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

[Dana V. Baldwin]

Damion Schubert wrote:
> I'm personally not a big fan of making such emotes a required gameplay
> mechanic in any way.  They should remain social tools.  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.

I am personally a fan of emote and agree whole heartedly. Another area
where most games need improvement in emotes out side of any gameplay is
access. Too often they are relegated to a slash command that can only be
discovered using another slash command or even worse, in an in game
manual or in the bowels of a web page or *gasp* paper game manual.

SWG did a reasonable job of this with the radial menu, though I don't
recall it being all inclusive. Other better attempts were keyboard
driven and excellent examples can be found in NWN1 and Tribes. Another
nice thing that we are doing with these types of emotes is automatically
translating them. These tend to not give the depth of optional
adjectives are adverbs that Richard was talking about earlier but the
ease of exploration of a key based tree system makes for quick responses
and a small learning curve which I think makes them more readily usable
by the masses.

Hotkeys and macros are also good for these type systems and I think a
combination of these 2 features could have a very nice effect.