[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is suppo

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Sun, 21 Sep 1997 08:41:00 PST8PDT, "Travis Casey"
<efindel at polaris.net> wrote:

>Many people who say "all blacks are lazy" will also tell you that they're
>generalizing from past experience, if you press them.  Why do you consider
>what they're doing wrong, but what you're doing right?

Because such a generalisation is an excuse, rather than a convenient
shorthand which would be needlessly encumbered by a clarification of
legal proportions to specify exactly what group of people is meant. It
is necessary in spoken and written language to divide people into
groups, because otherwise it becomes a real pain to discuss anything at
all. If we're going to get bogged down in linguistic issues, it will
just become next to impossible for anything of value to be said. There's
a very complex set of circumstances under which generalisations are
necessary, convenient, erroneous, irrelevant, or unacceptable; this is
further complicated by the subjective nature of such things. However, I
did not use these generalisations to draw any sort of conclusion... I
used them to explain my rationale in attempting to focus the thread on a
specific issue, rather than allowing it to widen into an unwieldy and
ultimately irrelevant topic. There are areas that don't get discussed on
the list in any great detail which I feel are important and should be
discussed; since they don't get discussed, it's pretty fair to say that
the group doesn't discuss them. I have not ascribed any particular
quality to the group, nor have I made any specific judgments on the
group's nature; I am instead saying that I disagree with the group on
some points, and attempting to ascertain the reason. 

>Remember that the sample you see may not be representative -- I don't have
>any statistics on this list, but it's quite possible that there are more
>lurkers than regular posters -- 

I'd say it's not only possible, but likely, and therefore the lurking
populace is by necessity not part of any statistical sample taken from
the posts. Statistics are by nature flawed.

>and even many of the regular posters won't
>post on every thread.  When you say "everyone" when you actually mean
>"everyone who replied to my thread," you are needlessly antagonizing those
>of us who didn't reply to your thread.

Actually, I'm only needlessly antagonising those who actually replied to
my thread with some form of positive comment, which to my recollection
was a nonexistent group. If I were in a room full of programmers, and
asked 'is everyopne a programmer?', the answer would most likely be yes
by consensus, even though there are a lot of people in the world who
aren't programmers. The context of the word indicates and limits its
scope sufficiently in my opinion, although others may certainly
disagree.

>Personally, I find it useful to be careful in what I say -- it encourages
>actually thinking through what you're saying in detail, and reduces the
>noise to signal ratio greatly.

I also find it useful, but being politically correct has never been a
significant goal in my mind, and I think inordinate amounts of effort
are directed at not hurting people's feelings. Face it, some people are
just plain fragile, and there's no way you can do anything about it. You
can't please everyone, why bother investing time in it? There's a point
of diminishing returns that you hit pretty quickly.

>[discussion of different things that "second X" could mean trimmed]
>
>Very true.  In order to make use of orderings, the mud needs to ensure
>that orderings are stable (i.e., "the second ball" in the room stays
>"the second ball" until and unless an event in the game world occurs
>which would change the ordering) and to document for the players what
>the ordering means.  Personally, I feel that "'the second X' is the
>second X that you see in the list of items when you look around" is
>the most reasonable definition for most muds (i.e., that it's the
>definition that players are most likely to use without thinking about
>it.)

One of the biggest problems I have with that (and it's a pretty minor
one, so obviously there aren't many problems) is that as items are
picked up, their position in the order changes. If there's a bag in the
room already, but neither of us notice it, and you drop a bag which I
then get, it's probably the wrong bag. If there are three bags in the
room, I drop one, someone else drops one, and a third person picks one
up, then the numbers shift around. It becomes annoying (and exasperating
when you have some guy in there shifting things around and dropping or
picking up bags all over the place).

>Another possible solution is to prompt the player for more information.

I see this as a minor pitfall, myself, as it involves state changes...
but they're trivial to get around, provided you don't miss one.

>Alternatively, you can simply treat this as an error and give a message:

This is the way TinyMUSH handles it, and I find it *generally*
acceptable. I still don't entirely like it, but I find it much more
acceptable than most of the alternatives. This is also the way most text
adventures handled the matter.

>With articles, you might want to do different actions depending on whether
>the player used "a/an" or "the" 

Hmmmmmm. Iffy. I don't know if I'd like this. ;)

>One possible solution is to assume as little as possible in general,
>but allow players to set what, if any, assumptions are made for them.

This can become cumbersome, and lends itself to huge lists of
configuration options... ugh. Not necessarily bad, if they're well
organised, but of course 'well organised' means different things to
different people. A programmer may divide them into 'assumptions',
'automatic actions', and 'preferences'... whereas the player may prefer
'combat', 'adventure', and 'display' options. Either set makes perfect
sense depending on your play style.

>Another solution is what I'd call "progressive automatic documentation" --
>when the player first performs an action in which a certain assumption is
>used, output some documentation about the assumption.  

I don't like this idea. I have visions of typing a command and getting
four screens of spam as a result. ;)

>Perhaps the idea of a "tip of the day" could be borrowed 

You know... I really like this idea! I know several people who have used
the tip of the day stuff to get a lot better at an application than they
originally were... I *really* like this concept.

>That's why I only wish to use partial NLP -- because I feel that NLP
>techniques can be useful in figuring out what players are trying to do,
>but I don't feel that NLP is a perfect solution.  I prefer the standard
>command-based interface for its exact meanings, but a robust parser should
>be able to handle such things as the presence or absence of articles, and
>common variations in syntax such as "give joe the sword" vs. "give the sword
>to joe".

Agreed, but I still have a real aversion to NLP in servers. From what
I've heard so far, your ideas make perfect sense and seem to be taking
into consideration most of the inherent problems with the structure; are
there any other things you've done or planned with respect to the
interface that you think are above and beyond the normal operations of
servers? 

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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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