[MUD-Dev] List rituals

[J C Lawrence]

None of the following written as list owner.

On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 09:35:30 +0200 
Ola Fosheim <=?iso-8859-1?Q?Gr=F8stad?= <olag at ifi.uio.no>> wrote:

> Discussing:

>   * what a character really is, is a bi-annual MUD-Dev ritual.

We've certainly hit it before and quite hard, but not from the
current direction.  Mihaley's insistence on mechanical definition
and dialectic logic for the topic has driven it in a few new
directions.

>   * in-game mail and the lack thereof is a ritual.

Off hand I recall only one prior thread that went this way, and it
did so only cursorily.

>   * the moral aspects of (random) player killing, followed up by
> list members confessing their PK career, is an annual ritual
> (well, now it seems to be called "grief" play).

Historically this has been split into the PK good/bad threads, the
how-to-implement-PK threads, and the how-to-control-PK threads.
We've not had them as incestuously knit before.  There's been some
integration work to going on there.  Not as much as I'd like, but
enough to nod at.

>   * UDP vs TCP is an annual ritual.

Recurrent, never has been a deep, long, or particularly content full
thread, just an arm-waving assessment and comment on the fact that
there are differences and you should be choose wisely.

>   * level vs skill systems is a ritual

It used to be common, especially on the "Levels are BAD!" side.
Been a while since we hit there with more than yawns or a dismissive
"It all depends really," assessment.  I think this is a shame.
There's raw meat still left in scoping and defining the basic
structures of MUDs in terms of player goal determination,
acquisition scales and approaches, player value perception, ROI etc
etc etc yada yada.  We've not really backed out much to try and look
at a meta level beyond a few dismissive hook and cherry models of
advancement scales.

>   * rollplay vs roleacting is a ritual

Yup.

>   * what this list really is about is a ritual.

Its rarely been a full blown thread, but there's a steady stream of
side notes on already extant threads, yes.  Arguably I've encouraged
this (I've a fondness for parenthetical expression), and my
moderation style has sustained the mystery and its surrounding
hubbub.

>   * rituals is a ritual.

You bet.  Earliest example: MUD-Dev is a MUD.  Second earliest
example: Even non-roleplayers roleplay, they just don't know it.

  ObNote: Actually there is an even earlier ritual, but none of the
  people who were active on the list at that time are still active,
  and the ritual died ~4 years ago.  Careful archive readers might
  find it tho (I haven't checked).

> In a sense these discussions are good, because they are general.
> You don't have to be a commercial game designer to have a say, and
> thus they bridge the gaps across the MUD-Dev population.

They serve other purposes as well.  On the one side they serve to
develop and establish concepts of "common wisdom", and on the other
side they serve to challenge those same assumed orthodoxies and get
the zealots to admit that it is a judgment call.  There's also a
second order value in educating new members who haven't learned from
the archives and need live repetition to grok.  We've gone through
waves of messages with URLs from the archives on that score.

MUD-Dev is repetitive in these regards.  I've been fairly pleased in
most such repetitions there has been some new new ground covered,
even if it proved barren.  

> These discussions are never conclusive...

Are ___ANY___ topics or threads on MUD-Dev ever really conclusive? 
And, in fact sre any of the topics usually discussed capable of
being conclusively answered?

Is the field deterministic?

This is not a fault of the list, but of the topic.  The list largely
deals with soft topics which come down to questions of evaluation,
order of importances, personal preference, as well as even softer
influences such as cultural predilictions, demographics, etc.  We're
dealing with people, not machines.  In a sense the job of the list
is teaching its members how to think intelligently about the field
while learning how to do it itself.  

  The blind and dub/voiceless are trying to lead the blind and deaf.
  Its hard to be surprised at the fact of comedy.

> ... but they reinforce the common understanding of what a MUD
> really is, or an appreciation of the fuzziness of the border.

Precisely.  

> (Big commercial games are not all that interesting either, they
> look good, but don't seem to be all that novel design wise.  

