[SnowTroll]

Opinions vary on this one, but if a MUD admin animates various mobs, creates special objects, and does things to have the world interact with the players' characters in a way that doesn't normally happen, but leaves the players free to react and interact however they want, that's not really a "scripted event," more like "I see 58 players online, so let's spice things up a bit and let the people who want to take part in something unusual jump in." I've always felt that to be fine, but had a really strong aversion to mush-type, "scene" oriented RP, i.e., "OOC: Hey everybody, come meet me at the fountain for some RP instead of doing what your character would normally be doing; IC: Hello there. I just happened to be wandering by the fountain today even though I'm a soldier stationed in the remote wilderness, and although you're a normal nondescript peasant sitting in a public place that I'd never notice, I'm going to approach you and take an interest because we set this meeting up out of character, then get bored and quit this mud when we have nothing interesting to talk about and everything feels contrived and artificial, declaring that the roleplaying here sucks."

Remember that Dungeons and Dragons cartoon where a bunch of real world kids end up in a fantasy world when an amusement park ride goes south? 99% of people who are into RP muds will tell you that's not RP, and that if you're just playing the role of yourself at a keyboard, it's not roleplaying, just playing. In whatever fantasy swords and sorcery world that cleric lives in, there's no such thing as heavy metal, and there is such a thing as orcs, so a cleric's going to talk about orcs, not the music some guy in another universe who pushes buttons to control his every move happens to like.

That does, on some level, have something to do with geeks and distaste. People who aren't into talking about "the orc army blah blah" tend to think it's kind of dumb and just want to play a game. They don't consider all of this play acting and in character chit chat a game. They consider that a tedious distraction from the game.

Like Will says, RP isn't for everybody. If it's not fun for someone, they should play a game that's fun for them, but I think both RP mud players (even the snobby ones who think there's a certain right and wrong way to play a game) and non-RP afficionados can see over the fence well enough to know what the other side likes about their way of doing things. I've played both and often do one or the other depending on the mood I'm in.