[MUD-Dev] Point of View

[Ted L. Chen]

Shane P. Lee Writes
> --- "Ted L. Chen" <tedlchen at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> Is this a result of technical limitations (switching POVs
>> requires a lot of wholesale state changes), or is it merely a
>> matter of tradition?

> As far as I'm concerned, I build worlds and design game play from
> a first-person perspective because that's how I personally like to
> play. Well, that's one reason, there are others of course.  I see
> avatars as dumb animals, incapable of original thought or
> movement, and anything that they do automatically is generally
> annoying (like getting hungry) but necessary overall.  For the
> most part however, the avatar is simply an extension of myself, a
> character that I play. My job is to teach him/her to be smarter,
> grow stronger and hopefully someday become the Evil Overlord
> (insert evil laugh here) of the world. This personal, one-on-one
> connection is what I want and any change in POV seems to detract
> from that.

Okay, it's hard to argue personal preference, but concerning the
'one-on-one connection' with your avatar, let's just call that a
strong form of sympathy.  Now, as far as I can gather, sympathy can
be generated even in third person in other forms of media.  Why not
in MUDs?

I thank you, for I think you just gave me the reason.  It harks back
to the comment about avatars being dumb animals or shells.  Is that
the reason why we prefer to be inside viewing out?  So we don't
really see that the avatars are rather lifeless?  After all, third
party sympathy revolves around us being able to relate to the
character.  Something hard to do when the character stands there
like a door knob.

> For instance, let's say my avatar (Tom) lives in a castle and has
> decided to walk around the world a bit. He left through the
> southern gate and just crossed the moat. The wizard wants him to
> find the treasure to the north and doesn't want him to search very
> hard to find it. Now the wizard could simply display a convenient
> map of the castle and surrounding area with the treasure
> prominently displayed so Tom could easily see what and where it
> is. But realisticly, could Tom have known the treasure was there?

This is cooked up example because there's only one goal, which is to
find the treasure next to his home.  Of course it would be silly if
you just showed exactly where the treasure was since that was the
goal.  Let's restructure the problem a bit:

  Tom lives in a castle and is reading a book from his library.  As
  he's reading, a note slips out from between the pages.  Tom, picks
  it up and reads it.  But instead of "seeing" the text on the page
  or a map, how about we use the cliched voice-over and 'fade to
  dream' sequence where the note author visually describes the
  reasons for burying the treasure, perhaps with the author digging
  near a giant oak tree, with the look of fear in his eyes.

I grant that the above is difficult to do on a text mud, and
impossible/improbable to do with success in person.  But graphics
wise, we've seen it before a hundred times.  Just not on an online
game.  With the non-char POV, I can more fluidly tell a story for
the quest.  There are a couple illustrative points here:

  1) I could have very well just scribbled on the note and have the
  player stare at it for the next few minutes (morrowind?) but I can
  easily squeeze in much more history into the same time-frame if I
  just jump POVs.

  2) I can add impact to the discovery of the note by using a
  viewpoint that follows it as it falls for instance.  If I stayed
  with a fixed character-centered POV, I have no assurance that the
  player notices the falling note (except by a jarring
  post-notification that 'a note has "fallen" from the book' - note
  the past-tense).

  3) I can build upon the excitement of first discovering the note,
  excitement which can diminish quickly if I force the player to
  read an essay.

  4) And without an explicit map (only an 'minds-eye' image of the
  burial site) it guides the player to the right area hopefully
  without being too overt.  I could also set the flashback in winter
  or some different season from the current one if I want to make it
  more difficult.

> 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.

Immersion-wise, is it better?  It seems more contrived to me that an
actor would approach me to ask me to do something he can do himself.
It's like the expansive dialog tree a designer sets up to show how
adeptly he can wield the system when all I want to ask was "which
way to the city?".  Perhaps the same could be said about the
non-char POV, but I should hope it adds more than a large dialog
tree.

> By simply taking a little more time and a lot more effort, the
> wizard has provided a mini-quest while still holding to the
> original POV and improving (IMHO) the game play.

If anything, I say it takes far less effort to stick to a single POV
than it does to switch.  Programming-wise and design-wise.  If you
can switch POVs, you start to have questions such as when is it
appropriate, at what point does it become trite or even annoying?
Even more advanced, you can start asking yourself whether you allow
for time-cuts and jumps?  What impact do different POVs have on the
playability of others?  How do synch them?  etc, etc.

All those annoying questions go away when I stick to POV.


TLC


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