bugs (was RE: [MUD-Dev] players who "take away from the game")

["Sellers, Michael" <MSellers#maxis,com>]

Holly Sommer wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Ola Fosheim =?iso-8859-1?Q?Gr=F8stad?= wrote:
> > Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > > On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> > > > Note 3: Some designers are inclined to call design flaws "bugs".
> > > 
> > > They are.  So are errors in the terrain (for example, a description of
> > > a door which claims to have a large lock on it, but trying to lock or
> > > unlock the door reports that the door has no lock), or anything else
> > > which breaks the consistency and enjoyment of your game world.
> > 
> > A bug is usually considered (for historical reasons) to be a defect in
the
> > implementation, not the design.  It's when you didn't write what you
> > intended to write. Or in the historical context, when a  wire has been
> > accidentally removed (by a bug :9.
> > 
> > That's how I use the term anyway.
> 
> At work here, I've heard more than one engineer refer to bugs as 
> "features without the tuxedos."

Yep -- there's an old programmer's cartoon about this.  Bugs can be design
flaws, logic flaws, or simple errors in programming.  Splitting hairs
between design flaws and implementation flaws is a programmer's way of
looking at the world: the user sure doesn't care if you meant to do that or
not.  If it doesn't work the way it *should*, it's a bug.  

And, to return to the previous discussion, if a bug is known and someone
repeatedly uses it to their own advantage, well, they deserve whatever they
get in the end.

Mike Sellers



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