Anyone have any crazy idea's of what the future holds for text-based gaming?

Are we going to someday be able to walk around with a pair of glasses that scroll a MUD and be able to think what we want to input into the terminal?

What about fiber optics and the speed at which computers are responding to voice communicated commands. Perhaps the future is a slew of strategy-based MUDs will you command armies with your voice, and the fastest on the draw wins the battles.

What do you think the future is for text-based gaming?

-D

I wish I could remember the name of the movie. But the general idea was that you had a brain worm - a quasi-electronic device stuck in your head, that connected you to the computer. Of course it also kept track of your thoughts, and dreams, and could even control them or manipulate them, heh. But I still think the idea of using the power of your own mind to play a mud is intriguing.

The matrix, Ghost in the shell? hehe.

The future of mudding.. I don't know. Most people I know consider mudding a lower form of gaming than 3D games. So perhaps to satisfy all of them a perfect engine will be made that can seemlessly integrate a text based and 3D enviroment.

Johnny Mnemonic was very well done. For the year it was made they were talking about all sorts of stuff that hadn't been created yet. Like 80 GB hard-drives, which was in Johnnys brain.

Erdos wrote:
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Sounds more like generic future of computing, to me. When such technologies get developed, it'll probably be done by someone outside the MUD community as a generic keyboard-replacing tool, rather than by a MUD coder.
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Yeah, that seems likely.

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Artificial intelligence could be a big thing for MUDs eventually. Imagine if 20% of the playerbase consisted of AI, and it was so well done that the only way you could tell was that those players mysteriously refused to go to reunions or even talk on the phone.
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This is likely to go the same way (developed outside MUDs, used by MUDers), though the sort of Turing-capable AI you're talking about is not exactly around the corner. AI of that magnitude is also surely going to be frightfully expensive in terms of CPU cycles and memory, so even if we as a species do develop Turing AI, it's not going to run on your average mud server for a long time after it's first developed, much less run well enough to support whole populations of Turing AI-based NPCs.

Online Alchemy is one of the companies I'm aware of working in this space (), but they're not working to create "true" (Turing) AI, just a good enough simulation. They're also not really aiming at massively multiplayer platforms because of the server cost.

--matt

These are some of the things I'd like to see in the future:

I think that one of the biggest problems with MUDs is that they aren't that fun without the people. Imagine your favourite MUD without the goal of interacting with other people - no guilds, no PvP, no chat even. Most of them would be pretty boring, running over and over through the same rooms, fighting enemies with two modes: wander and fight to the death. And as you play through this single player MUD, you can't leave a single mark on the world. Early MUDs had a lot of reason for this - not a lot of processing power or memory. Now, it's completely doable and would be a wonderful thing for almost any MUD. The big guns like Aardwolf or Achaea might have some troubles with this due to the size of their playerbases, but even then I think it's doable.

Going back to the AI idea, I think that mobs should interact more with the environment, each other and the player. It would be amazing to have a forest where the deer run away when they see a player, wolves hunt rabbits and the local goblin tribe viciously fights off the occasional wayward (NPC) orc that wanders into their domain. If the player catches a goblin guard unawares, he sounds an alarm and runs back to his lair to get more help to come after the intruder.

Another thing that I think would be a nice direction for MUDs to go in would be to interface more with the web. Telnet is great for real time interaction, but for larger scale things a web interface could be a great compliment. I have this vision of a MUD where within the game you manage adventuring and the normal MUD stuff, and through the web you can manage clans and guilds as well as even managing cities and wars.

Mobs/NPCs interacting with mobs/NPCs doesn't get you much, IMHO. If it doesn't involve the players it's a game playing itself.

The biggest problem for text-based games is a dwindling audience. The kids who used to play MUDS now play WoW. If it's not graphic it's a second citizen in the gaming world. And, really, MUD hobbyists can't compete with the mega gaming companies, their financial resources and armies of designers and programmers. Make no mistake. It is a competition. As sad as it is to say, the text genre of online games is slowly dying.  There will always be MUDs out there. A few of them may even flourish. But unless Blizzard or someone decides to devote significant resources to a text game, you'll never see another major text-based game. Just my opinion, of course.

Now, to stay on topic...

Online  games, and especially MUDs, are about the players. The people you meet and the friends you make are what keep you in games, not web-based bells and whistles. A game has to have well-designed and interesting mechanics, but in my opinion, if we want the text genre of online games to live, we need to design and build games with THE goal of player collaboration. As it is, players walk their characters out to some area where they perform an activity that advances their level and skills. It's a solitary grind that separates players instead of bringing them together. The future of text-based games has to be about making advancement and conquest a group activity.

