[MUD-Dev] Are eBay sales more than just a fad?

[Madman Across the Water]

[Apologies if this arrives twice- my first attempt at a send was
responded to by a "mail undeliverable" message.]

Joe Andrieu wrote:
> 
> It all depends on how you define your fiction.
> 
> Does the importance of available leisure time over financial resources
> "break" the fiction of being an interesting character in a virtual
> world?  Why then would the reverse? Or perhaps more to the point,
> *both* break the fiction in roughly the same way for different people.

In most MUDs, your character tends to be in a "coma", you could say,
while you are not logged in. However, let's say a MUD decided that you
weren't- you're character is still active while you are away, perhaps as
a city guard or a blacksmith or whatever.
In a system where your character does not go to sleep when you
disconnect, I withdraw (most of the way, anyway) my objection to it on
the grounds of fiction breaking- your character DID get the longsword
Ezwilden for himself, just not while you were "watching" him.
So you're right, it depends on how you define your fiction.
Even so, I'm going to respond to a few of the below points. 

> Food for thought: Does the size of my allowance/disposable income
> break the fiction of Pokemon or Magic the Gathering?

Fiction? I'm not playing a character when I play Magic the Gathering.
There's no fiction there for me to break.

> There are a lot of rules of how not to break the illusion of
> disbelief. And they are different for every medium. In fact, different
> works in different media have successfully established different
> rulesets--and broken the conventions of their genre to desirable
> effect.  It is _consistency_ within a given ruleset that is far more
> important than maintaining some ideal of "fiction".

True. Perhaps I posit that it seems inherantly more difficult to make
one that holds together when items and skills can appear out of nowhere.
:>

Adam



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