[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is supposed to be playing, anyway? (Was: PK Again)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Wednesday, September 17, 1997 4:46 AM, Matt Chatterley 
[SMTP:root at mpc.dyn.ml.org] wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
>
> > As the implementation of realism is increased, the chances and
> > methods of inflicting pain are increased either directly or
> > indirectly.
>
> Vastly so. The more and more realistic you make anything (within any
> theme), the more ways you provide for people to be directly and 
indirectly
> injured by others.

I've been thinking a lot on this, and it's occurred to me that realism is 
much like security, in that it is the reciprocal of convenience. Or, more 
in line with my experience, as security and/or realism increase linearly, 
convenience and ease of use decrease exponentially.

There's a lot of discussion here on how to make things 'better' for the 
gamer. But many of these improvements, no matter how many exciting 
possibilities they create, would make the actual game play more and more of 
a pain in the behind; we discuss all sorts of vast designs that make almost 
any action somewhat like programming. As programmers ourselves, we like 
this! Hey, you don't just 'kill monster' -- you 'slash monster mid forward 
lateral sword', or 'stab monster high left dagger'. Long commands? Bah, 
just bind it to a hotkey in your client, which appropriately simulates a 
trademark fighting style. Hey, 'wield sword' is too high-level... try 
'grasp sword handle right'! This can be extended, you see, so you can 
'grasp sword hilt both' for a more powerful thrust, or 'grasp dagger tip 
left' in preparation for throwing. The possibilities are endless! And it's 
so trivial, you just bind hotkeys and write scripts and stick additional 
logic into the server so related skills add to your ability to do specific 
things. And lots of skills! A thousand, at least! Forty-two classes! 
Eighteen races! Twelve genders! Three hundred and ten languages organised 
into various degrees of ancient, classical, and modern with a related parse 
tree that actually allows you to learn related languages faster! Look, this 
makes min-maxing impossible, there are just too many variables!

Actually, it makes it easier, because you start to get sloppy. If someone 
invests the time, like maybe someone with no life and no responsibilities 
and nothing better to do, they can find the little areas where inevitably 
game balance has been thrown out the window by a bad decision. You can't 
effectively balance this many variables. Especially with a publicly 
distributed server, which you can hack apart piece by piece and discover 
the secrets of. Basically this means that real people with real jobs and 
real lives are at a serious disadvantage compared to the twelve year old 
who MUDs from school and home and dabbles in programming. This twelve year 
old can invest forty hours of processing time on a program, no problem, and 
also has no difficulty creating several hundred characters just to get an 
analysis of starting stats. I'm sure many of us remember when we thought 
nothing of starting and exiting a game in DOS several thousand times while 
we hacked at the saved games with a hex editor trying to figure out where 
the cool powers were. I'm sure many of us still do such things.

I see three main goals on this list which come up over and over:

	1. Let's make the game really really versatile and complicated.
	2. Let's make the game really really difficult and challenging.
	3. Let's make the game really really different and interesting.

But what keeps getting lost is the idea of the players. Someone somewhere 
is going to have to play this game. Let's say you take the teamwork issues 
we've discussed recently to heart, and make a game targeted at the standard 
D&D style group of 4 to 6 people. The first three characters are guaranteed 
to have an initial experience which really and truly sucks, and since this 
is so different from the majority of MUDs, there will actually be a lot 
MORE people who think this really sucks because it's going to take a player 
base of some twenty people before you get a meaningful group together. 
Where are these players going to come from if everyone logs on to find a 
game that sucks?

Add onto that all the fantastic new concepts people bandy about here, and 
people log on to find a game with cryptic documentation, seriously complex 
usage guidelines, command sequences that bear far too much resemblance to a 
BASIC program, and an arrogant administrative staff with a basic philosophy 
of "up yours, this is our game and you don't have to play it". The game is 
terribly different from other games, so it's hard to learn. It's incredibly 
versatile, so it needs a lot of time and effort to get familiar with. And 
it's more difficult, too, so you end up frustrated.

I think we're losing our roots here. MUDs are founded in tabletop RPGs, 
with the admins analogous to the gamemaster/DM/storyteller/Game Operations 
Director. In any good tabletop campaign, a lot of effort is invested in 
providing the players with FUN. But here on this list, it seems like that 
has gone more or less out the window in favor of making the most incredibly 
rich and complicated world we can; I think both concepts have real merit, 
but I don't think either can be discarded. Consider the id software byline 
of 'a bad game with a good story is a bad game; a good game with a bad 
story is still a good game'. In this case, the world implementation and 
complexity could be considered the story, while the actual player 
interaction would be the game. A good game with a good story is nothing 
short of phenomenal, and since most of us on this list appear to be 
idealists, why aren't we spending more time discussing the ways players 
interact with the game itself and whether it's actually going to be fun to 
play?

