MMOs and extracting what seemed to mne to be timeless bits of wisdom or particularly acute observations. The majority of them came from MUD-Dev. In many cases, they exist as such solely so that complex dilemmas or problems can be referenced in shorthand. The Laws was undertaken as a bit of community contribution, and is a melting pot of many people’s observations, with the caveat that I get to pick what makes it. Laws get added very rarely.

The HTML changes are because the site design has changed a few times. :)