I think we in the MUD development community need to step back and take a look at what makes MMORPGs popular other than their graphical interfaces. One thing that made EQ wildly successful was the group hunts it necessitated. Groups of friends would set up times to get their PCs together to go killing. There are lots of other ideas and concepts incorporated into MMORPGs that can also be applied to MUDS, and I think it's important that we recognize and embrace them.

So, what is the future of text-based games? In my mind, the next generation of MUDs incorporates goal-oriented mechanics that allow PCs to learn anything simply by doing it. None of the "repping" point-gain that you see in learn-by-doing systems these days, but layers of abilities learned by using what you know. Each advancement activity is a mini-quest all it's own, where success requires multiple characters possessed of varied abilities and talents. Every facet of the game is multi-layered, creating interdependence among the characters. I think most of these things already exist. They just need to be taken to another level.

The future MUD will be accessible through a client that, when launched, teleports you to a multi-room "club" (complete with bar and other amenities) where you can chat OOC with other players. There's one board listing the drinks you can order and another listing the characters in the game.  Several arches, portals and doorways lead out of the room: One to character creation. One to the game message boards. One to in-house mail. One to an interactive game manual. One to player-created and administrated guild/house/clan areas. One to a room full of player website links. And one to the game, of course. The object is communication.

I actually had a crazy idea myself. What does a text client need to do "really"?

1. Describe the general environment.
2. What you can see in the immediate area.
3. Let you interact with those things.
4. Tell you what directions you can move in.

Now.. Imagine a 3D text environment that figured, server side, what you could see in the near distance, which "generic" description to pull up for the terrain, etc., what was close enough to touch and which, as you approached walls, etc, changed the exit list to show that you can't pass through the wall. Someone on the mud I play at is working on just this idea. However... What makes that different than a MMO? Not much, since you could easilly drop a full CG system over top of it, replacing the generic text for the room, which tells you about the mountains, etc. with actual mountains, and so on. There is some suggestion that this is virtually what EQ did when they designed their system.

The future of text games might, if done right, be an environment that you could "choose" whether to use the text system, or the graphical system. Would be interesting to try it at least.

Nearly anything else you might do, is already in MMOs to one extent or another. With some exceptions. It would be a lot easier in text to burn down most of a city, then have it rebuilt, complete with new NPCs and stores, with a few specific types always appearing (an idea I am working on for an area, where actually solving one of the quests unleashes a major war, which then must have its perpetrators fought off, hopefully with the master behind it finally defeated and peace restored. Not going to make that easy though. lol) Doing that in a graphical system would require a lot of generic building designs, a much more limited number of possible shops, etc. Though, if you didn't mind it being somewhat generic... the items for sale wouldn't be as big a deal. Even things like EQ have names + a few basic icons, instead of one for every named item.

Malifax, I'd have to disagree with you on the game playing itself comment. Ambiance adds to the scene and increases immersion, and I think it's these details that really create a sense of depth. I can't think of a single video game outside of the racing genre where weather has any effect on the player, and yet it's included to create a sense of scene and paint a picture. Imagine what having a town where the NPCs went to work, went to stores to buy food and other things, went home and ate dinner with their families and went to sleep in their house at night. Although chances are this wouldn't have any effect on the players gameplay wise, I think that it would be incredible at getting the players interested in the world.

In the end, MUDs can't try to be graphical MMORPGs. Even the sum population of all of Iron Realm's very popular games combined isn't a drop in the bucket compared to major MMORPGs. Although this is a curse in terms of mainstream appeal, it's also a great opportunity. No longer are you making a game to appeal to 1 million people, you're creating one to appeal to 50. To do that you have to create something that these McMMO games can't offer. You can't have a million people trying to leave their mark on the game all at once, but you can sure as hell have 50.

The thing I find  about the majority of players is that they don't pay a lot of attention to ambience. Heck, even room descriptions go unread a majority of the time. They MIGHT get read once, but after that they're pretty much ignored. I don't see how bots interacting with bots is different. It's cool to see the first time, but beyond that, if the bots don't offer players something to further their goals or SOME kind of interaction I don't think players will pay any attention. To me, the time it would take to implement interacting bots would be better spent adding a new class, skills, spells or other feature systems that directly involve the players.

MUDs will never equal MMORPG, but that doesn't mean we in the MUD community can't learn from MMORPGs and emulate some of their features in our text games. The text genre is dying. Second Life is the new "MUD." Unless a new text game offers something provokative and appealing, it's not going to attract a decent player base. Will any MUD ever attract 6 mil players? No. But I don't think an average in-game presence of 40 and daily peak of 100-150 is out of the question.

