[MUD-Dev] List rituals

[Travis Casey]

Wednesday, June 27, 2001, 11:11:50 PM, J C Lawrence wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 12:04:21 -0400
> Travis Casey <efindel at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Wednesday, June 27, 2001, 3:31:50 AM, J C Lawrence wrote:
>>> On Sun, 24 Jun 2001 15:38:41 +0200 Ola Fosheim
>>> <=?iso-8859-1?Q?Gr=F8stad?= <olag at ifi.uio.no>> wrote:
>>>> J C Lawrence wrote:

>>>> The net result may be that designers are no longer able to see
>>>> the mechanisms behind strategic game play.  Neat. :)

>>> Quite.  It encourages attempting detente.

>> I'd like to note that the whole notion of "detente" depends on
>> something else: the idea that the game is a struggle or
>> competition between the game designers/builders and the players.
>> This is not the only model for games.

> Yup, its only really applicable to GoP games.

Well, it doesn't even apply to all GoP games.  For example, consider
a mud where the setup is one group of players vs. another -- it's a
GoP mud, with a goal of "defeat the other team", but there's no
struggle between players and the game's designers/builders.  Thus,
there's no reason to hide your strategic communications from the
designers.

There's also the possibility of a trusted admin -- e.g., in D&D
games, the group will often discuss their plans in front of the GM.
They're trusting the GM not to unfairly take advantage of the fact
that they're doing so.  (Indeed, they *have* to trust the GM to some
extent, since a pencil-and-paper GM can easily change such things as
the number of NPCs present, what weapons they have, their combat
skill, etc. at the drop of a hat.)

In a mud, this kind of trust generally doesn't happen, because the
players don't know the GM personally, the way they do in a
pencil-and-paper RPG.  Further, the same level of trust isn't
necessary, because a mud GM generally *can't* change the
capabilities of monsters, the existence of traps, etc. instantly and
seamlessly, the way a pencil-and-paper GM can.

I understand that some pencil-and-paper groups don't trust the GM to
that extent, and instead use a sort of split-GM model: there's the
GM, who performs much of the world setup and all the "game judge"
activities, and an Adversary, who is responsible for running the
opposition to the players (and sometimes for creating it, with
guidelines given to him/her by the GM).  If a mud used this sort of
model, it should be possible to set things up so that the GM has
access to player communications, but the Adversary does not.

(For that matter, many muds already have limited forms of this.  For
example, where there's an admin/builder split, often the admins have
access to in-game mail and such, but the builders don't.  The
players, however, generally perceive the admins as being in league
with the builders -- and are often right, at that.)

>> The biggest problem that I see is the lack of real
>> world-modeling.  Most games don't really try to model the world,
>> but instead are...  well, games, with very arbitrary limits on
>> what can and can't be done.  For example, in how many muds or
>> MMORPGs could you dig a tunnel from a nearby forest into the
>> dungeons of a castle?  Almost none.

> There are two levels of strategy in that regard:

>   1) Doing something logically consistent based on the assumed
>   real-world-like rules of the game world

>   2) Doing something logically possible given the capability
>   definitions of the game world.

> You seem to be referring to #1.  Players generally seem to be
> referring to #2.  The interesting part I see is not in attempting
> #1, but in making a sufficiently detailed and logically consistent
> (to itself) #2.

My goal is that #2 should be as similar to #1 as possible.  Ideally,
anything that your character could do in the game world, you should
be able to have your character do within the game.

Now, that's not always achievable, of course -- but I think that it
is a good goal to keep in mind.

>> The flexibility of a world-modeling system allows an incredible
>> number of creative solutions to problems.

> Yospe has talked about some interesting work in this area.

Yep... I remember those, and always thought that they sounded like a
wonderful basis for the kind of things I'd really like to do.

>> This is both a blessing and a curse, though -- if the players are
>> truly free to come up with creative solutions to obstacles they
>> encounter in the game, then the amount of work that the game
>> designers and builders have to do goes up exponentially, since
>> they have to try to anticipate the creative solutions and guard
>> against them in some way, so that they don't become easy routes
>> to success.

> Quite.  Complexity theory comes to dominate and balance
> calculations tend to go out the window.  About the only approach
> then is to make balance calculations dynamic based on observed
> action.  This tends to unfairly (?) penalise the skillful, as well
> as unfairly (?)  advantaging the rummager in out of the way places
> and challenges.

I'm not sure what sort of balance calculations you're referring to
-- do you mean calculations used to establish a "difficulty" for a
task, so you can set a reward for the task based on that?

