[MUD-Dev] Report: MUD-Dev dinner of 10 June 2000

[J C Lawrence]

A slightly smaller showing than last time, but Mike Sellers manfully
succeeded in making up for that.  Attendee list (from memory, sorry
if I miss anyone, in order I remember them sitting about the table):

  Jeff Rawlings
  Wes Connell
  J C Lawrence
  Brian Green
  Mike Sellers
  Mathew Mihaley
  David Bennet
  Par Winzell
  Dave Kennerly
  Joe Andrieu

Photos (carefully not encluding me) will be found under the
following URL as soon as I finish pulling them off the camera:

  http://www.kanga.nu:9009/events/SV.dinner-10.june.2000/images/

Note, they're not there yet.  Soon.  It will be another hour or so
at this rate (not a fast link, and the photos are scattered between
two cards containing other photos).  Yes, I'll get a gallery script
up.

A good time was had by all, the food was excellent (even the
unpronouncable lemon chicken soup), and way too many people spent
way too many hours standing about outside after the dinner still
talking (Brian and I were prime (and lunatic) offenders).
Conversation was generally an active demonstration of the art of the
uncontrolled segue (I was a prime aoffender), which was both one of
its strengths and greatest annoyances.  Unfortunately the group was
a little too small to support two ongoing discussion threads, and a
little too big to be comfortable with just one thread.  The standard
long/narrow table seating pattern didn't help.  We really need to
get something much closer to a round table approach which would have
worked better for running a single conversation.

The concensus was to do the next Silicon Valley dinner in two
months.  Mike might do a barbecue out his his place before then
(gotta check with SWMBO), but that would be a more family non-MUD
focussed event (poke Jon Lambert).  A major comment was that making
them monthly, tho appealing, would also make them much easier to
miss, and would therefore reduce their value (the fact that you know 
certain people are going to be there, and that there will be a
critical mass of people seems to be a necessary assumption).

Topics mentioned in no other order than my failing memories burps
follow.  The list is incompleat, I didn't keep notes.  If I missed
something, please chime in.  Careful readers will be able to deduce
which topics came up after the restaurant give us all free glasses
of (a rather tasty) plum wine (we got a little more silly).

  Mike repeated the offer/idea to do a barbecue at his house in
Pleasanton sometime later this summer.  Given how much of the whites 
of his eyes were showing by the end of the evening, one hopes he's
currently not trying to emmigrate to Sealand/HavenCo instead.

  Some discussion of the implications of looking at your game world
design from the vantage of the world being the only actually
persistent item, and players being entirely transitory or
ghost-like.

  That our current crop of persistent world games are entirely TOO
persistent and that this is destroying much of their gameplay value.
What they really are are static backdrops where the players can only
move minor (and meaningless) scenery pieces about in the forground
while nothing actually changes in the game or game world.

  Some discussion of busniess models, VC and angel funding routes.

  Brian Green popped up repeatedly with Schubert's triangle
(simulation, community, game) as being a defining field for game
definition, and then kept mapping things against that triangle.  His
assertion is that we're going way too heavy on the simulationist
aspect and are dropping out the corner way too much.

  Some discussion of L^HPostLinear and the story of ten6.

  Some discussion of the political and bloody history of M59.

  Why Firefly really can't and didn't/won't work as a method peer
review and interest mapping.

  People who use Emacs.  (Mike Sellers had his ears soundly boxed
for deprecating Emacs).  Horror/funny stories on accidentally
invoking Life, Psychoanalyze and other cute Emacs games on source
buffers.

  The fact that we all refused to be involved in a vi vs Emacs
discussion, and that if David Bennett aka Pink Fish even tried we'd
do something nasty.

  What the first really big (and expensive) flop in the commercial
MUD arena will be, and what effects that will have on commercial
development budgets and activities.

  What will be the first 1 Million subscriber MUD?  My suggestion
was that if anybody did EQ/DIKU with oversized and explicit
genitalia (both sexes) _and_ explicitly supported rape, all with
full first person graphical imagery that you'd ping 1 million
subscribers within a couple months.  Of course you'd also ping a
million we-want-to-see-you-dead crusaders within as many days.
However it is one of those ideas which is far too cheap and easy to
do for it not to be done.