I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of interactive bots. We have them in Inferno and they're great for imparting information and spinning off large auto-quests. As I said, player interaction with gaming worlds is the key. MMO developers have gotten this concept. I'm not sure if it's a case that MUD developers haven't or they just haven't moved into that space. I don't think it's an issue of laziness. MUD developers just don't have the resources and manpower available to the big companies that dev MMOs. If you had a team 20 desigigners and a couple dozen full-time coders, you could build a MUD where every object in the game spawned an auto-quest. As it is, and the same goes with most MUD builders, it's just not possible. In this vein, I'm more than willing to help form/join a team of designers and coders aimed at building a REAL next generation MUD. I have lots of time to put into it. f a bunch of us collaborated we could do something big.I just don't think there's much interest.

Yeah. For muds that have fixed staff and no volunteer coders, that is likely the case. The problem is, its not just there that you see generic stuff with some mobs glued onto them. I admit that since better quality control and new staff took over where I play things have gotten better, but there is **still** too many cases of, "Here are a bunch of rooms. I put monsters in them. One has a key you need to open the locked boxes in the other room. Go kill stuff. You will win a quest point if you find the key and open the box." Yawn!!

Mind you, part of the problem is that complex interaction wasn't built in to start with, so examples are lacking in how to do it, but still, some people are managing to make the rest look silly already and they are barely doing anything more interesting than the previous bunch. A lot of them get in, start coding, find out it is harder than they thought and just decide to finish without doing any of the interesting stuff they planned too, which is hardly helpful either.

I'd love to see music/sound integrate more into MUDs.

Speaking more to the client side, one thing I've always wanted in my muds but never found was real encapsulation of text, meaning that when I send 'help combat' to the mud it sends me back the combat help file -as- a mini combat help file. Also take combat itself -- the mud sends that as a 'combat stream', and so on.

You have a rudimentary form of this already with client spawn windows, where you can capture tells, channel talk, etc., but it could be taken to the next level such that you would have a contiguous record of your help requests, your combat, and everything else you wanted to define as a separate stream. Of course the actual game play would still take place in a main window if you so wshed.

Moving along, to access this information your client could be an actual '3D' client, such that you are playing the mud within a mud so to speak -- the main game window is front and center, but when you want to look at the help stream, you just 'rotate left', instead of having to either position many sub windows on your 2d computer screen, or alt or control tab through different windows. With 3D text you can also zoom in and out -- and heck, even have a friend playing in the same 'room' as you, and you can check out their game play window, even if you're in Illinois and they're in Iran.

I think this is one of the best threads I've seen on here in a long time and definitely more of what the MUD community should be doing as a whole - figuring out how we can make ourselves more attractive to the mainstream instead of all the infighting we so often see.

Shame we're not on vbulletin yet, I'd love to highlight this and keep it on the front page for a month.

One thing I have a lot of hope for is to find a way to embed a client into a webpage such that it "feels" like a web based game. I know Java clients are out there, but they always have the feel of being "off the page" to me. Perhaps something could be done with Ajax, perhaps some other technology.

Cell phone screens are getting larger too. It's going to be a long time before anyone can play WoW on their blackberry or trio, so there's a good opportunity for MUDs in the meantime.

Being driven slowely nuts over that one Ide, with the client I use. It has no native support for spawned window, though you can now "fake it" by creating a new world window with an IP of 0.0.0.0. But, its an MDI window, so you can't drag it outside the clients main frame. The client supports dozens of possible script engines, but since those are suspended between calls to the scripts by the client when it needs them, such as a trigger or timer firing, its not clear if event managers in ones like Python work and even less clear if they work when you have to use the frame of the client as the host window (using NULL to make it a primary, which you would do coding entirely in Python crashes the client real fast... lol) Its default script system is now Lua, so even running it in WINE under Linux isn't a problem, since ActiveX isn't needed to use scripting, but Lua doesn't have any built in GUI functions itself and tacking on wxLua would bloat the client from 1.8MB to nearly 7MB.

Trying to figure out how, and more to the point, even if, some serious change needs to be made to the client to support even basic frames, buttons, images, etc., given that the application is in MFC, the developer isn't interested in completely rewriting it and MFC kind of hampers the ability to handle events from objects created "after" the main program is already running. I.e., you can build them into it, but not make new ones as needed so easilly. I keep going around and around in circles trying to find some solution both he and I like and which is either easy for him to add, or easy for me to code as an optional addon.

