[MUD-Dev] Self-Sufficient Worlds

[Zak Jarvis]

> From: Lee Sheldon [linearno at gte.net]
> Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 9:02 AM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Self-Sufficient Worlds

> > From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu
> > [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> > Zak Jarvis
> > Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2000 8:03 PM
> > To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> > Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Self-Sufficient Worlds
>
> <snip>
>
> > What I want, ultimately, is for the biography of a sizable
> > portion of the player population to contain the puzzle pieces
> > which tell a series of larger and larger stories - stories
> > which are not mapped out beforehand, but flow out of the
> > interactions between each other and their environment.

> > Given my definitions, how would you use a team of writers to
> > accomplish my
> > goals?

> LOL, I don't think what you describe is practical, but you don't
> think what I describe is practical, so we're okay there.

Clearly we're getting somewhere. We have agreement on what we don't agree
on. ;)

Actually though, I'm still not exactly clear enough on what you're
advocating to say whether or not I think it's practical.

> Setting that aside, given your goals, writers trying to shoehorn
> story into the proceedings would be very intrusive and undesirable.
> It sounds as if you would not want any conscious shaping of
> the course of events beyond what the players can manage.
> I can't tell for sure whether there would be any NPCs in your
> world, or not.  If yes, if I were you, I'd cozy up to at least
> one writer to handle their characters and dialogue. :)

The more I think about it, the less I want the classical version of NPC's.
NPC's would largely take the form of menus, and I completely agree.  This
is where writers come in. Fortunately, I'm married to one.

It's worth noting, however, that what I'm advocating isn't purely
player-scripted storytelling either. My experiment is for a system that
generates a framework that the players work off of and tie into.

Lately, my concerns with it are less technical than philosophic. Namely, I
don't want to create a system which makes players feel a *need* to play the
game, as it's my opinion that games players don't feel they have a choice
whether or not to are games players end up hating. See the recent Ten
Commandments thread for what I mean about hating.

The root of this whole line of thought for me is my conviction that with
multiplayer games the need for democracy scales with the size of the
population. IE, in small games (20-150 simultaneous users) democracy is
much less important than order. With tens of thousands of simultaneous
players, it becomes increasingly important for the players that democracy
and empowerment be equivalent.

The model for how to manage smaller scale games is -- for me -- the GM who
took me aside to discuss where I saw my character going, and how serious he
was about his motivations. As far as I'm concerned, this is the way that
storytelling should be done when you can have a reasonable GM-to-player
ratio (which I define usually as one GM or admin per 20 players, though it
is preferable to have smaller ratios).

Watching Simultronics games for the last 11 years, I've seen a kind of
psychological neotony developing that really disturbs me. The extremely
top-down style of management seems to be breeding players whose grasp of
the world is so fragile that poor punctuation ruins their fun. (I'm
exaggerating only slightly here.)

But this is another subject entirely.

Hrmph.  So, what exactly *are* you advocating, Lee?

<grin>

-Zak Jarvis
 http://www.voidmonster.com





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