@faraday said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
This is an interesting point of view. Using the command line is generally an important skill to have when doing anything programming- related though.
That's the thing, though -- running a game, ideally, shouldn't require programming. It shouldn't require you to be a server admin. I can spin up a whole website in 10 minutes with Wix or Wordpress or whatever. I can set up a Discord voice chat server or forum or Storium game with a few clicks.
I've made Ares as easy as I can imagine given the tech requirements. You don't need to do any code to set up a game, but it still requires you to ssh onto a server and mess around with the command line occasionally. That is freaking intimidating to a large number of people, and it's an obstacle to having more games. Having (comparatively) few games, in turn, is an obstacle to having more people.
Ares is doing a good job here! It is able to do this by committing to a highly specialized game style and genre out of the box. It's important to separate a game administrator from a game developer I think. For those that have no programming knowledge, a pre-prepared game template is definitely going to lower the point of entry considerably. For those that do have the programming knowledge or willingness to learn it, they generally hate to have to tear down the pre-made stuff since they want to build their own thing anyway (this is really a matter of audience of course).
That said, we have wanted to have more pre-made template-games for Evennia for a long time. The Ainneve project was/is specifically aimed to that goal. Progress has unfortunately been a slow though 
@gryphter said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
@faraday Power-upvote. There are lots of us who can't code a bit, but we might make badass games, for all the world knows, if we were just empowered to do it.
Empowering people to create is something every engine dev wants I think. Thing is, unless you want exactly the game mechanic as someone already did that you can then just add a world to, you will at some point have to get down to programming. All we can do is try to make that step easier, but the step will have to be made eventually.
@Apos said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
There is an upper bound to how many people staff can invest their time in and entertain, and if they aren't doing this then there is not much difference between MUs and less arcane RP formats. Table top writ large can only be writ so large before people are constantly forgotten and left out.
Someone could advertise hard on all the younger demographic RP communities but there's only a point in doing that if you can support them, and take the time to help get them into the game. I mean the larger RP forums, chat room type places have tens of thousands of users and I'd guess maybe like a tenth of a percent have even ever heard of MUs, but if I threw down ads and had like, 100 people log in as guests to ask questions on how to MU, there's no way I could support that.
It's a good point, a huge influx of newbies need to be properly handled to actually make the best of the new influx. That's where tutorials and easier entry goes a long way, limiting the amount of personal instruction is needed.
(having too many new players is a bit of a luxury problem anyway of course).
@Tehom said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
I have a few things on my wishlist for the far off future.
I would love is to have something sort of similar to django-cookiecutter but for game templates out of the box, but even more accessible than that: some sort of wizard where someone who has absolutely no programming experience could enter a bunch of values to customize a game experience out of the box. Ideally we'd configure their settings file for them, then apply some fixture or database seed values for a game genre, and then the rest is up to them. For example, selecting 'medieval fantasy game' might add a 'contribs.fantasy_template' to INSTALLED_APPS which would more or less be what Ainneve is supposed to be, automatically adding relevant commands, etc.
I think the biggest hurdles coming into this hobby are getting started as a game-runner and getting past the text-based interface for a player. Ares is making great strides with both areas. I think it's unfortunately very rare for most people who want to make a game to have both boundless motivation to do both heavy lifting of creative writing work and want to tinker with deployment/configuration/coding on the technical side. Anything that makes either area easier probably would increase adoption proportionally to how painless they are, imo.
Yes, I agree something cookiecutter-like would be great to have for various genres so as to make it faster to get started with a game structure. Ainneve is a step in that direction, albeit slowly moving.
I think there are a lot of improvements that could be done here (certainly on the part of Evennia). But I also think that there is a limit to how much a game engine can help you ('you' in the general sense, not you in particular). We are not anywhere near said limit yet, mind you. But I don't think it's realistic for people to expect to be able to run a multiplayer MMO from scratch without having any technical skills or willingness to pick up such skills. "Just" being creative is all fine and dandy if you have someone else doing the coding, but if you are setting out to make a game on your own you must be expected to actually learn the craft, IMO.
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Griatch