[MUD-Dev] What's in the lack of a name?

[Ted L. Chen]

shren wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Ted L. Chen wrote:
>> shren writes:

>>> A momentary thought - I wonder if you can prevent the rate of
>>> mass publication of game secrets by not giving anything a name.
>>> Don't name places, don't name items, don't give out coordinates
>>> to players.  Common names for things are critical for
>>> communication.

>> So players will figure to call it something instead of some set
>> of coordinates.  "Hey, I'll meet you at the Dancing Atrox" is
>> much easier to write and informative than "Hey, I'll meet you at
>> 358x345".

> Ah, but the point is that if you deny the players both names and
> coordinates, they have to name everything themselves.  You're
> almost forcing them to develop culture, and in doing so the will
> collaborate.

Good point about coordinates.  Although in AO, coordinates are not
very well understood by all, and most initial descriptions of places
do take the form of landmarks.  The Dancing Atrox one had the "go
out the east-gate of Omni-1, past the outer wall and then directly
south along the wall through the shanty towns."  Of course, places
without any good landmarks did have to resort to coordinates.  But I
see your point and would expand on the thought with the idea that
some common point of reference is required to get the ball rolling.

That is, at least one prominent place in your world should be named
by the developers (Omni-1 in the above example).  I wonder though if
even lacking that, would players use the newbie starting place as a
widely accepted landmark origin?

> Say I'm in a nameless, coordinateless world, up in a mountain
> region, and while fighting off other foes a bunch of goblins come
> over the ridge.  A member of our party named Dierog runs over and
> holds them at bay untill we defeat the other foe and come help
> him.

> Later on I want to meet a member of my group there, so to tell him
> where I'm talking about, I tell him to meet me where Dierog fought
> all of the goblins.  Lacking any other name, we might call this
> area "Dierog's Stand", and other people, lacking any other name,
> might pick up on it, and how it got it's name.

> Because this area did not have a name, we now have a player-made
> name, a famous player (famous for doing something other than being
> cruel to other players or capping his level), and a shared myth.
> None of this would have happened if the area already had a name.

While I do agree that player-named places can propogate, I'm not
convinced anything that is so closely attached to a single player
(i.e. their name) can.  That is, the usual way for such a name to be
formed is through a tight clique.  Such a clique rarely interacts
with other people in the same way.  Just as it happens in RL.
"Bubba's Fiasco" (the mexican resturant where Bubba had food
poisoning and barfed on the waitress) might have meaning to one set
of my friends, but it would have far less effect and sticking power
in my other set of friends who didn't know Bubba.

Looking back at it, I guess the "Dancing Atrox" has the benefit of
being a rather neutral name.  It might also have benefited from the
fact that the one RP group I know of who used that term regularly
disbanded and scattered among all the other RPers in AO.  Without
that, we would have had to rely on the occasional interaction with
what I call "the fringe" and that might have allowed the more common
sense alternative "The Relax Bar" to grab a foothold.

  note: "the fringe" are the ones who don't establish themselves
  that strongly in the clique and actually go on to another clique.
  They're like the bumblebees and cliques are the flowers.

> Everything in the game that we do not give a name, we give the
> players the opportunity to name.  As you have pointed out, every
> time the players name something, they build culture.  So why name
> anything in advance?  Yank visible place names and visible item
> names right out of the system and let the players name everything
> and share, through communication, the names they create.

For the very simple reason of landmarking.  We would have been hard
pressed to show new people where the Dancing Atrox was if we weren't
sure we could refer to Omni-1 at all.

> Giving things in rpgs names during the design stage is practically
> reflexive at this point.  Everything gets a name.  All I'm calling
> upon all of you to think about is, what would the games be like if
> this were not the case - if a longsword +5 didn't, for all intents
> and purposes, have "longsword +5" digitally branded on the side?

Heh, I was never a fan of the +# naming scheme :) Although I would
say that at least having the word "longsword" does have the
advantage that people know that you're talking about a hand-wielded
weapon instead of a spell.  In a way, that's the landmark, and the
+5 is just the directions to get to the variant [longsword +5].  If
no name was given, and a [longsword +5] is interesting enough in
itself, I think people would start calling it the "dancing atrox".

TLC


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