But, in my experience.. The bigest problem is failure to impliment stuff on the mud side when its available. Like some of the MXP places I looked at that use hyperlinks everyplace (ugly...), but don't use images at all, color codes when they might be useful (just the lame standard ANSI) and don't support sound. And then there is implimentations problems where Zugg can't agree what the actual implimentation *should be* in the client, so you can ignore the specs and feed < and > through in zMud without it caring (breaking spec), but someone else, like Mushclient eats the text in between because its an *invalid tag*, which is spec. What should be a simple matter of adding a bit of extra code to handle sending certain types of codes ends up being an argument over whose actually supporting the protocol correctly, because no one actually seems to know how its supposed to work in the first place.

It would be nice if clients all supported all the basic features and gadgets, and the look and feel, plus some extras, mattered. Instead, most of them are still not much improved over Telemate, which I used to use to connect to BBS games and had triggers, timers, scripting, music based on the QBasic languages music playing functions, etc. Even some that took the text from some games and replaced them with limited animated graphics. Some modern ones just have spawnable windows... Oh wow! Real impressed. lol

Bah, iPhone is just a clone of LG's Prada... just instead of an MP3 it has an iPod.

They're both outrageously priced. The technology has always been there, so neither of them are clones of anything. They're just the next-gen computer phones.

I disagree somewhat, Brett.

There are features beyond graphics that lure people to MMORPGs and in my opinion, the MUD community would be wise to emulate some of them. There will alwayys be things done better in a graphical environment. And you're certainly correct: There are things that can't be done in a MMORPG that work very well in text. But an attractive feature being part of a a MMORPG is no reason not to integrate it into a MUD. To me, the next generation of MUDs will combine some concepts found in MMORPG with a whole lot of the stuff that can only be done in text. There's a sector of the gaming community out there just waiting for a true role-playing game with mechanics that rival those found in MMORPGs, and in my opinion that game can only be done in text.

What makes a "MMORPG" a "MMORPG?" Is it the size of the player base? Graphical interface? If a "graphical MUD" attracted a million paying customers, would we call it a MMORPG?

Yes.

I didn't say elements used in MMORPGs shouldn't be in text games - merely that text games should not try to base their primary concepts upon the concepts that MMORPGs dominate.

The ideal, lasting text based game in my opinion would be primarily focused upon detailed character interaction, world changing effects, and powerful storytelling tools; however, it would be quite possible to go on hunting or raiding expeditions, or to play a combative character if that were one's preference.

It just wouldn't be a game BASED on the core concept of combat/repeat quest advancement, where most of the systems and coding effort were expended in trying to out-hunt the MMORPGs.

A flexible text-based world that allowed dynamic storybuilding tools requires reasonably good combat and expedition mechanics, because those things will come up from time to time. However, it should not be the primary point of the existence of the mud, or the characters within it.

I have many friends who are diehard MUDers, and have been for many years, who are now turning to WoW whenever they have a hunting urge and only go to their MUDs when they want to develop storyline. I know of no one currently that goes to a MUD when they get an urge to 'hunt', unless they are simply relying upon old habit. It's one thing to have an expedition that is tied into an event (which they will instantly drop WoW to go do) and other to go hunt for hunting's sake and watch the text scrolling by.

I imagine this trend is only going to continue. We can say "But look, such and such a game is still doing fine" but I think we all know they are primarily existing upon old momentum, and the challenge lies before us in creating a new generation of MUD players that will come despite the lure of fantastic, massive, graphical games.

---Brett

Hmm. See, here is a major problem I have with the argument of MMO vs. mud. That one can't do what the other does. True **only** within the limits of the current systems. But consider.. Second Life is right now only just a graphical mush, though one group of people have stuck into it some script to mimic an RPG area. Same problem as the other RPGs, the stuff is all repeatable quests and stuff to hack up. The fundimental problem in all cases is that it takes time, effort and skill to produce quests, so you get canned quests, or at best, quests that are "same as before, but with variations". That's somewhat easier in text, but its still fairly limited. And all mud style games and MMOs work like that. The closest thing to non-linear you can ever expect to see in MMOs is progressive servers, where solving a set of key quests "unlocks" the modules and areas of the game that you didn't have access to before. The problem being, that in cases like EQ, that can mean being limited to a few races at the start and only getting ones like the Kerra of Luclin *after* the existing players have unlocked the areas. It also means that improvements in maps and a mess of other things are never seen "until" they get unlocked in some even later module. In muds (and in EQ2) you have epic world quests. Ones that run from one end of the game to the next, where new parts get unlocked as you go. But *most* of everything going on is still repeatable canned stuff.

