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

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 04:26 PM 7/29/98 -0700, I personally witnessed J C Lawrence jumping up
to say:
>On Thu, 9 Jul 1998 12:28:48 -0500 
>cat <cat at bga.com> wrote:
>
>> 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 think much of what we discuss is applicable to both genres. I'm a lot
more interested in creating something like a MUSH than something like a
MUD. You get less players, but the players you get tend to be more devoted. 

>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?

There's an additional focus, sort of like the lurker in a mailing list...
the focus on the other people in the game and what they do. To a large
extent, most of us here do that. We don't just look at the game, we look at
what the people are doing in the game. And we ask ourselves why a lot. Why
are people logging onto this big, expansive, carefully-constructed game...
and then hanging out at one location in a huge group discussing their CD
collections, movies they've seen, and their personal sexual habits? What
has gone wrong here? There are four hundred rooms, and everyone's in the
same one... and nobody's playing. Why did this happen? How would I stop it?
Would I want to stop it? Should I support it, instead? What exactly is
happening? Why do people do this? 

Have you ever logged onto a MUD and seen that everyone on it is apparently
idle, but the who list says they're active? And then after a little
investigation, you discover a heated debate about the relative merits of
Hanson and the Spice Girls on some internal channel? And you look around at
this huge MUD that people spent a lot of time and effort to build, and you
wonder why everyone would waste it on some stripped-down imitation of IRC? 

I don't get that. Maybe one day I'll figure it out. ;)