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

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> J C Lawrence
> Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2000 7:42 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Report: MUD-Dev dinner of 10 June 2000
>

>   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.

"We" being who? The commercial industry, this list, the hobbyist field?

>   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.

You arrived at a solution, yes? Please share. ;)

>   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.

An interesting quote from the Lum site review of Vampire: the Masquerade:

"Imagine if you were trying to run an improv interactive theater with
audience participation.  Now imagine if the audience was encouraged just to
walk in and out of 400 other similar plays.  This gives you an idea of the
magnitude of the problem faced by those wishing to run a game... The only
games that seemed to be running were frag fests, where the "storyteller"
would throw down monsters for players to kill."

Given the massive success that WoD has had on MUSHes, this is rather
disappointing; it also raises the spectre of whether, given Neverwinter
Nights, most people will run Diablo-with-better-graphics servers.

>   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.

Love to hear more discussion of this, what got said?

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

What did you conclude?

>   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.

Details?

>   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.

DEFINITELY want details. ;) By private email if need be...!

>   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.

Eep, where do you get the impression I can do that? I have to search for
URLs like everyone else... I can usually pull *keywords* and often message
thread titles out of memory though.

>   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.

Interesting. What was the sense on how MUD-Dev changed?




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