[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 26 Sep 1998 17:28:53 -0500 
Koster, Raph<rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:

> I've often seen it cited as a rule that room descriptions in muds
> should not impose feelings on the player or character.

> How do you feel about room descriptions like these? These are from
> an area I did for Legend which was never completed, themed around an
> idealized 1950s:

For me they define one end of a scale where one end aims to generate a
pre-defined first person introspective and self-aware viewpoint in the
player, and the other end merely requests that the playe be aware of
(only) the salient points of his physical surroundings, eg:

  > l
  A small room with a low ceiling.
  There is a sword here.

Your examples attempt to generate much more of a literary/immersive
story-telling experience.  In essence, in game form, the attempt to
engender a sense of defined personality (you mentioned the child),
viewpoint, and development.  Not to bludgeon the crowd with the
all-knowing archives, in quite a way this parallels the development of
the story telling process that Mike Sellers described back in,

  http://www.kanga.nu/~petidomo/lists/mud-dev/1998Q1/msg00188.html

--<cut>--

My best memories of RPing have to do with seeing the world through my
character's eyes in a way that had some personal or emotional impact.
My favorite "Call of Cthulhu" character, Guido Lentini (gangster and
member of a family that controls a large cheese-making empire :) ) has
worked with others in the group towards common goals using everything
from bribes to his favorite SMG; but the real *roleplaying* comes out
in times when I have had to choose to help one character over another
based on Guido's relationship with each, not with my relationship with
the players behind them, or when I have had to react based on Guido's
view of himself and the world.

This is difficult to describe, but I think to some degree it comes
down to the relationship between plot, theme, and character in
fiction: our characters live (via our roleplaying) only to the extent
that we are able to flesh them out.  The events that happen and the
goals they are working toward are the plot, but this is just a
lifeless string of events unless there is some theme, likely different
for each character but no less personal and real for that, that binds
the whole together and gives it some human context.

Another way to look at this is contained in the story of Beowulf, as
it's changed over the centuries.  As I understand it, the story
progressed along lines something like this:

1) We went out.  We killed the monster. 

2) We went out.  We killed the monster.  We came home and got drunk.

3) We went out.  We were scared.  We killed the monster.  We came home
and got drunk.

4) We went out.  We were scared.  We killed the monster.  We saved our
village.  We came home and got drunk.

Most RPGs/MUDs/etc are at 1) or 2) above: just the external facts,
perhaps with a little heroic celebrating.  The addition of the
internalization evident in 3) is signficant, and is the beginning of
real theater, roleplaying, and satisfying fiction.  With 4) we see the
beginning of the addition of the theme, the human-mythic context that
makes the story *meaningful* and adds human context to the string of
events.  That, I guess, is the kind of thing I'm going for in my games
(tabletop or online).

I continue to think that there is immense commercial and human value
in this, but that actually doing it is no easy feat.

--<cut>--

I know how I like my fiction.  I also know how I like my games (MUDs),
and they are not the same.  #4 above, if imposed by a game would drive
me nuts and right off the game.  Then again I don't view my MUDding
experience as either story telling or fictional in the process of it
occurring, only after it has happened when viewed in retrospect.  In
essence this means that while I am playing I'm not taking part in a
story, I am rather deliberately playing a game.  However, after the
game I describe the prior actions in story-telling form.

In a way this is much like RL -- right now I am not considering my own
emotional state, reactions, the characterful references to the several
score wind-up toys scattered over my desk, the collection of frog
ornaments atop the monitor and on the windowsill, the yellow and
purple scale Plymouth Prowler models, the Rubic's dodecahedron, the
yellow "Kangaroos crossing" street sign on the wall, the gallon jar of
pistachios beside me, the 8 stuffed penguins scattered about, or the
black Cerebus/Kerberos glaring down red-eyed over it all from atop the
bookshelf right beside the goofy-eyed inebriated dragon.  I'm also not
really thinking about the fact that my last changes to the list
software STILL don't work, that I need to reconfigure xntp on the mail
server, that I'm typing on an IBM keyboard plugged into a DEC
workstation with an HP monitor atop it, or that I'm eating far too
many dried cranberries right now and my tongue is beginning to pickle.
Instead, I'm typing a message into Xemacs with a wan and wish that I'd
remembered to send home my last ELisp changes from work while thinking
intently about what the structural elements of a sense of "place"
within a game are as well as what defines the minimal requirements for
a sense of place and whether those requirements are universal or
potentially player-specific.  Mono-maniacal?

Real life is only a story after it has happened.  The process of life
isn't a story.  MUDs allow two disperate views of time and reality in
this regard in that they can concetrate either on the immediate *or*
on the story.  They can concentrate the attention in the
here-and-the-now, and thus remove all pretense of story telling from
the _process_, or they can put a (large) fraction of the concentration
on the context of the actions and thus engender a story-sense to the
proceedings.  

The former of course bears close relation to DOOM-esque twitch games.
Listen however to the stories that Quake players tell each other
however.  The stories did happen -- just only in retrospect.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...