[MUD-Dev] Re: npc memory and reactions

[James Wilson]

On Sat, 05 Sep 1998, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
>I would care quite a bit if someone were wearing a swastika on a MUD, but I
>would never think to register an interest in it. I would be quite unable to
>fathom the existence of any measurable likelihood that someone would wear
>one, and therefore even if the thought occurred to me I would be unlikely
>to define any sort of event related to that possibility. 

instead of a swastika, it could be a clan emblem, for instance, which members
and enemies of the clan would care about but nobody else would. Or "wearing
the swastika" as act-which-makes-Zeke-mad could be replaced with "worships
the devil" or "kills bunnies" or whatever.

>There's also a problem related to what exactly a swastika *is*. We all
>remember the movie 'V', in which the visitors' symbol looked very much like
>a swastika but most definitely was not a swastika; although it was a
>'not-swastika', the red/white/black coloration of the flag and the general
>shape of the symbol *suggested* a swastika. This sort of thing almost

hmmm, yes. In order to determine that Tom is wearing a swastika, everything
that has a swastika on it would have to be pre-flagged. If he puts on
a big nazi coat, it would have to have some machine-reasonable info
on it saying 'I display a swastika'... this doesn't seem like too big a price.
You would need to put this information into all those swastika-
adorned items. I come from the SGML world, where there's always multiple 
views of information, so I would probably want to support "naked eye"
information ("You see a black, hooked symbol on a red background") as
well as differing social overlays ("You see a swastika", or, if you're
a Navaho, "You see a [insert Navaho word for the same symbol here]"). 
All Zeke cares about is "coat displays swastika", which would of course 
be represented in some convenient internal form.

This ignores the question of what happens if a player manages to somehow
draw a swastika on his coat without setting the "coat displays swastika" 
tuple.

[snip interesting graphical stuff]

>>If there is also a mechanism
>>for transmitting memories from NPC to NPC (possibly distorting
>>them along the way) this could be quite a nice system.
>
>This seems like the "right" way to do things, if you ask me. Zeke can pass
>on the information he has, but someone who has never met Tom has no access
>to that information.

Yes, for (a sort of) realism. However, let me play devil's advocate: the whole
PK discussion brought  up the idea of a reputation system, which could be used
(among other things) to simulate the consequences of social mores in the
absence of a real society. As I understand it, they mainly consist of some
flags which warn EVERYONE who meets that person that they are wicked (and 
thus these flags help protect newbies). Realism in this case is a bit hamstrung
by the UNreality of mud society, and perhaps we need to resort to setting 'evil
bits' so the practical effects of social condemnation (or perhaps mixed support
and condemnation, as the example with the revolutionaries suggested) can be
simulated.

James