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

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <01BCC431.4A4B6D30.caliban at darklock.com>, on 09/18/97 
   at 09:55 AM, Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com> said:

>Yes, a wide choice of skills is great, but skills like musical
>instruments  are just plain stupid. What the hell does this add to
>the game?

>	>play lute
>	You play your lute.

>Yes, it's nice being able to run some form of bard who carries around
>a  musical instrument, but does a 'play lute' command REALLY enhance
>the  experience for anyone? What's wrong with ',plays his lute
>merrily, skipping  about the marketplace' instead of a social
>command?

One could imagine a skill which allows others to be manipulated thru
song/intrument playing (sleep?).  Similarly one could imagine a hidden
language between bards where they could communicate freely using an
instrument:

  > i
  You have a harp.
  > play "lets plot to kill the king" with harp merrily
  ...
  You hear Bubba the fiddler bowing, "Okay, shall I poison his wine?"
with a jig.

While the rest of the room reads:

  Boffo strums a merry tune on his harp.
  ...
  Bubba plays a dancing jig on a fiddle.

>So if I decide I don't like this character, and I decide to delete
>it, you  kick me off the game? That really sucks. If I really like
>the game, and  just want to start a new character, what POSSIBLE
>rationale would convince  me to come back after several days when you
>say 'sorry, you just threw away  a perfectly good character, you
>can't have another one until date X'? A  message like that would
>really hack me off, and I'd go play elsewhere.

This is a direct parallel to the question on what obligations if any
an Admin has to his players.  Interestingly enough that divide seems
to parallel the RP/GOP divide.

>All of us are PROGRAMMERS. We are by definition *not* the average
>player.  And this attitude is exactly the type of arrogance that
>pisses me off about  MUD development, because your market is too
>specific and too narrow and as  far as I'm concerned it makes you the
>single worst type of MUD admin on the  face of the planet. I'd like
>to design a flexible and easy to use game that  middling numbers of
>people (say 50 at a time) will log onto and enjoy. I  don't need
>hundreds of people online; that's just too crowded.

Please don't try and erect a straw target of "Elitism is a Bad Thing",
or "Populism is a Good Thing", or "Discrimination is a Bad Thing", or
any other variant.  They're boring.

>I've been on it for a good long while, and this is true. However, the
> discussions tend to be 'how much should the players be able to do'
>rather  than 'how should the players communicate with the server'.
>We're discussing  design issues on the back end and administrative
>issues on the front end,  and somewhere in the middle there are a
>bunch of players trying to play a  game who SHOULD be the main
>concern.

I'd argue your "should", but its an old mantra to dust off again. 
There are no such "shoulds" here.  Yup, its a valid topic.  Yup, there
is value there.  Nope, its not mandated.

MUD design can be considered a problem domain.  As such it can be
sub-divided, and the fragments examined from any of many viewpoints. 
One can (largely) safely assume that for any sub-division under
discussion (such as that back end stuff above), the other fragments
assume their default values.  As such its is automatically assumed
that players are attempting to have "fun", and that they will have an
interface etc.  However, those are merely other (under-discussed?)
fragments of the entire problem field.

Note for the blind: None of this is written as List Owner.  If it
were, I would have stated so.  <sigh>

>If it's so easy, why do we spend so much time discussing how
>different the  underlying server has to be for these types of people?

Assumed orthodoxies?

>What if English isn't my native language? What if my vocabulary isn't
>quite  as good as yours? How do you handle verbs that have multiple
>meanings?

Do you define english-as-an-n'th-language players as valued members of
your game's market?

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

>Then why wasn't anyone else discussing it?

Its an assumed point.  Nothing is stopping threads on it other than
someone to start them, and enough interest in the specific thread to
maintain them.  Potentially we have an assumed othodoxy here.  More
likely the details of what makes something "fun" as vs "not fun" is
either not generally deemed interesting by the membership, or is not
well enough investigated to have much to say about.

>All in all, I could be easily misled into thinking you're being
>overly defensive.

Et Tu Brute?

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...