Raph Koster discusses the similarity (categorical sameness, actually) of MUDs and MMORPGs, and on the way has many interesting things to say about textuality as well. For example, the fact that both MUDs and MMORPGs (someone needs to hire a PR firm to come up with catchier acroynms) are basically types of texts:
Text muds, exploiting the power of hypertext, treated each block of text as a discrete location, but did not apply scale to the “room” that was described. In these room-based systems, therefore, you could move a very large “distance” by traversing a link. Many of these links were literally labelled with cardinal map directions (”north”), but some of them were instead “prepositional” such as “under,” “through,” or “into.” Indeed, more adventurous builders sometimes created links that were conceptual, carrying users to “places” that were not real, such as dream states.
One of the difficulties facing fields like composition is the degree to which it's dragging its collective feet about this realization, for the most part: Composition is architecture. Readers and writers are designing textual spaces, and unless we start thinking of texts in spatial ways, we're going to behind the curve.
[via Raph's Website]
Posted by johndanseven at April 1, 2006 12:11 AM