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

[Maddy]

Previously, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote....

> 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!

I think you're being a bit melodramatic here *8).  I'm sure if anyone is
doing anything along the lines of 'grasp sword handle right', which is
probably going to include me, then all that extra stuff is optional.  If
anything I'm definitely going to accept 'wield sword' or 'wield the sword in
my right hand', it'll be up to the users how much detail they put into their
actions with the rest using defaults.  'wield sword' will obviously wield
the weapon in your primary hand, unless there is a weapon there already in
which case it may (if you're good enough) wield it in your other hand(s).

Surely you also see that having a wide choice of skills makes things more
interesting for people?  Don't you think it'd be boring if there was only a
"use weapon" skill?  Having every player looking the same, with the same
skills and speaking the same language is very boring.

> 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.

Well that 12 year old is going to have a hard time with my place.  For a
start - he'll only be able to have one account.  If he destroys it (as
opposed to being killed) it won't be able to get another account for a fixed
amount of time, that I've not decided.  And even then, it won't under any
circumstance tell him what his stats are in numbers.

> 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?

Why will the game suck because the game allows people to form groups to do
large tasks?  There will obviously still be tasks for solo players, it's
just that making a mud where the only use for a team of players is so that
they can kill something big, seems a bit pointless.  Players should be able
to do all kinds of things together.

[See below on some ideas about how to stop players feeling lonely]

> 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.

All of us (and I imagine I speak for all of us) are trying to create a game
that we as players would want to play.  Who cares if Biff the 12 year old
doesn't like it, there are plenty of muds out there that do play like he
wants.  And if they don't, then he (like we are) can write his own.

> 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?

I'm not sure where you've been, but even tho I've been on this list for a
short while all I can see are people discussing how the players interact
with the game.  Take the thread you're replying to.  It's about whether
players should be able to kill each other, indirectly or not.  Now
admittedly it was being discussed in a way to make the whole thing more
realistic, but no-one was talking about reducing the level of fun.  Ok, so
you might think that being killed by another player isn't fun - but how is
that different to being killed by a large monster?

> 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.

It's very easy to cater for a lot of the groups you mention.  If you add a
varied assortment of puzzles and monsters and traps, you'll end up with a
varied assortment of players.  The easiest way to make sure you can cater
for almost everyone is to get rid of the powergamers - powergamers are only
really at home on Hack'N'Slash muds - muds where there are levels and
experence points.  There are already plenty of muds that cater for them
already.

> 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?

Well ok - 

> My own personal preferences, as seed material:
> 
> Command structure should be simple, small, and at least somewhat intuitive. 

Yup - I'd agree with that - but I'd also like to be able to specify certain
things in detail.  I want to be able to 'drop ball on table next to candle',
rather than always dropping the ball on the floor.

> 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. 

All of the above goes without saying - sure at the moment, there are lot of
old muds that do this, but I doubt anything we've been discussing is going
to make those mistakes again?

>       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*).

NLP has been the easiest part of my mud to write so far, but then I don't
have "commands", I have verbs and the verb works the same way it does in
real life.  Documentation isn't hard and in most cases you don't need it -
surely anyone above the age of 5 knows what the verb 'get' does by now?

> 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.

I agree with being able to say anything, but emoting (or posing) anything is
too prone to abuse.  Say if you want languages and anything you 'say' is
translated for people who don't speak your language, well to get around it
you just emote what you want to say.  A wide range of socials with optional
adverbs and even the ability to set default adverbs (I hate grinning evily)
should give you enough scope for self expression.

I personally like the idea of a mud that has languages.

> 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.

I personally feel that channels are a waste of time and like the 'who'
command are too open for abuse.  I'd like to play a mud that has none of
these.  Without being able to find out who is on, you remove the difference
between players and NPCs, which I believe there should be no difference.  If
players & NPCs look the same then the jerks that log on to haress players
will have a much harder time getting their kicks.

> 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 plain on having all documentation in html.  I've already done this on my
talker and all helppages are avialable on the web complete with a small
search engine.

> 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 think we all want to play a mud that is fun.

> 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. 

Yup - you don't get any of these things in any of the muds I've seen, but to
get these features you need a game that is a bit more complicated than your
average diku.

Jokes from reallife are a big no-no - players aren't omnipotent and you're
bound to get a large number of players that might not have read the book, or
seen the movie/tv program.

All in all I could be easily misled into thinking you're still stuck in the
Diku/hack'n'slash/lpmud mentiality.

Maddy