[MUD-Dev] Re: State of the art?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

> On 10:30 PM 2/17/99 -0800, I personally witnessed Matthew Mihaly jumping up
> to say:
> >Furthermore, the opinion of a novice in a field is, I think, rightfully
> >discarded as not valuable except from a user-interface point of view, or
> >when one is trying to market ones product to the greatest number of people
> >possible. In issues of quality and taste, experience and expertise is
> >called for, I think.
>
> I find this too offensive to respond to meaningfully, having tried for a
> couple hours to compose a reply that isn't a thinly-veiled flame, and will
> therefore stop with a simple registration of that offense.

I think you two are arguing from two different perspectives. Matt seems to be
arguing about MUDs as Art, wheras you seem to be arguing about MUDs as
infrastructure, or (god forbid) as entertainment.

Every field has several state-of-the-art aspects. MUDs are very heterogenous,
not only when comparing individual muds, but also when you look at what
constitutes a single mud. What you are discussing is basically not "state of
the art", but "state of the artS". Discussion is futile! (that "clicking is
futile" thing on the 3dfx site is really annoying :-).

One might talk about "state of the art" in the commercial gaming sector, but
there are sooo few so the concept makes little sense. The large gameproducers
are low risk noninventive copycats anyway, which renders the term fairly
useless. "state of affairs" might be a better word ;) What is "state of the
art" in interactive 3D computer graphics? Certainly not Quake, more likely
research funded by the military.

Hopefully future developments within the MUD field will ensure that there is no
"state of the art".  I for one would prefer widely adopted diversity...
--
Ola Fosheim Groestad,Norway      http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~olag/





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