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

[Dave Rickey]

From: Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag at ifi.uio.no>
> Dave Rickey wrote:

>> Then you'd be mistaken.  The non-"Roleplayer" may not simulate
>> the extremes of emotion (love, hate, etc.), but he can feel them,
>> and when he does they are genuine.

> Oh, but the roleplayer also have genuine feelings. He just have
> the opportunity to optimize for them to happen all the time.  IF
> he chooses to.  Btw, the emotions are no more simulations than
> people who cry when they are immersed into a TV series.

That's my point, for most people they *would* be a simulation.  Most
players start from "I am sitting here manipulating a computer
character in a non-existent world."  It is by degrees that they go
from "My toon whacks the bot" to "Me and my friends kill the orcs."

>>  Oh, that's easy.  They want it all to be real.  Short of that,
>>  they want it all to behave as if it was real (within its own
>>  internal logic).

> Huh?

They don't want it to be a game.  They want it to be a "real" place,
where magic works and they are growing in power and wealth.  The
fact that they are sharing it with genuinely real people is part of
why it becomes real to them.  The more it behaves with an internal
logical consistency, the easier it is for them to treat it as real.
At some point (long about the time we start arguing over property
rights to virtual property, maybe) it is no longer "Virtual" in any
meaningful sense.  It's a different place, not an imaginary one.

>>  Same thing the other players want, they just aren't willing to
>>  pretend it is a world when it acts like a stage.

> No. They insist on talking about the mechanics with which the
> stage is built, thus evaporating the little depth that might be
> there.

To that place, talking about the mechanics is like discussing the
weather.  Or physics and chemistry.  At worst, quantum dynamics.
Hey, too much knowledge of chemistry can take all the romance right
out of perfume, too (do you know what they actually put in that
stuff?).

>>  Then why have ActiveWorlds and similar VRML projects stalled
>>  out?  In that environment, you can do anything, have anything,
>>  and that's the source of the problem.

> For the same reason that most people watch soaps on TV and buy
> trash food?  They are God damn lazy escapists with no initiative?
> Why use ones brain if one don't have to?

When you can have *anything*, and so can anyone else, how do you
define value?

> I strongly doubt that you can have persistent depth without adding
> an additional layer. I.e. it may increase the time the user spends
> on recognizing how shallow the design is, but eventually most will
> recognize the lack of depth. The net result is that to achieve
> "the feeling of real" you have to increase your breadth
> significantly over time.

That, I agree with, but I suspect we'd have very different methods
for doing it or of defining "breadth".

--Dave

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