[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Fri, 19 Sep 1997 21:43:02 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins
<nightfall at user2.inficad.com> wrote:

>[Caliban:]
>> I have. I've seen people give long complex descriptions of mixing poisons 
>> and other nifty things, which is really a great idea for the cerebral 
>> types, but some of us don't want to scratch our heads and go 'Now HOW does 
>> that work again? Do I stir *before* I add the hemlock, or after?' -- while 
>> it's a neat academic exercise, it's a terribly bad game.
>
>I disagree very strongly with this.  I consider the exploration/discovery
>element to be the defining feature which differentiates a 'standard' linear
>game and a true gaming world.  

All I'm saying is that if everything is a collection of small simple
commands, it lends itself very badly to play but very easily to
scripting. Ultima's reagent mixing was an example; it was almost a form
of copy protection, as you had to have the game reference handy the
whole time. In time, you memorised certain combinations for common
spells (An Nox and In Mani Corp, for example), but you still had to have
the spell list available. If I could have written macros, these things
would have been single-key. 

Note that whether you intend it or not, people will almost always come
up with a way to script. The above example of mixing a poison would be
trivial for someone who had coded it into a script; the script would
probably be on some web page; and the *spirit* of the process would be
lost. 

On the other hand, if you count on people scripting, then people who
don't know how to script or where to find scripts end up having a real
pain of a time trying to play the game. It's a double edged sword.

>IMO, the more involved,
>the longer it's going to hold your attention.  Now, if the interface is
>difficult or there's no easy way to gain a foothold into the system (ie,
>learning a simple part of the system to get a feel for it) then it can
>be frustrating.  

I'd most prefer an interface which is simple to learn and easy to use,
but can be increased in application to complex tasks easily. One way to
achieve this is to have all the atomic, low-level commands in the MUD,
and then have pre-written scripts built into the server which allow new
players to play without learning everything first; for example, my
concept of 'grip sword handle right' could be scripted into a 'wield'
command, allowing the player to choose whether he wants to be complex or
simple. While 'wield sword' is equivalent to 'grip sword handle right',
they serve different purposes and are both useful.

>But given the ingenuity and curiosity of the types of people
>that play these games, I feel that it's better to overshoot a bit on complexity
>and have it take a little longer to figure out, as opposed to them getting
>bored with it quicker.



>FWIW, I though the PC game Daggerfall had a nice balance of this sort.
>A newbie could have a character in three mouse clicks, while old grognards like
>me can fiddle around with numbers all day long.

I'll have to go pick up a copy. I don't buy many games, because they all
tend to annoy me these days.

>Careful with those unconditional statements, now.  The first mud I played
>had languages, and it was one of the things that drew me in right away.
>First of all, I never found languages in P&P terribly interesting.  The
>DM tells you, 'He's jabbering in a language you don't understand'.

That was a bad DM. He should have given you some description of the
language itself, or attempted to simulate it somehow by prattling on in
giberish. ;)

>This actually turned out to be quite useful,
>as players there frequently muttered things in their native language, or said
>things only for the benefit of their fellow <insert race name>.  

In my experience such things rarely happen online. Maybe I've been
playing the wrong games. 

>These skills actually came in handy in 'real' situations, too: you had to say
>'friend' in elven to open the door to Moria; you had to say a phrase in demon
>to solve a certain quest (which I have detailed on this list before); many
>spellbooks were written in different languages (written being a different
>skill than spoken, of course); 

I don't find that any of these are terribly additive to the game. You
lock anyone who can't find an elf out of Moria; you prevent anyone who
can't speak demon or conjure a demon out of a quest; and you lock
spellbooks out of the accessibility of people. Languages are like locks,
you slap them on something and then the player ends up with this simple
binary 'yes/no' thing as to whether they gain any benefit. 

In P&P, all of these things are just as possible, but you have many more
options to get by them. In all the games that I've played, I've never
seen one of them offer a translator for hire. I guess only PCs are
supposed to do that. 

>Eventually a friend and I started collecting party members
>and communicating via sign language.  Unfortunately only about half the part
>had ever bothered to learn it; the other half had to sit there and watch us
>wag our fingers and wonder what the hell was going on...

Cute solution. Note, however, that the majority of the party was
completely screwed. Languages are applicable and useful only in certain
small, rare situations in my experience, and many of the real uses of
language are completely overlooked on MUDs. 

>First things first.  D&D without the handbooks would have been silly.

