Alternative Formats to MU
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I would play a game that had a web only interface. The problem isn't the web only interface, it's the disconnect and needing to open multiple things to play /one/ game.
If it were all web access only? Cool. Works for me.
It's when I am trying to use a telnet connection that /also/ requires a web window open that I experience the issues.
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@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I want a web-only 'MUSH' more than anything.
As @Tat pointed out (thanks btw) - for all my naysaying in this thread, I'm basically angling Ares so that you can do everything from the web someday. It's not a goal for 1.0 because I don't think most people want that, but it's still on the horizon.
That doesn't mean forcing people to the web. The telnet side still exists, until the day when some game decides it's superfluous and turns it off. It just means making more and more stuff accessible via web in ways that are oh-so-much-easier than dealing with +this and +that foo=bar/baz.
The thing is... my idea for a "web only MUSH" may be different than other peoples'. The idea of a grid? Even in the telnet version, I'm moving away from that with my scene system. By refocusing our RP around the idea of scenes, the grid becomes unnecessary. Give folks a map and some pre-defined locations/descs and they can go to to town. Channels and pages? We can bundle them together into an in-game chat system that works just like Slack or Discord. Etc.
I don't think there's value in just re-creating the old world with a web GUI slapped on top. I think that making a good web experience requires a paradigm shift.
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@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:
And yet, despite the really nice web client also available there, I will almost certainly be using a separate client for the RP aspect. That's because I want my real-time stuff to be broken out into it's own 'space', because it works better for my head and my attention that way. It's the same reason I use the slack PC client instead of its browser-based one, why I use an email client instead of webmail, and why I freaking hate facebook messenger. I want that stuff in its own box.
I use separate apps for Spotify and Slack and other such programs whenever possible, and I honestly don't view this as that different than using a MU client. I just think it's a better user experience.
I'd probably PLAY a web-based game if it was in a theme I was interested in and I liked the other players, mind, but I don't view 'a separate app in which to play' as a dinosaur thing, and certainly not one that needs to be tied to telnet.
I do think having a better web-based experience is the clearest way to bring in new players, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I'm excited to see how Ares and Evennia are developing. I just don't think a preference for the separate-app experience is purely a byproduct of being an Old.
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@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I use separate apps for Spotify and Slack and other such programs whenever possible, and I honestly don't view this as that different than using a MU client. I just think it's a better user experience.
The main difference IMHO is that those apps are easy to use. A MUSH client just isn't. It's like a DOS shell.
I have no philosophical objection to breaking out chat and RP into a separate stand-alone client, though there's a ton of work involved there when you account for all the different platforms. What I object to is expecting people to learn all these game-specific +-commands with crazy syntaxes.
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@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I have no philosophical objection to breaking out chat and RP into a separate stand-alone client, though there's a ton of work involved there when you account for all the different platforms. What I object to is expecting people to learn all these game-specific +-commands with crazy syntaxes.
Yeah, this is basically what I want to see, and where I think the barrier to entry is for people. Hell, I've been MU*ing for nearly twenty years (dear lord), and I STILL look up the syntax for how to reply to a bb or add a job to a certain category. And I HATE doing it every single time.
Give me GUI. Give me dropdown menus and submit buttons and edit buttons and reply buttons.
Re: grids, I think there's an interesting question to be asked about what counts as a 'grid' on a non-telnet game. I've actually had this conversation a lot with people. What are the key components? Is it being able to 'walk' from room to room? Is it being able to look from one room to another? Is it a sense of where things are located? Is it the descs?
I'd be happy with a clickable map with descriptions and have no need for 'walking'. But I also feel super strongly that I need both location orientation and descs. Some people have different requirements. But this is a great example of the sort of discussion needed if we really want web-based play, where there are so many possibilities telnet doesn't have.
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@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
What I object to is expecting people to learn all these game-specific +-commands with crazy syntaxes.
I really think once people play a web-only game done even half right and see the advantages they could have and have been missing all this time they will never be able to play a telnet-based version again. It will ruin that experience.
For example what I had in mind for a GM was to let them create a 'room' in advance or even on the fly; give them different terrain icons they can interject into grid squares, allowing for the visuals of combat to be complete clear to the players, and for ranged powers (including hitting people under cover) and movement rates to be handled automatically. Just point and click, zero need for memorization.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:
For example what I had in mind for a GM was to let them create a 'room' in advance or even on the fly; give them different terrain icons they can interject into grid squares, allowing for the visuals of combat to be complete clear to the players, and for ranged powers (including hitting people under cover) and movement rates to be handled automatically. Just point and click, zero need for memorization.
This is a SUPER interesting idea! We're been using Google Draw for years to have interactive maps during messy combat scenes so people can reflect where they are and see where enemies are. Imagine having that integrated into the ACTUAL game.
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@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I have no philosophical objection to breaking out chat and RP into a separate stand-alone client, though there's a ton of work involved there when you account for all the different platforms. What I object to is expecting people to learn all these game-specific +-commands with crazy syntaxes.
