The recipe for advancing the field is…
A long-time MUD-Dev poster posted feeling that the field of online world design was stagnant.
To me, one of the major signs of burnout in a mud admin is when they start this sort of us vs them thing going. Yes, we often see the worst side of players; we see the nails that stick up out of the wood, we hear the squeaky wheels and the grindingly loud ones. And it gets tiresome. But despite the many protestations of those on this list who say they are doing this purely for their own sakes, I still believe that we do it for the players. And you can’t do it if you don’t take them as a whole and respect them and appreciate them. You take the screeches and the scratches as part of the territory just as you do in the real world.
Now, if you have come to just dislike people, well, that’s a whole bigger issue. And it’s certainly true that in the real world it’s usually easier to ignore or walk away from those people that represent sgements of humanity we just don’t like. In a mud admin role, you don’t get to ignore those people, just as politicians and cops and doctors don’t get to.
What gets lost when you go up in [game] scale is a certain type of community; I’d say the thrust of history very much argues against the notion that humanity shouldn’t be in large groups. The atrocities of one large group versus another large group are largely failures of empathy, and part of the human condition is that we find it easy to lose empathy for other groups–it often takes just a few propagandistic posters and a few lightbulb jokes. Fortunately, a few Picassos painting Guernicas or a few Spielbergs making Schindler’s Lists can restore it.
How many player-admin relationship problems are because of the lack of someone providing that empathic bridge?
“Do large groups vanquish our humanity? Are commercial muds catering for the selfish, mindless, destructive throng that is caused by simply having so many users? Are the perpetually small free muds actually a Better Thing?”
Let’s reverse the question, since I don’t think it has any easy answers.
Do small groups vanquish our humanity by permitting us to believe ourselves superior and better than everyone else? Are small muds catering to the selfish, cliquish, destructive mindset that is caused by simply associating only with those we deem acceptable? Are the large playerbase muds where we meet a better crosssection of actual humanity actually a Better Thing precisely because we do see more of the range of human personalities, behaviors, expressions, and attitudes?
Does MUD-Dev?
To tie it back up a little bit–do we, as admins, by consistently saying, “players like this” and “players always…” and “what players want,” simplify and label and stereotype and objectify to the point that we come to see them as Other, that we come to see them as not worth having? Is that how we burn out? Because we want the comfort of only associating with those who don’t have “an intelligence verging on zero”?
Now, of course, those who know me know that I am only half-arguing this. I’m always labelling and classifying; I’m very into taxonomy and analysis, and that relies very strongly on labels. It’s just that I have grown very very suspicious of any attitude that says, “Players are by and large stupid” or “Players don’t know what they want” or “God, players are whiny these days.” To me they are the sign of a loss of respect and empathy for players, and a loss of understanding of what drives people, and frankly, the loss of the knack that makes a good mud administrator or designer.
Even if you make your mud for yourself, the basic premise of it is that a player logs in and a player logs out, and there is some intervening experience. You are in charge of crafting that experience. Even if you make your mud for pyschological investigation or for the purpose of virtual torture, you need to understand what makes people tick–what makes your players, your subjects, whatever you wanna call them, tick.
At Origin, there was a practice for a while of making every member of an online game development team sit for several hours with an admin and watch them do their job. I’ve often wished we could get every player to spend an hour doing that job too.
“Did commercial muds kill free muds?”
What free muds need to grow and thrive is talent. There’s a decided lack of talent in the commercial online games industry, so strongly doubt we stole all of it. If we did, then maybe this is all harder than we thought. 🙂
Free muds haven’t changed hugely over the years period. Consider these facts:
- muds were commercial very very early in their history
- it took slightly over half a decade for them to start messing with graphics and non-hack n slash gameplay
- it took over decade for them to embrace user-generated content
- it took until the early nineties for them to start generating a critique and a sense of best practices; also until then to intentionally design a full PvP experience
- it took until the mid-nineties for serious exploration of simulation; and for muds to finally achieve some measure of awareness in the larger world, along with a “larger” audience made up almost exclusively of computer geeks and sci-fi geeks
We’ve always bemoaned that on this list. Hell, I seem to recall writing such a moan myself during my first year on this list (was that ’96? I don’t remember). Muds stagnate, muds don’t advance the state of the art, and worse, when we do, nobody notices. Boo hoo hoo.
Well, guess what. By and large commercial muds are in the same boat. Yeah, UO tried some new things. EQ recreated an old experience and did better in the market anyway. AC tried a few more innovative things and failed to do as well as either of the previous two. The next batch is bringing such radical, brand-new, innovative ideas to the table as safe zones (!), territory-based team warfare (!!), character aging (!!!)… Forgive my sarcasm, but the commercial world has plenty of mining of old ideas (and old mistakes) to go before they revolutionize muds.
Now, that’s not to say there aren’t gems of ideas in the commercial mud world. Small innovations or big ones. Some of them are solutions to problems that only exist on larger scales. We’ve talked about some of them on this list. But the problem of slow progress is across the board.
