[MUD-Dev] "The Artisan's Hands" - Storytelling tools

[Matt Mihaly]

On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Koster, Raph wrote:

> Excellent article at Waterthread.org.
 
> http://www.waterthread.org/news/102790232827285.html

You know, I mainly found this post to be fairly annoying. It seems
to be written from either an attitude that is willfully ignorant of
the offerings in the online games space, or someone just addicted to
the latest eye-candy.

He ranted on for awhile about the sorry state of storytelling in
MMOGs. Well duh. So go play the games that have better
storytelling. Plenty of them out there, and generally in the text
MUD field (though I understand Underlight has pretty good
storytelling). I gave him the benefit of the doubt at first,
thinking maybe he was just into the scale of the big games, but then
he started including NWN in his discussion.

I understand that text isn't for everyone, but man is it irritating
to hear people bitch about the non-existence of things that have
existed for years. Every single storytelling deficiency he lists
there is addressed in multiple online games, including my own (and
I'd never claim we're the first or the only ones out there doing it,
as we most certainly weren't and aren't).  On and on he goes about
how every plot involves a horde of invading monsters. I think we've
done exactly one plot in our history that involved hordes of
invading monsters. I'm willing to bet Castle Marrach is short on the
hordes of invading monsters as well. He talks about empowered
in-game admins. We call them Gods, and they are a huge everyday
influence on the world. Our God-player interaction model was
blatantly borrowed from Avalon, which has been doing it since 1989
or so. I'm not trying to blow my horn, or the horn of the text
medium here, but the article simply ignored all sorts of MMOGs doing
exactly what he talked about (if NWN worlds count as massively
multiplayer, than lots of text MUDs certainly do too).

--matt


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