[MUD-Dev] What keeps people interested in social muds?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 03:55:30PM -0400, Martin C. Martin wrote:
> Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
>> On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 11:09:00PM -0400, Martin C. Martin wrote:
  
>>> Why would someone choose a social mud over a simple chat room,
>>> like IRC?
  
>> In a word: props.
 
> Like Ron's example of the Valentine's Day flowers?  Or did you
> have something else in mind?

Things like that, yes. But also more `mundane' things.

I'm not quite sure how to describe the commonalities of them, so
I'll start with a set of examples and try to figure it out as I
write:

My friend, Jay, is presently holding:

  http://home.earthlink.net/~rozzin/Graphics/3-D/POV-Ray/Scenes/Still/cubey2.pov,
  a typic negator, a however, a bowl, a bottle of Shorty's `Liquid
  Yfel' hot-sauce, a reference, some crap, a drawing of a bath,
  Jay's hand, a sock, and a tuber

My inventory presently consists of (this includes things that I'm wearing):

  the rob0, dice, Generic Beep, a pomegranate, a lid, katsinam, some
  sugar, a name-tag reading "rozzin", unix underpants, a stummy, a
  bottle of ginsen-drink, some personal responsibility, a little jar
  for friends, a convenience-capacitor, a nipple, a hug, note to
  call nyssa, a doctoral diploma, a chart labelled "features of
  Jay", and a lollipop

I think that I made most of this stuff; I tend to use props rather
heavily....

The bottle of `Liquid Yfel' that Jay has is a reminder of very
painful time that we shared at Shorty's (Mexican Restaurant).

I gave him his `typic negator' when he was, for some reason,
forgetting to type negations (e.g.: forgetting the "not" in
something like "that hot-sauce was NOT enjoyable"). The tuber is an
artifact from a conversation about a meal that we shared that
consisted mainly of meat..., and during which I responded to a
comment about us being `carnivores' with a note that we had also
eaten some potatoes. The URL is..., well..., a URL that I wanted to
give to him.

In my inventory: someone gave me a hug, and I still have it. I have
a pomegranate to remind me to talk about pomegranates. The capacitor
is from when we were talking about `convenience stores'. The `Beep'
is so that I can make beeps and give them to people when I want
their attention....

Some of these things are persistent puns, quips, and other bits of
manifest fun.

Some of them are intentional conveniently-located reminders.

I don't remember whether the URL is there to save context-switches
or because I thought that the idea of handing manifest information
to people in MUDs was especially pleasing at the time.

I do sort-of have this feeling that Artifacts are Just So Dang
Cool. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm the kind
of person who, in real life, keeps *everything* that anyone gives to
me.... Manifest memory is just so... pleasing....

And there's something... `magical' and delightful about the
-infinitude- of props available to me in the MUD--*conversation* can
be converted into ad-hoc proppery, and we can create something that
we'll stumble onto in the future and be reminded, `oh, yeah--I
remember that conversation'; it's just like when I find some
fogotten little bauble, in the bottom of a drawer, given to me by
someone as a gift. But, I think that there's a little more to it,
too.

This `remembrancer' aspect that I've mentioned in my previous
paragraph is available, to some extent, by just logging output to a
textfile; the limits of that, though, include:

  - I have to switch contexts to go read the log-files

  - reading the log-files is a highly-intentional act; it's rather
  unlikely that someone else is going to cause the log-file to poke
  into my reality, and, so, there's a little less of a `surprise'
  aspect.

  - things in log-files aren't easily (potentially even
  inadvertently) recontextualised.

Hmmm.... Have I communicated anything that makes any sense to anyone
else, yet?
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