[MUD-Dev2] [REPOST] DGN: Text MUDs; in need of an (r)evolution?

[Tess Snider]

On 7/11/06, Mike Rozak <Mike at mxac.com.au> wrote:
> For example: Excuse my poor prose, but... "Sarah elegantly sits down, lifts
> her teacup and saucer from the Georgian coffee table, and daintily sips her
> tea, her pinky raised in proper fashion."... While graphical MMORPGs could
> theoretically motion capture this narrative, they won't because it costs way
> too much to motion capture every scene.

Heheh, this made me giggle.

The sweet spots for roleplaying lie at opposite ends of a huge
spectrum.  At one end, you have text games, and at the other end, you
have Holodecks.  Anything in-between is going to have a lot of big,
expensive, fancy stuff in the way of what you're actually trying to
accomplish.

Interestingly, machinima developers have managed (through the magic of
editing, and dogged trial and error) to produce some fairly impressive
expressiveness out of the limited tools available to them in games
like World of Warcraft.  But, even if you provided a player with a
huge gesture palette to use at-will, most players lack the
puppeteering skills to produce a roleplayer's level of expressiveness
in the animation of their avatar.  The Ill Clan do real-time machinima
performances in front of live audiences -- with wiggling eyebrows and
everything -- but they've had years of practice at this stuff.

You know, this is the first time I've given much thought to the
relationship between roleplaying and machinima.  It's interesting,
because there IS a connection there -- and not just because there are
Second Lifer's who like to play movie moguls and set designers.  If
graphical roleplaying didn't suck, machinima could be to graphical
roleplaying what logs are to text roleplaying.

Tess