[jackal59mo2]

I started out on RPIs (SoI, Armageddon, Harshlands), but after a few years I found that I don't like them. In fact, I think they have limitations that make them less enjoyable for some people than other kinds of games.

The limitations of the code (especially the clumsy and limited speech/emote code) on the RPIs I played made "immersion" impossible for me. Having to justify eating for the third time in the middle of a scene, having to type in exact commands in order to see someone's misspelled text approximation of what "crafting" an object should look like, and not being able to slow actions down enough to emote something interesting and personal in the midst of the game's stock emits gets old very fast. I think that code is vital for conflict resolution, but for me attempts to code a simulation of reality on RPIs always come off as the worst of both worlds: not real enough to be believable, and not game-like and silly enough to be enjoyed just for themselves.

Also, in time I found the "no OOC" rules on most RPIs to be major irritants. They do not help people stay "immersed" in the game. Instead, those who want to cheat do it outside the game where they're less likely to be caught, while those who have trouble distinguishing play time from real life and their characters from themselves find institutional support for indulging in all sorts of whacked out self-insertion and OOC dramatics in response to IC events. Moreover, not being able to simultaneously interact with the player as well as the character takes out a lot of the fun for me. I still don't like a lot of OOC chatter, but a little bit of OOC communication at the time can make scenes more challenging and more enjoyable. At its best, there is more of a sense of playing for each other when you can have that sort of communication. RPIs--especially ones where the culture encourages "solo RP" for crafting/practicing in order to advance skills and levels--feel a lot more like playing by myself, but with additional "RP" restrictions that prevent me from just playing with the environment for the fun of it.

One final thing about supposedly keeping OOC completely out of the game: If I find out on a MUSH or MUX that almost every one of the powerful and influential characters in the game is the alt of a staff member and that each member of staff has three, four, or more alts, experience tells me that I want to run for the door as fast as I can. Because there's not that sort "OOC secrecy" on those games, I can usually find out pretty quickly if that's the case; frequently, I can find out without even logging in. However, it was only when I became staff on an RPI after nine months of playing that I discovered that was the case and that one of the main staff duties was to hang around invisible in public areas waiting for swat people for whispering OOC stuff like "I'm going to go out and fight the X later, want to come?" to each other. That's not the atmosphere in which I want to play, and it's the one that IC/OOC separation can foster. At least on more open games, problems are much less easily hidden and not justified under some rubric of "immersion" or "role playing."

I know play on much more lightly coded MUSHes/MUXes (with some brief forays into heavily coded MOOs like Hell just for the fun of it), and I have a hard time imagining going back to the restrictions of an RPI MUD.