[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle

> On 22 March 2007, John Buehler wrote:
> >When I say "an interest in emote systems", I'm talking about the use of
> >emotes to build up a character's role or to augment the game context in
> some
> >way.
> 	Oh, well in that case, sure, they're not going to be used this way
> very often in WoW-like worlds.
> 	However, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be present. They might
> not be used this way, but they WILL be used for other purposes.

Agreed.  In my mind, the question then becomes one of matching the emotes
with the players.  That can be done by considering what players who enjoy a
given game are like.

> >You may get a grass roots thing going or you may not.  I'm skeptical.
> 	That's fine. It's such little effort to implement an emote
> system that it's worth a try, though.
> 	Indeed, even if it's not worth the effort, it's certainly worth
> making whatever you have instead work so it doesn't get in the way
> of player intentions. If I /clap, I want to see "You clap.", I
> don't want to see "You clap excitedly.". I may be clapping to be
> sarcastic, or for silence, or because I'm playing "Simon says".

Is a textual emote in a graphical environment a reasonable thing?  I assume
that players who are drawn to graphical settings are drawn to them at least
in part because they are graphical.  If they're going to be using emotes,
surely they want graphical emotes.  Graphical emoting isn't "such little
effort".

> >I assume that emoting systems are one of those things that people either
> >enjoy using or not - at a fundamental level.
> 	Undoubtedly. However, I would venture that the people who play
> virtual worlds are greatly more likely to fall into the "enjoy"
> category than the "not" category.

Understood.

> >Okay.  I can see people dipping a toe into this area once every so often.
> >Is that going to serve as an argument to a product team for
> expending more
> >resources on it?
> 	As I said, if you don't want to animate these actions then it's
> hardly any work at all to create a list of emotes. You can take a bored
> member of the admin staff, sit them down with a thesaurus, and ask them
> to type in all the words that they can find with some connection to
> emotions.

This goes back to my comments above about the desirability of textual emotes
in a graphical setting.

> >My point is that if the majority of players are auto-smiling merchants,
> then
> >the game is flawed.
> 	I agree (although my experience of shops in the USA is that most
> sales assistants are indeed auto-smiling merchants; here in the
> UK, they're auto-surly instead).

Which is a lead-in to the debate about entertainment versus reality.

> >Putting in a penalty for players not playing the game
> >the way you want them to is fundamentally a bad idea, in my opinion.
> 	I disagree. If some players playing how they want spoils the way
> that the vast majority want to play, then it's legitimate to
> penalise them.

Yes.  I was assuming we were talking about the mainstream player.

> Is it fundamentally a bad idea for a soccer referee to award a free kick
> if an outfield player decides they want to throw the ball instead of
> kicking it?

In a computer-controlled environment why are we letting the player throw the
ball if the game is structured to only allow kicking it?

> >My rule of thumb is that if players are macroing a game system,
> then there
> >is a mismatch between the player base and the game systems.
> 	Well, between the macroers and the game systems. People who
> use macros
> don't necessarily represent the entire player base: plenty of
> players might
> really enjoy what they're doing.

Again, I'm talking about the mainstream case.  But it seems that we agree on
the basic principle: macroing of a game action is a sign of a problem
between the system and the player who is macroing.  I'm simply saying that
the game system is as flawed as the fraction of players who are macroing it.
"Flawed" meaning anything from "mistargeted" to "ill conceived".

> >Multimedia games demand multimedia treatment.
> 	They do, but you don't have to give in to the demands. When my
> character speaks in WoW, does its lips move? When it swims, does
> its clothes get wet? When it jumps off a cliff, does its hair fly up?
> Who's going to care if /gasp doesn't have an animation?

I think that players DO care about all those cases.  Yes, a non-graphical
emoting system can be put in, but because there are graphical emoting
systems extant, players in graphical settings will be disappointed.  Just as
they would be disappointed if there was lip-synch in a graphical game.
Other games would look primitive when compared on that point.

> >This is what it boils down to:
> >You say that a rich emoting system would be used if it were made
> available.
> >I say that a rich emoting system will be used if it were made
> available and
> >part of the "right" kind of game.
> 	I agree with you. However, I happen to believe that virtual worlds
> are intrinsically the "right" kind of game. If you have a game in which
> freeform inter-player communication through some analogy of speech is
> used, you have one where emotes would be used.

I'm certainly not going to argue with you about what a "virtual world" is.
:)

JB