[MUD-Dev] Missing MUD-Dev post (fwd)

[Dr. Cat]

JC Lawrence wrote:
> cat <cat at bga.com> wrote:
> 
> > [JCL:]
> 
> >> Dr. Cat does the extreme.
> 
> > I think this perspective may be fairly typical of the people on
> > mud-dev.  It's why I feel like a kangaroo at the annual emu and
> > ostrich convention.  There's nothing wrong with being an emu or an
> > ostrich, but kangaroos don't necessarily have enough in common with
> > them to have much to talk about.
> 
> > And I mean, really, you have to be really, really into your
> > ostrichness to think "oh, being featherless is some kinda extreme
> > unusual thing".
> 
> > How many of the almost six billion humans on this planet play games
> > where they make believe that they're striking Bubba with a sharp
> > object in order to get some coins, or some equivalent?  
> 
> There are at least two ways of viewing this.  One is by popularity
> count, and the other is by attempting to define a scale and noting
> what its end points are (or are approximated by).
> 
> In the latter method Furcadia fairly accurately defines one end of the 
> scale and is as such an extreme.

Actually, if you look at something like Raph's suggested MUD interface
to the Internet, I think you could view Furcadia and Ultima Online and
Bubba's Bodacious DikuMUD as all being pretty "way out there", in that
you're expecting people to make believe they're in some medeival
setting, act like different characters instead of acting like
themselves (I think they call that "roleplaying", has something to do
with that D&D thing I heard of once), to have some interest in gaming,
etc. etc.  All things pretty far from the mainstream.  If we zoom in
on that tiny little portion of what human beings on this planet are
interested in experiencing, until just the kinds of MUDs discussed on
this list are filling our entire field of view, and the Virtual
Walmart and the astronmer's scientific discussions MOO are out of our
range of vision entirely, then yes, you could find a zoom level
setting on the telephoto lens where Furcadia is on one edge of your
viewfinder - let's say the left side - and combat muds are on the
right edge of the viewfinder.

I think it's misleading to say "that's the extreme" though, because
that too easily supports the continued assumption that what's in the
viewfinder of our telephoto camera here is the whole universe.  If you
start zooming back again, I think what's revealed is that there's not
much to the right of the combat muds, but there's huge amounts of
territory to the left of Furcadia, far less weird, far more
mainstream.  That's why I wouldn't call it an extreme, that's an
illusion from being zoomed in too close.

If anything, I'd say that when you zoom all the way back, Furcadia
appears to be the exact same extreme as the DikuMUDs!  Way at the
right edge of the universe, and the fact that it's a few millimeters
further to the left really isn't distinguishable at that scale.

> > You don't see much talk about the MOO, MUSH, TinyMUD, MUCK and other
> > families of social muds.  
> 
> You did, once (or might have, it was just before your time AIR).  Us
> testosteronal types seems to have run them off.  This is perhaps not
> surprising, but is, umm, lamentable.  That said I'm just not sure that
> this venue can support two such actively diverse cultures
> simultaneously.  We don't have the traffic levels to sustain such a
> disparity.

I don't have much to say about this, other than I think you're
probably right.  If nobody has any desire to solve the Marian's Taylor
Problem in a way that's emotionally satisfying to tailors, as opposed
to a way that's emotional satisfying to warriors, then I don't think
you're ever going to get much in the way of active discussion about
MUSH-style approaches to roleplaying issues here.

I am glad to see some of the technical discussions like the one on the
overhead of select calls under Linux, anyhow.

*-----------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions     ||       Free alpha test:
*-----------------------------------------**  http://www.bga.com/furcadia
  Furcadia - a new graphic mud for PCs!   ||  Let your imagination soar!
*-----------------------------------------**-----------------------------*