[MUD-Dev] Gossip, fiction and tactical lore

[John Buehler]

Sasha Hart writes:
> [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?

Goose egg.  I'm graphical only.  I fooled with a couple text MUDs
for about 20 minutes.  I can't deal with realtime reading.

> 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).

Of the treatments that you're talking about, only a true distinction
between player and character successfully addresses what I'm talking
about.  For example, Out of character (OOC) conversations remain
character-centric.  Thus the term OOC.  The use of private
communications is the very point I'm relying on to claim that games
should be including player identities in the structure of the game
experience.  At some point, players *want* to interact with other
players.

> 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.

Whether old news or not, current games do not provide a mechanism to
identify players.  If players are identified as the start point to
gaming, instead of characters, I wonder what derivatives of game
interactions would come into being.  For example, does it make sense
to have another character look over my shoulder while I play the
game?  I might want that in order to show somebody what I'm doing,
or to have them help me with controlling the game.  I don't hear
about such things being discussed, and I chalk it up to the lack of
an identity for the player in the game structure.  The player is
wholly wrapped up by a character identity, producing strange
messages from games such as "You have died", and statements by folks
on MUD-Dev (myself included) such as "When the player dies."  We all
know that it's implicit in all of this that the player's character
is what is dying, but the mindset is one of the character and player
being one and the same.

How about the idea of having players get together in the first
'screen' of the game, in order to locate other people to play with?
Well, I've got a Bard, a Warrior and a Skeleton Mage that I run.  I
hop into the game and find somebody asking for a Warrior for their
group.  And off we go.  Character location being a hindrance to the
*players* enjoying the game, we just blow off that little problem
and hop into the game with our characters and start playing.  No,
it's not necessary to sacrifice the continuity of character
location, but I hope I've made my point.

With a separation of player and character, can we consider more
autonomous characters?  Does Will Wright's thinking start with
separate player and character, permitting him to come up with The
Sims?

The separation of player and character is largely a psychological
issue, but having ramifications up and down the design of a game.

JB


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