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the_logos · 05-17-2003, 08:43 PM

So then if I come into your game and know what a sword is, I should be punished? After all, I learned what a sword is through OOC conversations when I was quite little. How about if I already know what a dragon is? And it's funny how everyone seems to speak a language I learned OOCly (english).

The difficulty is that there's no strict line between OOC and IC. No mud has ever, in the history of the world, actually expected people to bring -no- OOC knowledge into the game, no matter how few players it has and how strict the game is on roleplaying enforcement. To do that, you would have to first exactly define -everything- a character knows and the sum of what people want to talk about is far greater than any MUD is going to document. Further, since every character is supposed to be different (they weren't all raised in an identical manner with identical experiences, obviously) it owuld have to be different for every character.

Now, you might argue it's obvious that every character (let's say they start at age 16 or 18 or something fairly standard) knows what a tree is. How about an oak tree? How about the difference between a white oak and the sawtooth oak?

You might then argue that ok, it's impossible to keep real-world knowledge out of the game, but what about knowledge of things that exist only in the game world and are unique to it, such as race unique to your mud. How do you track whether a character knows about that race? Do you just assume he or she knows about that because it's common? That's fine, but then it's the same problem as with the oak. What does the character know and what doesn't it. There's simply no way to track it. Even if you could somehow (god knows how in a decent way) track every bit of tangible information a character receives, it'd still be impossible.

For instance: Bob reads a room description and the game makes a note that Bob now knows there is a carved chair, 3 tin cups, 1 dented copper cup, and that the room is painted an off-green color with lots of smoke stains on it. The game puts a check mark next to this individual pieces of information in a database as well as every single other piece of information in the game. (You should already realize this is not implementable.) Unfortunately, there's WAY more pieces of information than you can ever catalogue. And that's before you have to worry about what the character knows if he knows A and B, but not C (after all, a character is a reasoning creature and is capable, in-role, of deduction and induction).

It doesn't end there though. You then need to figure out a way to parse out every bit of information characters pass to each other. You'll probably have to push the fields of epistemology, linguistic analysis and computer AI past the current bleeding edge. Once you've done that and figured out how to extract all pieces of information a character passes to another the real work begins: Contextual analysis, keeping in mind that the context a character is working in can only contain, under the strictest rp rules, information the character has already encountered.

That's really only an overview of some of the problems you face in actually determining whether OOC conversations affect IC situations. But, once you've gone ahead and solved those, we can talk about the rest of the problems.

--matt
P.S. I'm not trying to be sarcastic or over the top here (well, maybe a little over the top) but the fact is that the definition of cheating you gave is inconceivably difficult to operate by.

05-17-2003, 08:43 PM	#9
the_logos Legend Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Mill Valley, California Posts: 2,305	So then if I come into your game and know what a sword is, I should be punished? After all, I learned what a sword is through OOC conversations when I was quite little. How about if I already know what a dragon is? And it's funny how everyone seems to speak a language I learned OOCly (english). The difficulty is that there's no strict line between OOC and IC. No mud has ever, in the history of the world, actually expected people to bring -no- OOC knowledge into the game, no matter how few players it has and how strict the game is on roleplaying enforcement. To do that, you would have to first exactly define -everything- a character knows and the sum of what people want to talk about is far greater than any MUD is going to document. Further, since every character is supposed to be different (they weren't all raised in an identical manner with identical experiences, obviously) it owuld have to be different for every character. Now, you might argue it's obvious that every character (let's say they start at age 16 or 18 or something fairly standard) knows what a tree is. How about an oak tree? How about the difference between a white oak and the sawtooth oak? You might then argue that ok, it's impossible to keep real-world knowledge out of the game, but what about knowledge of things that exist only in the game world and are unique to it, such as race unique to your mud. How do you track whether a character knows about that race? Do you just assume he or she knows about that because it's common? That's fine, but then it's the same problem as with the oak. What does the character know and what doesn't it. There's simply no way to track it. Even if you could somehow (god knows how in a decent way) track every bit of tangible information a character receives, it'd still be impossible. For instance: Bob reads a room description and the game makes a note that Bob now knows there is a carved chair, 3 tin cups, 1 dented copper cup, and that the room is painted an off-green color with lots of smoke stains on it. The game puts a check mark next to this individual pieces of information in a database as well as every single other piece of information in the game. (You should already realize this is not implementable.) Unfortunately, there's WAY more pieces of information than you can ever catalogue. And that's before you have to worry about what the character knows if he knows A and B, but not C (after all, a character is a reasoning creature and is capable, in-role, of deduction and induction). It doesn't end there though. You then need to figure out a way to parse out every bit of information characters pass to each other. You'll probably have to push the fields of epistemology, linguistic analysis and computer AI past the current bleeding edge. Once you've done that and figured out how to extract all pieces of information a character passes to another the real work begins: Contextual analysis, keeping in mind that the context a character is working in can only contain, under the strictest rp rules, information the character has already encountered. That's really only an overview of some of the problems you face in actually determining whether OOC conversations affect IC situations. But, once you've gone ahead and solved those, we can talk about the rest of the problems. --matt P.S. I'm not trying to be sarcastic or over the top here (well, maybe a little over the top) but the fact is that the definition of cheating you gave is inconceivably difficult to operate by.