[MUD-Dev] historians

[Matthew Mihaly]

Hi. I want to have a position in Achaea that consists of overseeing the
chronicles of Achaean history, and ensuring that all the plots and
intrigues and broad storylines are recorded for the sake of posterity, and
for the sake of making players want to behave in nicely epic ways in order
to get their names in the history (We have found that this sort of
incentive is absolutely huge to players. They love being immortalized.)
I'm wondering if any of you have any experience in terms of getting a
project like this off the ground, and keeping it going, and, if so, what
tips and pointers you may have for ensuring that the histories maintain a
reasonable degree of objectivity. Particularly, the problem I haven't
gotten around in my head yet is that allowing a mortal to do this sort of
thing is going to really open it up to more subjectivity than I'd like
(players in the game almost cannot avoid taking political sides, as they
are sort of forced in to being associated with one city state or another,
with one guild or another, etc, all of which compete or cooperate as
groups). Further, a mortal isn't generally going to see the big picture,
as he or she will just see things, for the most part, that affect him or
her. 

On the other hand, Gods tend to be slightly disconnected from the
day-in, day-out sense of things that makes for history that reflects the
times. They can see the big picture more easily, and can generally write
more objectively (as their emotional involvement in the affairs of
mortals is lower), but they miss that gritty in-the-middle-of-things
feeling that mortals can get.

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.
--matt




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