[MUD-Dev] Critiquing Muds

[Travis Casey]

On Monday, June 21, 1999, Marian Griffith wrote:

> There probably are many more, but these must be sufficient to start with.

> Game Oriented Play is where the player triest to beat the game. The player
> is not looking for an immersive experience,  or for any kind of experience
> at all.  Instead the aim is to achieve some kind of goal that the game has
> set. The most common type is the traditional mud where players must try to
> achieve the next level.  The means by which that is achieved may vary, but
> the players themselves are busy working towards that goal.

> Role Playing is where players do just that.  They have a character and are
> playing a role in a larger setting or scenario.  Many single player compu-
> ter games that are marketed as roleplaying are in fact game oriented play.
> The player is not playing any role but is rather trying to defeat the com-
> puter game.  The roleplaying aspect comes from the fact that there -is- a
> scenario that is being followed by the game. GOP games lack even that.

> Acting is the most immersive form of gaming. It is related to Role Playing
> but the player is trying to act out a character in a (game) world,  rather
> than playing a role in a scenario.  There is no clear distinction  between
> these three types of games, though in general  they focus  on one of them.
> Many roleplay oriented games vary between the acting and RP, or RP and GOP
> and even acting oriented games often have RP bits and pieces in them.

Some thoughts:

 - One way of distinguishing between GOP and RP is by the level from
   which major goals come.  In GOP, the player has certain goals, and
   uses the character as a game-piece in order to achieve those goals.
   In RP, the character has certain goals, and the player attempts to
   generate subgoals that the character might use to achieve its
   overall goals and achieve those.

   Thus, it's not actions which distinguish between the two, but the
   source of motivation.  The same actions might be taken by both a
   GOP player and and RP player, but for different reasons.

   For example, a GOPer might decide that she wants to be able to be
   able to beat any other player in the game.  In order to achieve
   this, she might try to build up the strongest possible character.

   An RPer might decide that his character has a goal of becoming as
   powerful as possible.  The result would be the same -- that the
   player tries to build up the strongest possible character.  Only
   the motivation differs.

   There is, however, one major difference in how GOPers and RPers
   tend to try to achieve goals:  an RPer generally attempts to work
   within the game world, while GOPers often go outside the bounds of
   the game world.  To relate this to the previous example, the GOPer
   might try to increase her character's power by using a client which
   allows her character to do things that it wouldn't otherwise be
   able to do.  An RPer would work within the game world to gain
   power; e.g., by making alliances with other characters.

 - This brings up the idea of "firewalling" -- something often talked
   about among "paper" RPGers, but which I've almost never seen
   discussed by mudders.  Put simply, the idea is that characters
   should only be able to act on knowledge that the character
   possesses, and not on knowledge that the player possesses but the
   character shouldn't.

   This is often one of the most difficult things for someone new to
   RP to do -- people simply aren't used to pretending not to know
   things that they really do know when deciding what to do.

   In particular, knowledge transfer between characters seems to
   happen often -- in theory, someone who was RPing perfectly and who
   made a new character would make that character not know things that
   the old character did.  This rarely seems to happen in muds.

 - Re: the "Acting" form of gaming.  I don't really see where this is
   a separate form -- to me, it's just immersive RP.

> Realism is a phrase  that repeatedly spawns heated debates  in news groups
> and mailing lists  that deal with muds.  The common misconception is  that
> realism means 'as in reality'.  In the mud community it does not.  Instead
> it is  the somewhat nebulous  quality  that the perceived laws of the game
> universe are consistent and reasonably predictable.  Having two goblins in
> the game,  one of which is found in the training grounds and is a practice
> target for new players,  and one who is found in a high level area and can
> wipe the floor with all but the most powerful characters is not realistic.
> Not because a goblin could not actually be that powerful but because first
> in the game a certain expectation is created  about the relative danger of
> a goblin which is subsequently ignored,  and second because usually by the
> game's laws of nature,  goblins are indeed weak and wimpy characters.

Hmm... I wouldn't call that unrealistic *unless* they either were the
only two goblins in the game, or there was no evidence elsewhere in
the game that goblins could become powerful.  If, say, there were
other goblins about that were more powerful than usual, but less
powerful than this one, there wouldn't be a problem.

> Completeness is the complement of Realism.  Where Realism is about consist-
> ency,  completeness is about the level of detail that is applied throughout
> the game. Again this is somewhat nebulous and encompasses more than the ob-
> vious meaning. The size of the game world, the level of meaningful details,
> things that are named are described or shown, and so on. For game mechanics
> a similar leve of completeness  is required.  If the game has fighter, mage
> and other classes each  of them must have a similar level of detail applied
> to their skills, abilities and gameplay.

I'd say that the completeness with which different parts of the game
should be presented depends on how important you want that part of
the game to be.  For example, if combat is not supposed to be
important, but social interaction with NPCs is supposed to be
important, you might want to have very abstract combat, but have
detailed systems for interacting with NPCs.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)





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