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

[Miroslav Silovic]

caliban at darklock.com (Caliban Tiresias Darklock) writes:

> 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. 

It's interesting that I've never taken the full advantage of this
'feature' - although it's possibly because I don't create characters
very often.

I think, however, that the very underused consequence of this is
creating MUSH families - it's VERY helpful character trait to start
with a PC brother/sister/cousin/parents already created on a MUSH.
Knowing some players can help it a lot.

Hmm, I'm rather surprised we never met on Cajun Nights. I didn't even
think to +finger Caliban before. :)

> 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...

Actually, it's not a good comparison. While taking a T1 to my home
would cost insane ammount of money (for most people, and especially
non-US folks), social contacts can be obtained simply by playing the
MUSH long enough.

On the other hand, social contacts are extremely important for MUSHes
(and far less for hack&slash MUDs). While hack&slashes (and even most
roleplaying MUDs) concentrate around personal game mechanics, MUSHes
(and other social/roleplaying games, by Amberyl's classification)
absolutely depend on large group dynamics. This is the reason for the
large number of staff, complex hierarchy of OOC and IC administration,
and commonly available means of OOC communicatiin. Cutting down on any
of these would break the structure of the game. Hmm, in addition to
this, try some of the Pern themed MUSHes, because IMHO they display
this in much purer form than the WoDs I've seen (which is rather few
WoD MUSHes, I have to admit).


PS. This is my first reply to one of your posts, and I'll use this
chance to apologize for the overraction in my last reply.

--
I refuse to use .sig