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

[Travis Casey]

On Wednesday 13 February 2002 3:57, Matt Mihaly wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Travis Casey wrote:
>> Friday, February 08, 2002, 6:13:50 PM, Matt Mihaly wrote:

>>> Hmm, I don't think we are. I think we can settle this pretty
>>> easily too. If your character can know something, where is the
>>> data stored? I maintain that it's stored in you and is thus part
>>> of you.

>> But it's not.  Data about my character is stored in many places;
>> some of it is in me, some of it is in my notebook, some of it is
>> in my GM, some of it is in the GM's notebook, some of it is in
>> other players in the game, some of it is in the character sheet,
>> and so on.

>> If the only information about my character were in my head, then
>> it would be impossible for someone else to play my character --
>> but it's not.

> Nod, I mis-spoke really. It is, actually though, impossible for
> someone to play your -specific- character. That would require that
> everyone have exactly the same idea of what the character is,
> which fundamentally is impossible. From an essay on Ideas by
> Dr. Harold Brown, "Ideas are subjective in that individuals can be
> aware only of their own ideas. If two individuals are imagining
> Pegasus or thinking about the Pythagorean theorem, each is
> directly aware of a distinct idea, although these ideas may share
> many features. This is analogous to the sense in which two
> reproductions of the Mona Lisa are distinct objects even though
> most of their properties are identical, but it is impossible for
> one individual to inspect another's ideas."

> The salient point in my argument is that anything -you- do as a
> roleplayer comes from you. A character cannot have any ideas (an
> idea requires a mind) or thoughts. You can form the idea of a
> character having an idea, but it is you having the idea and
> pretending it was the character.

Of course, we can go to this level with any ideas.  Do horses exist?
I have a specific idea in mind when I talk about a "horse", which is
not exactly the same as your idea of a "horse".  We can argue, then,
that there is no such thing as a horse.

No one else has my specific idea of my character, any more than
anyone else has my specific idea of what a horse is.  However, that
doesn't necessarily imply that my character does not exist
separately from me, any more than it implies that horses don't exist
separately from me.

To take your specific example here -- my character's idea doesn't
have to be my idea.  The idea could come from the GM, or from
another player.  For that matter, the idea might not exist at all --
it may just be the idea of an idea.  For example:

  GM:  Ok, the spaceship's zifilator is broken.  

  Me: My character has "spaceship repair" at 15.  Does she have any
      ideas on how to fix it without going to a repair depot?

  GM: [makes a roll] Hmm... yeah.  She comes up with a plan to
      jury-rig it.It'll take two days and five units of spare parts,
      though.

  Me: That OK with everyone?  [The group expresses assent.]  Ok,
      she'll do it.

My character had an idea here -- an idea about how to jury-rig the
zifilator so we wouldn't have to take the spaceship to a repair
depot.  I have no idea what, specifically, that idea was.  Even the
GM doesn't know -- it's simply abstracted.

>>> When you, playing a character, are talking to me, playing a
>>> character, and we get to know each other, the information is
>>> being stored in us.

>> Yes, it is.  But it also exists as a part of our characters.
>> When someone else plays my character for me because I can't make
>> the D&D game, my character doesn't suddenly stop knowing everyone
>> it knew before.  Indeed, when this happens, my character can meet
>> and start to know a character that I'm not even aware of the
>> existence of at the moment.

> Well, I'd argue it's not the same character, but only a very
> similar one.

I'd argue rather that they're slightly different portrayals of the
same character.  What defines being "the same character", to me, is
continuity of experience -- the character's virtual experience.

> Leaving that aside for the sake of argument, your character still
> doesn't gain any knowledge or know anything. You do, the GM does,
> the other people playing your character do, etc. The character IS
> real, but that's not the same thing as saying it has a mind.

Of course.  My character doesn't *really* know anything, any more
than there's *really* a chest in the room when someone who's
roleplaying says, "I'm going to open the chest".  My character is a
virtual person, existing in a virtual world, and all of his/her/its
knowledge is likewise virtual.  We typically ignore that distinction
while gaming, though, and talk about our characters and their
environments *as if* they were real.  It's much more convenient to
do that than to constantly be saying "virtually" or something else
to make it clear that none of this is real.

If we *didn't* do this, playing the game would be impractical.
Imagine a game where the players said things like "I have an intent
for the character in the game world who I am controlling to
virtually open the virtual chest which we are imagining to exist in
the imaginary room we are imagining that character to be in."

>> [the party has just met an NPC named Bubba]

>> GM: Travis, Efindel [my character] already knows Bubba.  The two
>> of you were apprentices together under Magister Boffo.

>> Me: What do I [*] know about him?

> <snipped example trying to show a difference between Travis and a
> character, Efindel>

> Well, again, the character doesn't know any of that. The GM does.