Its just not possible for a small number of people to code completely new world wide quests every week or make them all non-repeatable. With graphical systems, its just an order of magnitude worse.

Now, that said, what might be needed is some adaptive AI in mobs that give certain types enough autonomy to start in some caves some place, then move out to the forests, spread camps through them, etc., while the players don't even know the danger. All you do is set goals for them and some parameters for how they are going to act. Some might prove to be allies, others dangerous enemies, depending on their agression, goals, etc. Then, let the players build the rest of the world, al la Second Life, with the main limitations being how much cash they can scrape together to build and maintain the things they build.

In other words, combine the concepts. Make it a player created world, where *they* get to design the combat systems, etc., or at least the descriptions (and animations if 3D), and placing the only limits on a) how much damage things can do at what levels , b) how many skills of that level you can create personally and c) how many skills someone else can pick up from those. Let classes develop naturally, as people create skills, but have to pick "which" of those go together best. But, add additional limits to balance this, like creating a healing feature over a certain level automatically effecting the maximum damage you can do with anything else. Let them do what ever they want, within the bounds of sane limits on how those interact, then let people figure out what "class" they are based on what they pick. For that matter, make societies *and* guilds. Guilds should be real guilds. You might hire some thug to guard the doors into your guild if you are a priest, but you don't have theives, assassins, warriors, etc. *joining* them. Guilds are collections of like minded people, with similar skill sets, who work to improve "those" skills. Societies are collections of like interested people, who may have entirely different skill sets, which they believe can compliment each other. Having the ideas seperate means that you can create a guild designed to improve combat, for example, and naturally end up with an entire group that is trained to be a "Knight" class, or a "Monk". There might still be some variation in the skills, they might find people from other guilds willing to teach them, under the table as it where, skills their guild disdain, but this develops naturally, not as a "pick and choose" sort of thing where you just one day talk to someone and they teach you a dozen new skills to show off. Even the real world doesn't work that way. In the real world, you get "classes", with some cross over and some become experts at those classes, others are jacks of all trades, but the later pay for it by not being "quite" as good at them. Class based systems try to enforce this rule to stupid extremes, classless ones ignore it, producing something a result that is just a tad absurd. Both get it wrong imho.

The best world is one where classes and structure develop naturally, due to the constraints and rules of how the world works, where the world is a world, so you can change it, not just stage dressing and where, like the real world, things exist around the corner you don't know where there until you bump into them. That those things are orcs instead of other humans just means the rules get more complicated, not that everything should be prescripted.

The obvious problems with this approach though is, of course, scripting the AI for the mobs and making sure that the "populations" of NPCs that belong to the races of the people playing don't get so big they vanish all the outside threats. Mind you, that means that building your castle needs to attract those (also AI driven) NPCs. It needs to be semi-real time strategy + mud + Second Life type design to *really* do what people are suggesting. Anything short of that is going to still be "mostly canned quests, but we have a few long running ones that let you conquer W or defeat X, which will late be replaced with Y and Z when these are finished."

If done right imho, the player base should create most of the world, with the staffs only job being to maybe fiddle with the combat/magic/priestly skills of the mobs or give them a bit of extra encouragement to start a war, if the player and NPC cities start getting a bit too big or spread out into to much of the world. But getting it right...

Just keep in mind that what constitutes the 'best world' is basically just your own opinion.

The most popular game-worlds are all almost entirely developer-created (WoW, Runescape, Lineage, etc). Second Life is a blip on the map by comparison and it has not managed to reach profitability after years of operation. That's not exactly the kind of virtual world I'd be looking to imitate.

--matt

Brett: I think we agree on more than we don't.

As far as canned quests go, that's not a big deal to me. I prefer live, GM-run events where the decisions and actions determine the history of the world. Inferno, as will Shadowfall in the future, includes many automated "mini-quests" like: a puzzle for entrancing a spell library, a world-wide overseas search for ocean sector charts, a search for a merchant we sells disguises, a dynamic puzzle-laden path into the underground shrine of a goddess who grants different favors for different offerings, etc. But the hallmark of Inferno is storylines presented by gamemasters and driven by the players interacting with each other and GM-played NPCs. We often use small automated "quests" as tools in the furthering of plotlines in the game, but they aren't our focus.

Well. I don't necessarilly suggest using the SL model for running the server, just as an idea for getting land. If someone finds, hires people to do, and gains profit off of a mine, one might expect them to buy more "land" in the game. It might not be possible (especially if you do it right) to make huge profits off of such a mine solo. You might not even make huge gains with a guild. Founding a city, hiring NPCs to do some of it, etc., *will* gain you more. Point not being to micro-manage, but just to add some strategy into the game, beyond which spells to cast against the big mob you plan to take on.