Part of this is who you target the game toward. There are groups within 
groups within groups here, which can usually be divided up into bicameral 
camps:

	RP gamers and the rest
	PK gamers and the rest
	PO gamers and the rest
	Experienced MUDders and the rest
	Experienced gamers and the rest
	Programming types and the rest
	Puzzle oriented types and the rest
	Solo players and the rest
	Socialisers and the rest
	...etc...

These can all be put together in just about any combination, although one 
might posit that an experienced MUDder can't very well not be an 
experienced gamer or something like that. You can add any number of 
additional groups, and any number of additional distinctions. But somewhere 
along the line, you have to select some group to cater to because you can't 
cater to them all. You just don't have the time or the energy for it, no 
matter how dedicated you are. Gamers as a whole are a very demanding group, 
and will want their own needs taken care of first -- the puzzle types will 
want more puzzles to solve, and the solo players will want more things they 
can do themselves, and the power gamers will want more levels and more 
skills and more equipment, and the socialisers will want an enhanced 
channel system... it never ends. You can't do it all. You have to select 
the group you intend to target, and cater specifically to that group. It's 
also occasionally helpful to select groups you do NOT want on the game, and 
specifically hamstring those players in one way or another. If you want to 
discourage PK, then just plain don't allow it. If you want to discourage 
power gamers, then make all the mobs low level and use very few of them. If 
you want to discourage solo players, have a lot of places that require 
teamwork to negotiate. But the bottom line is, you need to have a target 
audience, and 'MUD players' is far too general. On the converse, 'MUD 
players like me' is far too specific, because *you* by definition have an 
intimate and intricate knowledge of everything in the game which no one 
else will have.

So here's my question. I know it was a long time in coming, but really -- 
what sort of things do you look for in a MUD? How would you like to play, 
if you were to log onto someone else's game and find that it was exactly 
what you've always wanted?

My own personal preferences, as seed material:

Command structure should be simple, small, and at least somewhat intuitive. 
Any and all commands in the game should have some purpose that is evident 
both from the command itself and from the error message I receive when I 
use it inappropriately. Generic messages like 'Do what?', 'Huh?', and 'You 
can't do that!' are just plain stupid. I prefer something immediate and 
specific, like 'You cannot pick up another player'. Above all, syntax and 
behavior should be *consistent*. If I can type 'cast fireball north', I 
should also be able to 'cast lightning north'. If I can cast a fireball on 
a pool of oil and make it burst into flames, casting lightning on a pool of 
water should have a similar (though not as persistent) effect. I don't want 
syntax that changes around. If I have to 'cast' a spell, I should have to 
'use' a skill, and no spell or skill should be used by typing *just* its 
name. Natural language processing is BAD. Bad bad bad, I hate it and it's a 
big pain to implement which takes time away from more useful things like 
documenting the commands (which becomes impossible in NLP *anyway*).

My own personal expression options should be limitless. I should be able to 
say or pose anything. There should be no artificial limitations on the 
length of my actions, nor should there be some convoluted series of 
implicit rules like line lengths and truncation and default modification. 
Variable substitutions are a Bad Idea here, although in code and 
descriptions they are indeed very useful, and character escaping should be 
completely unnecessary.

Players should have limited out-of-character expression options, such as 
channels. Channels which have nothing whatsoever to do with the game don't 
belong here. (Music channels are dumb.) Channels which have in-character 
significance should be rationalised. (Auction channels are pretty 
destructive to suspension of disbelief.) In no case should I be able to use 
non-game communication to communicate *all* the time or to communicate with 
people I normally could not communicate with.

Documentation in full should be available to me and anyone else in 
downloadable, printable, and online viewable formats which are clearly 
marked and referenced on the game. Revision histories should be maintained 
scrupulously.

I expect to have fun on this game. This means that under no circumstances 
is anything to happen to my character that *prevents* him from progressing 
further, ever. Only under rare circumstances is anything detrimental to 
happen to the character without my implicit consent (e.g. beginning combat, 
drinking something unidentified, walking through dangerous areas). 
DEATHTRAPS ARE HORRID, nobody likes them, nobody has EVER liked them, there 
shouldn't be any. Period.

I should be able to kick back and relax and watch when NO ONE is logged on, 
and enjoy myself. The game *itself* should be enjoyable. If I just go hang 
out in the town square, I should see people going about their business, and 
changes in the time of day and weather, and all manner of intriguing 
things. There should be meanings; if the baker goes off to the barber shop 
every night at midnight, then the bakery should be closed, the barber 
should be closed, and there should be the butcher and the baker and the 
candlestick maker all out at the barbershop singing in a quartet. Things 
that are just fun. Not necessarily important to the gameplay, but important 
to the game nonetheless. Likewise obscure puns and inside jokes from 
classic games, movies, TV, and books are nice to see.