#8: Electoral Ramblings

[ShannonA]

Article #8 in this series, "Electoral Ramblings", is now available at http://www.skotos.net/articles/.

Here's an excerpt:


In designing the Skotos StoryBuilder Server, we came up with a neat system where you could use ordinals (first, second, third) to select objects. So, if there were three Denebian Mudslugs in a room, and you typed "take mudslug", you'd be asked "Do you mean the Denebian Mudslug, the Denebian Mudslug, or the Denebian Mudslug?" and the obvious response would be "take first mudslug". It was a terrific system that made sure you never selected the wrong gastropod.


Comments, as always, welcome.

Shannon

[Monkey]

From the Electoral Ramblings article:

In a text-dominant game, how do you represent this fact – that room names are usually determined by use? We can't have StoryHosts constantly wandering around, querying players about the communal names for rooms and then renaming them, but we wanted there to be some answer.

I think that in Skotos' current game, Castle Marrach, it's okay to fix the names of the rooms. In your green bedroom example, it was only two people deciding what the use of the room would be. In the game above, it is assumed that there are many castle inhabitants that came before the hundreds of newly awakened guests. The guests look to the previous inhabitants for clues as to how to behave, and what to call things. If these hundreds of people all think of the room the cook is in as the kitchen, it shouldn't become a bedroom just because one guest drags a sleeping cot into it. The other hundreds of guests have all consensually agreed (spoken or not) that that room is the kitchen.

Don't get me wrong, I think your idea is great. I think, however, that it would be a better idea for Skotos' Worlds, as then you will have players spread out farther from each other who have enough time to rearrange furniture to their liking. It becomes a lot harder for an entire world to agree on the purpose of a room most of them will never see, and in a Stage, the players are there for a finite period of time, so they will hopefully have more pressing concerns than changing the nature of the room they are in.

--Monkey

[cedric]

I think that in Skotos' current game, Castle Marrach, it's okay to fix the names of the rooms. In your green bedroom example, it was only two people deciding what the use of the room would be.

I love the idea of furniture voting on it's room name. It's very, very cool and original. Unfortunately, even where only two people have to decide on a room name it can sometimes break down.

My wife and I have lived in the same two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment for four years. Technically speaking, the bedroom with an attached bathroom is (by definition) the master bedroom while the other is the guest bedroom. In our particular case, the guest bedroom is larger and has a nicer bed, so that's where we sleep every night. When we have guests, we switch to the master bedroom and let them use the guest bedroom.

To make matters worse, the master bathroom is where we perform our daily hygeine but the guest bathroom is where we do other, um, bathroom things usually.

So, the whole master/guest nomenclature broke down within a week of us moving in. We started calling the guest room the 'main room', but sometimes the master bedroom was the 'main room' because it had the 'main bathroom' (which, by the way was not the room with the 'main toilet').

To this day, unless I go out of my way to say 'Do you mean the MASTER bathroom or the LITTLE bathroom', or 'Do you mean the bedroom where we NORMALLY SLEEP, or the MASTER bedroom', then I will usually end up in the wrong place if she asks me to get something from one of the rooms. So, by falling back on static names that have little to do with furniture, we can communicate.

If, on top of all this, the furniture started arguing with me and expressing it's opinions, I would probably go utterly mad.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go beat a rug.... It said something mean about my mother.

[ShannonA]

Originally posted by cedric:
Unfortunately, even where only two people have to decide on a room name it can sometimes break down.


I had all but forgotten that when I was a teenager, still living at home, my mother and I used to have arguments about which room-full-of-couches-and-chairs was the Family Room and which was the Living Room.

So it's good to hear that we haven't solved this problem in the real world, let alone the virtual one.

Shannon