[MUD-Dev] "An essay on d00dism and the MMORPG"

[msew]

At 18:41 11/26/2000 +0000, Marian Griffith wrote:

> To me this is not only condescending, but also quite wrong. I do not
> propose a mud as an environment to teach social skills, but to treat
> anybody inside a mud the same way as these archetypical youths are
> treated in their real lives is morally reprehensible (always wanted
> to use that word ;) These people may not 'get' the social aspect of
> the game, but the do 'get the game' quite nicely. Rather than seeing
> them as a 'force of nature' that should be tormented out of the game
> we, as game designers, should perhaps give them some hooks to create
> rudimentary social skills.  They get enough tormenting in real life,
> that the mud is an essential escape for them.

why not have games/muds as the new teachers of society?

Ultima IV did it for me.  The virtue system was a big part of my
childhood.  Everything you did in the game affected your virtues.
Certainly you could cheat the system (ie giving 99 gold to the blind
reagent seller) but it was wonderfully done.  And it was wonderful
when you found out your actions affected you virtues.

I also really disagreed with the "answers" the author proposed.  They
are just ways of ignoring the problem and sandboxing it.  See no
d00ds, hear no d00ds, there must not be any d00ds!  Problem solved.
BAH

It seems that the youth of the next few generations will be spending a
lot of their time and energy in various virtual environments.  Whether
these are full blown VR worlds or whether they are just the next
generation of graphical muds.  The fact is that MASSIVE amounts of
time will be spent in these environments.

Instead of just having people go and kill rats and frogluks or run
around the world doing fedex quests, can't we add some interesting
moral / social dilemmas that have no real answer but instead provoke
debate from the player community?  In addition to the stories regaling
the tale of how the guild killed the uber dragon for the first time,
have people debating whether or not they should have returned the
stolen gold that the beggar stole from the corrupt baron or should you
tell the baron the beggar got away.


I really really like the idea of something akin to the book in the
Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.


I am not certain that a mud / virtual environment should replace the
school systems we currently use as irl human contact is a teaching
mechanism in its own right, but I think we as designers should try to
add thought provoking situations that are just not: how do I solve
this puzzle, but more moral / social dilemmas.



msew

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