[MUD-Dev] The 'Socialiser' problem

[Greg Munt]

On Sat, 9 Aug 1997, Nathan Yospe wrote:

> On Sat, 9 Aug 1997, Greg Munt wrote:
> 
> :Seperating the game into two is a possibility. However, this falls into 
> :the 'two muds in one' trap. In some aspects, it can appear rather 
> :contrived, and only existing as a means of attracting pure Socialisers.
> 
> I suppose so. I never really thought of that as a bad thing... I have
> competitive chess and bridge, two competitive tetris style games, and
> various other online competitions worked into the shell, along with at
> least one (so far) mud and the chatrooms. The shell also accesses admin
> accounts, which are _not_ player accounts plus stuff... there are three
> kinds of admin account... the coder account is a protected access to the
> unix shell with its own source control system... the builder (admin level)
> account gives access to the game building facilities on several levels,
> ranging from the golem (essentially, build as character that points and
> redescribes objects) to the softcode source level editor...

Hmm. This is interesting. You seem to be developing some kind of virtual 
OS, rather than a simple mud. Do you see the possibility of providing 
more than one mud through this system as feasible? I think that the 
competitive games do add something special to this. I guess I was 
thinking purely of conventional OOC features from a stock TinyMUSH, 
rather than something that is a fully-featured part of the software (I'm 
reluctant to call it a 'game'). Do you see this sort of functionality as 
becoming more popular? (I know that Neil Robertson is/was working on 
something similar...)
 
> :The feature that you refer to, allowing OOC players to page IC players, 
> :would that not disrupt the 'immersion'? If you are going to allow this, 
> :you may as well integrate the two areas into one. I can see no effective 
> :difference - and my unwillingness to integrate abstraction with 
> :virtual pseudo-reality (and the resultant problems) was the motivation for 
> :the original post.
> 
> Pages can (of course) be blocked, and do not communicate any information,
> save that "(shell acount name) has paged you". There is no way to ID the
> in game id of whoever you have paged, as you are paging the shell acount.
> Its minimum disruptions... sort of like a "call me when you can" message
> when at work.

Sorry. I am used to the TinyMUD definition of 'page'. You don't know how much 
it hurt, having to say that :)

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