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

[Raph Koster]

John Buehler wrote:
> Richard A. Bartle writes:
>
> > On 29 March 2007, John Buehler wrote:
> > >Is a textual emote in a graphical environment a reasonable thing?
> >         Sure it is. It works for speech, why not emotes?
>
> Because emotes are visual and speech is not.  Typed speech is a crutch
> until we can get voice working properly.  Whether that means player
> voices or character voices, I have no idea.

Typed speech is not a crutch; it's an alternate mode of expression. It
has different strengths and weaknesses. Large-scale multithreaded
conversations, for example, are something that text enables that voice
fails at.

Technologies accrete, they don't replace. Text chat arrived in the 70s,
and isn't likely to just go away; it may lose some popularity, but it
will likely remain as a feature in the same way that the command line
still lurks in all the current OSes.