Within the virtual world, the character knows things.  In the real
world, of course, the GM is the one who knows all that -- but we
know that already.  We talk about the character knowing it in order
to avoid the sort of circumlocution I gave an example of above.

  GM: Travis, I'm imagining that the imaginary person we're calling
  "Efindel" already knows the imaginary person "Bubba".  Let's
  imagine that the two of them were apprentices together under their
  imaginary person who Efindel, if he existed, would call "Magister
  Boffo."

  Me: Craig, are you taking drugs again?

>> And, of course, there are also skill rolls and similar things.  I
>> can't draw a map of Efindel's home town of Tarnath, but Efindel
>> can, since he has a good "Area Knowledge: Tarnath" skill.  I
>> don't know who the current ruler of the elven kingdom in my old
>> GM's campaign is, but Efindel would, since he's still alive in
>> that world.  And so on.

> Can he? So where is it? Who actually drew it? The person that
> actually draws the map would have to know how to draw it, unless
> you're willing to assert that he was possessed by a foreign
> intelligence.

You're assuming that someone has to actually draw it.  I can say,
"Efindel draws a map of Tarnath and gives it to Joe", and the GM can
then say, "OK, Joe studies the map and puts it away for later".
Later, when Joe has to get somewhere in Tarnath, Joe's player can
remind the GM that Joe has a map, whereupon the GM says, "OK, you
consult the map and use it to get where you're going."

It's quite possible that no one involved in the game has a clear
idea of what a map of Tarnath would look like, any more than anyone
involved in the SF game I mentioned before has a clear idea of how
to jury-rig a fix for a zifilator.  The existence of the map isn't
important -- what's important is the things it lets the character
do.

>>> Characters are ideas, and don't have data storage
>>> mechanisms. Avatars do, but characters and avatars aren't the
>>> same thing, and people don't roleplay avatars. They roleplay
>>> characters by using avatars (witness that many people play the
>>> character Gandalf, using many different avatars).

>> Characters do indeed have data storage mechanisms -- the memories
>> of people and notes on paper.  Further, I'd like to note that the
>> distinction between "character" and "avatar" that you're making
>> is not one that I recognize -- from my point of view, a character
>> with a different "avatar" is not the same character.

> In that case, there is no way to put aside the fact that you and
> the GM are not talking about the same character, but merely
> characters with many features in common. If a character in a new
> avatar is not the same character, then a character in a different
> mind cannot be said to be the same character either.

We are talking about the same character -- we just have different
ideas about that character.  Even if we were talking about a real
person (say, my wife Elisa), we'd have different ideas about that
person.

I should have said, "a character with a different avatar is not
necessarily the same character".  My mistake there.  As I say above,
I'd consider "the same character" to be a function of continuity of
experience (virtual experience, that is, just to be perfectly
clear).

The umpteen thousand "Gandalfs" out there have had different sets of
experiences -- thus, they are different characters.

You could have different avatars for a character but keep the same
character through continuity of the character's virtual experience
-- however, that's not the case for all the different Gandalfs in
your example.

>> It is, at most, a new character modeled after an existing
>> character.  (Now, loosely, we may speak of it as being "the same
>> character".  However, that's no more true than, say, saying that
>> two different versions of an operating system are "the same
>> operating system".  They may have a lot of things in common, but
>> they are not *exactly* the same operating system.  We just call
>> them "the same" as a matter of convenience.)

> Oh, I agree totally, but I don't think you're going to be happy
> with the consequences of that point of view.

Yeah, you're right.  The point I was trying to get at, but was
thinking of poorly and therefore explained poorly, is that we define
"the same OS" through a continuity.  SunOS 4 is the same OS as SunOS
3 because of continuity -- the continuity of code between them.
When continuity is broken, people recognize two separate things --
to continue with the OS example, many people will tell you that even
though Sun called their new operating system "SunOS 5", it is not
the same operating system -- the move to a new code base destroyed
the continuity, for those people.

Something to note here is that different people can disagree on the
degree of continuity required.  For example, some may maintain that
SunOS 4 and SunOS 5 *do* have enough continuity between them to be
considered "the same", since some code was carried over.  Whether
something is "the same character" or "the same OS" is a fuzzy
function, rather than a binary one.

>> Thus, from my point of view, there are many different characters
>> named Gandalf.  They all have points of similarity, but they are
>> different characters.

> Yep, I'd agree with that. Again, in your examples, you and the GM
> were not speaking of the same character, but different characters
> sharing many similarities, so I'm back to just pointing out that
> the character still resides entirely in you. (Characters are
> ideas, and ideas can only exist in minds, not on paper or hard
> drives.)

Technically, yes.  But most people will, again, speak of "the ideas
in this book" and such things, because the alternative is just too
lengthy to be practical.  In the same way, we speak of "the
character on this sheet".

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) 
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