[MUD-Dev] What's in the lack of a name?

[shren]

On Sat, 26 Oct 2002, Ted L. Chen wrote:
> shren wrote:
>> On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Ted L. Chen wrote:
>>> shren writes:

>>>> A momentary thought - I wonder if you can prevent the rate of
>>>> mass publication of game secrets by not giving anything a name.
>>>> Don't name places, don't name items, don't give out coordinates
>>>> to players.  Common names for things are critical for
>>>> communication.

>>> So players will figure to call it something instead of some set
>>> of coordinates.  "Hey, I'll meet you at the Dancing Atrox" is
>>> much easier to write and informative than "Hey, I'll meet you at
>>> 358x345".

>> Ah, but the point is that if you deny the players both names and
>> coordinates, they have to name everything themselves.  You're
>> almost forcing them to develop culture, and in doing so the will
>> collaborate.

> Good point about coordinates.  Although in AO, coordinates are not
> very well understood by all, and most initial descriptions of
> places do take the form of landmarks.  The Dancing Atrox one had
> the "go out the east-gate of Omni-1, past the outer wall and then
> directly south along the wall through the shanty towns."  Of
> course, places without any good landmarks did have to resort to
> coordinates.  But I see your point and would expand on the thought
> with the idea that some common point of reference is required to
> get the ball rolling.

> That is, at least one prominent place in your world should be
> named by the developers (Omni-1 in the above example).  I wonder
> though if even lacking that, would players use the newbie starting
> place as a widely accepted landmark origin?

I can certainly see naming at least a few things.  The idea of
building the newbie point as a primary landmark so all directions
tend to be relative to it is a clever bit of social engineering.

>> Say I'm in a nameless, coordinateless world, up in a mountain
>> region, and while fighting off other foes a bunch of goblins come
>> over the ridge.  A member of our party named Dierog runs over and
>> holds them at bay untill we defeat the other foe and come help
>> him.

>> Later on I want to meet a member of my group there, so to tell
>> him where I'm talking about, I tell him to meet me where Dierog
>> fought all of the goblins.  Lacking any other name, we might call
>> this area "Dierog's Stand", and other people, lacking any other
>> name, might pick up on it, and how it got it's name.

>> Because this area did not have a name, we now have a player-made
>> name, a famous player (famous for doing something other than
>> being cruel to other players or capping his level), and a shared
>> myth.  None of this would have happened if the area already had a
>> name.

> While I do agree that player-named places can propogate, I'm not
> convinced anything that is so closely attached to a single player
> (i.e. their name) can.  That is, the usual way for such a name to
> be formed is through a tight clique.  Such a clique rarely
> interacts with other people in the same way.  Just as it happens
> in RL.  "Bubba's Fiasco" (the mexican resturant where Bubba had
> food poisoning and barfed on the waitress) might have meaning to
> one set of my friends, but it would have far less effect and
> sticking power in my other set of friends who didn't know Bubba.

I live, IRL, in a world full of things named after people.  Just
because the names are remote doesn't mean they arn't
culture-enhancing.

<snip>

>> Everything in the game that we do not give a name, we give the
>> players the opportunity to name.  As you have pointed out, every
>> time the players name something, they build culture.  So why name
>> anything in advance?  Yank visible place names and visible item
>> names right out of the system and let the players name everything
>> and share, through communication, the names they create.

> For the very simple reason of landmarking.  We would have been
> hard pressed to show new people where the Dancing Atrox was if we
> weren't sure we could refer to Omni-1 at all.

>> Giving things in rpgs names during the design stage is
>> practically reflexive at this point.  Everything gets a name.
>> All I'm calling upon all of you to think about is, what would the
>> games be like if this were not the case - if a longsword +5
>> didn't, for all intents and purposes, have "longsword +5"
>> digitally branded on the side?

> Heh, I was never a fan of the +# naming scheme :) Although I would
> say that at least having the word "longsword" does have the
> advantage that people know that you're talking about a
> hand-wielded weapon instead of a spell.  In a way, that's the
> landmark, and the +5 is just the directions to get to the variant
> [longsword +5].  If no name was given, and a [longsword +5] is
> interesting enough in itself, I think people would start calling
> it the "dancing atrox".

In a sufficiently graphical game, a sword would look like a sword
and swing like a sword, and thus you might be likely to call it a
longsword.


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