Communication [was Introductions and..]

[Matt Chatterley]

On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Richard Woolcock wrote:

[Enormous snippage]

> However I think OOC channels are important to have, as a lot of players
> are friends and do like to chat about OOC stuff.  It is particularly 
> important when death will result in you getting a new body (and thus 
> name+description), forcing you to remeet everyone.  At least OOC (using
> your soul/login name to talk with) is a constant factor.

I'll take this paragraph to spin off on a tangent, if you don't mind. :)

One of the big beauties of online-gaming in this fashion (as opposed to
quake, and so forth) is the level of communication which you have with
other people, potentially all over the world, from all sorts of
backgrounds (this is one of the big pulls of muds for me).

There are a lot of things which can restrict this communication (which is
9/10 times going to be OOC in nature, the way I am referring to it), and
it often seems desirable to do so, but is this perhaps an error, at least
in 'marketing' - does it make the game less attractive to players?

Good examples here are games whose servers do not traditionally have a
background in roleplaying, but which are trying to move into that field
(for instance, an RP based game running on ROM, or Diku), where many of
the commonalities of the server (gossip, and so forth) are removed to make
the environment more singularly focussed towards realism and RP (read
realism as self-realism or consistancy within the gaming world and
environment).

Perhaps it is wholly more desirable to have a completely bifocal game,
which has an RP side and an OOC/social side to it - this is something like
what Richard is aiming to, with a login name that is *totally* abstracted
from Character Names, and helps to define the difference between player
and character to a good extent.

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
"I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." -Einstein