FW: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[Travis Casey]

Thursday, March 29, 2001, 1:28:36 PM, Matt Mihaly
<the_logos at www.achaea.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Travis Casey wrote:
>> Matt Mihaly <the_logos at www.achaea.com> wrote:

>> I'd say that in a perfect world, you should be able to design the
>> game world without worrying about players using metagame methods.
>> From a practical point of view, though, you can't.  It's just like
>> computer security -- in a perfect world, no one would ever try to
>> harm your data or use your system for things you don't want it used
>> for.

> It has everything to do with it if you're actually designing a game.

Which is exactly what I said -- from a practical point of view (i.e.,
in actually doing it in the real world), you have to consider metagame
methods.

> I don't really see the relevance of claiming that in an ideal game
> there'd be no metagame methods.

The only relevance that I see is that the closer you can come to an
"ideal" RP-oriented group of players, the less you need to worry about
it.

To continue my security analogy from above: these days, with a
computer on the Internet, you need to worry a *lot* about security.
However, in other environments, that hasn't always been the case.
MIT's ITS (Incompatible Time-Sharing System) was set up with *no*
security (Literally.  The system was deliberately designed in such a
way that anyone could access anyone else's files, both for reading and
writing.), because the community that was using it had long been
sharing a single single-user machine, and thus, had already dealt with
the problem by ostracizing those who messed up other people's data.

To bring it back to muds: if you filter for roleplayers at the start
by using an application system, you won't have to worry nearly as much
about players applying out-of-character knowledge.

> I am all for metagame methods as I'm interested in entertaining
> players, not characters. Characters are datasets and have no money
> to give us. Without a metagame, you've just got a simulation with no
> player input.

As a hobbyist, I'm not worried about money.  And, IMHO, that's a
fundamental difference -- I can make whatever kind of mud I want, and
if it finds an audience and they're happy with it, and I'm happy, then
I can count it as a success.  Thus, I can do things that will limit my
audience extremely, which commercial muds would find much more
difficult to do as a practical matter.

The bad part about being a hobbyist is that it greatly limits the
resources one has available.  I don't *have* a mud right now, so all I
can do is talk about what I would do.  Ah, well... it's my own fault
for having too many hobbies.  :-)

>>> Shrug. I could make an equally silly statement: Even in a
>>> Power-gaming light MUD, roleplaying has no place. Both are
>>> statements I think are silly, because both illustrate a mindset
>>> that says "I want to make my players play like I want them to, not
>>> like they want to."

>> I think the mindset is rather "I want to play with other people who
>> like the same kind of game I do."  No force or coercion is
>> involved.

> But you said that power gaming has no place in MUDs. Did I
> misunderstand?

I didn't say that -- J. Coleman did.  I was simply trying to bring in
a different interpretation of the statement.

>> Adventure games (by which I mean what others would call
>> "powergaming" or "GoP" -oriented games) are a distinct type of game
>> from role-playing games.  They have similarities, but there are
>> also differences.

> Ah hah, I see what you mean.

Good, good.  :-)

>> It's like the difference between an action movie and an art house
>> movie.  Are the makers of art house movies silly because they're
>> making movies that a lot of people won't want to watch?

> If you've read my posts lately, I suspect you already know the
> answer to that. I have infinitely more respect for art house
> directors than I do for, say, Michael Bay.

:-)

>> However, I would distinguish between powergaming and cheating.  Not
>> all powergamers are cheaters -- and many who are "cheating" by the
>> stricter standards don't understand that what they're doing is
>> considered to be cheating.  Powergaming can be a legitimate part of
>> an RP environment.

> It's also not a binary condition. Few worlds are either
> "roleplaying" OR "powergaming". Most are combinations of the
> two. (It's also not a two-dimensional scale with just combinations
> of those two absolutes determining the sort of world you have.)

Yep.  That's part of what I meant in saying that it can be a
legitimate part.  A hypothetical "pure" powergamer could be very
disruptive to an RP-oriented mud, but a real gamer who has a high
interest in powergaming and moderate interest in roleplaying could be
an asset to an RP-oriented mud if the designers take time to think
about how to handle powergaming tendencies.

By "how to handle", I don't mean thinking about how to supress them --
I mean thinking about how to channel the player's love of powergaming
into working *within* the game world to gain power, instead of outside
of it.

  Travis' Rules of Roleplaying, #31 (collect them all!):

  Powergaming, expressed in character, becomes the desire for power --
  which is a perfectly fine thing for a character to have.

> As a designer, I feel you can head toward one of two poles:

>   1. Art-house: Design and implement only what you want. Damn the
>   player, because you're creating here and there's no way the
>   unwashed are going to sully your vision with their pedestrian
>   preferences.

Heh.  It is possible to do this without the attitude, but it does seem
to rare.  :-)

>    This is how all of the best art that I've ever seen, heard,
>    experienced, participated in, etc is created. I do not believe
>    commercial products are capable of moving all that far towards
>    this pole. Some (like myself) try, but mainly we fail in the
>    quest for the almighty dollar.

Well, I wouldn't call it failure so much as simply being limited in
how far you can go.  A commercial product has to keep an audience
large enough to support it.

>   2. Hollywood: Try to figure out what the lowest common denominator
>   wants and pander to that outrageously. This does take some skill,
>   of course, and some creative ability in that you need to interpret
>   the data you've (hopefully) gained from some sort of reasonably
>   analytical market study. Once you've done that, you create a
>   product based on it.

> What I think is interesting about this scale is that unlike most
> scales, there are actually a lot of products (we'll use movies as an
> example) that fall at the extremes. For instance, the American
> director John Sayles (Men With Guns, Lonestar, Limbo, etc) falls
> squarely at the Art-House end. He doesn't give a good goddam about
> what the audience wants. If you have some of the same aesthetic in
> you that he does, you'll absolutely love his movies (see Men With
> Guns particularly!) If you don't, you won't.

> On the other hand, it seems that about 20% of the movies coming out
> of Hollywood fall squarely on #2. No explanation needed there I'd
> assume.

> Apologies for the ramble. It's just that I've been doing a lot of
> thinking and talking lately on how badly the games industry needs
> the equivalent of the indie film scene.

It has an equivalent, but it's an early equivalent, I'd say.  Think
about what the indie film scene was like in, say, the 1960's.  Film
wasn't as widely considered an artistic medium then, so the "indies"
were things like AIP, turning out films like "The Horror of Party
Beach".

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_    Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)   


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