Now I am not knocking the Wiki. I was one of those who felt that leaving enforcement of the above "old" style of play entirely to the players was an impossibility....certainly more so as time went on. But this does mean that technological information flows have, in effect, disappeared from the game. There is no sense of questing for information, no sense of discovery, no possibility of invention. Technological innovation is now entirely in the hands of staff and arrives right across the world of Cantr in an instant. This is very artificial when compared to human history. I also have no doubt that this situation is also contributing to the higher turnover of more established players. Many, I suspect, are "exhausting" the game, so to speak, long before this should be the case. Indeed, I am in the process of terminating some of my senior characters right now. They simply have no sense of anything further to do or achieve. These are not decisions I've taken lightly. I've wracked my brains in an effort to find some motivation for them to follow, but there seems to be none. They bore me.
So, what am I saying? Well, simply put, Cantr needs a sense of invention and a sense of questing for the new. This need cannot be satisfied purely by discovery of new lands, let alone by trading across continents. The distances are simply too great. Also one would, in such cases, mostly be questing for new materials, not for inventions.
Now for a little diversion. There is a cycle of operas which goes something like this. It opens with the maidens of the Rhine guarding a lump of gold which lies deep beneath the waters. A niebelung called Alberich arrives on the scene and proceeds to flirt with the maidens, but they reject him as ugly and uncouth. Along the way, though, they tell him that anyone who siezes the gold, and who renounces love, may forge it into an object of power. Well, since his flirting had failed, our nerdish friend does precisely that. There follows an incredibly long and borderline incoherent story, during which the gods build Valhalla, but involve themselves in the corruption of Alberich's cursed object. Oh and a woman is condemned to sleep forever surrounded by a circle of fire, only to be woken by a man who knows no fear. (The whole of what became "Sleeping Beauty" is just one Act!) To cut a very very long story short, her champion later dies, she immolates herself on his funeral pyre, Valhalla burns down, and the Rhine overflows its banks. In the very last scene, Alberich throws back the cursed object and the maidens restore the gold to the waters of the eternal river. So what was the object Alberich forged? If you don't know the operas, you should be able to guess. No? Think Tolkien. Yes. Wagner's opera cycle is indeed called "The Ring of the Niebelungs".
I mention Tolkien because the two are not unrelated and have parallel sources in Nordic mythology. In Wagner's operas, Valhalla stands more or less for the modern state, Alberich is an industrialist of a sort and the ring perhaps stands for technology, or at least for some kinds of technology. In Tolkien, the whole saga perhaps stands for a quest to undo a certain kind of technology, at least that kind which brought us WWI and WWII. This was rather well brought out in the final movie, I thought. Anyhow, in both stories the ring of power is returned to Nature, the forging is undone. I mention all this because this overall epic saga is the primary source of all the fantasy books, D&D games and clones which followed. Alas the clones got cheaper and nastier and less relevant to anything as time went on. However, at root, that was what it was all about. Spell scrolls, magic objects and quests all stand, in a certain sense, for technological means of power. Good technology, "bad" technology, related environmental issues and so on.
So the essential difference between Cantr and your run of the mill MUD is that Cantr demythologizes the plot and leaves players to create their own mythologies through their characters. However, and this is my key argument for today, the players of Cantr cannot really create mythologies, or indeed history of any kind, without quests.
I am not of course suggesting quests developed by PD. Such quests should arise organically from the game. But in order for them to arise, you need some concept of innovation. Now, if a magic scroll in the traditional MUDs can be said to stand for a new and more powerful way of doing something, ie a technological invention which is written down, then maybe Cantr needs such a possibility. In Cantr this would simply be a blueprint. (Yes, I know this has been suggested before, but I'd like to try and emphasize the new rationale, since it was most likely rejected before the Wiki came to be).
A blueprint would be an object in your inventory something like a key, but containing descriptive information which could be read like a note. Blueprints would be displayed in a separate inventory subsection and could in some instances be clicked to start a project. Or else, they might be read through by the program to provide additional menu items when starting a project in some other way, eg when cooking in an oven. They would be copyable but, like keys, would require a timed project and maybe some resource to copy. This would preclude mass production. Blueprints would arise by a process of discovery or invention, and this is where the skills system would come into its own. My view here is that skills should either be really worth something, or else not be bothered with. In this instance, their worth would lie in the ability to "invent" rare items using one's speciality skills.
Let me try to provide an example pertaining to clothing. ProgD sets up the possibility of clothing items with multiple levels of description and RD adds some descriptions. For example, "X1 X2 dress ebroidered with a pattern of X3 in X4" would give us possiblities like "a scarlet satin dress embroidered with a pattern of lilies in gold lace and sequins". Now what RD has done has been to scatter around some resources for dyes and some other resources like lilies, oak leaves, etc, which aren't good for much except that they can serve as a basis for such patterning. What has occurred is that our expert clothier happens to have been holding in his hands some scarlet dye and some lillies; suddenly he "happens" to invent this particular blueprint. Once invented, the blueprint can be copied and passed around for use by other clothiers. It becomes information that is tradeable.
