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

[Joe Andrieu]

> From: Madman Across the Water
> 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.

Hmmm... Actually, there are still weird "fiction" problems going on.  What
is the metaphysical explanation?  That the character is possessed once in a
while by a demon from the outside world? But most of the time bumbles along
like all the other NPCs?

The "coma" is actually not really implemented in most MUDs as much as it is
a "teleport" from nowhere, which at least Asheron's Call tried to make a
reasonable fiction out of.

> > 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.

I guess you win that point. In fact, there is a fiction. You are a wizard
battling other wizards in a world where territory gives you power and you
turn that power into monsters and spells in an attempt to kill the other
wizard.  It is a simple fiction; it works independent of the economics of
the business model.  However, it is obviously one that you didn't know
about, so perhaps it is "broken". On the other hand, that game is not
character-driven, and I think the fiction you are discussing is about more
than just characters.

> > 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.
> :>

Heh. Well, characters and monsters already appear out of nowhere in these
worlds and everyone accepts it as workable.  In fact, in many of these
games, skills do appear out of nowhere. At some arbitrary point in my
experience (when I hit some level of x.p.), I suddenly get more skills. Or
perhaps I complete a quest and the monk bestows a skill on me. But even in
the latter situation, my character is in no way actually *learning* the
skill.  Training? Practice? Theory?  All the rules are pretty arbitrary.
If you can draw the *player* into the fiction, instead of the character,
then you can do much much more interesting things without it feeling
inconsistent, faked, or "commercial".

The real issue, I think, is that most game players (and designers) have
yearned for a type of game that puts them on a playing field where they are
as good as anyone else with a chance to be the best. For adolescents and
college students, this easily translates into mitigating the advantage due
to wealth and instead creating systems where spending time in the world is
the currency.  But from the point of pure economic theory, there is no
difference between the two biases--financial or leisure time--except who
gets the inherent subsidy from the system.  If one just takes
wealth-building out of the game mechanic, you don't have to worry about
that.

-j





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