[MUD-Dev] OOC functionality (was: I Want to Forge Swords. [Another letter to game designers])

[Greg Munt]

-----Original Message-----
From: Eli Stevens <listsub at wickedgrey.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: 06 May 2001 6:36 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] I Want to Forge Swords. [Another letter to game
designers]

> This all assumes that the community aspect of the game requires the
> avatars to occupy nearby locations in the gameworld.  This
> assumption is not really valid - the community could be built around
> a buddy-chat metaphor, or the guild hall could be a halfway point
> between being logged into the gameworld and being logged off.  Or
> the community could be based (in a sci-fi setting) around plugging
> into the matrix and meeting your friends online (geez, log onto the
> 'Net to play a game where you plug into the matrix to meet your
> friends?  Can you play games there?  Will there be grief players? 
> ;).  Or any number of other ideas.

In the context of world simulations, I have always had a problem
envisaging how real community-building would work. Why? Because I see
the community aspect to be wholly outside of the game's reality. Any
"in-game community" is based on out-of-game community. The former just
cannot exist without the latter. My problem is that having
player-to-player communication within a world simulation will easily
damage the internal consistency, the immersion, the suspension of
disbelief. (I keep going on about these things. I think they are
really important.) But, without them, you've pretty much got no
community. There has to be a tradeoff between internal consistency and
player satisfaction ('fun') - it's a very real problem, the existence
of which I find frustrating and annoying.

The solution (which isn't really a solution at all, to my mind) is to
have an OOC area. This is like the "halfway between connected and
disconnected" state that someone else has referred to on this
list. Basically, you connect to the server. At this time, you are not
in any kind of 'world', as such.  You can do all kinds of OOC things
here. You can access community newsgroups, chat to other players
directly, stuff like that. I'm imagining an IRCish place, with a heavy
talker influence. You can also choose to enter a world. (Of which
there may potentially be several.) Or you could play any number of
(multiplayer) OOC games.

Once in a world, you can't access OOC commands directly. You can't
communicate directly to players. The only form of communication
available is that offered by the world you are in. This may include
horrible, horrible hacks like telepathy-tells. You want to do some OOC
stuff? Come out of the world, back into the OOC area. Potentially, you
could have shortcuts that can access OOC commands without exiting the
world you are in, but I'd try to resist that. The reason for this is
to force the player into switching context whenever they want to do
OOC stuff - so that the world and OOC are kept seperate in their mind.

> One method that might work with a little refinement has a guild's
> halls scattered around the world in logical places.  Each of those
> places is an entrance to the same interior.  There, the players can
> interact socially, but can only leave to the location that they
> entered from.  Of course, a glass wall would have to be up to keep
> the avatars from interacting in any way with permanent game mechanic
> manifestations (unless they came from the same entrance), as this
> would probably be used to defeat the reason the world is so large in
> the first place.  Illusion / projection might be the explanation to
> use in a fantasy world, but I am sure there are better, depending on
> the setting.

I like this idea. In fact, it might fit in with the above quite well -
instead of typing a command to leave the world, you have to go to a
guildhall...

How have you approached the consistency/fun tradeoff? Or have you made
OOC stuff part of the world?

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