You've never played completely without the books? You don't know what
you're missing. We used to do this routinely on the school bus, and it
was truly fascinating. 

>By the same token, usually what I see on this list is discussion of how
>specific game mechanics support certain goals.  I could prattle on all
>day about our philosophies and ideas for what the game should be, but
>concrete examples are a lot more useful, both for the example itself
>and for the purposes of illustrating the 'higher' purpose.

Mainly what I keep looking for is ways to get past all the
technicalities and into the real meat of what people really want out of
the game, so I don't have to work just from my own opinions and ideas. I
see a lot of high-level goals for what the world will be and what people
can do, but I keep seeing this stuff that makes me go 'yuck, why would I
want to play in THAT world?' -- so obviously, there's some difference of
opinion here. On the other hand, I thought Warcraft absolutely sucked,
so evidently my views aren't altogether mainstream.

>Someone's got to push up the ante; if everyone decided that doing something
>a little more interesting was just too dang hard, or 'a fool's errand',
>we'd all still be playing Pong.  Actually, Pong would have never been
>invented.

What? Of course we have to up the ante, but let's not do it by stacking
eight million new things on top of what we have on impulse, okay? You
can't just hang a multitude of new things off an existing framework and
expect it to run properly. 

Modern gaming isn't pong with fifty paddles, after all ;)

>> I am not discussing any specific game or any specific goals.
>
>Which is probably why you are so often misunderstood.  When JCL or Nathan
>or Jon or Chris G talk about some specific topic, I know pretty much
>right where they are coming from, because I know both details about their
>own game(s), as well as their gaming philosophies.  I'm still confused as
>to where you're coming from exactly, despite having read many of your posts.
>Perhaps you're trying to avoid being pigeon-holed, but...

I don't have a server under construction, nor do I run any notable
online game. The main reasons for this are that I don't feel the ideas I
have at this point in time are ready to be implemented yet. I have some
supporting code I've written, and I remain active in the online game
community, but it's probably going to be a long time before any of my
own work sees actual production. The tools are there and the concept is
there, but I'm not quite convinced it's time to start building yet.

As far as pigeonholing, you can't do it where I'm concerned. Probably
the most applicable category is 'miscellaneous'. I do too many things on
too many levels, which more often than not is an embarrassment so I try
not to go into too much detail on it.

>> > Different does not require programming in any shape or form.
>> 
>> Atomic low-level commands encourage it, providing significant advantages to 
>> those who do.
>
>Yes, this is true.  Some folks are trying to design a game this way
>on purpose, and make no bones about this fact.  I am not trying to do this,
>at all.  Certainly this is something that needs to be decided early on
>on the development process.  

I already mentioned above that the two concepts can be combined.

>Some many not
>like this approach, but we love it, and once we had solidified how it worked
>with a few basic commands, we expanded the concept to work with everyone
>possible command we wanted.

I certainly think this sounds like a fantastic idea, and I'd love to
hear a little more background on it.

>> > Different does not entail a difficult to use command set.
>> 
>> Complex does.
>
>Not sure where this is going - is 'difficulty' considered a bad thing?

A difficult command set is Bad. A difficult game is Good, provided the
difficulty varies to fit different players...

>There's a difference between difficulty and simple obscurity, of course.
>Difficulty is learning all the different nooks and cranies of the
>system, and how they interact.  Obscurity is not being able to either find
>out how something works (via experimentation and documentation) in the
>first place.

Obscurity should be punished in truly heinous fashions. Difficulty is a
good thing provided it's difficult to MASTER, not to learn. 

>> > Different DOES entail turning off hundreds of Diku-expectant players.
>
>Mmmm, more pigeon-holing.  People don't like different things, usually.
>I do.  But the only way to advance the field is to introduce something
>new.  'Something new' is usually defined as different.

Standard human resistance to change, which of course is something I hit
a lot. I've been impressed by some recent game efforts, such as Dungeon
Keeper which still amuses the hell out of me. I've been looking at some
of the newer games and thinking about how GUIs could be used to enhance
the MUD experience; I've been thinking about some things that can make
the building process a lot simpler for the admin staff, but I really
don't see a GUI being of much use for the players. Administration can
certainly be enhanced a great deal by GUI tools.

>On Day 2, they can still do both these things, but they can also chop it
>into little bits with a knife, roll it up, and smoke it.  Does the user
>need to know this?  Do they care?  Does this impair their ability to pick
>up, or drop the rope?

