[MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user2.inficad.com> wrote:
>[Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad:]
>> Are you talking MUD or what?
>
>Of course, since that's the topic of this list.  But I'm also speaking
>of other games.  Some examples with recent games:
>
> When I play Command & Conquer, I am not a Nazi.
> When I play Monkey Island, I am not a wanna-be pirate.
> When I play King's Quest, I am not an estranged priness.
> When I play Space Quest, I am not a futuristic janitor.
> When I play Master of Orion, I am not a silicon-based creature bent
>  on the genocide of all the other races within fifty solar systems of me.
>
>My *character* is.

I'm afraid this might be a very subjective thing.  One of the habitat
papers point at this.  I'll note that the emotions involved are also
quite subjective.  In some sense this is unfortunate for designers...
How far can you go? You don't know, unless you know your audience. :-/

>piloted by some unseen character, this is true.  If you're talking about
>the majority of adventure games where you are given a character which
>has a certain personality, you are simply not them.  Now, since you
>do control them most of the time, if they are constantly doing things
>which anger you (because you would have done something different
>had you been in control), this can be bad.  Without a character having
>their own personality you can't have story motivations which personaly
>involve the character - meaning paper-thin stories with no character
>interaction at all.  I think this is worth not being able to pick up
>an axe and go on a killing spree just because it would be inconsistant
>with the character's nature.

Well, I don't really agree.  The character is still me. It is up to
the producer to convince me to project my own personality into the
limitations of the "avatar" and to accept the background of that
"avatar". So I might try to look at the gameworld through that
character, but it is still me.  Or should I say, it is if my mind has
been teleported into that character's body.  I would then expect the
surroundings to treat me as if I was the soul that previously had been
living in the said body.  I sort of accept that trying to convince the
other characters that this is the case would be useless and act
accordingly.  It's only a computer game, you know. :)

>> There is less motive for roleplaying,
>> roleplaying/acting for a computer makes me feel like I am wasting
>> time, more so now than when I was a kid.  When I play Myst, I am me
>> (it is me in a role, but I has MY personality).  To roleplay for
>> another humanbeing...  That's fun.
>
>Hmmm.  Like I said, I haven't played Myst, but one of the artists I
>work with worked in the sequel and I watched him play it for a bit.
>There's no role - there's no character stuff at all.  You're a robot
>flying through a series of static pictures and fiddling with
>misc. devices.

Uhm, I would rather say that you are a visitor, an explorer, a
traveller, a reader, an observer, an investigator.

Another visitor?  Stay a while, stay forever!!

>> Lucasarts, they make movies in a box, right?
>
>*scratch* You consider Lucasart adventures to be movies in a box, but
>Myst is a fully interactive roleplaying experience?

No, not roleplaying.

>> I can't say I feel I am "in" the game, I am more having one hand in
>> there.
>
>Is that good or bad?

Yes?  Good if you look for fast consumption I guess?

>> It's more like watching a movie, skipping the boring parts (if
>> allowed to), and saying "I bet that's what's going to happen next".  I
>> find these types of games highly annoying unless I've got a
>> cheatmanual somewhere. (Like I'm going to hunt down that missing key,
>> lazy designers, go find it yourselves)
>
>Hum, okay.  There's not much point in talking about adventure games
>if you don't like them.

Hey, I like adventure games with freedom. Without those annoying
roadblocks (Myst had it's share).  I would like an adventure game
without freedom if I don't have to look for those stupid keys.  My
personal reference for a game with a story and with freedom is
Infocom's Deadline.

I was thinking about the state of the art (games) today, I couldn't
really find many examples of new concepts that haven't been used in a
classic CBM64 game.  On the other hand I can think of a couple of
"C64" concepts that isn't visible in the current games I know of.

Ola.