The story doesn't quite end there. The "satin" mentioned can of course only be made on a speciality loom. And such a loom would likewise be the invention of an engineer (skills in constructing buildings, machines and vehicles, for example). Given that you can have satin, velvet, brocade, corduroy, tweed and any number of speciality cloths, there is much scope for new engineer-invented machinery. Furthermore, following the recent suggestions about modularity (Doug, et al), engineers could likewise "invent" the machines required to produce the new hardened steels needed for superior blades and steel bow parts, and so on, while metalsmiths would have to "invent" the components made from such new materials. There are many other possibilities. If raw foods were divided into carbohydrates, vegetables/fruits, and proteins (meat, fish, nuts, etc), and values were assigned in a way that could be made formulaic (based on how values were manually calculated in the case of stew), then it should be possible for characters to "invent" recipes for new combinations in a way similar to the above suggestion for clothing. The only onus on RD would be to ensure an adequate spread of these three food components across broad regions of the map. RD would not themselves have to intoduce each new type of meal.
It seems likely to me that if skills are ever to be worthwhile, they should be grouped into professions which make some sense in terms of roleplay opportunities. Currently, skills are too atomized and I've seldom if ever seen players pursuing only their expert skills in any coherent way which can be said to constitute a profession or trade. It is actually shockingly bad. Only one of my characters has ever bought a weapon and hardly any have ever bought clothes. Even New Xanth has only managed to provide scope for dedicated blacksmiths, fletchers and clothiers through a rigorous form of communal social organization which can hardly be said to involve "free enterprise". You need something to make a profession necessary. Such broad skill groupings might be engineer, clothier, metalsmith, woodsman/fletcher, chef, horticulturalist and maybe just a few others, while medical doctors might become possible if we ever get to see anything resembling medicines. However, the bottom line is this. Skills will only ever amount to more than an irritating nuisance if they bestow unique opportunities. However, in order to design professions that characters can pursue in a coherent way, it is essential that skills somehow be grouped into trades that are worth following.
What does all the above buy us? Well, it buys the reintroduction into the game of information flows. Inventions may once again be controlled, sought, traded and even fought over. Remember that in real life no single person can remember in their head how to build a BMW. The documentation, if ever printed out, would amount to a massive stack of paper, most of which are appendices filled with tables of engineering tolerances. You may have read just recently of the attempt to steal and pass on patent information from CocaCola. And then there's your great aunt Agatha with her secret recipe for jam tarts, just to prove that control of information is not restricted to large corporations! There is nothing artificial in this suggestion about blueprints...it is how the real world works.
I'm not suggesting, by the way, that existing "entry-level" machinery, buildings, items or food should require this process of invention and blueprinting to produce. This will be used only for more "advanced" items yet to come. It will remain possible to play the game without blueprints and questing for them would be rather more a preoccupation of the game's elites. One of the problems that both ProgD and RD have to face is that human societies are always evolving. Fashions are forever changing, technologies forever arising and being superseded. So the challenge for these departments becomes how to keep ahead of the game. Clearly, combining a process of modularized components with a process of invention and blueprinting, will provide a massive explosion of potential since such potential grows exponentially.
I am always concerned when I read announcements such as the recent one that the laying out of resources has been "finished". Surely the golden rule must be that nothing in the game can ever be said to be finished? Just recently I chanced upon an article about the world palladium industry. Did anyone even know what palladium was a few centuries ago? Do you know? What is it used for? What might be quite fun in Cantr is to have new resources appear but be unidentified or unusable except by expert miners (if they're metals) or expert horticulturalists (if they're plants). You would have to invent a "blueprint" for their use.
In conclusion, the above ideas--or similar ideas which someone else might come up with--might serve to help reinvigorate the game and provide something akin to the "questing" of well-managed traditional MUDs. Large parts of the two established continents have become very static over time, the only brief excitement arising from "timber quests" here and there. In some ways the Treefeather Map is almost too powerful. I can clearly detect the difference between that island and the poorly mapped Xiria region for example...some of my characters there face rather more that is unknown. But of course, in time, the player maps will always catch up with physical geography. What they can never catch up with is the above outlined process of innovation and blueprinting.
And just imagine the fun of your character arriving in a strange town bearing new blueprints for machines, weapons or clothes never before seen there! The chance to play a craftsman with real secrets of your craft. The possibility of real craft guilds with something to protect. Finally, if your character has a baby son or daughter, and that son or daughter will one day be played by you, then your character will be even more reluctant to part with the "secrets" that will one day form part of his or her patrimony. Or else imagine playing a medical doctor who has discovered a new instant cure for the sneezing sickness. Use your imaginations! As always, an idea should promote activity and motivation, in-game motivations being of course the source of good roleplay.
Once again, stalwart souls who read this far, thanks for your patience!
tsigoloicos yasse taerg rehtonA
Furthermore this is very different from the issue of information flows, and it's that which I was trying to model.