[MUD-Dev] Life

[Adam Wiggins]

[JK:]
> Reasonably mature players generally DON'T want to hurt the other player...

You're confused between 'player' and 'character'.  The statement
above is correct, but has nothing to do with the game.

If I kill you in order to 'hurt' you as a player, I'm not playing the
game - I'm bringing in outside stuff which is beyond the scope of the game.

If I kill you within the context of the game and you take it personally,
than YOU are not playing the game correctly.

> this is not exactly a socially positive action, and killign off someone
> elses charatcer that they have time and emotionasl investment in definately
> counts as hurtign the toher player.  Paritcuaklrly when, as you suggest,

Well, this is fine, if you're writing HappyMUD(tm).  Where everything is
flowers and daisies, everyone always gets along, and everyone spends all
their time baking cookies to share with all their friends and talking
about how wonderful everything is.
Don't think I'm being sarcastic.  If this sort of game appeals to you, then
GREAT!  Make it impossible for anyone to harm anyone else, and there you
go.
Now, I'm a human being.  Human beings are fond of conflict.  In most
cases, we consider situations where everything is hunky-dory to be downright
boring.  We like challanges, which is why we do pretty much everything we
do, including playing games.  Now, these challanges can me more or less
competative (that is, Tetris is a very non-competative challange) and
can be more or less related to violence (Quake vs Tetris).  How you want
to do this is up to you.
I *enjoy* conflict, in a pretty raw form.  Maybe I'm making up for my
modern-day life being too low-key - most of my challanges and conflicts
arise from a routine I'm having trouble writing at work, conflicts with
personal relationships (which the women I date seem to excel at, or
maybe it's just me).  The worst crises I have are things like my car
breaking down or my one of my friends ODing on crystal.
I find it pretty refreshing to enter a raw, basic world which is both
dangerous and vital.  The conflicts here are closer to the basic elements
of survival.

> this iws in fact the GOAL, to hurt someone else personally.

Although you guys keep blabbing about this, I've never witnessed this
(well, to my knowledge anyhow).  I've seen people kill others on a whim
(and have done it myself, when it's in character) and have seen people
take revenge vendettas too far, but that's all in the context of the game.
I've very rarely seen someone just say, "I don't like X, as a person, therefore
I will kill any of their characters whenever I see them."  The only
time I've ever seen someone vow to kill any character belonging to a certain
player is usually when those two players have a rivalry of some sort going
(usually because they know each other in RL).  Hell, those are usually
the people you get to like the best, because you have a healthy respect
for them, and in this situation it's just part of the game.  There's no
malice involved, except if you want to RP that.  ("You killed my brother,
you bastard!!")

> I guess I see no "value" in providing a place for people to hurt each other
> on a personal level. Let me do it on the streets, but not in my game.

Heh, well for starters, I'd much rather have someone get killed in the game
than on the streets.
But more importantly, that's neither here nor there.  I'm not sure what
you think of as 'hurting' someone on a personal level.  As near as I can
tell, there's really no way to do that in the game - at best you can
just sling insults, which you could do perfectly well over email or irc
or in RL, for that matter.  If you feel personally offended when someone
picks your pocket, or has a character that hates all trolls and you happen
to be a troll so they attack you on sight, or someone dupes you into buying
a piece of trash jewlery, or mugs you, or gives you some not completely
cooked meat and you die of salmonila, or frees all the animals in the zoo
and you get trampled in a stampede, or calls you a heathen bastard since
you worship a different god than they do and refuse to speak to you,
or a shopkeeper charges you extra because he thinks you look like you don't
really know the value of what you're buying and he thinks he can trick
you into paying more, or you rat on a thief to the guards and the thief
comes after you later and murders you in your sleep, or someone extorts
money from you by virtue of being twice your height, or the two dwarves
in the room speak dwarves specifically so that they can talk about what
stuck-up pricks elves are (you being the elf), or you go to cast a simple
cantrip for the amusement of your fellows and the barbarian who is deathly
superstious and afraid of all magic that is sitting nearby gets angry
and knocks you down, or someone sees you lieing on the ground, writhing
in pain with your shoulder dislocated and they try to tug on it to pop
it back into place but only make it wors causing you to scream in pain and
slap them away with your one good arm, or someone is firing an arrow at
the person next to you and misses and hits you in the throat, then
I'm warning you now - DO NOT play my mud.  You won't like it.  I like
these things; they are all in the context of the game; therefore, I
put them in (or at least, I should say, the capacity for them to occur).
Things that are outside of the context of the game are irrelevant.  I can't
control those things, so why should I bother?