Subject: Further ramblings...

From: "Morpheus (who doesn't want the world...)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1992 00:45:52 -0700

This followup is mostly in response to Saruman's posting...

Firstly, he mentions waiting for someone to get "smart and make[s] a spot for
imagination". It is this unrestricted/undirected building that I am most 
strongly objecting to. I don't consider the "wonderful" creations hanging in
$nothing to be particularly imaginative...quite the reverse in fact. The objects
and areas which I _most_ appreciate are those that are cleverly integrated into
the theme of the LambdaHouse itself. This shows ingenuity (IMHO).

Next, he states that people often "like to join things together, mainly because
it is more natural to walk then teleport". However, this is obviously not the
case, as the rampant use of teleport rings and the move of @go/@join to $player
seem to indicate.

Finally, Saruman states that other MOO's are "bound to fail" due to the fact
that new people don't stick to the theme. What I would like to see is a MOO
where the players have _no_ building/creating commands at all. The emphasis 
would be on roleplay, not on who can build the cleverest gadget of the month.
If people don't want to play within a theme, then there is no reason for them
to continue visiting the MOO.

(Saruman, please note that I'm not flaming you, I'm just using your message
to clear up some points).

I realize that Lambda always has been an "experimental" MOO, and I suppose this
wouldn't bother me so much if there were more MOOs up that offered what I'm
looking for. I'm definately not advocating the "clipping of wings" at all, I'm
just suggesting a reavaluation of the approach taken to setting up a MUD.

Well, I've forgotten what my point was. It's 3am and my mind is still juggling
my latest C assignment. If anyone is interested in further discussing of this
and other theme issues, might I suggest we take it to the *themes mail group
on Lambda?

It's been a long night.

Morpheus

---

From: Clay Luther <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1992 10:19:13 -0700

> to continue visiting the MOO.

Funny, isn't this what we've (Jordan, Scott, and I, with others) been working 
on for the past 8 months?  Does no one pay attention here?

-- 
Clay W. Luther                  [email-masked]
System Manager                  Center for Network Neuroscience
University of North Texas       PO Box 5218 Denton, Texas 76203
817/565-3896,3472               aka. Malraux@GodNet (Bushashuru!)

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1992 20:03:02 -0700

I don't have too much to say at the moment, except I want to point out that
none of the issues that have been brought up on Moo-cows in the past two
days are anything new (anyone remember the BUILDER bit back on TinyMuck?)

 > If anyone is interested in further discussing of this and other theme
 > issues, might I suggest we take it to the *themes mail group 
 > on Lambda?

Might I suggest the MPIF mailing list?  Seeing as it's been quite dead
recently (I blame myself for not having the time to put together some
conversation-starters), and the issues brought up have relevance far beyond
just LambdaMOO or MOOs in general.  The address is [email-masked];
please send subscription requests to [email-masked].  There
is a short advertisement on the refrigerator on LambdaMOO.

As I see it, there are (at least) two extremes: a role-playing-based
mud, with a strictly enforced theme policy, with little or no building or
programming except by a core of Wizards/Tinkers/Elders/Gods; and a
completely open mud where everyone is allowed and encouraged to build and
program whatever they want.  The former can work well, but you have to
decide exactly how strictly you want to enforce the theme: how do you
prevent someone from creating FlashGordon when your world is Middle Earth?
Do you force players to have their names and descriptions okayed by the
Wizards before they are allowed to play?  And how do you prevent people
coming on and talking about homework, or dating, or whatever?  Should you
remove general-purpose 'say' and 'emote' verbs?  The latter extreme is just
as problematic: what do you do if someone tries to create a chess-board with
exit objects for every single possible allowable move?  (Believe it or not,
someone actually did this back on Atlantis...)  In an ideal world this
wouldn't necesalleviate the arily even be a problem, but there are real limits as to how
big the database can get without filling the disk drive, or slowing the
response time, or whatever.

Neither one is intrinsically "better" than the other, though the latter
certainly suits itself better towards "test sites" (which is (I think) what
Lambda started out to be); but it's up to the people who run the mud to
decide how far towards either extreme they want to be.  The current
situation in the world of MOO stems from the fact that Lambda is the only
public MOO out there, so people haven't had the chance to experiment with
different ways of running MOOs.  I look forward to seeing whether Godnet
will succeed, though I'm not too optimistic...

Well, I guess I did have something to say; hopefully this will start some
discussion on the MPIF list.  What to you think?  What are some other
advantages and disadvantages to these two extremes?  How successful or
unsuccessful have previous muds of either type been?

-- DougO aka WhiteRabbit aka owner-MPIF
[email-masked]