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

[Sean Howard]

"John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:

> To me, professionalism is about the rank and file worker being diligent
> in his work, completing it to the best of his ability.  It is a
> mindset. For the 1% of the population that comprises the geniuses of
> our society, they can work however they like.

I find it very interesting that you make a distinction between the "rank
and file" employees and the "geniuses". So, professionalism is only
worthwhile to the stupid and uncreative? Okay, I'll give you that.

But the problem comes from singling out that 1%, because they, more than
anybody, are confined and controlled by professionalism. I mean, if you've
got an IQ of 160, people think you should be able to arrive to work on
time and not take three week breaks to measure the acoustic qualities of
your ceiling tiles. Being a genius usually involves exhibiting extremely
unprofessional behavior and thought, but that doesn't mean they get away
with it in practice.

> Thank you ever so much for supporting my comments to Richard Bartle.
> Richard, this is exactly the type of player mindset that I'm thinking of
> when I say that depth isn't in the games because the players really don't
> care about it.  It doesn't have inherent appeal to those who are drawn to
> the current crop of games.

That is NOT what I said as all. I said that depth is but one tool in the
toolkit. You can make games without depth just like you can make games
without graphics or without stories or without breadth. I made NO
judgement on the players or their preferences. Depth is optional because
depth is not the only virtue videogames have. It isn't the holy grail. It
isn't the One True Way(tm). It's just something that good designers know
when to use, and perhaps more importantly, when not to.

> That said, I couldn't disagree with Sean more.  He and I are in entirely
> different demographic groups.  I care nothing for advancement and
> competition, and would love to just fool around in a game world with a
> lot of depth.

While I'm sure we are indeed very different demographic groups, you are
mischaracterizing my position completely. I actually find advancement and
competition absolute repulsive on many levels. But I don't play games for
a single purpose, just like I don't read books for a single purpose. Maybe
your bookshelf is filled with nothing but Tom Clancy novels, but mine has
novels, serials, nonfiction, programming manuals, foreign languages,
manga, philosophy, psychology, strategy guides, coffee table picture
books, encyclopedias, reference material, comic books, pen and paper
roleplaying games, and like a million other things.

Which is precisely my point. Videogames don't cater to a single purpose
and it would be just as big a mistake to insert depth when it is unneeded
as it would be to ignore it when it is. You don't want existentialist
ramblings in your porn, and you don't want porn in your existentialist
ramblings.

> Explorer socializers.

I'm a libra.

> You rely on your anecdotal evidence and I'll rely on mine  :)

Surely you must see the difference between making blanket statements using
anecdotal evidence and disproving them with anecdotal evidence?

>> > Graphical games lack the precedent of quality and depth because
>> > the first ones stood on the novelty of their graphics.
>>
>> What? That's just crazy talk.
>
> I invite alternate theories as to the reason for the success of EverQuest
> and its follow-ons.

Well, for one thing, it was marketed. It had advertisements in magazines,
reviews from well known sources. Text MUDs never got exposure, nor never
really tried to break out of the type of players it was attracting. No
doubt EQ's graphics made a difference, but there were graphical games long
before EQ that were not as popular (Meridian 59, for example). It wasn't
graphics. It was media attentions. Although if you wanted to argue that
most "game journalists" were little more than manchildren with the reading
level of a six year old with dislexia, I won't fault you that point.

> Without that cheap graphics engine, a garage effort can't bring depth to
> a game of any size because depth and graphics are just too time
> consuming to do from scratch.

Depends on the depth and depends on the graphics. I think Runescape is one
of the biggest MMORPGs out there right now, and it is largely the result
of something like three people. Not exactly big on the depth or graphics,
but like I've argued earlier, neither of these things are really
requirements. Runescape stands as the single greatest argument for the
potential success of a garage attempt.

Also, if you keep the depth largely abstract and keep the graphics simple,
a few people could easily create a compelling, competitive experience in
their garage. As a pixel artist, working only a couple hours a day for a
few months, I could probably pump out a significant amount of attractive,
semi-professional pixel art once the standardization process was completed
- something on par with Maple Story or at least Habitat/Club Caribe - and
I'm a very slow pixel artist. But the complexity comes from the
standardization process: figuring out how big the characters should be,
how the paper doll functions, what features to anticipate, which ones to
rule out completely, and how these things all work together with the
greater effort of SQL tables, account management, failsafes, world models,
and so on... well, that's the tricky part.

To make a long story short (too late), it's not the graphics engine which
is the problem. It is the WHOLE engine. With a certain homogenized MMORPG
engine (something like a graphical lpMUD with not just a world mudlib, but
also a graphical mudlib, upon which players can build rather than create
from scratch), you'll start seeing the variety, depth, and virtues that
old text MUDs exhibit that you believe lack in more modern
interpretations. It's not just the graphics. It's the networking, front
end, back end, database, customer service, testing, yada, yada, and yada.

-- 
Sean Howard