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

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 22 March 2007, John Buehler wrote:
>When I say "an interest in emote systems", I'm talking about the use of
>emotes to build up a character's role or to augment the game context in
some
>way.
	Oh, well in that case, sure, they're not going to be used this way
very often in WoW-like worlds.
	However, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be present. They might
not be used this way, but they WILL be used for other purposes.

>You may get a grass roots thing going or you may not.  I'm skeptical.
	That's fine. It's such little effort to implement an emote
system that it's worth a try, though.
	Indeed, even if it's not worth the effort, it's certainly worth
making whatever you have instead work so it doesn't get in the way
of player intentions. If I /clap, I want to see "You clap.", I
don't want to see "You clap excitedly.". I may be clapping to be
sarcastic, or for silence, or because I'm playing "Simon says".

>I assume that emoting systems are one of those things that people either
>enjoy using or not - at a fundamental level.
	Undoubtedly. However, I would venture that the people who play
virtual worlds are greatly more likely to fall into the "enjoy"
category than the "not" category.

>Okay.  I can see people dipping a toe into this area once every so often.
>Is that going to serve as an argument to a product team for expending more
>resources on it?
	As I said, if you don't want to animate these actions then it's
hardly any work at all to create a list of emotes. You can take a bored
member of the admin staff, sit them down with a thesaurus, and ask them
to type in all the words that they can find with some connection to
emotions.

>My point is that if the majority of players are auto-smiling merchants,
then
>the game is flawed.
	I agree (although my experience of shops in the USA is that most
sales assistants are indeed auto-smiling merchants; here in the UK, they're
auto-surly instead).

>Putting in a penalty for players not playing the game
>the way you want them to is fundamentally a bad idea, in my opinion.
	I disagree. If some players playing how they want spoils the way
that the vast majority want to play, then it's legitimate to penalise them.
Is it fundamentally a bad idea for a soccer referee to award a free kick
if an outfield player decides they want to throw the ball instead of
kicking it?

>A game
>cannot say "Kill everything in town, then go and have a little chat with
the
>hermit outside of town."
	I agree that there are only limited situations in which you might
want to design something like this, yes.

>My rule of thumb is that if players are macroing a game system, then there
>is a mismatch between the player base and the game systems.
	Well, between the macroers and the game systems. People who use macros
don't necessarily represent the entire player base: plenty of players might
really enjoy what they're doing.
	I could macro this list (ie. spam it) but that doesn't mean there
would be a mismatch between the user base and the mailing list; it means
there is a mismatch between me and the mailing list, which would probably
be best handled by separating us (ie. banning me) than by changing the
mailing list so it sent out spam automatically.

>Multimedia games demand multimedia treatment.
	They do, but you don't have to give in to the demands. When my
character speaks in WoW, does its lips move? When it swims, does
its clothes get wet? When it jumps off a cliff, does its hair fly up?
Who's going to care if /gasp doesn't have an animation?

>This is what it boils down to:
>You say that a rich emoting system would be used if it were made available.
>I say that a rich emoting system will be used if it were made available and
>part of the "right" kind of game.
	I agree with you. However, I happen to believe that virtual worlds
are intrinsically the "right" kind of game. If you have a game in which
freeform inter-player communication through some analogy of speech is
used, you have one where emotes would be used.

		Richard