  Some discussion of sexually explicit/adult MUDs and why they don't
exist outside of FurryMUCKs and the TinySex models.

  How much I really dislike the terms MMPOG and MMORPG and feel that
they are inherently distractive and destructive of useful
conversation in the field due to their misplacing of emphasis and
attention.

  Brief discussion of business models for niche MUDs.

  Some discussion of the history of Maxis.

  How to build a decent and interesting world which embodies complex
player-based political and social systems and is yet populated by
players who login for only brief periods and in general just don't
care about and are not interested in investing themselves in the
game.

  How Never Winter Nights maps very well to the old D&D style
players of a small group of friends who got together of an evening
to run a campaign one of them GMed, how much fun that basic concept
was, what we've lost in ignoring that activity in our MUD designs
(outside of MUSHes), and some reference to the impacts of this on
player stories and player's awareness of their own stories and
scope.

  Some rejection of the fact that we've been concentrating on the
large player base and large community models for our (commercial)
worlds, and entirely ignoring the idea of a world built from very
large numbers of very small groups (5 to 20 people with the mean
between 5 and 10).  I argued that LambdaMOO exists solely on this
model (and is an entirely commercially ignored model unlike DIKU
(EQ), LP (AC), etc) Never Winter Nights was mentioned as hitting
this end hard, and being something worth watching in detail in this
regard, with the regret that there is/will be little to no support
for inter-group communication or any surrounding persistent world

  How neat/impressive/large the NWN demo is.  My note, not having
seen it, was that all the enthusiasm seemed to be surrounding how
cool the graphics were.  (Mike Sellers said he'd post the URL of the
demo.  Warning: the movie is several hundred Meg).

  Some discussion of what occurred legally/financially between the
DIKU people and EQ.  Most reactions were of the, "Well, duh!" or,
"That's just not surprising," variety.

  How neat Turbine's technology is, and related to that what AC did
right, and why they're remaining such a bit player. Also how MS'es
backing of AC helps and hinders them.

  Some discussion of what we all read, and what the value would be
of me starting a what-we-read mailing list to run in parallel to
MUD-Dev.  (I'll probably do this)  Some discussion was related to
this of how much our designs are influenced and inspired by various
and specific pieces of fiction.

  Peeling off that discussion, we also hit the areas of story
construction and method, with me championing Algis Budrys (an author
I love tho most people's reaction was, "Who?") and Mike Sellers
speaking at length about an author/book whose name I just can't
recall and wish I could.  (Mike, mind posting the details on that
thing and the whole dramatic analysis of Casablanca bit?)  

  What really makes an excellent backstory, and what are some ideal
examples of backstories in games.  I proposed Myst as having almost
the perfect backstory.  This was generally agreed to except that
applying the Myst model to a MUD seemed way too difficult/fragile to
several people.  I'm not convinced.  Prove me wrong.  

  Some discussion of the value of particular MUD-Dev members as
holding and maintaining variously extreme/different/uncommon values
and viewpoints, the beneficial effect this has on discussion and
topic development and coverage, and what some of the points/aspects
are that just aren't being occupied/championed and what a shame that
is (eg Dr Cat, John Bertoglio, and a couple others, the whole heavy
RP end, the purely GoP end (glorified Quake), a hobbyest MUDs,
etc).  How, for such a fractured field, there's too much consensus
on the list.

  What sucks about Gamasutra and (less so) Lum, and yet why we still
do (or don't) read them.  Why Gammasutra just has not and will not
live up to its promise.  (You may detect personal bias on my part
here) and the role that Kanga.Nu and MUD-Dev have played there in
breaking the normal development chain of newbies participate, slowly
become experienced and finally peerage, and then turn around and
sponsor/act-as-patrons for the next crop of newbies before falling
out themselves.  I also have a long standing question as to where
all the referrer tags I get in my logs coming from Gamsutra.  I have
a devil of a time finding mentioned of Kanga.Nu/MUD-Dev there.

  What function Kanga.Nu and MUD-Dev play in the industry and how.

  How each of the people had found out about MUD-Dev's existance and
what their expectations were and why they joined.  This is a topic
I'd love to see discussed on the Meta list.  I consider it key to
improving Kanga.Nu's services.

