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

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 29 Jun 1998 20:58:23 -0500 (CDT) 
Cat <cat at bga.com> wrote:

> It is telling that you refer to "leaving combat out", as if the
> default state is to contain combat, and if you don't have it then
> you've "changed" something or done something "unusual".  I don't
> view combat as having been "left out" of IRC, ICQ, or the many
> TinyMUD descendants that don't contain any.  I view them as having
> "not been added in".  The words you use to describe a game without
> combat & the words I use to describe it are an indicator of our
> respective biases, I think.

Nahh.  Combat is very definitely a part and parcel of IRC, and
TinyMUDs -- they just haven't formalised it.  In the IRC cases
consider the cases of channel splitting, the use of robots to
steal/prevent stealing of admin priviledges etc, and for TinyMUDs,
wouldn't the LambdaMOO rape case serve well enough?

>> It is "shouldering the burden of organization on the code side" to
>> be exact. And it is, yes, a sacrifice of freedom of action for the
>> player.

> That's one way to look at it.  Another way to look at it is that
> environments where everything is done with a pose/emote type command
> offer the ultimate freedom of action, and games where they impose
> the game mechanics of the coded combat system on you off you less
> freedom of action.  

The counter to which is that posed command sets require other players
to assume the relative effects on the game world (as the server
doesn't track them).  The extreme of which of course has the server
providing no game world -- the whole things happens ala the
storytelling IRC channels (which are populaar I note).

There is a critical difference between:

  > pose carves his name on the tree

and:

  > carve bubba on tree

in terms of who creates the initial data set, and who creates and
manages the data's persistance.

> By refusing to allow you to do things that "aren't possible" in the
> combat rules, like making your sword turn into a pink-polka-dotted
> nuclear bomb, by refusing to allow you to hit (or miss) when you
> choose to do so, rather than when the dice come up the right way,
> and by making you subject to the effects of actions that, in a world
> of ultimate freedom of action, you might have chosen to respond to
> with the classic "bang you're dead - no I'm not" countermove.  Some
> freedom is added - the freedom to more effectively impose YOUR "bang
> you're dead" on a would-be no-I'm-notter, a freedom you don't have
> in the pose-everything world.  But it's freedom given one at the
> cost of taking from another, and there are freedoms globally removed
> from everybody, like the ability to turn your platemail instantly
> into fluffernutter sandwiches for a picnic, so I have to say the
> total, global amount of freedom becomes lower when you code combat
> into a game, not higher.

There are two base freedoms:

  1) The ability to create an effect.

  2) The ability to refuse or stop an effect.  (which is really just
the corrolary and counter to #1).

Formalised combat (swords etc) merely defines a certain class of
effects for #1.  As a side-effect it also defines the mechanics of #2
(armour, parry skill, etc).  

> Are the pkiller, the obscenity shouter, the game-crashing hacker,
> the entrance blocker examples of "agressor"?  Or are they examples
> of "thief"?  

Both.  The tags are not exclusionary.

> Somebody who is stealing the information-age currency of "attention"
> from you without giving the tradional sorts of payments, like being
> interesting, friendly, or helpful?  

As a friend put it (paraphrased): "The most prized particle there is,
is admiration."

> Personally, I really feel like attention-control mechanisms are far
> superior to life-and-death control mechanisms for a myriad of
> reasons, not the least of which is that they accurately represent
> what the players are REALLY dealing in with each other, trading,
> sharing, stealing, coveting.  

Why are lif-and-death control mechanisms not a mere class of
attention-control mechanisms?
 
> This particular incident involves, among other things, the use of
> posed violence and murder.  There's tension and dispute about such
> issues, among others, as whether to deal with the issue in an IC or
> OOC manner, whether the guild should RP conflicts with evil/violent
> characters who are non-members of the guild that come in trying to
> act out attacks, or if they need to establish some characters within
> their "RP Circle" who everyone agrees will be playing as evil.
> (Talzhemir, my co-creator, has guidelines for this in her Sanctioned
> Guilds page, indicating that evil characters should only be played
> in these situations by members of the guild, to avoid just exactly
> the kinds of problems The Circle is facing right now.  Of course
> most of them haven't read those guidelines yet - I'm going to
> suggest more of them take a peek.)

Coming from an utterly non-RP viewpoint, my instant answer to the
above dispute: "Coventry!".  If you don't like the chap or what he is
doing, and he is in essence unable to care direct effects on you, just
ignore him.  cf newsreader killfiles.  If they don't agree to the game
the other chap is playing, then there is no requirement that they play
it.

> There have also been incidents with players trying to cause OOC
> types of trouble for the guild - mostly people that have been
> ejected and/or banned from Sanctuary for being rude or not following
> the rules there.  A common attack against them is to surround the
> entrance to their map with obstacles so nobody can get in, which
> requires members to go and clear the obstacles.  There was also an
> incident where a member of the guild used a bot or macro to spam one
> of these "enemies" of the guild, prompting him to go after the guild
> more aggressively.  When the guild leader told him he mustn't spam
> people like that, he quit the guild in anger and vowed to become an
> enemy of the guild himself.

Any you say these aren't example of combat?

> In "astronomy mud" where some scientists are simulating physics in
> order to develop and test out theories about star and galaxy
> formation, simulating the presence of thousands or millions of
> rabbits and orcs upon that little "earth" planet (or any other
> planet), your ability to go there and kill them and eat them,
> etc. would be a huge waste of resources.  It would suck up
> programmer time to implement, and suck up disk space and memory
> during runtime, without contributing in the least to the goals of
> the project.  On the other hand, simulating the motion and
> gravitational effects in Ultima Online of some nebula or pulsar or
> black whole millions of light years from Britannia would be a waste
> of memory and disk space and CPU cycles on your servers.  Couldn't
> the astronomers rightly sneer that UO is not a "full environment"
> for not having that?  Or is it the case that A) there are no "full
> environments" possible (remember that a computer totally simulating
> the whole universe would have to contain a total simulation of
> itself within a subset of itself, leading to infinite regress), and
> B) you can't even meaningfully speak of "more full" or "less full",
> because different goal-sets for online environments aren't all
> co-linear, but rather scattered over a weird multidimensional
> solution space.

> I think "full environment" is just a prejudicial and misleading
> term.

The base question is what is being represented.  Typically in MUD what 
is being represetnted by players is themselves, or some other
"somebody".  In Astronomy MUD players are not representing themselves, 
they are representing astronomical figures.  Food, sex, etc are
important to Homo Sap. selves, but not really to galaxies.
The gravitational constant, relativistic effects, and vast distances
are important to astonomical objects, but hardly to Homo Sap. selves.

>>> Or, depending on the style and focus of the game, in some cases
>>> you could get a playership that is MORE conducive to good 
>>> self-government than a random samplying of average human beings
>>> would be.  Naturally.

> Earlier, in a passage I didn't quote, you replied to my believe that
> combat-games attract those least suited to self governance.  Here
> you agree that some type of game could attract people above average
> for it.  

"Above average"?  Above defines a scale and infers a degree of
desirability.  I question that validity.

> If the goal is to find a game model that causes self-governance to
> occur, then, it would seem reasonable to conclude that one should be
> seeking a game that does not contain combat, and that does have
> whatever it takes to attract these above average people.  

Given that the attracted set are not representative of the greater
population (ie the "average"), then a key question is whether any
results from such a constrained population can validly map to the
greater population.

> Ok, I'll go crawl back in my hole now.  98% of the list only wants
> to make games about combat, right?  :X)

Nahh.  Not _about_, just _inclusive_of_.

--
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...