[MUD-Dev] historians

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Laurel Fan wrote:

> Excerpts from muddev: 30-Oct-99 [MUD-Dev] historians by Matthew
> Mihaly at best.com 
> > Hmm, I suppose I can just have the God manage a group of dedicated
> > historians, with various ones chosen from each side. The god could then
> > try to sort out some semblance of the truth by getting versions of it from
> > his followers, who would ideally be from various factions in the game.
> > This doesn't seem like a fantastically good solution to me, however, and
> > I'd be interested in hearing others.
> 
> I've never actually done this, so this is just speculation on my part...
> 
> In the real world, historians disagree about what really happened, and
> arguing about this is part of being a historian.  Of course, any
> individual will tend to see things from "their" side of things.  So as
> an IC-ish thing, I think multiple historians wouldn't be a bad idea,
> especially if some events are described from multiple points of view. 
> If you have kingdoms or religious groups, perhaps these could appoint
> their own "official" historians.. 

Sure, historians disagree, which is why I kept making sure I said that I
wanted people reasonable objective rather than completely objective. The
problem with encouraging history that is explicitly from one, very biased
viewpoint, is that you end up with an unfocused history of the world,
which confuses people. It's been my experience that mudders love a good,
solid history, but that they also like it to be neatly laid out for them.
Further, a few players have written extensive personal histories, some of
which I had to say 'no' to, because they were just blatant attempts ti
discredit other organizations by claiming that said organizations had
committed nasty horrible crimes against them as children, etc (none of
which ever happened). I guess I'd rather the history thing didn't turn
into  PR battle between factions within the game (happens enough as it
is).
--matt




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