[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wi

[s001gmu at nova.wright.edu]

On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt wrote:

> 
> On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Dan Shiovitz wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> > > On  7 Aug 98, Dan Shiovitz wrote:

[... voting, etc ...]
 
> You could set up the judgement as well at the penalties to be an
> in-game-context event, even though you perhaps would have to
> short-circuit some of the cause/effect feature you may have build in
> the game to ensure the effectiveness of such a system. As an example
> (in a mideval-like scenario) you would have the town elders set up a
> meeting hearing the evidence, etc, sentencing a player to 2 weeks
> (realtime) of jail (removing their ability to communicate with anyone
> who is not actually visiting them, limiting their movement around the
> game to the jail cell). Ofcause for this to be effective, (and it have
> to, otherwise you have not really solved any problem), the criminal
> should more often than not actually end up in jail.  Here perhaps you
> need to short circuit some of the rules of cause/effect so that
> atleast the 'criminal' gets his punishment.  Something like a message
> the next time the person logs on: "During you sleep, some guards came
> and threw you in jail" (or something more elaborate, but to exactly
> the same effect). Such forcing of things are ofcause not desired if
> you aim at a "realistic" game environment, but the alternative is that
> the entire process is out of game-context. You could try to implement
> it in a more realistic procedure (such as the guards actually showing
> up and dragging off with the criminal, but you still need to make sure
> that punishment is more often than not, is measured out.  Also you
> need to set up in-game concepts for other out of game-context
> penalties such as banning and deletion. As an example banning could be
> "the casting of a spell that banish all souls with origin in a
> specific plane or dimension", probably requireing the aid of a higher
> being such as a god or its vatar (enter exciting description here),
> deletion (in a game that implement easy or atomatic resurrection)
> could be explaind away as some major banishment of a given soul. All
> this ofcause take some carefull planning and tying in with all the
> concepts of the game, but i feel that perhaps it is not that hard to
> hide the administration context inside the game-context.

The only real problem I have with this idea is that it blurs the lines
betwixt In-Game action/reactions and Out-Of-Game action/reactions.  A
hockey player who kills someone doesn't get 5 minutes in the penalty box.
An out of game action should result in an out of game response.  By
bluring the lines, you remove the abstraction that the game _must_ provide
to be a game.

-Greg