Now, if you did want to do "profit", then you can't use the SL model anyway, since its all about land ownership, which would need to be artificially restricted by some factors to keep one race (or just player races in general) from over powering the lesser NPC races. Any RL rentals would need to be based on something that didn't alter that balance. Only thing I can think of would be something like additional optionals. Like, maybe if I ever got the 3D text script model idea working, one optional extra would be rendered images of specific rooms/items/etc., which would only work properly with the custom client and a paying account. Same with environmental sounds, etc. The more emersive effects you add, the more you "rent". The game balance itself is left uneffected that way and money *stays* something you have to earn in-game.

And really, profitability on SL is the *server* issue, not the world. Internally, within the game world itself, the system is very profitable (and functions as a real economic system, not just due to being tied to the real world one), its just the server usage and maintenance that isn't (even if they hint that its real close).

Its not necessary to mimic the entire model, including real world currency conversion, to impliment a working system. Its just... never been done totally effectively in most cases. In general, most in-game economies are derived based on models that limit what you can do at all. It hardly matter if you can make 10 types of pies if you *can't* find some new item in some other part of the world that no one has seen before and make a new kind of pie with it. You are stuck with 10 pies. Same with armor, equipment, etc. With SL, anything you make *needs* to not only work in the world, it has to do so within its limits and not look so lame no one will buy it. Now.. How you manage that in text, where what something is has nothing to do with its real appearance, you can't expand what something does without running into balance issues, etc... You would almost need to build a physics system that accounted for magic and alchemy, which internally limited what things can *do*, while letting people make almost anything. But then... You still have to have people checking to make sure its not the "Magic Dildo of Flatulence" or something. But heh, its a lot easier to QC a few items than build all of them yourself. I would think. Especially if there where clear time requirements for researching the design, etc., to give the staff time to look at them.

But is that because nobody's managed to break free from that model yet? World of Warcraft has the advantage of being able to look at a decade of previous MMORPGs that were essentially the same (Meridian, Everquest, etc). I think what has made Blizzard's game so great is that they took what was already a popular genre and cleaned it up, giving it mass appeal.

Second Life went off into uncharted waters, and although it may not have been a sleeper hit, it has generated enough buzz that I wouldn't call it a failure either. Whereas almost everything was figured out for Blizzard and co. by their predecessors, Second Life had to figure it out for themselves. I wouldn't discredit the genre of social MMORPGs just yet, as I think only now it's starting to get some steam. Look at Sony's recently announced 'Home' software, for example.

And Matt, look at your games for example. I would argue that the Iron Realms games have perhaps the most well developed player run politics of any games out there, and I also think that without it your games would not be nearly as popular as they are. I know that's a far stretch from player defined classes and other roles, but it's at least a few steps in that direction.

The biggest drawback of a player-defined text world is that you end up with a lot of really bad writing.

The player that writes it might not think it's so bad.

The key is not in managing the quality of the content, but managing its distribution.

If you have a game full of players adding content to your world, you're going to get lots of bad writing, whether its authors think it's bad or not. There have to be standards, and substandard writing will be substandard, no matter of how it's distributed. If I have to spend time "managing" player-written content I might as well write the stuff myself.


That doesn't mean anyone's an idiot or a bad person. Just not everyone can write well enough that I'd want them painting my world. I probably set the bar higher than most, but regardless of standards, if the player population is adding text to a game a lot of it isn't going to measure up.

Malifax, what if you had a system that was designed to increase the average quality of descriptions?

Take, for example the act of designing the description for a room. You could have a collection of say 1000 (or however many) base sentences, from which the room designer gets to choose 5 - 8. Each of these sentences has customizable adjectives, allowing for a greater amount of customization. With the restriction of using premade sentences, nobody with a base level of intelligence can make a description that is too bad. Now, of course, even with thousands of sentences from which to choose you limit flexibility and eventually you'll get repetition, so you can then look at people with say 100 rooms built, look at the quality and flow of their areas, and slowly give them more and more rights - the ability to write their own complete descriptions in the end. If you created an out of character praise/report system allowing for people to anonymously praise descriptions that they enjoy, and report ones that they don't, it'd further ease the job of quality control.

To clarify on the sentence collection, you could have for example a file with a list of sentences as follows:

In the centre of the [adj] room sits a [adj] table.
From here, the player could create something like:
In the centre of the smelly room sits a giant table.

Obviously, it would rely on a creative person to create the tagged sentences to begin with (can you tell I'm not a writer?). In any case, I'm sure such a system would require more thought than what I've just given it, but it seems like a good starting point.