>> It should be noted that goals can be temporary in scope: for
>> example, if I'm playing basketball, I have a goal of getting the
>> ball into a particular net.  However, that doesn't continue to be
>> a goal for me after the game is over.

>> Humans have many goals -- at a wild guess, I'd say that the
>> average person has hundreds or thousands of goals, counting at a
>> detailed level.  It's hard to keep track of that many goals
>> analytically, so we abstract them into such things as
>> preferences.

> There are human activities for which it can be difficult to
> determine an itemisable goal.  The critical bit is that while the
> actual goal is difficult to determine, the observed behaviour is
> consistent with having a goal (people work quite hard to get to go
> the beach).

>   Certainly my sons who are both being on their very extra special
>   best behaviour and sucking royally up all this week so they can
>   have a chance of going to the beach again this coming weekend
>   would seem to have a goal for beach going, even if its not clear
>   what their goal is once there.

Why can't, "spend time at the beach" be the actual goal?

I think sometimes people get too caught up in the terminology of
goals as being used in business, programming, etc., and forget that
there's nothing that requires a goal to have a tangible payoff.  If
you like an activity, then the simple enjoyment you get from it may
be enough to make it a goal.  Even "doing nothing" can be a goal,
for someone who needs a chance to rest and relax.

Goals don't have to make logical sense, especially from the point of
view of an outside observer.  I'm certain that many people would
think that my own personal goal to obtain copies of certain RPGs,
even though I have no desire to actually play those games, makes no
sense.  Why would you want a game that you're not going to play?

Personally, I'm a pragmatist -- I'd say that if their behavior is
consistent with having a goal, then we can say they have that goal,
even if that goal doesn't seem to make logical sense.

>> Would a PBEM RPG game be a mud, then?  The need to have a GM in
>> order to do anything significant doesn't seem to be an obstacle
>> to being a mud... what level of automation is necessary to be a
>> mud?

> You've read the bit on the list page about the definition of "MUD"
> ad the drop of ink?  This is among the reasons I made the charter
> for MERA so broad: I see PBWEM and LARP (for instance) sharing
> several core concerns with more classical MUDs.  At a point
> boundaries have to be drawn, but at this point I see no danger of
> crossing them, and I suspect I'll know much more about it should
> we get close.

I'd read it before, but it had been a long time, and I'd forgotten
it.  As you say, I see a lot of points of similarity between them,
and I think the different communities have things to learn from each
other.  That's one reason why I stay here, even though I have little
active interest in muds right now.

>> Personally, I let a lot of posts just go by me, because of just
>> that -- if I responded to *everything* that interested me, I'd
>> spend way too much time on responses.  One technique I like to
>> try to use is to wait a couple of days after a post, and see what
>> answers have gone by.  Often someone else will have made the same
>> point that I would have made, at which point I don't have to.

> Having done much the same thing I've a second order effect of
> doing that in that waiting reduces the perceived urgency of
> replying.  When its fresh it is interesting, new, and somewhat
> urgent.  Nobody may have raised the points you wanted to do but
> after a few days it tends to get stale,

That can be a bad side effect... but it can also be a good one,
especially where posts that elicit a strong emotion are considered.
Cooling-off periods can be a wonderful way to prevent flamewars.
:-)

>> As the old saying goes, if you don't like what's being posted,
>> post something different.  If there's an "interesting part" that
>> you think isn't getting attention, try to draw some attention to
>> it.

> That too, tho it seems quite unsuccessful when I say that.

I think part of it is that it's often much easier to respond to a
post than to create one from scratch.  Responding to a post gives
you something concrete to work off of -- something you can compare
and contrast your own stand with.  Creating a post requires you to
work without guidelines, creating from scratch.

Also, creating a post requires a bit of courage, or possibly of
pride -- the belief that you actually have something interesting
enough that other people will want to read it or respond to it.
When responding to a post, you know that you're probably going to
have an audience of at least one who's interested; the original
poster.

>> What if you were aware that "you" were actually incarnated in
>> many different physical bodies at once, and that your continued
>> existence was, in truth, independent of the existence of any of
>> those?

> Hehn.  Are you trying to bring back my whole rant and championing
> of swarm bodies?  I've been thinking of working that into a
> discussion for a while now.  There's some interesting implications
> in there I've not dug at yet.

I was thinking more in terms of having characters on multiple muds,
but having multiple characters/bodies in one game could also
qualify.

--
Travis Casey
efindel at earthlink.net

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