[MUD-Dev] Games within Games [Was: Gender and Mud Development]

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 9 Jun 99,, Kristen Koster wrote:
> At 1:01 PM 6/9/99, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> >Here's a list of games/activities that I'd like to see implemented on a
> >mud:
> >
> >Tag or Blind Man's bluff
> 
> Whoohoo!  LegendMUD has this.. of course we kinda stole the idea from
> World's of Carnage. We play recall tag. It's now in it's second
> implementation for automation and is a popular and oft requested game. I've
> also seen social tag (again.. Carnage).

Excellent.  Tag was a popular ancient Greek courtship ritual, and with
children as well.  I'm going to have to check out Legend I guess. :)
 
> We've also traditionally held "flag hunts" to encourage exploration. We've
> talked about various capture the flag variations as well, but suspect those
> would work best amongst the pkill crowd.

Mmm... Capture the flag is very popular on Quake servers and multi-player
realtime wargames.  Yes, this would be a good game for the pkill crowd.

Here's another idea.  Capture the flag using paintball guns.  Once you've 
been painted red, you're out, and will drop the flag or be unable to pick 
it up. 

> For April Fool's day this year we did try a "king of the hill" style game
> to stress test our dynamic clan/guild system and to give all the players
> who logged in that day a chance to experience it without having to form or
> join an established group. Each clan/guild tracks the leader by tallying up
> which members have pledged loyalty to which other members. Many complained
> this was just a popularity contest. For one day, yeah it probably would
> have been just that if I hadn't given out a small prize to every character
> that ended the day with someone else loyal to them, or loyal to another
> player. I can also think of pkill variations on this one too.

Haha.  This sounds like something that happens every fall on college
campuses on fraternity and sorority row.  I think Clans/guilds on social 
muds end up being quite similar.

> >Team Croquet
> 
> This would be interesting. *ponder*
>

"Off with her head" screamed the Red Queen. 

> >Karoake
> 
> We've had a couple of nights of Stand-Up Comics and StoryTelling. We used
> to run a Lecture Series that often had players as the speakers sharing
> topics that they were suitably knowlegable about. And we get lots of
> Karoake on the global channels. We occaisonally set up a conference(dynamic
> channel) just for song lyrics or jokes.

Dunno why I suggested Karoake.  Performances of songs, poetry readings, 
and plays would be interesting.  A client that has the feature of 
loading, entering and saving text files... and then presenting them in 
nice timed chunks to the room would help.  Sort of like textual 
PowerPoint presentations.  Or waiting on another actor .. mmm... 
inserting sounds :))

    "To be or not to be"
    <dramatic pause>
    "That is the question."
    <rumbling thunder>
    <quickly>
    Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows....
    ...blah
    The fair Ophelia! ...
    <wait on Ophelia>
    Oph.> Good my lord, ..
 
> Trivia is another popular past time when they're bored with hacking and
> slashing.
> 
> Another popular but administratively taxing game is "Casino Night" which is
> similar to a huge scavenger hunt (we've done plain jane ones of those too)
> where everyone who wishes to participate is given a "token" one of several
> different types. People have to gather as many as possible or match a
> certain preset list in order to get a bigger prize. Often these "tokens"
> are coveted to use as "strung items".

Ah.. games of chance are eternally popular and addicting.  Wait that's 
redundant, mudding's already addicting.   This is like adding nicotine to
cigarettes.  :P

> >Multi-player card games, like Hearts, Canasta, Bridge or Euchre
> 
> I recall a couple of our players mentioning they'd sat and played cards.. I
> know there's a full deck available to them in the game as individual card
> objects.

I bet this was difficult.  A special deck object would be nice that 
supported special commands.

  >get deck from pouch
  >shuffle deck
  >put deck on table in front of Bubba
  Bubba> cut deck  <---hopefully he had unreadied his battle axe ;)
  Bubba cuts the deck.  
  >deal 7 cards to Bubba, Biffy, Boffo, myself
  ..blah..
  need some commands to cheat too

> We also just added a dicetoss/coinroll command to allow for simple games of
> chance as well.

Nice.
 
> >Baseball, Football or Cricket
> 
> We have a new area coming in that will allow players to participate in a
> baseball game. The games will run with or without players, so if you just
> want to sit and watch you can do that too.

That should be interesting.  
 
> >Ballroom dancing
> 
> Sure would be more interesting than just the silly dance socials. *grin*
> We have had Halloween Costume Contests, which were interesting to say the least.
 
I was thinking that many of the concepts common to automated combat could
be used to implement social dancing.  Performance dancing could be done
like the plays and poetry readings.


--
--*     Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD Email:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com             *--
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