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

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 24 Jul 1998 16:08:25 -0500 
Michael Willey<Michael.Willey at abnamro.com> wrote:

> Author: s001gmu at nova.wright.edu

>   Theoretically, the point of a 'reputation system' is to simulate
> people acquiring a reputation from the news and rumors spread about
> their actions, right?  It makes sense to track information regarding
> their actions somehow in order to simulate reactions from NPC
> characters, but why do players need that crutch?  Unlike NPCs, they
> have the ability to listen to the rumor mill and make up their own
> opinions.

There are two reasons:

  1) Players are not connected 24/7 and so don't have available the
constant social feedback that defines a social context as well as "the
word on the street".  Tracking and publishing this sort of data
doesn't solve this problem, but does lessen aspects of it.

  2) The quantity of data attached to a character that is accessable
by others is tiny.  Compare RL: At one glance you can judge age,
occupation, racial and cultural background, education type and level,
affluence level, broad social traits, character type etc.  Heck, just
hink about how much you can tell by looking at someone's face.  Little
to none of that data is available about a MUD character.  Any sense of
history assosciated with a character is utterly impermanent and vapid.
Any sence of relevance, of implicit connected-ness of a character to
the basic structure of the world is a logical overlay rather than a
functional tenet.  Reputation systems, again, can't solve this, but
they can do a little.

>   You may argue that Bernie, at the least, needs to see those
> numbers.  I would say that Bernie is the *last* person who needs
> them.  He knows what he's been up to lately, and can decide for
> himself whether his actions will have consequences.

Which is an interesting point in its reflection on orthogonality and
its implication on transparency.  IRL we all know how we see other
people.  We don't know how they see us.  We know how they _say_ they
see us, we know how they seem to act to us, but we don't know exactly
what they see.  In MUDs we see player's descriptions and their stats.
Run the same commands on our own characters and you'll see the same
output as any one else.  What we see of ourselves is __exactly__ what
they see.  What's worse we know that *everybody* will see exactly the
same thing, and that that same thing will also be the same thing that
we see of ourselves.

Earlier there was discussion of having descriptions and other
generated output run thru a filter based on the experience line of the
viewer.  Thus descriptions would be tailored to what the player
character had experienced and seen, to the level of some data being
supressed and other data emphasized due to the altered levels of
importance that pertained to that specific character (eg warriors
would notice battle scars and the states of weapons, tailors would
notice the material used in clothing and details of its repair, etc).
Thus each character would see something potentially different from
what any other character saw of the same item, ad this in turn would
be guaranteed different from what that character saw of himself.


--
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...