No, you're missing the point. Substandard writing will not be distributed. That's the idea behind managed distribution, and perhaps managed is the wrong term if you think you need to spend a great deal of time on it. You write a system so that the players 'manage' the distribution of the content according to your rules.

Also, who's to say what's substandard and what's not? If you want to write everything yourself, fine. If you want to write with a team where everyone writes to the same standard, fine again. But there's nothing that says a player-generated world must result in 'a lot' of really bad writing. You're looking at the situation too simply.

Player-added content doesn't necessarily mean freeform writing.  Implement the appropriate rules for managing the content, then you can work on something else while the players use your tools to expand the game.

As an example: I allow players to set their own descriptions, but they may only do so through configurable options, not by writing their descriptions manually.  This ensures that they cannot write what I would personally consider to be a 'bad' description (i.e., descriptions don't have spelling mistakes, bad grammar or incorrect information).

Admittedly the above example doesn't actually help expand the game, but it does save me the effort of verifying people's descriptions for quality and consistency.  The only other two alternatives I can think of would be to (1) spend administrative time and effort verifying/validating player descriptions, or (2) allow players to write what I consider 'bad' descriptions. My approach sacrifices flexibility, but it's a price I'm more willing to pay than the alternatives.

I agree for the most part with KaVir. I think for the most part players should be able to change the environment they play in, even if they aren't adding 'new' content per say, they're still changing things up for other the players, keeping each adventure new and exciting. I think MMO games could do the same thing, but its a lot easier to create more permutations in text without the expensive overhead of paying artists and designers. In this regard a MUD is more or less a continuous system where as a MMO is discrete, we can fill in the gaps because of the flexibility of text that MMO games cant.

-Toraux

Not necessarilly. They recently open sourced their client. They know they have bad interface design, so they are going to see if the thousands of people using it can fix it. Good bet they can. By contrast, games like EQ and EQ2, WoW, etc. have fixed, non-adjustable interfaces. Even when you add a hack, like the one I recently added to EQ2, to give you more points of interest on the maps you can navigate to (and so you can fracking find things at all sometimes), you still can't re-scale the map to focus in on specific points, the maps don't always line up 100% with where you are in the world and other glitches. The maps in EQ didn't look as pretty, but the new ones suck in some critical ways and you *can't* fix them, since the client's interfaces don't let you make the changes you need to correct the problems.

By contrast, text parsing is only non-trivial if someone intentionally designs areas that are nearly impossible to map, but the mapping can be done using several existing systems, or you can build entirely new ones, which someone did for a Battletech based mud a while back.

As for muds being better at actions... Maybe... If you mean you could "write" three paragraphs about what a monster is doing in a room, instead of having it animate it. But part of designing muds tends to be small and concise room descriptions, small and concise object descriptions and lots of very short descriptions for how you hit, kick, zap, etc. the mobs (or them you). There are really only a few "actions" muds deal with combat wise - DOT, heal over time, heal, hitting. Everything else is a label. Do muds do a better and easier job of "labelling" things? Sure. But so what. You spend almost as much time trying to avoid attack A from looking too much like attack B, C and D in three other guilds as you would changing the color of a cloud of sparks or gluing a different handle to an axe, so attacking with it doesn't look the same.

But.. How about Emotes/Souls? Well, a lot of them are now animation scripted in 3D games. But, you have the same problem with non-scripted ones there are you do in muds. A Muds mechanics don't generally allow you to do an emote that "automatically" corrects for gender pronouns or other issues, neither do they do so in 3D environments. The only *gain* you get from the text environment is that its not 3D, so you can do, "Shadowfyr hops on one leg.", and not worry about the fact that the character model just stands there. Gosh! lol

Seriously, 3D environments do action as well as muds do, and they get better all the time at it. Its probably not going to be too long before someone tries building a "magic" physics engine in one that defines internally how spells *work*, and not just manually script every spell individually. There will still be limits, but adding one effect that is missing is going to be a lot easier than animating 100% of the entire sequence. I wouldn't be suprised if some of that is already going on. The gag animation in EQ2 is also used for most plague type spells, just with some other stuff thrown on.

Put simply, muds could write chapters for the "big" details, but no one wants to play the text equivalent to a Hemmingway novel, so they write what is paragraphs for main descriptions and mere sentences for the details, when you look at them. 3D systems don't need to "write" the novel, they just need to show it, so even the smallest object of real interest, if transformed into part of a book, would take a whole page. And that includes actions, which if described in sufficient detail would be so horibbly spammy you wouldn't be able to tell what was even happening in the fight.

