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

[Adam Martin]

On 03/04/07, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
>
> Despite the verbosity of my posts on the internet, I do not like talking
> in game. However, I am more than willing to communicate through emotes if
> possible - it just rarely is. Some of my most interesting encounters in
> World of Warcraft have been with Alliance players (I'm Horde) who couldn't
> use verbal communication at all (good thing, those Night Elves, you know?)
> - so we used emotes and body language to insinuate things about each
> other's stench and propensity for engaging in sexual favors with
> particular farm animals.
>

The richness of your typical free IM client's smileys these days is
enough that I've often had full conversations in emote. Because you
can, and it's both an interesting challenge to interpret what the
other person is saying and a highly creative exercise to decide how to
express a particular concept with your strange vocabulary. It's
especially fun when done with multiple people in the same chat...

It works because the average person has many different concepts
layered on top of even the simplest of icons (or words) - partial
meanings and context-sensitive implications etc - such that you can
convey rich meaning through that.

It does sometimes feel like using a Golden Compass however, and there
are times when the conversation becomes completely incomprehensible
("your left nose is flying south for the winter? WTF??").

I'm guessing there are sites somewhere on the net dedicated to this
kind of pictorial contextual conversation?

Adam