Is space deep? (was RE: [MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?)

[David Kennerly]

Raph Koster wrote:
> From: Paul McInnes

>>   [1] I realise that the text side of things is very well
>>   established but I'd argue that the 3D commercial games are
>>   different enough to be a different medium. Lots of overlap and
>>   some deep differences.

> Like what? Seriously, I keep hearing that there are deep
> differences and I have yet to see them.

Here's three differences, that if not deep, must be broad.  :)

  Spatial reasoning.
  Construction.
  Navigation.

The textual medium cannot test a player's spatial reasoning skills.
Puzzle Pirates, BnB, and Gunbound cannot be done in text.  Neither
can archery in games that employ skill, such as Asheron's Call.  I
wonder: Could PlanetSide or Endless Ages be played with a text
client?  It certainly wouldn't be a first person shooter game.  If
City of Heroes had made it a priority, it could have (and still
could) design spatial reasoning into its gameplay in many ways.

Is space deep?  That is spatial reasoning a deep difference between
text and graphics?  It's older than the mammalian brain.  Human
brains have evolved to enjoy solving spatial reasoning problems,
including inverse kinematics, such as: how do I hit that dinner with
this spear.  According to one of Matt Ridley's sources in The
Origins of Virtue, human brains, especially males, contain neural
architecture to solve these kinds of problems.

It might be why boys like first person shooters, and why physics
among other sciences were invented.  Would Galileo have proven
heliocentrism through a textual looking glass?  Of course it is
mathematically possible and text is where he proposed the simplified
cosmology, but would he have been so fascinated as to try without
vision?  Some computer scientists work hard to discover data
visualization techniques, to transform text into images, just so
that they may become more entertaining to look at and so engage the
brain's search for patterns.  Such pattern searching is a simple
form of spatial reasoning.  Massive multiplayer games, compared to
other non-MMP games, seem nascent in regard to design of spatial
reasoning challenges.

Construction differs.  Second Life proves this by example: it is
built on players building in three dimensions.  It's builder mode is
a limited 3D modeling suite.  In the most abstract sense text is
built on players building in one dimension: One character after
another.  Pendantically, one dimension can encode any number of
dimensions, but that's not how the eyes see it or the ears hear it.
While I've used text interfaces to design graphic MMOs, and of
course scripting is inherently more efficient to program as text,
such things as level editors are inherently more efficient to review
as graphics.

Navigation also differs.  As an example, City of Heroes has a blip
on the compass that locates the next important location, which
rotates as the player rotates the avatar.  This would not be
possible in text.  As another example, text can collapse space.
Teleportation does this in graphic games, but it always jars the
player, removing her from the fiction for the duration of the
teleport.  But in text it's expected to be move through the boring
areas to reach a decision node.

This is not to imply that graphics are superior to text, especially
when the levels are designed poorly.  I would rather have text get
me to the interesting parts of the game, than trudge across a
noninteractive landscape.  Similar cases can be illustrated for the
other two aspects.  Text can exercise conceptual reasoning, for
which graphics are too concrete.  And of course, only text can
exercise reading and writing skills.  True graphics do include text,
but when all you have is text, then all you can do is read or write;
thus it is guaranteed these skills are being employed (3v3n 1f
t3rribl33).  :)

David
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