[MUD-Dev] Roleplaying in Muds

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 22 Jul 2000 02:09:28 +0300 
Solmyr of the Azure Star <solmyr at kolumbus.fi> wrote:

> I don't know why people think that levels or lack thereof somehow
> affect people's roleplaying. RP is not dependent on the technical
> rules, it comes from the player and his own imagination. I fail to
> see how removing levels and/or combat would somehow suddenly
> improve the quality of RP on a mud, if its players didn't make any
> additional efforts to roleplay.

A more simple problem is that there seems to be no single or even
generally agreed upon definition for "roleplay".  We seem to be
pretty certain what defines rollplaying as different from
roleplaying, and have nice definitional distinctions there, but the
term role playing is used for everything from full immersion story
telling, to minor attempts to stay IC by not talking about OOC items
in-game, to full identity assumption to pompous language choice.
Instead we have a lot of, "Well, I know it when I see it," which
doesn't really help a lot.

So what actually ___IS___ roleplaying at a definitional level?  What
are its boundaries(when does story telling for instance cease to be
RP, and when does simple in-game GoP play begine to be or cease to
be RP?  

Arguably your average Quake player, playing Quake is actually a
pretty good roleplayer given the venue (eternal combat, effective
identity immortality, honour thru sustained frag rate -- all very
Valhalla-like, just minus the feasting).  No?  Why not?

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                               Other: coder at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/        Keys etc: finger claw at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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