[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 9 Jul 1998 12:28:48 -0500 
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.

> There seems to be so much time spent playing these games, talking to
> other people that play these games, and talking to other people that
> program these games, that it's possible to get wrapped up in this
> mindset, perspective, and environment to the point of thinking that
> it IS the mainstream.  And losing sight of the big picture.  

Bingo -- and thus we have the endless graphical vs text flames in
r.g.m.* with healthy doses of "text MUDs == books" vs "graphical MUDs
== TV" claptrap. This is by its very nature an insular society with
few notable external inputs.

Such designs are not exactly recipes for survival.

> But this list doesn't even cover the totality of mud development,
> mostly only the subset that involves descendants of the combat
> oriented muds.  

<nod>

Please be careful to differentiate between the list's definition and
the character of the current list culture or population.

> 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.

> Instead of the interesting debate on whether or not it is or might
> be truly "necessary" to strike someone to deal with problems in an
> environment where combat and fighting aren't built into the code,
> the responses from various people drifted right back into the
> question of whether it is or isn't necessary in an environment that
> DOES have combat built in, and is in a setting (like medieval
> fantasy) where combat is normal and expected.  It seems this is the
> only kind of setting people here really want to talk about.

It is always easier to deal with familiar ground than foreign.  This
is no surprise.  If there's a specific point you want discussed you
need to play thead cop and constantly steer the discussion back to the
topic of choice.  The natural tendency is for each to tend to his own
hobby horse.

> "Oh, no problem!  If you don't like knights and wizards, go meet him
> in the new Futurama section and you can nail him with blasters and
> lightsabers instead!  Or if you're not into wild flights of fancy,
> more a down to earth, modern day, realistic guy - go over to
> Sim-Iraq, and you can attack him with guns, grenades, Scud Missiles,
> and germ warfare.  THAT will teach him to not go around posting
> obscene pictures in your photography SIG!"

> I mean, really - isn't anyone else capable of seeing it as extremist
> and ludicrous to think of striking people as universally necessary,
> rather than just necessary in certain specific types of
> environments?  Besides Marian, that is.

Again, there are at least two base viewpoints; the macro and the micro
vision:

  The VR service (or whatever collective term you want to apply to it)
has a basic function.  

    1) You can look the the service as a collection of individual
services each of which in its own arena has primacy with the service
as acting as framework or backdrop for the collected sub-services.

    2) You can also look at it such that the framework itself has the
primacy and the component services are lesser-than if not individually
almost insignificant.

The contrast is between the VR service as a collection of features
which happen to be collected (#1), or a world which happens to enclude
features (#2).  Do you use the VR service to take advantage of
specific features or venues it offers (eg the Photography SIG), or do
you use the VR service to manipulate and use the features it provides
as building blocks or tools?  What is yor focus?  The internal
feature/social_group/SIG/whatever, or the service/world as a whole and
your function in it?

They're not mutually exclusive of course, tho they are often treated
as such.

> Well I'm just a kangaroo.  Hop hop hop, boing boing.  Oh no thank
> you, no kangaroo-boxing for me today!  Nice plumage you've got
> there.  Hop hop.

I tend to have a prediliction for meta/macro views, so I'll vote for
the eye-in-the-sky.

--
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...