"Advanced" use of virtual worlds? (Re: [MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs)

[Matt Mihaly]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Miroslav Silovic wrote:
> From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
 
>> Well, if you can roleplay by being yourself, doesn't that kind of
>> make the term lose meaning? It means that we are all roleplaying
>> 24 hours a day. I'm not going to argue that's not true, as we all
>> play roles (husband, girlfriend, boss, employee, etc) but I'm not
>> sure whether that's what people mean when they talk about
>> roleplaying in games.
 
> Which brings us to the point: I *don't* fake my characters. They
> do have their own life, and when I roleplay them (or act them, if
> you prefer), I do become somebody else for the duration.

No you don't. It's like claiming that virtual worlds are somehow
"not real". They are real, because they are part of reality. There's
no way around that. They're a sub-set of it. Any character you play
is part of you, because it is a sub-set of you. No way around it, at
least without adding AI to your character. I don't think that's what
you mean by your characters taking on a life of their own though.

> I don't logically consider what my character would do, I *know*
> what he *has* to do, and the character's emotions filter through
> (the same way I feel real emotions while reading a good book, for
> instance, except that roleplaying can be even more intense).

Characters don't have emotions. People do. Characters are data-sets
and/or ideas.

> Moreover, the emotions one can go through during an intense RP
> scene have a far broader spectrum than the *YAY, FRAG, DUDE!* that
> Quake (and text-only fragfest variants thereof, no matter how
> tactically detailed) provide.
 
> I mean, heroism, gloating, hate, and even love are easy - you can
> feel them in RL, and you can go through them by playing your
> character.  But there are also emotional states one can not even
> approach in real life.  For example, how would it feel to Impress
> a dragon in Anne McCaffrey's Pern setting?

> I have a pretty good idea.

Well, you have a pretty good idea how it feels to impress a human
wearing a description that says "I am a dragon" at the least.

--matt

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