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

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Thu, 25 Sep 1997 08:50:47 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins
<nightfall at user1.inficad.com> wrote:

>This raises a valid issue for any mud, actually.  Not sure if this is
>what Caliban was aiming at originally, but I find it incredibly annoying
>to get a character creation sequence that goes something like this:

[snip]

>The morals being: character creation should ask questions in the correct order
>- general to specific; and second, documentation about character creation
>should be availible before you actually waste your time creating a character
>that you'll decide to redo an instant later now that you know what your
>choices are.   This gets even more important as your character creation
>process gets longer and more involved (which I vastly prefer).

EXACTLY. Exactly exactly exactly. Give me downloadable printable
documentation and the freedom to chuck a character and start over at any
time. Of course, your example looks so Diku-like, are you sure you
aren't an idiot or something? ;)

Let me add another example. I gave the various 'specialist mages' in one
of my AD&D campaigns appropriately atmospheric names, for example
instead of 'necromancers' we had 'jaak-tsarin'. If you come across
something like this in a MUD chargen, particularly in a list of twelve
similarly inscrutable names, what the hell are you supposed to do?

>Get is possibly the worst verb in the english language as far as this goes.
>How about:
>
>> get down
>You boogey down.
>> get high
>You whip out a fatty and light up.
>> get busy
>You get to work.

Hey, 'get busy' is often synonymous' with 'get down'. Not to mention
once in Italy my parents were out with friends at a disco when it was
robbed at gunpoint. A gunman fired a shot, the DJ yelled 'Get down!',
and one of my dad's (admittedly completely wasted) friends was up there
going 'Yeh, yeh, man, get down...' ;)

Even the wetware can't do NLP appropriately, I guess.

>I have a hard time envisioning a mud where 'get
>laid', 'get down', 'get high' and 'get busy' are all valid commands that
>cause your character to do something.  Although it might be funny..

Which is an admirable aim! :)

>> get laid
>You go to the store.
>You buy some make-up and a tight miniskirt.
>You spend an hour making yourself up.
>You squeeze into your new miniskirt and a tight top, showing plenty of clevage.
>You drive your car down to the local pub.
>You order a drink.
>You wait.
>You see a man with a cute pair of buns.
>You approach him and begin making flirtatious small-talk.
>He buys you a drink.
>He buys you another drink.
>You leave the bar together.
>He drives you back to his place.
>
>etc.  While I'm all for getting rid of super-atomic commands, I think that
>this is taking it a tad far. :)

Especially if the character is male @_@

>The only thing I don't like about this is that the text output on 'say'
>looks ridiculous - not even pronouncable.  

Ever try to read Arabic? ;)

>I've always wondered - how does one roar softly, exactly?

Chewbacca managed it several times in the Star Wars trilogy, or at least
that's how I always sort of figured it would work...

>However, I've been considering a way to, as you say, come up with the
>minimum name necessary to avoid ambiguity.  
[...]
>Of course, managing this is a bit trickier than it first seems.  

Nooooooo. Really?! ;)

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