MMOM: Massive Multiplayer Online Musical
- (Peter came up with this name/concept, but had no game to back it up with!)
- Last.fm embodied
- People get "points" for finding people and listening to music with them.
- Points can be spent to improve your avatar!
- People listening to the same music over and over will get less and less points for each successive song, like honor kills in WoW.
[13:11:40] aqhong: Listening to music... with them? What does that mean?
[13:12:08] Kass: What I picture in my head is like... the world is made up of a bunch of rooms.
[13:12:20] Kass: When you physically move your avatar to one of them, there's music playing in it.
[13:12:38] Kass: And maybe in some rooms you can select what's playing while in others it's more like radio.
[13:12:57] Kass: At any rate, when you and another person are in the same room and listen to one song from beginning to end, you get points.
[13:13:42] Kass: So theoretically you would wander around to a room that was playing music you liked.
[13:13:51] Kass: And you'd end up with other people in that same room who also liked that music.
[13:14:00] Kass: And maybe you'd actually get some interaction. O.o
[13:14:52] Forward Biased: with or without telling the players how to score points?
[13:15:18] Kass: Oh, I think it'd be kind of obvious how to score points. The trick is, of course, how do prevent people from just sitting in the same room all the time and not moving anywhere.
[13:15:19] aqhong: So your goal would be to... just wander around and listen to music?
[13:15:24] aqhong: It seems kinda vague.
[13:15:29] Kass: Or tons of people coming into the same room and building up points that way.
[13:15:50] Kass: It's not so much of a game as it is a... not-game.
[13:15:50] aqhong: I think it'd be more interesting if, say, you got points for getting people addicted to music you introduced them to ;)
[13:16:01] Kass: Sure, but how do you measure that?
[13:16:04] aqhong: And then you get even more points when they introduce that music to others :O
[13:16:06] aqhong: Play counts?
[13:16:35] Kass: You'd run into trouble of actually getting people to hang onto the music they hear, though.
[13:16:42] Kass: I mean, enabling people to keep songs.
[13:16:46] aqhong: Oh, well, yeah...
[13:16:54] Kass: Which is a pretty serious problem. :P
[13:16:58] aqhong: Not thinking of the technical/copyright aspects yet ;)
[13:17:01] Kass: In this day and age, at any rate.
[13:17:48] Kass: Probably change avatar to people having their own houses or something.
[13:17:55] Kass: Gives more customization options. >_>
[13:18:20] aqhong: It should unlock more rooms :O
[13:18:22] aqhong: Or more features?
[13:18:28] Kass: Sure, if you could think of any.
[Alex: Too lazy to add spans to each line. Everything after this point is mine unless otherwise noted.]
Expanding on this... [13:15:50] aqhong: I think it'd be more interesting if, say, you got points for getting people addicted to music you introduced them to ;)
- Primary objective: Be exposed and expose others to new music.
- Like a music-sharing pyramid scheme, but without the shadiness.
Basic scheme
- Person A introduces Person B to the Arcade Fire. Every time B listens to the Arcade Fire, A receives 1 point.
- Person B introduces Person C to the Arcade Fire. Every time C listens to the Arcade Fire, A receives 0.5 points, and B receives 1.
- Person C introduces Person D to the Arcade Fire. Every time D listens to the Arcade Fire, A receives 0.25 points, B receives 0.5, and C receives 1.
- You get the picture.
- Points may also be awarded to the listener? Haven't thought about it yet...
Other potential variables
- More points are awarded for introducing artists with fewer overall listeners/plays, and vice versa.
- Encourages the sharing of new/obscure music.
- Prevents you from earning a boatload of points by introducing your clueless friends to popular artists everyone likes.
- Fewer points are awarded with each successive recommendation of the same artist.
- Encourages you to keep searching for new artists to recommend.
- Discourages you from indiscriminately spamming all your friends with the same artist / encourages you to recommend the artist only to friends you think might actually like it.
- Fewer points are awarded when recommending artists with a similar musical profile to the recommendee's listening profile. ("If you liked X, you may also like Y.")
- Encourages the sharing of music that is unlike what you already listen to.
- Discourages you from recommending similar-sounding artists that the recommendee will almost certainly like.
- This rule conflicts somewhat with the previous one in that you are encouraged to be discriminating and only recommend music that you think someone will like, but at the same time discouraged from recommending artists that are too similar to what that person already listens to.
- One possible resolution is to also award the listener for listening to artists that do not fit their current profile, which encourages them to do so and in turn increases the chance of a reward to the recommender.
- A "pass" (introducing someone to music that was introduced to you) is worth fewer points than a "find" (introducing someone to music that you found yourself).
- Of course, one could argue that there can only be passes; e.g. if you found it on a weblog, it was effectively "passed" to you by the blogger.
- For simplicity's sake, we'll define a "find" as any music that was not introduced to you by another player of the game.
- (Not sure if this is a good idea, or if there's even a point.)