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

[the_logos at www.achaea.com]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, msew wrote:

> 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?

Players create those on their own. I find that if you feed them a
dilemma like that, they view it as gameable and ignore it unless it
tangibly hurts or harms them. I can definitely see this not being the
case in a MUSH, but I suspect it's the case in most worlds.

I also think you're being a little naive. Look at the last US
election. Most people had no in-depth clue whatsoever about the issues
at hand. They were just perfectly willing to believe whatever they
were told by the media, and then applying a personal bias towards one
candidate or another to that information.

Real moral, philsosophical debate requires contemplation and it isn't
easy. Your 16 year old d00d is generally not interested and not
equipped, and if you try to make him do it, he's either going to quit
or he's going to just irritate the other players with fart jokes as he
has nothing to contribute.

> 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.

Well, remember that you don't get to decide what the players
discuss. That's up to them (unless you're _really_ into censoring
speech ala Threshold and whatnot and even then they'll just take it to
ICQ). Further, I think you'll find that in any of the large games, no
one is going ot care if they should have stolen the gold from the
beggar. GoP players, who make up the vast majority of people playing
MUDs, are just going to be happy they got free gold and hey, they
didn't even have to hurt anyone to do it! (a beggar is an NPC after
all and GoP players recognize that it's just there to get what you can
from it.)
 
> I really really like the idea of something akin to the book in the
> Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

I'm sure everyone does. Producing anything remotely like it is well
beyond our capabilities.
 
--matt

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