[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle writes:

> On 21 February 2007, Michael Sellers wrote:
> >I think that many MMOG devs today are stuck in a backward-looking mode
> though.
> 	I think that many are so unaware of the past that they couldn't
> look backwards if they tried.
>
> >We live in a post-WoW, post-Myspace world.
> >That's it.  DIKU and LambdaMOO are about as relevant as Whigs and arrow
> >collars.
> 	I wouldn't go that far. It's more like we're the movie industry in
> the 1930s: everyone wanted talkies and the silents were no longer relevant
> to the movie-going public. The point is, of course, that many of
> the ground rules for movie-making were made in the silent era, so the
> educated director DID pay attention to the old even if the public only
> wanted the new. Even today's directors-in-training will study the
techniques
> of silent movie-makers.

I can certainly understand the analogy, but can you provide an illustrating
example of the what has been overlooked or lost in the graphical games that
was key to being entertained in the textual ones?  What lessons are being
skipped?

> 	Virtual world designers have a lot to learn from the textual
> worlds of the past (and indeed the present). It's astonishing that players
> think the occasional mild detail in the implementation of the world or its
> NPCs are the cutting edge ("did you see that? the wolf ate the frog!").
> They deserve more than that. Furthermore, if designers looked at what has
> already been done instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, they
> may get it.

I hope this isn't an illustrating example.  I chalk up the lack of
interactive details like that to cost and time to develop them in an
audio-visual environment.  If I handed the developers of a graphical game a
bunch of NPCs that behaved like actors and a fully-simulated environment,
I'm sure they'd come up with all sorts of elaborate details to amuse and
amaze.

> 	I fear we have to snap into the 1980s before we can snap out of
> it. However virtual worlds develop in the future, they're going to have
> to go through the level of nuanced complexity that textual worlds had,
> and only when they get to the other side will we be able to reap the
> dividends. When we get there, WoW will be as irrelevant as M59 and MUD.
> I hope I'm around to see it.
> 	Right now, though, the past still matters because we can still learn
> from it.

Right, the "nuanced complexity".  What are some key elements of that?  Is
there an existing writeup on the skipped lessons of text MUDs that anyone
can point me to?

JB