[MUD-Dev] Gossip, fiction and tactical lore

[Sasha Hart]

[John Buehler]

> I look forward to the first game that explicitly acknowledges the
> existence of the player in addition to the character within the
> overall context of the game.

Hmm, I should say you will be looking backward. How much MUSH have
you played? I have been using 'page' and @-commands as opposed to
+commands for years. This is player to player stuff. Actual
separation of 'player' and 'character' (you might say 'explicit
acknowledgement' of the distinction) ranges on a sliding scale, from
systems which have separate names for player and character and do
not link the two, to ones which use the same name for both (and in
which players quite effectively make the distinction all the time.) 
Any game which has explicitly OOC comms has recognized the
distinction, etc. I certainly know that there are games which both
set aside one 'player name' in a player name space, and a character
name in a character namespace. Look to the BBS, which had both your
system name and any names you chose in the door games!  A number of
games I have played have had message boards which were accessible by
players, and used as players. And just to stretch it even further,
players who use in-client, or IM, private comms are just setting up
the distinction when the MUD doesn't (or more likely, when they
don't want to be snooped by snoopy admins).

If nothing else, I have this idea in my code. The distinction starts
with the parser, which is totally different - the 'character' parser
gets the leftovers from the 'player' parser, with the sole exception
of commands which are room-situated for convenience (mostly building
stuff, like describing an object in the current room). These are
handled by a hack in player commands which grabs pointers using the
character, then operates on them in player land.

This made it very easy to have chat and tell systems which are
totally separate from the character identity. For most games it is
not at all necessary, because players form their own explicit
distinction between themselves and their characters. They know they
haven't died when it says "You have died," and they know any
contexts which have been provided for them to speak as to other
players rather than as to other game-tokens. The ideas I was playing
with at the time inevitably were bound up with the possession of
many characters at once, high lethality and character identity
turnover, etc. which degraded the character-player *connection* so
much that doing anything other than separating player comms from
character land would have murdered the ability of players to
socialize freely (not acceptable to me, although others are
encouraged to try denying any kind of OOC comms - provided that they
try playing it themselves, on someone ELSE's game, first).

As far as I know, this is all old news... you might have something
more radical in mind. But honestly I see little difference between
player-player voice comms and 'tell,' except perhaps that the former
invokes a little more of the other player's presence.

Sasha

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev