[Bakha]

Originally Posted by Molly Amazing. An entire Mud based on modern gardening? And a long thread discussing the short desc of one item in that Mud? I don't want to scoff really, and I am a huge gardening fan, but aren't there more important things to discuss in such an original project? Milawe, you should come around 4D some time and check out our gardening feature. It's not an entire gardening Mud, but it's a pretty nice feature, with 8 different garden plots, where you can sow your seeds and watch them grow. And unless you tend to the garden continuously, your crop will be eaten by insects, slugs, rabbits and other garden pests, trampled by kids chasing balls, wither and die from lack of water, and get suffocated by various weeds. I've promised a silver token to the first player that can get a full crop from all 8 plots, but so far nobody has succeeded, although it's quite possible. My aunt, who is an enthusiastic amateur gardener, designed the feature, and the only thing she seems to have forgotten is some Miracle-Gro. She'll probably come and play your Mud after it's up - that is, if she can tear herself away from her garden.

I don't think her mud is actually based on gardening. I think she was trying to use an analogy without giving away exact details on a particular feature of her mud. I could be wrong, though.

[Threshold]

Originally Posted by Bakha I don't know, I'm just not sure that I buy the argument that eventually everyone will recognize Excalibur automatically when they walk into a room.

But isn't it a lot more fun when they do? For some people... at least.

I imagine the movie Excalibur would have been a lot less exciting if every time King Arthur drew Excalibur people just thought "yeah, that's nice. You have a sword. So do the rest of us. Big deal." It would have been very anticlimactic.

This is starting to sound like another difference of viewpoint based on preference for simulation or story. Some people want a gritty, realistic simulation, and other people want an exciting, engaging storyline. If there are no givens or common frame of reference, it is hard for the characters in a story to relate to each other. Neither preference is better, but they are quite different.

But I think you are already alluding to that in some of your posts. Ultimately, the decision as to how "famous" an item can be, or whether brands are possible/feasible, depends on the type of world you have.

[Bakha]

Additional thought:

Assuming you have multiple cultures and centers of civilization here.

Work with a culture skill. Skill is based on native culture and can gain through spending time in other cultures (exposure to language, time spent in city, commerce conducted within other cities). To use Threshold terms, one could be well-versed in Thracian culture but ignorant of Sablean culture.

Items would work the same way as characters. An item would be assigned a dynamic cultural value. As an item is traded and used within other cultures, it can gain value within that culture.

Now you combine the two. A person versed in Thracian culture would recognize an item with a high Thracian cultural value by its proper name. They might even have additional insight into its uses and properties. A Sablean, looking at the same item, might see a very basic item description without any additional information provided. Now, as an item gains in it's Sablean cultural value, the Sablean cultural expert might start to see more. At some value, you allow an item to cross over from its generic descriptive form to its proper name that the designer intended.

[Milawe]

Originally Posted by Bakha I also imagine you want a bit of "gee whiz" or "neat" factor for the players as they create nifty looking items that grow in popularity and spread throughout the mud, becoming the latest ingame rage.

Yes, I really do want the gee whiz factor without everything and its mom having a proper name. However, I want the gee whiz factor without the jarring, "WTF. How do I know that weapon's name?" factor. It's kind of a fine line to draw, and it's something I've been debating for quite some time. I prefer to keep a short desc very short and a long desc full of details with additional detail descs if necessary.

Originally Posted by Bakha Well, the artist always has the option of only producing one of those items to make it a unique masterpiece, but I do get that you're going for something a little different. I think what it comes down to is what's in theme and consistent with the rest of your game world. If a proper named short desc isn't going to stand out like a sore thumb (or maybe the whole point is to have it stand out like a sore thumb), then go for it. If it's going to be jarring and look weird, then choose a different route.

Yeah, that's the problem. Is it going to be jarring or will it be more "Wow. That's different?" I totally want the "Wow!" factor and not the "Well, that's pretty out of character."

Originally Posted by Bakha My main concern would be ,mass proliferation of masterpieces and brands in such a system. So, you don't have just Starry Night in a room. Instead you have: This cozy bedroom is cozily arranged with lots of artwork hanging on the walls: Starry Night Guernica Mona Lisa The Scream Sunflowers

This would be acceptable to me only if the player has spent a fortune gathering these unique items and dedicated most of his/her online life to gathering these pieces. And in order to have them all in one room, he/she probably needs to be an art thief and hiding all the pieces together.

Originally Posted by Bakha And every single person's abode being decorated with "unique" items. Or, if you're looking at mass-produced instead of unique, every single persons' equipment containing, "Crown Jewels."

That's definitely not the goal. Unique will be unique on the scale of Excalibur and the One Ring. It's just a matter of deciding how to show their "uniqueness" and "fame" in a simple, informative way to players. There's lots of ways to do it. I'm just interested in hearing all the thoughts behind what people enjoy and what they would do themselves.

[Milawe]

Originally Posted by Molly Amazing. An entire Mud based on modern gardening? And a long thread discussing the short desc of one item in that Mud? I don't want to scoff really, and I am a huge gardening fan, but aren't there more important things to discuss in such an original project?

ROFL. Yes, I am making a pay-for-perks, modern, roleplaying enforced gardening mud. I plan to make millions of it, and I'm looking for a coder. Would you be interested?

No, I kid. I made up the scenario because I was trying to get to a specific point without bogging people down with the specifics of a rather large game. I figured if I made the example modern and a bit outrageous it would be easier to talk about without it turning into a comparison of games. (I made a booboo.) Also, I'll admit that I never quite got over the law school exams that consisted of professors making us analyze the craziest, most unlikely scenarios and write multiple page essays. While it annoyed me in law school, I now see the appeal in writing those things.

Originally Posted by Molly Milawe, you should come around 4D some time and check out our gardening feature. It's not an entire gardening Mud, but it's a pretty nice feature, with 8 different garden plots, where you can sow your seeds and watch them grow. And unless you tend to the garden continuously, your crop will be eaten by insects, slugs, rabbits and other garden pests, trampled by kids chasing balls, wither and die from lack of water, and get suffocated by various weeds. I've promised a silver token to the first player that can get a full crop from all 8 plots, but so far nobody has succeeded, although it's quite possible. My aunt, who is an enthusiastic amateur gardener, designed the feature, and the only thing she seems to have forgotten is some Miracle-Gro. She'll probably come and play your Mud after it's up - that is, if she can tear herself away from her garden.

Actually, Molly, that sounds like a lot of fun, and I'm at lose ends as far as games go at the moment. I may stop in and check out what sounds like a very interesting system.

Before you scoff, though, there's a very popular series of games out there that consists of nothing more than your character making the best farm ever. Your character gets married based on how well your farm is doing and how well you woo your spouse. You're expected to feed her based on the food you cook off the things you grow. Since the game is now on its 5th version, I wouldn't be too quick to scoff on the "modern farming" mud. (Maybe I'll make it after I'm done with my project.)

No, ultimately, I'm interested in what players of different games expect from a short description, how to treat an item becoming "famous", and how to give players the option of roleplaying that an item can be recognized or "known".

[Parnassus]

Originally Posted by Zhiroc However, there are plenty of trademarks used in the modern world that are as good... no better... than words. I bet if you show a can of Coke with no letters but only the device, better than 90% of the population would know what it is... or at least would know what it is *supposed* to be. The same is probably true of a number of others, like the McDonalds arches.

As an answer to the original question: As Zhiroc says, there have been times on TV where a red can has been shown and you instantly know its a coke can. This, in itself, can be amusing because we all like to think we're smart enough to catch it. I'd vote for the second option, a green and yellow bag filled with fertilizer, just for the fun of saying, "Hey, I've seen that bag before! I know what it is!"

Of course, this opinion is based on the fact that:

Originally Posted by Milawe Anyone who gardens can identify a bag of Miracle-Gro from a long ways away, though lots of generic brands try to mimic the Miracle-Gro bag for marketing purposes.

[Bakha]

I'm going to quickly throw out more ideas on my earlier one about cultural knowledge being a skill:

You could also differentiate between various classes of cultural knowledge: low and high. For instance, someone with a "low" cultural knowledge in the United States would probably be able to differentiate between powdered cocaine, powdered meth, and powdered heroin whereas a highbrow wouldn't. Converse, the highbrow would know the difference between a nice Alexander Valley Cab and an Australian Merlot.

Anyway, I know this is all getting very simulationist and offtopic for the OP's original intent, but I thought I'd throw the idea out there.

I should add, as I think my views are associated with the RPI viewpoint for the most part, that my suggestions don't really mirror RPI implementation. In an RPI, the broader, vaguer context would be coded, as LoD discussed in his post, with the "cultural" knowledge being gained ICly and ingame. There would never be a point where one's character codedly recognized the proper name for a generic looking object. The only problem with an RPI in this is that it makes veteran players who have a broad OOC knowledge of the game have an advantage over newbies who don't have that knowledge. An example that comes to mind from Armageddon is the IC lore surrounding "spice" (which Arm's version of drugs). I remember playing my first druggie PC whose background stated that he had been addicted to some specific spices for quite some time. Unfortunately, when faced with:
a pinch of golden brown spice
a pinch of viscous black spice
a pinch of moldy green spice
My addict couldn't tell you which of the spices was actually his spice of choice. Now, after playing that PC through his life and discovering all of this knowledge ICly, I was able to apply that knowledge to future underworld characters, but the problem is that OOC knowledge impacted my IC concept.

Anyway, I know I'm veering dangerously close to the RPI vs. The World thread, but I'm really just approaching this from a theoretical game design standpoint now.

Very cool original post to spark all of this, btw.

[Milawe]

Originally Posted by Bakha You could also differentiate between various classes of cultural knowledge: low and high. For instance, someone with a "low" cultural knowledge in the United States would probably be able to differentiate between powdered cocaine, powdered meth, and powdered heroin whereas a highbrow wouldn't. Converse, the highbrow would know the difference between a nice Alexander Valley Cab and an Australian Merlot.

I very much like exploring this idea of "cultural knowledge" for certain items since cultural could be geographically based, racially based, or even religion based. This wouldn't be that hard to code and adds only a little bit of extra description. Ultimately, though, it still brings us back to "Starry Night" vs. "an swirled oil painting depicting a night sky", or are you saying that certain cultures/level of learning would allow a person to identify it as "Starry Night".

Originally Posted by Bakha My addict couldn't tell you which of the spices was actually his spice of choice. Now, after playing that PC through his life and discovering all of this knowledge ICly, I was able to apply that knowledge to future underworld characters, but the problem is that OOC knowledge impacted my IC concept.

That's why it's so often hard to decide how to convey things to a player that a character would know that a player didn't have to learn completely him/herself. While the discovery can be extremely thrilling and immersive, I think I'm a firm believer that a player has choices when a character sometimes doesn't have a choice. For example, if there were a character on my roleplay enforced mud who had designed his character to be an art expert but absolutely was not one, I would want him to be able to identify "Starry Night", a painting on sight. He'd have to examine it closer to find out if it were a forgery or a reprint, but he could look glance at the picture and know it's "Starry Night" even if the player had no clue that it was a famous painting by van Gogh. At the same time, I would expect a player who was playing an uneducated brute from the northlands to ignore the name "Starry Night", a painting and say "Wow. That's an ugly picture of a bunch of colored circles." or whatever is appropriate.

OOC will always impact games in some way. I guess it's a matter of deciding how much knowledge to impart on a player and how much "discovery" the actual player should have to do.

[Bakha]

Originally Posted by Milawe Ultimately, though, it still brings us back to "Starry Night" vs. "an swirled oil painting depicting a night sky", or are you saying that certain cultures/level of learning would allow a person to identify it as "Starry Night".

Right. You could attach exact numbers to it, but it might look something like this:

Person A:
A person well-versed in Sablean culture sees the painting and they see:
"Starry Night" as the sdesc.

Person B:
A person somewhat well-versed in Sablean culture sees instead:
A painting of a swirling night sky.
When they look at it more closely, they might see:
"This painting looks to be Starry Night."

Person C:
A person with little understanding of Sablean culture sees:
"A painting of a swirling night sky."
When they look at the painting more closely, they still get no indication of proper name.

Now imagine this scenario:
Person C, while ignorant of Sablean culture is well-versed in Thracian culture. Now imagine that the item Starry Night has gotten so well-known that it's crossed cultural boundaries. It receives a 100% value rating in Sablean culture as well as a 100% value rating in Thracian culture because the artist has become famous in both cultures. Now Person C will get the same message as person A did above because the item itself has transcended its culture and people from both Sablean and Thracian cultures know of the item.

This system could get ridiculously clunky, but it could also be interesting.

[Jazuela]

Originally Posted by Bakha Now imagine this scenario: Person C, while ignorant of Sablean culture is well-versed in Thracian culture. Now imagine that the item Starry Night has gotten so well-known that it's crossed cultural boundaries. It receives a 100% value rating in Sablean culture as well as a 100% value rating in Thracian culture because the artist has become famous in both cultures. Now Person C will get the same message as person A did above because the item itself has transcended its culture and people from both Sablean and Thracian cultures know of the item. This system could get ridiculously clunky, but it could also be interesting.

It depends on the code I think. With a MOO-type of code where there are parent/child object setups, it wouldn't be clunky at all. It's been awhile since I've built with MOO but it would go something like this:

You want to start the game with Van Gogh being unknown to everyone. So -all- items with the parent of "van_gogh generaic object #42" will be flagged in the "famous" category of "0" on a scale of 0 (null, not at all) - 5 (with 5 being known by all PCs and sentient humanoid NPCs worldwide - which would be very rare).

Van Gogh shows up and starts painting in the town of Muffpuff. Everyone in Muffpuff eventually learns to recognize Van Gogh's stuff. The parent generic #42 gets a flag change: first, the flag of origin is checked to make sure it reads Muffpuff. Then, the fame flag will be changed to 1, indicating that ONLY people from Muffpuff will recognize ANY VanGogh paintings. In addition, the child of generic #42, item #177 which is titled "Starry Night," will have its fame flag toggled to 2, indicating that this specific item is recognized in both Muffpuff, and in the neighboring cities, but no further than that.

So now we have 20 VanGogh paintings, and generic #42 is a 4 fame, meaning every sentient humanoid game-wide, except cave-dwellers who never leave the tunnels of the caves and are considered a completely separate game component from the rest of the world (which is why a 5 fame would be rare). At this point, Starry Night is also flagged at 4, as are at least 10 other paintings. So generally speaking, the entire world would recognize a VanGogh when they saw it. They might not know the -name- of a specific painting, but they would all be able to identify his unique style.

You could even have master artists and appraisers, who exist to identify or create forgeries. So the master artist could create *a* Van Gogh style, that everyone who sees would recognize *as* a Van Gogh..even though they wouldn't know its name. They could then kill Van Gogh, so he can't deny ever making this painting, and tell everyone they found a lost painting of Van Gogh, and make a fortune on the fake. If the master artist's work is good enough, the master appraiser would never notice the difference. But if the master appraiser's skill is better than the master artist's skill, then he'd be called for a fraud, arrested, and banished to the caves, where he would never be allowed to see another Van Gogh for the rest of his miserable life.

[Spoke]

From what I read, the problem with an exact name for the item is that it may "destroy" the immersion feeling of a player in a RP Mud. This may make sense, true, but on the other hand, if it is done sparsely and thoughtfully you would be giving a player an option to role play around either knowing or not an specific item. I do know that as a player you carry around tons of OOC knowledge. I know this mainly from table-top D&D, where you had all these bestiaries and manuals you had read, you knew details about all the classes and many of the weapons, you knew about critters and their weaknesses etc. But there is no reason to believe that your Lvl 1 Thief should have known what the Lvl 5 Cleric was capable of. So, it was up to the player to role play accordingly and imbue their character with just enough knowledge and consciously decide to act as the character would with what the character would know instead of making decisions based on what the player knew. Hard, but all the more enjoyable when you worked to make it work.

So, in this context, I understand that RP RPI ASRP TSRP (Threshold style RP for those who didn't know), may want to be as immersed on their simulated reality as possible, but without a very elaborated code to work how famous a 'named' or 'unique' item is, and how recognizable an item should be (of course, what if my newly created character happens to be in a party with an older, knowledgeable character, who tells him about this immensely powerful sword with this particular engraving, these colours in the hilt, etc, etc ... well, my dumbinewbie should be able to recognize Excalibur should he not?,) you will be restricting and not enriching the experience a player can have. On the other hand, if you openly identify a famous or unique item, maybe even with a really soft code to determine how recognizable it is (maybe even a toggle flag players can turn off or something if they are playing some impaired character or similar) you are allowing the player to decide how he/she wants to role play the situation. If they decide they do not want to know Excalibur they can just role play accordingly, but if they do want to recognize it, then they have to option to Ohh and Ahh appropriately, which would not be an option if they were not shown the 'uniqueness' up front.

I hope it does make sense, maybe I am giving too much credit to Role Players and they really need to be spoon fed what they characters may or may not know and cannot decide for themselves how much they want to incorporate into their character's story, or maybe I am being too ignorant of the subject and it really is such a big deal to have anything that may be perceived as OOC shown to you when you are playing in a RP Mud. I do not know which is true or if there is a single right answer, I do know though, that if you over-restrict what a player can see, you are restricting the spontaneous awe at something you recognize on the spot ("Isn't that David Beckham??", "Woao, look they have the Mona Lisa on loan in this museum!!", "Hmmmmm must buy coke when the movie ends hmmmm hmmm coke when the movie ends hmmmmm")

[incognito9]

I think this thread is great.

Still more things come to mind:
Can simply having a certain skill allow one to recognize certain objects better? To me they're a bunch of pills. To my father-in-law the pharmacist, they're antibiotics. To me it's a guitar. To my brother, the guitar player, it's a fender stratocaster.

Can one artisan's work seem just like another's to the untrained eye? While certain artists are pretty distinctive, other's inspired a whole school of art. There are a whole bunch of impressionists whose work resembles Manet, for example. Could someone's apprentice make a work that looked like his master's?

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by incognito9 Can simply having a certain skill allow one to recognize certain objects better? To me they're a bunch of pills. To my father-in-law the pharmacist, they're antibiotics. To me it's a guitar. To my brother, the guitar player, it's a fender stratocaster.

I once discussed a similar concept on Mud-Dev: MUDDev Archive :: View topic - Introductions and descriptions

"As a 'cheap' alternative, you could use skills for this. Thus Bob, who has Survival 0, looks in the room and sees 'a tasty-looking mushroom', while Fred - with Survival 5, sees 'a deadly skull-cap toadstool'. This is not as 'nice' as learning about each object, but would be less cpu/memory intensive. Skills such as 'Occult' could be used for strange artifacts, whilst 'Melee' might show you 'A finely crafted steel katana' rather than 'a sword' - perhaps someone with a little Melee might see 'An oriental sword'."

The same concept also works very nicely for room descriptions - for example, someone with weak language skills might just see some old writing on a tomb, while an expert in ancient languages would see a warning message about the nasty undead creature trapped within.

[Milawe]

Originally Posted by Spoke I hope it does make sense, maybe I am giving too much credit to Role Players and they really need to be spoon fed what they characters may or may not know and cannot decide for themselves how much they want to incorporate into their character's story, or maybe I am being too ignorant of the subject and it really is such a big deal to have anything that may be perceived as OOC shown to you when you are playing in a RP Mud. I do not know which is true or if there is a single right answer, I do know though, that if you over-restrict what a player can see, you are restricting the spontaneous awe at something you recognize on the spot ("Isn't that David Beckham??", "Woao, look they have the Mona Lisa on loan in this museum!!", "Hmmmmm must buy coke when the movie ends hmmmm hmmm coke when the movie ends hmmmmm")

I think you're hitting the nail on the head here, Spoke, and why this is such a decision for me. There's probably no "right" answer, which is why the discussion helps work through all the possible issues in addition to possibly creating a few fun mechanics and code projects.

On Threshold, all of our unique objects are "named". People really like getting their hands on these things, and it's almost like graphics for them. They know they have something REALLY COOL, and I like to maintain that. Unfortunately, we didn't start out with a solid plan when we were creating items and their short descriptions, so a few things got "named" that probably shouldn't have been. Now, with a new game that has an incredible number of objects and the ability to create unique objects, I feel that having a naming protocol is the best way to go. So, my goal is how to I keep the "REALLY COOL" factor for some objects, and in giving all that information away in a single glance, how does that impact the discovery factor for other players? Some players really enjoy discovering not only areas but items as well, and they like that they're able to recognize things by sight that other people really don't know much about.

I lean more towards giving more information to players and letting them decide what their characters know, but I'm pretty intrigued by a "recognition system" for items as well as areas.