I am not sure the argument that muds do action better is anything more than, "We have more labels and they can be pasted on the jars faster than if you tried to paint them on instead." Certainly a valid argument, if you don't mind all the labels to be nothing but strips of paper with a word printed on them, while the guy down the streat is drawing pictures on theirs. Even more relevant an argument if you can draw pictures, but not quite the same as the guy the next block over doing glass etching, and so on. More generic doesn't mean "better", just easier and faster. And that only remains valid so long as it remains easier and faster to do it. The day the guy on the next block over can take "any" label and "print" it through an etching machine.... you're hosed. lol

So, the entire argument about "better at actions", really is just a statement of *for now*, with the additional caveat of, "but not with as big of a gap as there used to be."

---

I do agree that some sort of QC control needs to be placed on things. Perhaps that would be one grounds for guilds and societies. To make one you might be required to have one or more people "in" the group that is good at writing the descriptions. Or failing that, maybe those that "do" write well might even make a builders guild, which would take less time to build you your castle than if you submitted it to the games own staff. I.e., using local contractors, instead of hiring the experts from some far off kingdom. The later might do a better job, but they might also have so many other projects that it would take years to get to yours. Better to hire the local builders guild, whose work has already been vetted and approved "by" those distant experts.

Shadowfyr wrote:

Not necessarilly. They recently open sourced their client.

Yep, which is a step in the right direction but doesn't fix their crappy and stupidly expensive technology (they can support approximately 4 simultaneous players/server).


They know they have bad interface design, so they are going to see if the thousands of people using it can fix it. Good bet they can. By contrast, games like EQ and EQ2, WoW, etc. have fixed, non-adjustable interfaces.

Have you never seen Insomniac for WoW? It's a compilation of dozens of interface alternations. Runescape fans have also reverse engineered the client and made a completely custom client (which Runescape doesn't like).

Allowing users to play with the client is nothing new and is quickly going to become fairly standard. In EE, we plan on opening up the client to users after it's stable, for instance.


But part of designing muds tends to be small and concise room descriptions, small and concise object descriptions and lots of very short descriptions for how you hit, kick, zap, etc. the mobs (or them you). There are really only a few "actions" muds deal with combat wise - DOT, heal over time, heal, hitting.


Combat is one system in many MUDs, but just one of many. Perhaps one of the most important, but saying that a MUD only deals with a few actions combat-wise is true, but also misses the fact that the actions in combat are just a small set of the overall actions available.



Everything else is a label. Do muds do a better and easier job of "labelling" things? Sure. But so what. You spend almost as much time trying to avoid attack A from looking too much like attack B, C and D in three other guilds as you would changing the color of a cloud of sparks or gluing a different handle to an axe, so attacking with it doesn't look the same.

The labels are content/nouns, not actions/verbs.


But.. How about Emotes/Souls? Well, a lot of them are now animation scripted in 3D games. But, you have the same problem with non-scripted ones there are you do in muds. A Muds mechanics don't generally allow you to do an emote that "automatically" corrects for gender pronouns or other issues, neither do they do so in 3D environments.

There are certainly text MUDs that do that. Achaea does it for instance. I don't care what "most MUDs" do, as most MUDs are just people screwing around in their spare time, just like most graphical MUDs (few of which you or I have ever heard of as they have few to no players) are people screwing around in their spare time. I don't think there's much to gain by defining the potential of MUDs by the lowest common demoninators.


The only *gain* you get from the text environment is that its not 3D, so you can do, "Shadowfyr hops on one leg.", and not worry about the fact that the character model just stands there. Gosh! lol

As the classic example (courtesy of Raph Koster I believe) goes, try doing this in a graphical MUD: "You bow ironically."

And try doing custom animations at all in any gamey-environment (WoW, Runescape, etc etc). Second Life lets you but it's that very pupeetering system that has helped ensure that they are still not profitable.



I am not sure the argument that muds do action better is anything more than, "We have more labels and they can be pasted on the jars faster than if you tried to paint them on instead."

Well, again, those labels are content/nouns not action/verbs and are not what I'm talking about.

--matt

Re: The future of text-based gaming?
 

I think a lot of cool stuff could come from hobbyists rather than from companies. As a hobbyist you can focus on what you enjoy and try out new concepts that a company might not be as willing to attempt. I have seen good MUDs made by hobbyists. The issue though is that you usually don't know about these MUDs as to discover them requires you to play the game a while. There seems to be gems in the stack of MUDs.

One MUD I visited *really* impressed me. Oddly enough it had 0 players ;-).