Spaces or rooms? (Re: [MUD-Dev] Information sharing (was: Re:Wher are we now?))

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

"Koster, Raph" wrote: 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From:Ola Fosheim Grøstad

>> I don't see why "academic" should be unsuitable for design.  It
>> would be rather sad if that was the case... Maybe I got you wrong.

> What I meant was that often the analysis doesn't provide an
> assessment of the merit of each model specifically for game design
> purposes. It's often a theoretical analysis, rather than a practical
> one.

Hmm, for spaces maybe, but VR, HCI and CVE research tend to be rather
practical, design oriented, involving prototypes etc.

>> such.  Think of it as "spawn space" or "generator space" maybe. You
>> may say that the player is in the same room all the time but the
>> room itself is going through some kind of metamorphosis.

> OK--that seems like a very specific case, rather than a class of
> spatial structure. It's certainly a very interesting case--I've been
> toying with the notion of a storytelling multiplayer game that uses
> exactly that spatial model, actually.

Maybe you will beat me to it, then. *frown* And I would think that
such spaces would be closer to being a superset of other spaces rather
than a special case, but...

> Zones are usually set in spatial relationship to one another.

I still tend to feel that they are are approaching islands or at least
separate districts, due to the very distinct discontinuities. If sound
would leak from one zone to another then maybe I would feel different
about it.

> Chat channels, teleports, inconsistencies, etc, players seem to
> relate to as being layered on top of the basic spatial metaphor. We
> do speak of chat rooms, but channel is really a more proper term
> given the absence of a spatial metaphor.

Not sure, I sometimes feel close to experiencing it as a room. You've
got a room even if you are chatting in the dark, right?

> My definition of online worlds does leave out stuff like IRC for
> that reason; the presence of the spatial metaphor, of the sense of
> *place*, is to my mind sui generis.

Would you say that place does depend on a space? Well, depends on how
you define it I guess. There's this paper, which I am not all that
fond of, called "Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in
Collaborative Systems" by Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish, CSCW'96. If
you (or somebody else on the list) has read it, then I'd love to read
your comments. It mentions MUDs too, btw.

> the client representation can be. In addition, i am focusing ont he
> design of online worlds, not on the design of clients to access
> them; one can have many different client implementations for a
> single world design, and the output is manifestly shaped by the
> world's design.

Hmm... I wish people would design worlds primarily as they are
experienced, not sure if focusing on the networked server-client model
in the preliminary design is all that healthy...?

> This is not to say that you can entirely divorce client and server;
> but it does seem to me that server is where the world is.

But isn't this a rather technical focus?

>> I somehow doubt that most players really experience the map. What
>> hits their screen matters, I think? Then again, maybe designers
>> prefer to talk about what is implemented.

> Hurm, my sense is that players have an overwhelming sense of place,
> that place is intrinsic to muds. That's why I felt that codifying
> the ways in which we represented it was worthwhile. Whether they
> experience the continuous map via text, overhead tile graphics, full
> 3d 1st person, or whatever, feels irrelevant at the level that I was
> talking; the issues with continuous maps still apply regardless of
> interface.

How people experience space... A large research field it's own, of
course. Maybe you could define place? Actually, literature on
navigation may come in handy here. People don't really have very
accurate map knowledge. They have some rather distorted knowledge:
route knowledge (remembering when to make a turn, approximately how
long it takes etc) and survey knowledge (some rough idea of how
elements are positioned in relation to each other.  I don't think
humans experience or remember space as an euclidean space, which I
think is rather important to note.

What is a place then? When I look at a map of the area where I have
grown up and still am living, then I have serious trouble of figuring
out how that translates or delineates to what I feel is a place.

Maybe you define place by humanistic geographer Tuan's "when space
becomes thoroughly familiar to us then it becomes place" (off the top
of my head, not a true quote). I am not so sure. Then you have the
above mentioned Harrions/Dourish who focus on place as a social
interpretation (or something like that, I don't quite remember). I
personally prefer the a more perceptional interpretation, that is,
what does my surroundings afford? (closer to perception psychology's
J.J.Gibson maybe). I would acknowledge that a place has some kind of
locus though, but places can be nested too... Ack... Place is not a
very clear concept. Changes of perceived affordances in related to
locomotion, may be as close as I can get to a definition of place.

> I'm certainly not minimizing the importance of the interface. But
> Alphaworld is still a continuous map system. ;)

Do you experience it as such?  I don't.  I experienced it as a rather
discontinuous jerky place (err space?), where you popped from one
district into another.

--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/
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