[MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants)

[Mike Sellers]

Damion wrote:
> On 3/22/07, John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> > No argument from me on any of that.  What is the role of EMOTING in
> > World of Warcraft?  None of this is about multiplayer games being
> > social.  They are
> > highly social.  We started off with "Why is the /bow command in certain
> > games so weak?"  I think the game was World of Warcraft, but I can't
> > remember.  Perhaps it was only implied.  In any case, I don't want to
> > lose sight of the original premise.
>
> ...
> I'm personally not a big fan of making such emotes a required gameplay
> mechanic in any way.  They should remain social tools.  

It's commonly accepted that "social != gameplay" but I think that's an
unnecessarily limiting view: it's an Achiever's POV of the totality of
the
gameplay space that leaves a lot of others out in the cold.  

Imagine for example if "combat" was considered to be a lame and mostly
irrelevant addition to an otherwise social game -- depending on your
assumption set, almost anything can look like gameplay, or not.  Or
consider
that The Sims (a mildly successful game, if I recall correctly) was
almost
entirely social gameplay, using a model that hasn't yet been applied to
MMOs.  

> If you want to see more emotes, I personally would try to identify ways
> to create cultural change inside the game that made them more widespread.

> SWG's bots not withstanding, there was a huge culture in that game that
> encouraged more face-to-face contests, as well as impromptu beauty
> pageants and dance contests.  A lot of that came from simply giving them
> the tools, but also pushing people towards other people in the cantinas.

That's a good zeroth step, but it still doesn't do much in the way of
making
social *gameplay.*  Just as emotes aren't gameplay, neither is
non-interactive dancing, or dancing without real consequence in the
world.  

We're looking at relational gameplay -- including among other things
what
might be called emotional management -- but this is only distantly
related
to 'emotes' as seen in current games.  By analogy, if your combat system
was
not much more than "/swing sword" that'd be the equivalent of today's
emotes.  A lot of gamers won't be terribly interested in this, at least
to
start, but then there are a lot of potential players who aren't thrilled
by
the idea of yet-another-combat-system either.  

Mike Sellers