[MUD-Dev] Metric vs. English System of Measurement in Games

[ceo]

Michael Hartman wrote:

> It pains me as an American that we insist on perpetuating the use
> of the inferior English or Imperial measurement system.

> The game design question this raises is what should a developer
> use when create a new game world?

That opening sentence sounds like flame bait, but I'm treating it as
a serious question (hence what follows isn't a flame response, but
serious).

Why do you think people used that system for so long, and why do
they still cling onto it despite the simplicity of a decimal system
in cultures which already have a decimal numerical system? (counting
in tens is easier if your currency and maths is all already base-10)
It would seem worth asking this seriously before kicking it aside as
"inferior"...

The complaint I've heard time and again from people resisting metric
units (which are now partially enforced by law in the EU, which
makes a lot of UK people very unhappy) is that metric units are
"meaningless". This isn't a coherent complaint, but what they seem
to mean is that the major units in the imperial system are all
real-world chunks of usefulness.

For instance, if we only ever measured weight in kilograms it would
be a PITA to do any cooking, counting in 0.001's of a kg.

1 foot seems to be believed to be a more useful length than 10cm -
certainly, when measuring real-world distances on the "human scale"
(c.f. architecture books) a foot is much easier to work with,
completely ignoring the fact that it's approximatable by your own
body.

Ditto the inch. This one's better because the variance in the part
of the body used to approximate it is much lower than with the
foot. For instance, those friends of mine who are 6'-4" come up with
very similar hand-segment lengths as those who are a mere 5'-5".

Perhaps this is useful food for thought when you come to choose your
units. However, I can't see that you really have anythign to worry
about, since the relationship is deterministic: simply make a
checkbox in the setup menu for "imperial / metric". Implementing the
conversion formulae once is pretty trivial...

Adam M
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