Subject: Re: Further ramblings...

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1992 06:15:00 -0700

Morpheus sez (in part):

> 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.

I don't see that this is the case.  Take, for example, the following
setup (with which I have been toying)

$player     -- with no @create ability
$builder    -- with @create ability
$programmer -- with @create ability and with programming abilities
$wizard     -- with the ability to take any of the other three classes
                 and turn them into edible milk chocolate on a whim.

If all people want to do is roleplay, they can IRC.  The point of designing a 
system in which people can build things is to -let- people build things!  I 
find some of the stuff that people have built to be fascinating.  Yes, 
there's a lot of crap out there, but how much of the crap is just 
unprogrammed objects and how much of it is clever creations?

Theme should be something to take into consideration, but I don't see that 
it's necessarily the be-all and end-all.  I mean REALLY.  No matter HOW big 
this house is, China isn't in the basement.

Again, I am not sure where my ramblings are heading.  So I'll just drop this 
here and look for further comments.  (And I personally prefer MOO-Cows to 
*Theme-Issues, because this is easier for me to sneak in here at work. Heh.)

Blackbriar

---

From: Judy Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1992 11:54:17 -0700

>this house is, China isn't in the basement.

I suppose I have to defend myself about China.  China was originally
created by Rog as a sort of joke; its floor # on the stairwell really
does correspond to the diameter of the earth, assuming 10 feet per
floor.  It was much later turned into a ghetto by me for non-theme
things, when I had totally given up on trying to maintain the theme
and had redefined my goals as simply getting non-theme things far
away.  My only defense is that of insanity :-)

People frequently don't care about the theme.  And it's a lot of work
to be the Theme Police...

These things then build upon themselves.  We let in nontheme things
because it's too much work not to.  Then people see these nontheme
things, and say, hey, my thing isn't any worse than that! and it
snowballs...  Grandfathering is an evil thing.

Judy Anderson yclept yduJ     [email-masked]    'yduJ' rhymes with 'fudge'
   Join the League for Programming Freedom, [email-masked]