[MUD-Dev] No bots allowed

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002 03:05:04 -0800 
Frank Crowell <frankc at maddog.com> wrote:

> So, what do you think?  Should the mud side of virtual worlds have
> the convention of "no bots allowed please"?

Bots tend to be frowned on for two reasons:

  1) In GoP games as they can/do lend unfair advantage to the bot
  user (eg perfect timing/aim).

  2) In Socialiser games when they successfully impersonate humans
  or interfere with human socialising in ways which result in
  Bad/Unwanted effects.

(And of course the intersection of those two).

Note that bots, in the NPC or MOO active-object sense have rarely
been frowned upon.

PK'ers often state that other players are the only actually
interesting quarry.  Typically this is explained away in Griefer
terms.  Its not the only useful explanation.

  Which is more popular: Single player Quake(I|II|III) or
  multi-player Quake (I|II|III)?

  Why?

Playing a game against/with NPCs is ultimately sterile.  Outside of
puzzle games player-vs-machine games are something I have no
patience for any more.  (Arguably puzzle games are basically
player-vs-self games) Occasionally non-puzzle single-player games
will last a bit if I can clearly sense the human designer behind the
game and cam make him either the protagonist or admired quality --
but that doesn't last too long.

  Or, as a correspondent once pointedly put it: Why is sex so much
  more fun than masturbation?

  Outside of the first order difference in the level and quantity of
  sensory stimulation, sex has the advantage of actually involving
  another human.

PK arguably has the same advantage of actually involving another
human.

Humans are much more fun than machines.  

Apparently it doesn't matter (in the general sense) that the other
players don't talk and that they don't actually do much that's
explicitly human other than wiggling their mouse/joystick.  You know
there's a human on the other end, not a machine, and that makes all
the difference.

ObStory: 

  I've recently been playing a fair bit of BZFLag

    http://bzflag.org/  

  BZFlag is a fairly simple multi-player tank game with a multitude
  of configuration variants (flags, no flags, flag types, flag type
  distribution, bad flags on|off, map type/style, jump/no-jump,
  number of simultaneous shots, CTP/FreeForAll, teams/no-ream etc)
  resulting in surprising level of internal finesse and delicacy --
  well, for a game which is all about rumbling about the place in
  slow moving tanks and shooting at each other with big guns.  

  The more interesting thing is that chat/talk levels in BZFlag are
  extremely low -- its not uncommon for the chat/comment rate to be
  on the level of one or two per hour, total across all players --
  far lower than equivalent FPS games ala Quake -- and yet the fact
  that they are other humans at the other end moving those tanks
  about instead of machines is fundamentally important to the game.

  You know they're humans, and that makes all the difference.

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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