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

[Damion Schubert]

On 4/3/07, Mike Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>

Oh, I get what you guys are going for.  Still, one has to recognize the
impact of crossing the streams.

A classic part of the ultima license is the 8 virtues, and completing
quests to prove that you are honest, honorable, just, etc.  On UO and2
UO2, though, the designers really resisted adding these features in --
in a social space, having the game say that you've proven yourself
'honest' MEANS something.  It's socially relevant.  And IMPORTANT.
Sure enough, eventually a later UO team ended up putting in virtue
quests, and sure enough, they were all catassable, and the virtue
became a meaningless term.

Similarly, in the Sims, flirting is a fun and meaningless event.  However,
in an online space, the /flirt command MEANS something.  If you don't
believe me, flirt with a woman in an online space who is not your wife -
in front of your wife. It's even kind of wierd if you're doing it to an
otherwise non-responsive NPC.  Incentivizing flirting that isn't meaningful
does two things: first, it creates social dissonance, as players powergame
their emotions.  Second, it ultimately devalues those emotes of their
meaning.  My 2 cents only, of course.

Interestingly enough, I did once work on a game where player emoting
was the actual core of the game.  It was a game called 'Hollyworld', where
the core mechanic was emoting with sort of a rhythm-game front end to
it (Characters were actors taking parts in 'script' minigames together).
It side-stepped the problems above because, quite simply, any
actions you did inside the minigame were easily dismissable as 'just
acting'.  2

The problem with this train of thought is that it feels like people are
thinking that what socializers really want are achiever-like gameplay
with a socializer veneer.  This is not, I would argue, what socializers
want, and if you end up in this direction, you end up with achievers
pushing socializers out of their chosen portions of your gaming world
(as the bots did in SWG).  What socializers want is (a) tools to aid and
facilitate socializing and (b) to feel important in the world around them.
We could be doing a lot more to make socializers happy, I'd grant,
but if you're starting with 'let's give them gameplay', I'd argue we're
sniffing in the wrong direction.

--d