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

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Thu, 25 Sep 1997 08:17:06 PST8PDT, clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

>Is lack of a social context for new players a Bad Thing?  There are
>ways to work around much of the initial barrier to entry to the
>non-social world problem (cf Avalon's guides), however that doesn't
>address the problems of entering the social world, or the question of
>social context.

There's also the consideration of other social contexts. Some of the
people I used to MUSH with on DarkWeb (now defunct) were friends I had
met at gaming conventions, and many of the players there turned out to
have other characters elsewhere; I went from DarkWeb to Cajun Nights and
found myself with an instant social context in the sense that I as a
player knew and could contact a large number of people there. These
people could, from their previous association with me, introduce me as a
character to others, providing another accelerated social context. 

Similar sorts of accelreated social context can be gained from
surroundings, like a university, and from other channels like webrings,
IRC, guestbooks, or even newsgroups and mailing lists. If, for example,
someone here was describing their new server and it sounded really cool,
I might log on there. Chances are I'd name my character 'Caliban', which
would provide some instant recognition, and I would probably find myself
in some social context with other list members on the server. (Whether
that context would be positive is rather iffy.) 

Unfortunately, people who have the experience of being in some social
context or other on first login (university students are rather large
offenders in this arena) often assume that others have the same social
context. Sort of like the way people with T-1 lines out of their houses
tend to do web sites that take an outrageous amount of time to DL over a
modem, and people with really big screens will do interfaces that don't
fit on most other people's monitors. Natural human narcissism, which I
could probably write several more pages on...

=+[caliban at darklock.com]=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=[http://www.darklock.com/]+=
"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more 
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a 
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by 
the preservation of the old institution, and merely lukewarm defenders in 
those who would gain by the new one."                      -- Machiavelli
=+=+=+[We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams]+=+=+=+=