Re: [MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.

[coder#ibm,net]

On 10/11/97 at 08:43 PM, Ola Fosheim Gr°stad <olag#ifi,uio.no> said: >Adam
Wiggins <nightfall#user2,inficad.com> wrote:
>Glassner:

>>> We are in constant conversation with the game creator, more
>>> than we are with almost any author or screenwriter. Bad
>>> things done to the hero in fact happen to us, personally.
>>
>>Total disagreement here.  The bad thing is happening to *my character*, which
>>I do have a closer attachment to than a character in a film, but not the
>>the extent that Glassner seems to think.

>Are you talking MUD or what?  I think this depends on how much time
>you've spent with your character or maybe how much time you have spent
>with the game.  I think he is right in saying that if the game is
>unfriendly designed, then the game (creator) will be perceived as
>unfriendly to us as players as well.  You can extend this to badly
>designed controls as well, if the game makes us look clumsy, then it is
>making fun of us.

There is a line to be tread:

  The game should be difficult, but it should not be difficult due to the
poor quality of its interface.  To turn this around:  The game and thus
the game designer should seem to be making the game as easy and successful
for you as they can without actually taking advantage of any knowledge
about the game that you don't have.  

Thus you keep the sense of challenge without feeling that you're cheating
or "getting away" with something.

>>> Never take over control of the player's character.
>>
>>Again the logic is sound, but as a player I can't agree.  I *like*
>>cut scenes, when done right (again, all the Lucasarts game do them well).

>But it wrecks immersion.  Lucasarts, they make movies in a box, right? I
>can't say I feel I am "in" the game, I am more having one hand in there. 
>It's more like watching a movie, skipping the boring parts (if allowed
>to), and saying "I bet that's what's going to happen next".  I find these
>types of games highly annoying unless I've got a
>cheatmanual somewhere. (Like I'm going to hunt down that missing key,
>lazy designers, go find it yourselves)

To me they are intensely annoying because I always want to do something
else other than what my character does in the cut scene.  I want to pull
levers, investigate strange looking phenomena seen out the viewports etc. 
Screw the pre-cast purpose of the game -- I'm there to fool around.

>>> character's personality, which fatally injures the development
>>> of the character and leads to a psychotic personality and
>>> uninteresting story.
>>
>>I take exception to the last three words of that paragraph.
>>What is it that makes a psychotic personality inherently
>>uninteresting, pray tell?

Cf the anit-hero.

>I think he meant "not convincing", like a badly written novel. A novel is
>usually trying to make the reader feel/understand/reason with the main
>character in some sense, right?  I sure wouldn't enjoy a novel where I
>say to myself "oh well, this character is just plain stupid and boring,
>do me a favour, go jump off a cliff, will ya!". (Unless he does, of
>course ;)

Stephen Donaldson wrote a pair of trilogies entitled as a set, "The
chronicles of Thomas Covenant".  The protagonist is a self-loathing
thoroughly unpleasant morbid, moriose, and manic leper.  He is a
thoroughly dislikable character.  As happens I rather liked the books
(have a set of first print/first editions somewhere).  A number of friends
refused to read beyond the first chapters as the lead character was so
unpleasant and they really "didn't want to spend much time with someone so
detestable."

Horses for courses.  The definition of "interesting" is inherently
subjective and defies discrete analysis.

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