[MUD-Dev] Girl appeal (was: Boys and Girls)

[Sasha Hart]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 13:36:42 -0800 
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com> wrote:
> [Sasha]
>> [Caliban]

>>> (It might also be argued that there are NO options in MUD
>>> development on most servers -- you can only tell it to type text
>>> on a limited number of available events, but no matter what you
>>> do it will only ever type text.)

>> And most games ever devised just boil down to a bunch of mouse
>> clicking or hitting of keyboard buttons anyway.

> You're trying to compare "many causes, few effects" to "few
> causes, many effects". They don't really compare.

In this case, I think I am right. ;) Graphics are fundamentally a
big sort-of-square array of pixels, no matter what the picture is,
and sound is just a lot of air being vibrated by speakers. Input is
tapping a pretty limited number of buttons, in different sequences.
I can't see how letters, words, phrases, sentences and entire novels
are vastly more limited than the above; just as above, we attend to
the rich patterns embedded in them.

"You can only tell it to type text on a limited number of available
events" seems problematic to me as a description of the design space
for text games because, despite never really digging into graphical
options, mouse options, sound options, etc. - the number of good and
potentially interesting/informative sentences you could have it
output is astronomically huge, the grammars defining the command
structures are potentially enormous, etc.

And just so this doesn't devolve into an idiotic example of how
"FoodFoodFood"is different from "food food" and therefore the word
"food" offers infinite capabilities (Food)*, i am specifically
thinking of how any graphical/sound/mouse/keyboard game, just like a
text game, builds some kind of model of the world which is richer
than the output any given client gets at a given time. A big
difference being that the "bandwidth" available between the game's
model of the world and the player's model of the same game world is
constricted for text in some very specific ways. nonetheless, i
could (in principle, if i were so perverse) make an exact duplicate
of any other game world out there and then render it and its
dynamics and interactions with input in excruciating, unreadable
detail.

I will agree that in practice there are some presentational
possibilities whose lack is keenly felt after hashing out very
ambitious designs in text games - not a little bit because any
complexity you introduce in the game comes at the cost of ease of
control, intelligibility of output, or both. It's really bad if you
want a game which is effectively an action game, and can be really
hobbling if you want something strategic (displays are so much more
concise for representing a battlefield, for example.)

But text games are right in the sweet spot for lots of designs which
occur in a more exclusively social or communicative domain. Look at
how the graphical games all effectively must include a legacy
mud/IRC window, not just for socializing and communication, but also
auxiliary commands etc. etc. Although we have not yet scratched the
surface of how to use the new media socially, it is my opinion that
these are in the best case still going to work out to be adjuncts to
communication via language.

(Although I am belatedly realizing that you might have been talking
about things like just using a prepackaged server, changing a few
mobs, dropping in snippets etc. in which case there isn't much
possibility at hand, that's true.)
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