[MUD-Dev] Ownership

[Valerio Santinelli]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>

> One of my volunteers and I were chatting tonight about graphical
> vs. text MUDs, and he said, "Well to me, I'm in my mind's eye. I'm
> here, and even though you have your idea of how you look and how
> your world appears, I have a diffeferent one. I have ownership of
> my version of Achaea. When I play EQ I'm in someone else's 'Vision
> (tm)'. To me, roleplay and enjoyment is all about ownership. You
> don't like it, you don't make it part of your world."

Your post fits perfectly in today's thoughts of mine.

I've just installed the latest SMAUG codebase on a linux machine due
to something similar to what happened to you.

In my case I was thinking about what I expect from an online
game. It's been quite some time that I wanted to get back to making
an online persistent roleplaying game, but every time I pause and
think about my expectations and what would be my users
expectations. They are going to be really different both in design
and appearence. As your valunteer was saying, I can imagine a
character in my mind and it could be quite different from how you
depict it.  And that works well in MUDs, since text is acting like
in a book. It's stimulating your imagination and you can print in
your head an image of the character that's only yours and you get
very familiar with it.

On the other side MMOGs offer a static picture of characters. It's
more like a movie. Everybody's seeing the same image and what you
see could be different from what you expected it to be. It's also
true that in movies there usually isn't much expectation in
characters appearence since you already know who's playing what.

Now I'm seriously rethinking about embarking on a MMOG development
since apart from the huge effort it takes, it also constraints the
users to your vision of things, and there's no escape from that. At
least not yet.  Instead MUDs are still fascinating like books. They
are evolving (MMOGs are evolving too, adding new contents) and you
can paint areas in your mind.  You're not forced to see what a
designer wanted it to appear like.

Graphical MUDs and text MUDs are like movies and books. They both
have pros and cons, but most of the time if you take a movie
inspired from a book, the book is better. I think this is the same
for MUDs in most of the cases.  I still remember an Italian MUD I
happened to play. It was based on Kyrandia's world.I don't know if
Kyrandia was a fantasy world already existing in books or
something. But later on Westwood released a PC game called Legend of
Kyrandia (1992) that was featuring a similar content (That's why I
think both were based on a book or a fable or something similar),
but the MUD version was terribly more exciting and more real than
the graphical game could have ever been.

Just my 0.02 cents of Euro :)

--
Valerio Santinelli
HateSeed.com Founder (http://www.hateseed.com)
In Flames Italia Webmaster (http://www.inflames.it)
My Lab (http://tanis.hateseed.com)



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