Yeah, this is basically what I want to see, and where I think the barrier to entry is for people. Hell, I've been MU*ing for nearly twenty years (dear lord), and I STILL look up the syntax for how to reply to a bb or add a job to a certain category. And I HATE doing it every single time.
Give me GUI. Give me dropdown menus and submit buttons and edit buttons and reply buttons.
Re: grids, I think there's an interesting question to be asked about what counts as a 'grid' on a non-telnet game. I've actually had this conversation a lot with people. What are the key components? Is it being able to 'walk' from room to room? Is it being able to look from one room to another? Is it a sense of where things are located? Is it the descs?
I'd be happy with a clickable map with descriptions and have no need for 'walking'. But I also feel super strongly that I need both location orientation and descs. Some people have different requirements. But this is a great example of the sort of discussion needed if we really want web-based play, where there are so many possibilities telnet doesn't have.
In my mind, grids serve two purposes: 1 - They provide a sense of space/location that is shared between all the users and 2 - They can promote stumble-upon/random RP (if that is encouraged in the game).
A clickable map probably replaces the one. It probably doesn't even need to be as fine-grained as most grids are. If that map also included a list of players or scenes at that location, like +where does, it might also help with number 2, but I think games in general need a lot of work encouraging players to break out of their cliques and moving to a new format is a great opportunity to rethink things.
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@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:
For example what I had in mind for a GM was to let them create a 'room' in advance or even on the fly; give them different terrain icons they can interject into grid squares, allowing for the visuals of combat to be complete clear to the players, and for ranged powers (including hitting people under cover) and movement rates to be handled automatically. Just point and click, zero need for memorization.
This is a SUPER interesting idea! We're been using Google Draw for years to have interactive maps during messy combat scenes so people can reflect where they are and see where enemies are. Imagine having that integrated into the ACTUAL game.
I had most of it done... I was just looking for a free library of terrain icons at the time. It's not even that hard at that stage.
The 'killer features' a web interface unlocks are very interesting. But the amount of work needing done upfront is... discouraging. I have no idea how @faraday pulled Ares off, it was a massive project. I'm used to working in teams, since tackling this on requires too much of an investment (for me).
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@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.
That's not actually been my experience. I mean, it may turn off some newcomers, but there are also a lot of other options out there with much slower pacing for those people. My experience is that there are people who are ready to dive in to the kind of pacing we have on MU*s, but their turn off is the technology. They have to download a client and connect to this game and figure out commands and learn all the lingo that everyone already knows. When I was on staff at Transformers: Lost & Found, we got a lot of these kinds of RPers. Their experience is maybe somewhere like Tumblr, and there's a really high bar of education that a lot of us don't really think about.
So for me, a new web-based system isn't about adjusting pacing. It's about adjusting user-friendliness.
Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs. But even people that RP in a very similar environment find it difficult to transition, and it's almost always the format cited, with the 'I need to download something' and 'the syntax is really intimidating and confusing' for command line stuff. And if the MUSH has off game materials, like needing to buy books (well, steal PDFs), that's another big bar to entry.
I dunno if there's a huge rush to fix it though, since non-sandboxes would have a lot of trouble handling the kind of populations that would be possible by tapping into the big RP communities. I just can't see a MUSH being able to sustain like 15k people without fundamental design differences.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.
That's not actually been my experience. I mean, it may turn off some newcomers, but there are also a lot of other options out there with much slower pacing for those people. My experience is that there are people who are ready to dive in to the kind of pacing we have on MU*s, but their turn off is the technology. They have to download a client and connect to this game and figure out commands and learn all the lingo that everyone already knows. When I was on staff at Transformers: Lost & Found, we got a lot of these kinds of RPers. Their experience is maybe somewhere like Tumblr, and there's a really high bar of education that a lot of us don't really think about.
So for me, a new web-based system isn't about adjusting pacing. It's about adjusting user-friendliness.
Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs. But even people that RP in a very similar environment find it difficult to transition, and it's almost always the format cited, with the 'I need to download something' and 'the syntax is really intimidating and confusing' for command line stuff. And if the MUSH has off game materials, like needing to buy books (well, steal PDFs), that's another big bar to entry.
I dunno if there's a huge rush to fix it though, since non-sandboxes would have a lot of trouble handling the kind of populations that would be possible by tapping into the big RP communities. I just can't see a MUSH being able to sustain like 15k people without fundamental design differences.
On TLF, we spent a lot of time trying to go down to the bare basics of everything to write up our guides and welcome rooms on the game. We talked a lot to players we got who were entirely new to MUs and we tried to find out just what things we were taking for granted. We switched up our terminology and tried to refer to MU norms in ways that made more sense for people who had never been on them. (Instead of talking about channels and clients, we tried to frame things as basically a chat/RP program.)
You have to make a serious effort to recruit and retain people who are newcomers to the platform. I mean, sure, you can get people who are more adventurous about picking up weird, complicated stuff. But I feel like a lot of people don't recognize just how high the bar really is. But I know we really did find it worth the effort on TLF, because we managed to snag some really fun players who were entirely new to MU*s.
