[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[John Buehler]

Jon Lambert writes:
> John Buehler wrote:
>> Jon Lambert writes:

>>> How about this definition:

>>>   Permadeath occurs when the player decides that the character
>>>   they have been playing is dead.

>> Actually, I was thinking about this the other day - that
>> permadeath occurs when OTHER PEOPLE decide that the character you
>> have been playing is dead.  I can claim to be Charlemagne all I
>> want, but nobody is going to believe me or act on the idea that
>> it's true.  If the systems of the game are sufficient to make
>> players believe that Bob's character is dead, it's dead.  But
>> we're still playing with that grey area of perceptions.  The next
>> step is to talk about why people would assume that the next
>> character played by me isn't the same as the last character
>> played by me.  I took my stab at that in my last post on this
>> thread.

> I had thought about that angle but then I have a little trouble
> defining who the other people really are, and whether it's simply
> a majority view or unanimous view.  Do you confine "others" to
> those who knew Bob the recently deceased?  Then Bob is dead is
> most of them agree that Bob is dead.  Certainly even if Bob2 is
> played by the same player, they might still conclude that Bob is
> dead, and Bob2 is a wholly different character even if
> substantially similar in personality to Bob.

If I say that Bob is dead, then Bob is dead.  If you say he's alive,
then he's alive.  The bottom line is that it's just a perception
issue, and must be addressed on an individual by individual basis.
It's similar to whether we think Bob is nice.  If you say he is and
I say he's not, is Bob nice or not?  There is no courtroom
definition of 'nice'.  It's just a perception issue.  So it is with
avatar death.  It's just a perception thing, and it's about the
perceptions of others, not the player running the character.

> In truth we are talking about two kinds of permadeath, one part
> social and one mechanical.  In a role-playing game death is social
> or much more like real death.  One knows that Bob is dead.  One
> will never ever interact with Bob again.  One accepts that.

A social death is primarily one of an agreement to the idea that Bob
is dead.  Given that agreement, perceptions are altered and Bob is
as dead as he's going to get.  With mechanical systems, the systems
attempt to set perceptions.  As Matt has clearly pointed out, just
about any system can be defeated to some degree, because the
perception of Bob being alive can usually be perpetuated.  So
mechanical systems will succeed in convincing some people and not
others.

Perhaps we could rate death according to a poll of players.  The
greater the percentage of players who think that a character is dead
after X, the higher a rating the game gets for the permanence of its
death model.

> Another interesting feature is that in many muds players seek
> death as a mechanism to starting over in the "social aspects" of
> the game.  It's _rare_ but sometimes a socially obnoxious and/or
> outcast/banned player changes their ways and attempts a second
> chance at returning to the game.

And in that case, there is the desire to establish the perception
that Bob is dead.  As much as is possible, the player will attempt
to create discontinuity between the old and new characters,
encouraging others to adopt the perception that Bob is dead.

JB

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