[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998 01:51:15 -0000 (GMT) 
Matt Chatterley<matt at mpc.dyn.ml.org> wrote:

> On 01-Jul-98 J C Lawrence wrote:

>> Nahh.  Combat is very definitely a part and parcel of IRC, and
>> TinyMUDs -- they just haven't formalised it.  In the IRC cases
>> consider the cases of channel splitting, the use of robots to
>> steal/prevent stealing of admin priviledges etc, and for TinyMUDs,
>> wouldn't the LambdaMOO rape case serve well enough?

> Definition is everything, really. You could argue that in some ways
> combat and conflict are synonymous, and also make a good case for
> combat as being 'a situation in which one or more parties attempt to
> inflict damage upon another party or parties', in which case, social
> bashing, and so forth is most definitely combatative. Almost all
> Mud-like games contain combat. At some point. Even social
> games. Formalising it is a deliberate design step (as you say), and
> sometimes a theoretical one (guidelines for combat within roleplayed
> environments with a low code footprint). Nowhere is 'combat free',
> anyway.

Precisely.  The underlieing point is that this provides another metric
and scale for a game or world designer to examine and control: to what
degree is combat/conflict explicitly formalised and controlled within
the game settings, and to what extent is it a "roll your own".

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