As you add commands to existing structures, the probability of creating
a command which is incompatible with another grows. This sort of
incremental and additive modification makes the game unreliable and
annoying. 

>I for one would rather have a system where I'm always discovering new things,
>rather than one I can learn every aspect of in my first visit there.

I'd like one where I can learn about the important aspects in my first
visit, then learn the lkess important ones later. 

>> > How about...
>> 
>> An example is by nature nonspecific and incomplete. You can draw all the 
>> examples you want. I stopped at one or two because the message was already 
>> too long.
>
>Personally I find examples to be much more illustrative, rather than vague
>statements about how things should or shouldn't be.  

I don't feel that an example particularly invites other examples for no
good reason other than to force a reevaluation of the question. I
offered an example which dealt with levels. I was answered with
questions about what if there were no levels, or no classes, or no real
concept of power, or different types of power. Well, fine, then there's
a different scale; no matter how you measure it, the question still
remains to be answered.

>See my 'example'
>about languages above.  I could have responded, "You're wrong!  Languages
>can add quite a bit if done right!"  However, I doubt this would have
>convinced anyone, except people that already agreed with me.

It was a good example. But I still don't think that languages can't be
replaced by something else; I mean, a language is -- in every situation
you mention above -- just another skill that you have to have at a
certain level to accomplish a specific task. Languages in all those
situations could have been replaced by other skills, and the puzzle
would have remained the same. Even the silent room could have been dealt
with using a 'writing' skill. 

>> > I hate artificial restrictions and inconsistencies like
>> > 'You cannot pick up another player'.
>> 
>> Artificial worlds will impose artificial restrictions.
>
>Yes, but the above statement implies that you *can* pick up NPCs, just not
>players.  I find this to be massively inconsitent and unnecessarily 
>restrictive.

The specific example above is based on an error message I picked out of
the air, which was intended to illustrate that an error message should
tell you specifically what it is that it didn't let you do and why. The
realism or implications of the specific error message used as an example
are actually irrelevant.

As far as picking up NPCs, I would expect that trying to pick up an NPC
would result in the NPC taking some sort of action (presumably hostile),
whereas the player might not do anything at all (particularly if he's
idle). 

Theoretically, in the real world, you would be able to pick up the
player provided you could carry him and all the weight he was carrying. 

Realistically, I certainly hope you don't walk down the street picking
people up.

>From the administrative angle, if I logged onto a MUD, and some dork
picked me up and took me off someplace and dropped me, I would be pretty
pissed. Especially if he was able to put me into a room without going in
himself, in which case he could toss me into a trap or into a vicious
gang of dragons. Considering these possibilities, I would be very
hesitant to allow people to pick up other players, and very wary of
anyone who disliked this restriction. This comes under the heading of
bad things happening to my character without any kind of consent.

Another concern: High-level character picks up low level character,
turns invisible, and takes him to an area he can't normally get to.
High-level character drops low-level character. Low-level character gets
in fight. When low-level character is badly hurt, high-level character
grabs him and runs off to heal low-level character. Repeat ad nauseam.

I might provide special circumstances, like the ability to pick up a
player *provided* he was unconscious or dead. But this still has
potential for abuse. 

And this is just the sort of game balance idea that looks simple and
easy until you stop to think about how it could be used. ;)

>A mud which is based around the same premises as a good PnP game or, better
>yet, a good book, relies on the kind of expression one can only get from
>language (or, at least without complete VR, and I'm not sure even then).

Much better stated than my own points, and pretty much identical in
spirit. Thank you. :)

>> > I like consistent themes.  I wouldn't find it amusing to run into
>> > Elvis in Babylon.
>> 
>> I would find it vastly amusing, provided...
>
>All depends on the mud's theme.  I dislike objects like sunglasses and
>polyester suits in fantasy muds; on a futuristic mud I'd like this much better.
>I like humor, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the theme in order to get
>a chuckle, since there's plenty you can within your theme.

Considering how many MUDs have anachronistic magic items, I don't find
it too disruptive. Provided it is *rare*. I really do prefer amusingly
selected names, occupations, and mannerisms to silly appearances.

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 You see me now, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I've been 
 living on the edge so long, where the winds of limbo roar. And 
 I'm young enough to get involved, too old to see, all the scars 
 are on the inside; I'm not sure that there's anything left of me
               -- Blue Oyster Cult, "Veteran of the Psychic Wars"
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