[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 9 Jul 1998 23:37:24 -5 
Jon A Lambert<jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> A player run police force.  Many of the systems of seen in this vein
> are dependent on the game system automatically "marking" certain
> characters as killers.  And fail when the mayor or otherwise honest
> citizen is "marked" by the system as a killer.  There is only a
> built-in automated "direction".  Obstentiously this is to curtail
> potential abuse. ;)

Most of the designs I've noted are predicated on storage and
computation being expensive or in difficult supply.  (cf my own wars
on this front) Instead of a life history we get an interpreted summary
of the character's kill rates or some such cheaply derived statistic.

Outside of the given that storage, computation and bandwidth are
becoming cheap enough to ignore, two things about this bug me:

  1) The selection of interpretations is made my central authority
rather than individual players.  This does a lot ot pre-define and
characterise the game world and removes key aspects of the world's
interpretation from player ecologies.

  2) The statistic is a) not subject to "spin" and b) can and always
is subject to deliberate manipulation (yes, I killed the baby, but I
also helped 50 little old ladies across the street).  This #2 is
actually a direct reflection of and result of the removal of the
statistic from the player ecology space.

What if instead we made all the base stats and counts available, and
even supported player annotations to individual statistic entries (cf
EBay's reputation system), and _then_ allowed player written and
defined "scripts" to automatedly interpret the statistics in the
manner they prefer, resulting in the display interface they prefer.

I can forsee standardised annotation forms to equate to court or legal
pardons (pick your social heirarchy), with the resulting derived
statistic accomodating those (that one's pardoned so ignore, that
one's damned by the king so give quadruple value...).

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...