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@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
The idea of a grid? Even in the telnet version, I'm moving away from that with my scene system. By refocusing our RP around the idea of scenes, the grid becomes unnecessary. Give folks a map and some pre-defined locations/descs and they can go to to town.
True story: Victorian Reverie was the first game I played on which didn't have a Grid, but, instead, places of public interests to RP in. This was almost ten years ago. We didn't have the scene system, but it really would have helped a lot.
The 8th Sea has utilized what you're describing very well. As an added feature, opening up a scene by titling it a certain way sucks up a pre-made description from somewhere in the ether and drops it into your description for the scene. Beautiful.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I use separate apps for Spotify and Slack and other such programs whenever possible, and I honestly don't view this as that different than using a MU client. I just think it's a better user experience.
The main difference IMHO is that those apps are easy to use. A MUSH client just isn't. It's like a DOS shell.
Oh, yeah, I'm not arguing that telnet is great. I'd be happy enough to see it gone if something better rose to replace it (I think the web portal is, right now, on its way to being a viable wiki replacement, which isn't something I could've imagined a year ago). But I think that's where some of the resistance to a web-based game comes from (I mean, there are also those people who just love SimpleMU, but I'm not so much dealing with them), and I felt like the argument for the experience a dedicated client provides was getting subsumed in that. What I think people picture is something you HAVE to play in a browser tab, when it probably could be something different that provides a comparable focus/features.
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@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:
The 8th Sea has utilized what you're describing very well. As an added feature, opening up a scene by titling it a certain way sucks up a pre-made description from somewhere in the ether and drops it into your description for the scene. Beautiful.
It's sucking up descs from actual rooms. They just made unlinked rooms for that purpose. But at that point, you could think of a "room" as just a pre-defined "location" - which is in fact how the Ares web portal locations directory refers to them.
So if you do
scene/start Mess Hall=publicthen it starts up a scene using the Mess Hall desc. -
@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
So if you do
scene/start Mess Hall=publicthen it starts up a scene using the Mess Hall desc.Whoa. I totally didn't realize it did this.
BRB, rethinking grid options now.
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@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:
But I think that's where some of the resistance to a web-based game comes from (I mean, there are also those people who just love SimpleMU, but I'm not so much dealing with them), and I felt like the argument for the experience a dedicated client provides was getting subsumed in that.
From a user perspective, I totally agree that's ideal.
BUT we're a hobbyist community. This is not a commercial product and we don't have the luxury of having a full dev team focused on supporting dedicated clients for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, etc. with their attendant versions and upgrades.
Also - having to support both telnet and web in the code at once makes the code way more complicated. This makes it harder for people to extend the platform with game-specific custom features.
So there are tradeoffs, and that's what has me pipe-dreaming about a web-only client.
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@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:
Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs.
This is why my eyes glaze over whenever people talk about how "the hobby is dying." There's TONS of text-based RP, it's just in places most of us don't interact/acknowledge on this board. Like, RPI MUDs aren't much different than MUSHes, but that's still a very different audience. Once you get into stuff like Dreamwidth journals or Tumblr or whatever...people be RPing. If every PennMUSH game imploded tomorrow, I could go find a place to text-based RP. I like MUSHes because of the immediacy they provide and the way they create a persistent, shared world, but I can imagine that being created another way.
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@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:
Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs.
This is why my eyes glaze over whenever people talk about how "the hobby is dying." There's TONS of text-based RP, it's just in places most of us don't interact/acknowledge on this board. Like, RPI MUDs aren't much different than MUSHes, but that's still a very different audience. Once you get into stuff like Dreamwidth journals or Tumblr or whatever...people be RPing. If every PennMUSH game imploded tomorrow, I could go find a place to text-based RP. I like MUSHes because of the immediacy they provide and the way they create a persistent, shared world, but I can imagine that being created another way.
My MMO guildmates—who I've followed from game to game across more games than I want to think about—are avid RPers.
None of them, that I know of, have ever MU*'d. (I've tried to drag them onto games a few times, but they find the whole MU* commandset and dedicated client and everything else very strange.) They RP in Discord. On Tumblr. On forums. In Google Docs. And if I want to RP with them, I need to go there. It's eye-opening how many people are RP'ing that way; the number of people doing Tumblr RP probably dwarfs the userbase of this board. The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.
a.k.a. Packetdancer (or "Pax" for short)
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@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
It's sucking up descs from actual rooms. They just made unlinked rooms for that purpose. But at that point, you could think of a "room" as just a pre-defined "location" - which is in fact how the Ares web portal locations directory refers to them.
It's a really cool feature. You could basically have a whole swath of unlinked rooms, all parented to the appropriate rooms that have things like the weather, the time, the date, and so on, and so on. I think this system is really revolutionizing the way I see MU*s and what can be done with them.
I mean, I've crowed about your stuff before, but this is incredible.
I have an idea for another feature that might be very popular, but, like, that's not for this thread.
