[MUD-Dev] [DGN]: Ludicrous scheme.

[John Buehler]

Amanda Walker writes:

> What's the current thinking about a MUD/MMO world with multiple
> types of client?  3D, 2D isometric, text, telephone,
> etc. *simultaneously*.

I'm all for it, and my own designs consider it as a mainstream
feature.  Fortunately, I'm not paying anyone to implement all those
interfaces so I don't have to deal with the impracticality of it
all.

In my design, the world has many different types of entertainment.
Estate management, crafting, combat, politics, etc.  These subgames
each provide entertainment for the players who are engaging in them,
and also provide opportunities for entertainment for other players.
A simple example is a combat character wanting some piece of
equipment going to a crafting character.  Or a crafting character
asking for the support of a political character.  And so on.  The
are intended to interrelate, not to be distinct games in the same
environment.

The purpose of bringing up the intersecting entertainment is that
the entertainment found in each type takes place ON DIFFERENT TIME
SCALES AND IN DIFFERENT INFORMATION CONTEXTS.  The longer the time
scale, the more a player will operate in an interrupt-driven mode.
The player will be notified of interesting events.  Turn-based games
operate this way.  The shorter the time scale, the more a player
will operate in a realtime mode.  Constant interactions.  Given
that, it seems appropriate to have interfaces appropriate to the
type of entertainment involved.

I'm not particularly interested in having somebody try to battle a
dragon from their internet-capable phone.  That's just silly.  The
entertainment should match the interface.  And the device must be
capable of handling the interface.  As part of all this, let's
assume that leveling a character is not the primary goal, but that
enjoying the actual interaction with the game is.  That's why the
interface itself is supposed to provide some real entertainment to
the player.  Because it presents the task at hand in an interesting
way.

I see chat messages being delivered to me as emails or instant
messages when I'm away from the game.  Either to my normal email or
delayed inside the game such that I can retrieve them on demand and
'catch up'.  I see event messages being delivered to me while I'm at
work, on vacation or just at home on the computer.

  Message from Boffo at Game.Com:
    ORDER REQUEST: Elm longbow for 30 silver pieces

  Message from Boffo at Game.Com:
    CHAT: Hiya Biff.  Fixed your computer yet?  I need that bow for
    my little brother's char...

Similary, commands can be sent back to characters to get them to do
interesting things.  I use some UI appropriate to whatever I'm doing
to compose those instructions.

This is light entertainment over time, where the player operates
primarily in absentee mode and enjoys that longer-term context for
interacting with other players.  And sometimes folks won't be
interested in playing, but only in chatting with those who are
actively doing something with their characters.  So they hop into
the guild chat room and banter away, without running any of the game
information context displays.

The assumption here is that the game characters continue to do
things even while the players are absent.  The general idea is that
NPCs and PCs merge into one set of machinery and that the NPCs can
be controlled exactly as the PCs are.  Lots of synergy between the
various UIs and AI used by both players and game administrators,
permitting more effort to be put into each because of the
double-win.  Ideally, the server protocol is documented, permitting
customers to produce their own clients.  There's a whole secondary
market there.  You charge for access to the server, they charge for
access to the client.  You buy out the clients that you really like
if they turn out to be better than your own.  But in the end, YOU
become the de facto server and protocol.

For a long time, I was going with the attitude that the game could
zoom the display in or out to show alternate information contexts.
Zoom in on a lock to pick it.  Zoom out on a town to administer it.
But it remains limited.  I really want distinct displays using 2D
graphics, 2D text, standard windows controls, etc.  As a player, it
lets me operate far more naturally and I get to enjoy manipulating
the information context that is of significance to what I'm doing.
Essentially, it is taking the back end of a bunch of single player
games and smashing them into a single server - then reconciling all
the timeframes because of the shared context.

So in summary, the idea is that there can be multiple forms of
entertainment in the game world, that these forms of entertainment
play off each other, that interfaces appropriate to the forms of
entertainment can be created, and that the interfaces vary widely
because of changing information contexts and timeframes.

Not all entertainment is 3D realtime.

JB
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