[MUD-Dev] [MEDIA] Finding an Interesting Middle Path in the RPG

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 10:17:24 -0700 
Raph Koster <Koster> wrote:

> Hmm, for online worlds you usually see this phrased the other way
> around--there's plenty of morally gray areas--accumulation of wealth
> being a key one--but what you are lacking is clear morality, a clear
> sense of being a hero.

Certainly the backdrop of the games suggests enormous scale, great deeds
with huge impacts, and infinite supplies of glory.  Of course infinite
supplies of glory makes glory kinda cheap, and that great scale not only
reduces the relative size of the great deeds, but starts looking a whole
lot like the bit of vinyl on the they pasted on the score board of the
pinball machine so that all the scores were now in terms of hundreds of
millions instead of hundreds of thousands.

Heros by almost by definition "exceptional" and its a bit tough to be
exceptional where everyone is above average.

> Let's not kid ourselves, of course--a hero in KOTOR is *pretending* to
> be a hero, not actually a hero. What muds and MMOs often fail to do is
> offer a good enough pretense of being a hero for those who want to
> pretend. 

Quite.  We don't paint the story well enough to be convincing.  The farm
boy saving the village from the fire dragon is wonderful story, but
relies on the resource and intelligence starvation of the poor farm boy
context, the lack of long distance communications and the simple
equation of either handling the dragon or having every one and thing you
know eaten, is not so easy to pull off convincingly in a world of career
Conans.

> Since you are not driven along a narrative line, you often have other
> motivations polluting the heroic arc.

Is it really a question of motivational purity or difficulty of choice
dichotomy?  LegendMUD did/does this surprisingly well.  Can such
techniques be effectively scaled across both player densities and player
counts?  I'm not sure and am starting to think that it is only really
possible in the smaller contexts set against a thinly painted huge
backdrop.

> On the flip side, muds do permit people to ACTUALLY be heroes, in
> struggling against genuine bad behavior, evilness, moral cowardice,
> etc, on the part of other players or even the game admins. 

Touche.

> But actual heroism is, alas, too hard for most people--they'd rather
> pretend to be a hero than actually be one. After all, actual heroes
> have uncomfortable and often abbreviated lives. It's not as fun an
> experience as "the good parts" version of heroism that a a *lack* of
> moral choices can give you.

Nobody really wants to be Private William Mandella.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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