[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface ...

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Thursday, October 09, 1997 5:16 AM, Broly 
[SMTP:gunther at online1.magnus1.com] wrote:
>
> There is a fish swimming in a lake.  You are hungry, so you whip out your
> Castmaster 2000 and attempt to catch the fish.  Do you remain hungry? Or
> do you catch the fish?  If you leave it up to the character, that fish
> doesn't stand a chance.

And what exactly does this add to the game? Aren't we all more or less in 
agreement that eating and drinking and toilet habits are needless detail? 
Add them if you want them (emote casts his line into the water, watching 
the float intently.), leave them out if you don't want them. If you think 
fishing is fun, you can fish for your own enjoyment. If you don't, you 
never have to. Same with singing, musical instruments, etc.

I for one think it's fun to be really bad at something and think you're 
good at it. On most MUDs, the more I go out and do something badly, the 
better I get at it -- but I don't WANT to get better at it. I want to stay 
bad at it, because there's just some fundamental part of the skill that my 
character doesn't get. Golf is an excellent example. Don't we all know some 
guy who just SUCKS at golf, and has been playing for years, but never quite 
seems to *get* it? I like that. I think it's funny in games to have quirks 
like that. If there's an actual skill attached to it, it's rather difficult 
to maintain one. This is also entertaining to the other players...

> Simular arguments for scrollwork (can your
> character write a scroll, or will the magic in the words activate and
> crisp your character?)

No, I meant like carving scrollwork along the edges of a table for 
decoration. No matter how well it's done, lots of people will think it's 
ugly, and no matter how crappy it looks, someone will just love it. There's 
no effective game mechanic that can represent that.

> So back to the 'singing' example...Say a character breaks out into song 
in
> the middle of a battle.  If the words inspire the singers allies (they 
get
> bonuses on key dicerolls while the song is sung.) and strike fear into 
the
> hearts of the enemy(thus causing them to rout), then there should be some
> game construct controlling the quality of the music.

That's not a function of how well you sing. Barbra Streisand and Celine 
Dion both sing beautifully. Neither one is likely to be heard over the 
sounds of battle, and neither one is likely to be very inspirational or 
fearsome. (The vast majority of rough and ready battlemongers probably 
wouldn't be caught dead listening to them anyway.)

Ozzy Osbourne isn't much of a *singer*, but he could certainly inspire the 
troops and strike fear in the hearts of the enemy. Iron Maiden does some 
crunching, grinding songs that just make you *want* to advance through 
enemy lines and slaughter everything in your path.

They're not hard to sing or play.

They're not fantastic award winning performances.

But they just kick ass as inspirational war anthems. "War horse and war 
machine/Curse the name of liberty/Marching on as if they should/Mix in the 
dirt our brothers' blood". That would push me a lot harder than "This land 
is your land, this land is my land/From California to the New York island". 
I find the latter a much more beautiful and well written piece. But it 
doesn't inspire me to battle. It doesn't piss me off and make me want to 
split skulls (with the possible exception of the singer's after ten or 
twelve choruses).

Even the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" doesn't have the tendency to spur me 
into almost certain death the way Nine Inch Nails' "Last" would. If you 
want non-electronic examples, I'd sooner march to Beethoven's ninth than to 
one of Chopin's Nocturnes. If you know the difference, you can see why.

This sort of 'inspire the troops' effort is not a direct measure of musical 
ability. Look at the conditioning we go through in the military. The horrid 
doggerel that we use for calling cadence is vastly more inspirational than 
some perfectly constructed mellifluous melody. Nobody marches to 'America 
the Beautiful'. We have stupid, non-poetic, badly-written stuff like 'Mama 
and papa were lying in bed/Mama rolled over to papa and said/gimme some, oh 
yeah, gimme some, oh yeah'. And if anyone reading this was *in* the 
military... you can hear it, can't you, in the back of your mind? Still 
gets the blood pumping a little faster, doesn't it?

Why? It sucks. It's worse than "roses are red, violets are blue" ("...some 
poems rhyme, this one doesn't"). It's bad poetry, bad singing, and has no 
real meaning. But IT WORKS. (Unless you want a recording contract.) There's 
just blatantly no effective game mechanic for it. It's too variable.

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