That’s why this list is here. It’s certainly why I do things like the timeline and the laws and writing essays or whatever. For all I know, the makers of many of these “redux” games and inventors of many of these “redux” features don’t know that they are reinventing the wheel.
Now, if we get a better understood common definition of “wheel” along with known parameters for operation and the like, we’re more likely to have someone invent shock absorbers. But too many people just say, “uh,that round thing over there.” And we advance only when someone thinks, “Hey, I could use that round thing as a fan or a merry-go-round.”
The recipe for advancing the field is a) share knowledge of what’s been done b) innovate on it c) go back to step a).
“Well, but your GDC presentation didn’t really say anything new.”
It was definitely new to a large group there. And sometimes you can’t tell who you’ll teach something; Will Wright took copious notes during the presentation and told me afterwards that there was much new to him. I certainly learned things at his presentation.
There’s only two kinds of information that are useful to share. Raw data, and analysis. The raw data is by and large being kept secret in the commercial and hobbyist worlds. There’s anecdotal evidence, but for a lot of really important kinds of data, there aren’t even any metrics being gathered, much less publish3ed in a systematic manner.
Analysis, in the absence of publicly available raw data, is even scarcer. I mentioned earlier that I’m into taxonomy. To my mind, a lot of analysis has to do with classification. Most of what was in that presentation was stuff that is publicly available raw data: room-based maps versus continuous maps, for example, is something that just about anyone on this list could identify as an important design difference. But when I went looking for analysis of mud design, I found that nobody had even classified those two very basic structures.
That’s why the presentation was called “Design Patterns”–this is stuff that everybody knows, yup. But I maintain that nobody knows how to talk about it because it doesn’t even have names. Classification in this sense is the art of telling you what you already know in a way that makes it comprehensible. I’d go so far as to say this is stuff that nobody knows they already know.
To engage in an extended analogy–just about everybody knows that some music goes ta-DUM ta-DUM and some music goes OOM-pa-pa OOm-pa-pa. People more educated in music can even say that the latter sounds like a waltz and the former like rock ‘n’ roll. If you had music lessons as a kid, you might say that one is in 4/4 time and the other is in 3/4 (or maybe 6/8 given how I wrote it).
If it’s actually useful to you as a musician, then you can easily ascertain things like the fact that most Celtic music is in 6/8 and and Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” is one of the few pop hits in waltz time and that most reggae beats break the 2 and 4 beats into a pair of eighth notes and so on down the line. And when you go to play, write, or arrange a tune, there’s common practices and standards associated with different time signatures and rhythms.
Now, everyone KNOWS that some music goes ta-DUM ta-DUM and some music goes OOM-pa-pa OOm-pa-pa. And if I got up at a musician’s convention to share that I was working on something new by saying, “well, I’m exploring a new piece that goes DUM-ta-DUM-ta-DUM DUM-ta-DUM-ta-DUM” I’d be laughed out of the room. It doesn’t matter that I use that rhythm regularly in writing guitar pieces (in fact, I use it so much I really ought to stop!). What they want to know is that it’s a syncopated beat in 4/4 with three downbeats to the measure and 8th note pickups before the 2nd & 3rd downbeats, etc etc.
Matt, when you say “nobody’s sharing anything new and substantive” at GDC, all you’re saying is, “OOM-pa-pa is useless to me.” It’s especially useless if you’ve heard the beat a billion times before. What I tried to do in that presentation was say, “There’s two major classes of beats–OOM-pa-pa and ta-DUM. They’re both great, but they work differently. This beat lends itself to this, this other one to that. You can embed triplets in other one. By the way, you can also change time signatures every measure if you want.”
GDC is full of anecdotal raw data. Shaping it into terminology and best practice is a necessary step towards innovating in an iterative way. It isn’t until a musician figures out that you can count triplets that they can make an effort towards using them (or fail to challenge themselves to use it). 7/8 is not a natural time signature to the human mind, and it takes a degree of effort to get there; folk musicians don’t just stumble across it.
Similarly, perhaps continuous-map muds with embedded multiple scales with flag-based PvP structures and expressive collect ’em all mechanics are non-intuitive too. Who knows, might be huge–but nobody’s made one because right now we’re rearranging variables we don’t even know the names to. We certainly can’t analyze without the terms.
On this list, we have an unusual membership in that there’s a bit of a vocabulary established. But frankly, not much. Hell, consider that I know of at least four terms for people who don’t engage in PvP (non-PvP, carebear, peacenik, socializer) that actually mean different things, and yet get used indistinguishably by many. Or consider PvPer vs PKer vs Killer vs Grief Player. It’s important to get those terms straight because otherwise we’re not even talking the same language, and if we’re not talking the same language attempts at information sharing and education are bound to fail.
Of course, you might just be the type who hates memorizing the names of metric feet in English class in high school. 😉