Investors are risk adverse.  Such higher cost businesses are
inherently invested in heavily normed populations which are subject
to mass market mechanics (and in norming those populations further).
I know you're well familiar with this territory Ola.

You rarely get ground breaking advances from such commercial sectors
-- they're too invested in the status quo and incremental
development revenue stream growth and return as the accepted form of
risk management (there are exceptions, just not many).

> What makes them interesting is that they have enough players to
> validate a particular design model. Unfortunately all the
> interesting topics (design, theory, new ideas etc) seem to be
> killed more or less instantly, maybe the list has too many members
> to be productive? If productive means anything more than
> information dispersal...)

Its a good question.  My suspicion is two fold:

  1) I haven't lead and formed the list over the last year as much
  as I should.  There's much I could and should have done over the
  last 18 months I didn't.  There appear to have been gains from my
  inactivity which I haven't appreciated, but I suspect we netted a
  loss.  My bad.  

  2) Human interest and cognitive development is non-linear.  It
  follows a drunkard's walk.  In an idealistic sense this is
  incredibly wasteful in terms of efficiency of progress toward
  known goals.  The problem is that the actual definition of the
  goals can't be fully defined until after they are accomplished,
  and human vagary and brownian motion encourages as many gems to be
  found on the back-staggering retreats as it does the forward
  lurches.  

  Think of it as an evolutionary process: there are more dead
  mutants than surviving ideotypes (if that's not a word it is now).

    Or if you want, think of it in terms of political and economic
    theory.  Theoretically fully planned and organised economies are
    maximally efficient.  Human implementations of such don't tend
    to work out that way.  Neither does or has MUD-Dev despite
    efforts (and requests) in that direction.

Of course properly this thread should be on Meta rather than here,
but then I'm not writing as list owner.  Urk.

>> Yeah, MUDs don't REALLY have any control over when a character
>> dies.  So?  Would could knee-cap every discussion on any topic
>> ranging from PKing to resurrection with that.  I don't think that
>> would be particularly useful.

> PK discussions are always knee-capped, by the topic's spamminess.
> They never go anywhere.  They are never useful (except for the
> ritual aspect).

Here I diagree, vehemently.  The PK debate on the surface is
monochromatic.  When dug at colours appears, both in the fact that
even without explicit systems players will manipulate each other,
and will explicitly manipulate each other in ways that upsets
them. hurts them, causes pain, and deals with concepts of
ideotypical (to coin a term) mortality (the mortality of valued
mental constructs, or in this case the mortality of a class of types
of mental constructs, ie, "ideotypes").

As members of western society we're typically unused to dealing with
mortality as a iterative process and our culture in particular is
not adapted to that.  Other societies which deal more intimately
with reincarnation still do not fluently express them as a regular
working concepts for day-to-day ordinariness-of-living
get-up-in-the-morning-and-go-to-work-and-I've-got-a-headache world
views.

That's juicy stuff in there.  It also juicy stuff that we've not
even begun to bite into, tho the recent thread on character
definition in terms of permadeath definitions has gotten closer to
that direction than any previous attempt.

  In the middle days of setting up MERA I was asked what my purpose
  for MUD-Dev and MERA was.  The answer I gave at the time (somewhat
  fleshed out below):

    "We are about to enter a period where we cease to be human by
    any definition of humanity that we have or suspect now.  I'd
    like to be prepared for that, or at least to have some level
    of foresight and prediction than go in blind."

  Its not a great answer.  It is _an_ answer. however, which
  probably suffices.

> Discussions about character is slightly more useful because they
> create a common understanding of design limitations.  I.e. you can
> only affect a character through design if the character's
> repertoire is dependent on in-game resources that are unique to
> your game.  Meaning, design decisions will always hit your
> population unevenly.  Designers never get to define the
> characters.  They want to, they can't, and they complain about it.

Nail.  Hammer.  Hit.

> (Easily verified by looking through the archive) 

Yup.  I'm getting to like the flexibility of the new search engine.
(The fact that it mis-logs titles for archived messages is annoying,
but I think I know why and hot to fix).

--
J C Lawrence                                             claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                                http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
I never claimed to be human.
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