[MUD-Dev] The impact of the web on muds

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, Travis Casey <efindel at polaris.net> wrote:
>On Saturday, 17 January 98, Marian wrote:
>> not even about what you think a dragon looks like.  Those details will be
>> more easily supplied by the imagination of the players.  As a graphic ar-
>> ...
>
>But who says you have to?  Just as your text description doesn't try
>to give all the details of the dragon's color, size, texture, etc.
>that it could, there's no reason that a graphical representation has to
>be highly detailed.  The dragon could be shown in a cartoon/comic-book
>fashion, could be represented by a semi-abstract icon, or could be shown
>like a charcoal sketch.  Such representation leave more room for the
>player's imagination -- just as giving a less detailed textual
>description does.  (Granted, they don't leave *as much* room -- my point
>is simply that you seem to be contrasting a very sketchy description
>with a photo-realistic graphic depiction.)

A preface: I purchased a copy of Blade Runner by Westwood 
Studios a few weeks ago, quickly "finished" it, and have been reading
the [relatively sparse] reviews and discussions about the game.  I found 
the graphics, mood, and the pseudo-non-linear storyline to be well done.
One gem I came across in the GameSpot review: "The designers have chosen
a strange way to affect the plot - your behavior in the game actually
affects your fate."  But more than that, a lot of experienced gamers
complain that the graphics aren't any better than those in  
Gabriel Knight that came out in _1993_ (which I've never played).

I like to think that although there is a vocal share of the gaming
audience that demands the fanciest graphics requiring the fastest
machines, this visually oriented/impaired group is only a very small
part of the potential audience for VR and virtual environments.

People who demand the best (the most sophisticated) graphics are pretty
much stating that they don't want visual ambiguity or abstraction to be 
part of the game.  But ambiguity seems to be one of the potential
merits of text, so maybe it's not possible to please the people that
want cool graphics at the same time as the people who want compelling
environments.

The point isn't to argue against graphic-based muds but rather to figure
out how to introduce the good qualities of text muds to a 2- or 3-D
mud.  Often 3D designers use level of detail (LOD) to "simplify"
objects that may be far away from the user.  It is a practical concern:
too many polygons will slow down the graphics, and since things in the
distance are so small, no one will notice or care if they have less 
detail.  But why "things in the distance" and not "things of no
current interest"?

So maybe the dragon you are fighting has a really low polygon count.
You can see that is it green, and you've fought hundreds of green dragons
before, so you don't really care to examine it any closer.  To take a
good look at the dragon would take some time, much like the way reading
a text description of a monster takes your attention away from fighting
the monster.  And perhaps there are details hidden in the graphics
that would be useful in the fight, details you won't know unless you
look for them.

What this seems to be leading to: "looking" is an action.  For the most
part, you can look for free in text muds, and you can hardly avoid it in
2/3D muds.  Looking in detail is sometimes not a free action, but the
current 2/3D philosophy is that looking is always free.

(There are some cases where the player's perspective is intentionally
manipulated to make the game more challenging, such as in Mario64.
This relates more to the field of view and not so much to the presentation
of content which I'm implying above.)

Somehow this is related to:

>If a writer doesn't worry about "what is large and terrifying" to the
>reader, the result will be a poor description that won't make the
>reader feel anything -- although it might *tell* the reader what the
>writer wants him/her to feel.  A good writer *does* worry about these
>things.
>
>It's a careful balance -- when trying to create a description which
>evokes an emotion, you don't want to give too much detail, but you
>also don't want to give too little.  Unfortunately, where that balance
>lies differs for different people -- thus, some find H.P. Lovecraft's
>stories absolutely terrifying, while others find them stilted and
>boring.

"Terrifying" is subjective, and we all know that a walking tank will
refuse to admit being terrified by "a large scaly green dragon."  If
large is supposed to imply incomprehensibly vast then in the 2/3D case
we can certainly do that: don't ever show the entire dragon.  This 
leads back to the various discussions of scale and frame of reference.
This means leaving out some details (in this case the detail of there
actually being a whole dragon) to allow a player their own
interpretation.

It would be nice if players would accept charcoal sketches instead of
hi-res photo-realistic renders, those players are out there somewhere
(amazingly people are more discriminate about charcoal sketches than
they are about crappy 3D graphics).

Anyway, I sit and think about this all the time.  If anyone is 
interested in VRML and the crazed way I try to apply these notions
of representation take a look at
http://www.zennet.com/pub/misc/vrml/ (some models featured in the SGI
Buzz Wrl of the Week).

- Brandon Rickman - ashes at zennet.com -
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