[MUD-Dev] Game construction and a big mistake

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

I was thinking about the nontraditional games Jon Lambert suggested, and it
brought to mind the biggest mistake I ever made building games.

I wrote a BBS door game once, which I intended to later release to the
public as shareware. It was an arrogant but well-intentioned concept,
intended to appeal broadly to anyone and everyone as a very low-detail
social simulation to make you consider specific interpersonal issues, and I
put the first version up on my BBS in Virginia (The Crimson Tide, at the
time -- later TriniTech, formerly The Abyss). The end result was that
everyone was pissed off at me for writing it and at each other for the way
they played the game, and it was probably the single biggest failure I have
ever been responsible for. 

And I was a defense contractor, so that's saying something. ;)

The name of the game was "Color Wars", and when you signed on you were
assigned a random color from the eight available high-intensity ANSI
colors, and an "opinion" of all the available colors, in which your own
color got a bonus. You wandered around and talked to other players, and you
were given a menu of choices for what you could do to or for any given
person. Based on how you chose to react to other players, the approval
ratings fluctuated both on an individual and groupwide basis, and the
combination of individual and group approval was used to provide the menu;
if your approval of a given group was high, you could do primarily nice
things, whereas if your approval was low you could do primarily nasty
things. It was intended to make people think about the ridiculous nature of
racial prejudice and help stamp it out in some small way. 

Unfortunately, the colors often offended various groups because either the
approval rating was too low or the approval rating was higher than it was
in reality. Yellow and red offended Asians and Amerinds respectively. Since
dark grey is really bright black in ANSI, some computer-literate people of
color were offended by that as well. If the approval rating of white was
too low, people complained that it was unrealistic, and if it was too high
people complained that it was unnecessary to reflect the real world in the
game. A couple of Jewish players complained about blue, several players
couldn't differentiate between blue and cyan effectively, one Islamic
player complained about green, and many players were convinced that magenta
was really supposed to be hot pink and it was some sort of statement about
homosexuals. 

All in all, it offended a whole bunch of people, and the demographic was
frightening: to the last man, all of the players were rapidly lowering the
approval rating of EVERY color by consistently selecting the most vicious
option available to them. In no time at all, we had all out racial hatred
of the same general level as one would expect if there were eight political
parties modeled on Hitler's Nazi regime. People are evidently homicidal by
nature, and all too willing to treat anyone and everyone else like crap
given even the slightest encouragement.

On 01:01 PM 6/9/99 +00-05, I personally witnessed Jon A. Lambert jumping up
to say:
>
>Here's a list of games/activities that I'd like to see implemented on a 
>mud:
>
>Karoake

Heh... many Dikus offer a "Music" channel where you are expected to quote
song lyrics. I think that's about as close as anyone's come. 

And how about hide-and-go-seek? :)

Kick the can strikes me as doable within the context of Ultimate Universe.
You could have a device which carries with it some amount of desirable
commodity. When you acquire it, you just hold onto it through the
maintenance cycle, and you get whatever's in it. However, it will then
leave your possession to travel randomly to someplace else, and acquire
through unspecified means something else its next locator can take. I don't
think this will fit well into the context of the storyline, but it's a neat
idea.

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
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