[MUD-Dev] Types of game

[coder at ibm.net]

On 20/09/97 at 07:22 AM, Matt Chatterley <root at mpc.dyn.ml.org> said:

>The three basic types are:

>Roleplaying...

>Hack'n'Slash...

>Adventure...
...
>Cogitate, deliberate, and dissect.

There are some obvious parallels:

  -- The three basic plots which all literature, movies, stories etc fall
into at least one of:

    1) Boy meets girl
    2) The little tailor (man goes out, has an adventure, comes home and
tells everyone about it)
    3) Man learns a lesson.

  -- Bartle's clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades system (see JOMR, or the
list archives for a copy).  

Both above parallels illuminate portions not covered by your dissection:

  From the plot categories: TinySex, NetSex, and other erotica as a
variation on "Boy Meets Girl".  (I'll tentitively accept that Man Learns a
Lesson can be accepted as a sub-set of "Adventure").

  From Bartle: Puzzle solving, tinkering, systemic exploration, which I'd
argue is not a sub-set of "Adventure".

  From Bartle:  Socialisers, talkers, and other such like which bear
little relation to RP (arguability accepted on their definition as
"games").

I also suspect that it would be valuable for any system which attempted to
describe this field to put an axis perpendicular to all the others,
labelled "personal involvement".  Each segment stretches from "I am my
character an everything that happens to him happens to me" to "Hey, I have
a character, look what I can make him do!"

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...