  How large and intractable the archives are, and what might be done
to make them more useful and flexible.  Summary, I have to get all
this wiki stuff and the people pages done.  (I'm still happy with my
current DB design for it, and only have an hour or so a week to
devote to it)

  Will I eventually have to deputise and allow others to actively
assist in the running and development of Kanga.Nu (eg perhaps as
MUD-Dev moderators, SysAdmins, web developers, etc), and what the
risks of that would be and how it might alter the focus and
definition of Kanga.Nu's product.

  The problems of the MUD-Dev peerage, in what ways the existance of
the peerage is a Really Good And Necessary Thing, and how the only
effective/helpful address is to pump up the peerage, not to devalue
it.

  Some aspects of the list culture, such as the view of "I owe the
list and am obligated to write high signal posts" and how that was
created and is supported.

  Will Sealand/HavenCo manage to survive, and if so, why?

  What the implosion model is for commercial MUDs on player base
size, and what the threshold values are.  How once a threshold is
crossed the implosion becomes a chain reaction and accellerates
expontentially.  How M59 fits into and demonstrates this.

  My astonishment at how much consideration and thought some people
give to what happens at Kanga.Nu and Kanga.Nu's effect on the rest
of the field.  It appesrs that Kanga.Nu itself has become an object
of study for some people.  Flattering, yet boggling.

  Raph's likely problems at Verant, the culture clashes there, and
what management has to do with that.  The impact and import of the
Sony acquisition in this area.  Some of the behind the scenes
machinations surrounding the acquisition.  Frequent references were
made to UOs, AC's, and other projects and how their customer
relation experience demonstrated their internal state and operation.

  What is really going on with Furcadia?

  How very very sick, incestuous, back-stabbing, perniciously
political, etc the game development business really is.  Examples
(sadly) abounded.

  How sick, annoying, counter productive, and just stupid the whole
NDA model is.  Frequent references to "fungus" in this discussion.
There was also some talk of how short the half life of most IP is
now and just how people aren't realising that.  I referenced a
rather interesting speed Breau Vrolick gave at SGI on this topic
(his comment was that the half life of IT IP was now low single
digit months).

  What is left in rec.games.mud.*.

  The humour in MUD-Dev's old tagline, "MUD-Dev: Advancing an
unrealised future".

  The fact that certain people (Hi Raph!) are able to chant the URLs
to particular archive messages from memory as relevant to particular
topics, and what that really means about the impact of MUD-Dev and
its archives.

  Why a knowledgebase would be a Good Thing for Kanga.Nu, and some
of the characteristics such a knowledge base should have.  (I've
been looking at several)

  Why a weblog would be a Good Thing for Kanga.Nu, how that's not
really represented in the current market, and why Slash, PHPSlash,
and that thing that runs Advogato (forget name) would not be good
choices.

  Where/what is .nu, Niue, and where is Kanga.Nu itself?  (See the
first few links at http://www.kanga.nu/ for the first two, and
http://www.kanga.nu/home.php for the last).

  Mike talked of a group/weblog that discusses 'net culture and
living patterns on the 'net (Howard Rheingold?).  The only thing I
can remember is that you have to apply for posting rights, and that
you must post at least monthly or else you are unsubscribed.  Any
further details Mike?

  How people fail to keep up with MUD-Dev traffic, how they handle
that, how they wish they could keep up, the times they wish they had
kept current and why, the use and value of replying to very old
posts and thereby resurrecting topics, how they wish they had the
time to post a well thought out reply or represented a particular
view to the list that wasn't considered in a thread (and examples of
same), and their methods of triage for this area.  How MUD-Dev is
beginning to act as a journal for the field.  What MUD-Dev really
means to them in this regard, and has lived up to or failed to live
up to their hopes for it.

  How the character of MUD-Dev traffic fundamentally changed after
the first dinner at CGDC and why.  Related to which, the personal
networking benefits of MUD-Dev (and in particular the CGDC dinner)
both professionally and personally.  How the existance and operation
of the Meta list has also affected this.

Writing as list owner:

  Please feel free, nay, actively encouraged, to pick up these
topics for further discussion.  For some of the topics the Meta list
would be a better choice than here.  If you haven't subscribed to
Meta and wish to, please see:

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/Meta-L/
  http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/meta/

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


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