[MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was:ArantagainstVanguardreviewsand rants)

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 03 May 2007, Stephen McDonald wrote:
>Spoken "sigh" was not uncommon around MIT in the early
>80's, and it had nothing to do with computer communication.
	We had it at Essex University, too, where it was a
MUD thing. It isn't, however, just a MUD thing.
	My own experience of sigh as a spoken emote goes
back to my postal gaming days. It was popularly used in
letters and zines as an ender for a paragraph describing
some obviously bad/stupid thing over which the writer had
no control. At game conventions, where people met
face-to-face, you'd sometimes hear it spoken.
	My guess is that this is one of those things that
got invented independently all over the place, but tended
to remain in relatively closed groups. A gathering of
telegraph operators in 1880 would have probably had some
of them saying the word sigh or lol or whatever other
means they'd developed to express emotion in Morse
code.

		Richard