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

[Matt Chatterley]

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On 01-Jul-98 J C Lawrence wrote:
> 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?

Definition is everything, really. You could argue that in some ways combat and
conflict are synonymous, and also make a good case for combat as being 'a
situation in which one or more parties attempt to inflict damage upon another
party or parties', in which case, social bashing, and so forth is most
definitely combatative. Almost all Mud-like games contain combat. At some
point. Even social games. Formalising it is a deliberate design step (as you
say), and sometimes a theoretical one (guidelines for combat within roleplayed
environments with a low code footprint). Nowhere is 'combat free', anyway.

>>> 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).

Yup. Its a key design decision - do you want effects on the world to be
literal, or played out by players. The potential for 'damage' by a player who
doesn't quite understand what is going on (damage defined as irritation,
confusion and other types of harm spread amongst his/her peers), is minimised
by a large code pawprint, and maximised by a small one - its a matter of
restriction. This is largely irrelevant (in my view), because it all boils down
to what you are trying to create. It doesn't become relevant unless you give
consideration to how players (or rather, characters) are to interact within
your world. Similar to Bartle's paper on 'suits' - at one level it tries to
give an overview of social dynamics, and at quite another, it attempts to
encourage a very, very cautious (and premeditated) approach to these things.

> 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.

Ayup.

[Snip rest, no interesting comments to make]

- ---
        -Matt Chatterley
        http://user.itl.net/~neddy/
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.." -John Lennon (Imagine)

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