[MUD-Dev] Point of View

[Damion Schubert]

From: Shane P. Lee
> --- "Ted L. Chen" <tedlchen at yahoo.com> wrote:
 
>> Second - and hopefully something to provide a seed for discussion
>> - why are we all so ingrained into providing only a point of view
>> in our games that derive from a simulationists' perspective?
>> That is, the only things we see are what is observable from our
>> avatar's perspective.  Is this a result of technical limitations
>> (switching POVs requires a lot of wholesale state changes), or is
>> it merely a matter of tradition?

Tradition, mostly.  Interestingly, I thought there would be no good
reason to switch away a player's viewpoint in a first person
shooter.  Then Heretic 2 discovered that, if you hit a switch, it
helps gameplay immensely to cut the camera over to the door that
that switch opened.  Now, such camera cuts are common in single
player FPSes.  I suspect a similar revolution will hit MMPs.

> Mostly, I see a change in POV to include a broader range as
> cheating on the part of the wizard, who doesn't want to put too
> much effort into the quality of the game.

True, but there are still definitely 'in character' ways to
dissimenate this information.  You could call it a newspaper, a
reenactment, player putting together the clues.  In UO2, we wanted
to use Dreams and Prophecies heavily to dissimenate story
information (and in fact hoped to give player Prophets, effectively
a player class, more information, in hopes they would spread news
for us).  This was an idea that was toyed around with minorly back
in CarnageMUD.

> A better way to handle it would be to send in an actor,
> complaining about losing his treasure to the north of the
> castle. Perhaps the actor offers to share a portion of it with Tom
> if he would be nice enough to fetch it for him.

The problem with using actors and triggered events to dissimenate
information is that only the person in the castle (the king) is
going to recieve that information.  Anyone elsewhere in the world or
logged off at the time will miss this information, or have to see a
repeat performance.  While fine for 5-10 person quests, this
solution isn't one that scales well.  And while others may think
that 5-10 person quests are the best experience in an MMP, I think
that more global changes and events are necessary to keep the game
fresh.

>> To me, it seems that limiting ourselves to only observable
>> viewpoints is part of the difficulty in conveying an engrossing
>> narrative.  Imagine if Shakespeare's plays could only be shown
>> from one actor's perspective?  A lot of the plot devices employed
>> require that the audience knows more than any given character.
>> This does border the "what the player/or character knows" thread
>> from a while back.

You don't have to imagine it.  "Rosencranz and Guildenstern are
Dead" tells the story of Hamlet from the perspective of 2 lesser
characters in the epic, who barely interact with the tragedy and yet
still die from it.  It is a very amusing play which displays a lot
of confusion on the part of the two titular characters. ;-)

It seems there are competing requirements for disseminating news.
The news (a) needs to be distributed 'in character' to the recievers
and (b) it needs to be recieved uniformly by the recievers.  This
seems difficult until you realize that recieving news 'in character'
doesn't necessarily mean another character delivers it.

--d


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