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

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Matt Mihaly wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Ola Fosheim [iso-8859-1] Grøstad wrote:

>> etc... RPers are quite obviously often more advanced in the way
>> they use the game, because they use the game on multiple levels
>> and in ways which has not been designed for and provide
>> significant enjoyment (or the opposite) for other players as
>> well. Now, the commercial designers treat them as "just a kind of
>> gamer" because they dont constitute a significant population...

> Quite obviously? Clearly it's not obvious or there'd be no
> discussion about it.

Oh come on, mud-dev'ers discuss the obvious all the time. ;>

> I'm not sure why using the game in ways it hasn't been designed
> for is a sign of an advanced gamer. If I take a chess board and
> start throwing the pieces across the room (using it in a way it
> wasn't intended) that hardly makes me an advanced chess player. It
> just makes me a person who enjoys chess in a different way.

Horrible analogy. First of all you would not be a chessplayer at
all.  RPGs are marketed as rollplay and a fictional experience, the
first one is pretty much a hamsterwheel where the designers are in
control. All you have to do is follow the path, in excellent
roleplay you become a co-author and still get to do everything that
other players get to do.  You do it with a level of sophistication
and you get to do more.

(You seem to assume the chess is an advanced game, which is pretty
much a cultural idea. It actually is a pretty rigid and limited
pattern matching game)

> I see nothing more advanced about roleplay than there is about
> strategic PvP combat and certainly not compared to the political
> game. Certainly the level of practice and skill put into being a
> chessmaster in Achaea is far far greater than is required to
> simply act out a few things, but I wouldn't necessarily label the
> couple of killer chess players in Achaea "more advanced Achaea
> players". I'd just label them "more advanced players of one
> particular part of the game, e.g. the chess part of the game." I'd
> do the same with roleplayers. One person could be a more advanced
> roleplayer than another, but beyond that, I don't think you can
> make a valid comparison.

There is no reason for not doing any of those activities in a
roleacting mentality. Especially political games are very well
suited for roleacting, you get to maximize drama. But no MMO have
any great political game built in, and probably will not have it
either. Because, if you do, you risk getting the entire server
killed off, which seemed to happen on some Meridian server.  MMOs
are static by designphilosophy.

You dont really have any sophisticated PvP combat either, it is very
much a simple optimization or twitch thing. And even then, PvP is a
great source for roleacting and roleacting adds another layer to
that experience as well.

> To say that A is more advanced than B is to say that there is a
> continuum using some measurement criteria upon which you advance.

Actually, formally all you need is some kind of ordering involving A
and B. You dont need a continuum.

> I think it is fallacious to say that a basket weaver (a producer)
> is more advanced than I, a consumer of baskets. I do not, in fact,
> see any continuum on which you can measure their relative levels
> of advancement.

Actually, we were talking production of experience. I can agree with
you to some extent, but only because and advanced consumer of
fiction is productive. I.e. she makes an interpretation.

> Likewise, for roleplayers to be automatically considered advanced
> players, there'd have to be some logical continuum to progress
> along. Where is the logical continuum from tactical combat to
> roleplaying? It strikes me (and a lot of others apparently) as
> simply different, fairly unrelated areas of the game. That's why
> we say that they are simply another KIND of gamer. There's no
> logical way to measure tactical combat (or politics or chess or
> whatever) vs. roleplaying, as it's apples and oranges.

You got too hung up on your assumptions about one dimensional
continuum.  Now, who is the gourmet: a person that cant be bothered
to taste and smell (or even chew), or one that does and also add
spice and atmosphere to the dinner?

Ola.
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