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Old 11-24-2010, 08:40 AM   #18
scandum
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Join Date: Jun 2004
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Re: The Art of Seach - Categorization of MU*s

Tolkien trolls and dragons are definitely more fantastic than realistic. I'm not trying to be the authority on what qualifies and what not however, though I'd like to create a clear system of detailed categorization.

I'd rather define it as the fantastic vs the realistic, in which case you only have to define one of them as one excludes the other. A low scientific rigor would indicate a lot of fantastical elements, which may be magic, telepathy, or something else.

That's not really a problem with the actual categorization, I guess it makes sense to clearly describe the meaning of the various terms.

That's not necessarily a bad thing if there are enough additional search options to further narrow the search. I personally don't see a big problem with binary options as they leave the least amount of room for ambiguity.


MSSP has a GENRE variable which will allow a MUD to choose Fantasy, Horror, etc, as their genre. Next there is the SUBGENRE variable which would allow something like Dark Fantasy, which is a subgenre containing elements of both Horror and Fantasy.

Using this mechanism the difference between a 3 and a 4 becomes arbitrary, and subsequently many games would still cluster around the same scores. Then there's the question whether you can only search for games with a 6 (or other number), or if you define a range, 1-5 for example. My guess is that providing a range would become the only way to get meaningful search results, which would bring one back to a binary/trinary system, with some added confusion.

It's an interesting concept though, and might not be overly confusing if you have a simplified search interface that converts a 1 to 10 score to low, medium, and high, possibly with an algorithm that return the bottom 20% for low, top 20% for high, and the rest for medium, though this may not give ideal results in all cases.
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