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{% extends "issue/article/index.html" %}
{% block page_title %}
A text MUD with a working ecology system
{% endblock %}
{% block article_authors %}<span class="author-nick">Molly O'Hara</span>{% endblock %}
{% block article_date %}30th May 2015{% endblock %}
{% block article_content %}
<p>
I’ve always liked consistency in the game world, which is actually a rare thing in most text MUDs.
</p>
<p>
Many builders typically work on the same MUD, all of them have their own ideas, preferences and writing styles, and as a Head Builder you don’t want to hamper their imagination too much, for fear that they’ll just up and leave — which many of them do anyway. Consequently, many MUDs end up with a patchwork of rather incompatible zones, on a wide variety of themes and environments, where you could walk directly from an elven forest into a Smurf village, or from a desert landscape into a field of snow, without any logical distance or explanation.
</p>
<p>
The other end of the spectrum, the grid based world, usually gets rather dull and monotonous, with very repetitive descriptions.
</p>
<p>
As a new and totally inexperienced builder in a brand new MUD, almost twenty years ago, I was happy to be allowed to develop my own ideas, and so were all the other builders. There was a lot of enthusiasm among us, as we toiled away on the zones on the build port, while the coders had their own fun on the game port. Building is slow work, but with all that unbridled creativity, zones were produced at an amazingly fast pace. The result was… a patchwork, as it was in most other MUDs back then.
</p>
<p>
As a new and totally inexperienced Head Builder in the nineties, I spent most of my time building “travelling” zones between all those different themed patches, so as to at least keep them apart a bit and provide some kind of explanation as to why they were so different. The result was better, but still not really spectacular. The MUD was still a patchwork, but by now with an amazingly large world to explore … and it kept growing.
</p>
<p>
About ten years ago, I started to get ideas about a more interactive world, where the inhabitants — the “mobs” — would have lives of their own. This, in turn, would affect the players to a point where they had to think a bit about the choices they made before going on a killing spree. I ran with some of these ideas, and they resulted in lots of scripted mobs who responded to approaches by telling the players about their woes and sending them on various quests to help.
</p>
<p>
The quests and the “intelligent” scripted mobs are now large and vital parts of our MUD, but it still isn’t quite the vision I had 10 years ago.
</p>
<h1>A cohesive MUD world with a working ecology</h1>
<p>
If I were to start a MUD from scratch today, with the knowledge I've gained over the years, I’d go about it in a very different way. I’d create a dynamic world that changes with the time of day and year, the weather and the seasons, with a working ecology system, where all plants and animals have a life cycle of their own, and where players also could affect the ecological balance with their actions — for better or worse.
</p>
<p>
The players should be able to utilize all natural assets – minerals, plants and animals – and also cultivate the soil, to increase the crops. They should be able to hunt and kill the wild animals for their meat and hides, but also domesticate herds of cattle, horses and sheep, fence them in for protection and drive them to the market to be sold. They should be able to develop most of the most of the raw materials into more advanced and usable products by crafting. There should be a market where they could trade their products, and get a higher price the more developed they are. Above all there should be a balanced ecology system, so that the MUD would be alive and changing in yearly cycles, even if not a single player were logged on to it.
</p>
<p>
I don’t know if such a MUD already exists somewhere. I’ve never come across one myself. Yet almost all the elements needed already exist in my own home MUD, which is run on modified Circle code and the DG_scripts. If anyone knows of something like this already existing, I’d appreciate a link, so I could visit and watch for myself. Otherwise, this is how I’d go about it, if I were starting from scratch today:
</p>
<h1>The world</h1>
<p>
I’d go for a combination between a large, continuous grid and “normal zones”. The main world would be grid based, and I’d definitely utilize the beautiful graphic maps from the Client app that KaVir developed for MUSHclient and so generously shared with the community.
</p>
<p>
From this main grid you’d reach some “special zones”, which would be more like traditional MUD zones, such as islands, caverns, mine tunnels, or player built mansions, fortresses and cities. These extra zones would only show up on the main grid as a single entrance square, and you’d need to either enter a portal, or descend/climb some object to reach them.
</p>
<p>
The main grid world should be very large, meaning that you'd have to travel long distances to get from one end of a continent or ocean to another. Distance and weight should matter, meaning that you'd need to use mounts, carts, wagons or ships to travel far, or to carry heavy loads.
</p>
<p>
I’d make the world grid in 20x20 room pieces, which is a nice size to map on A4 graph paper. It would be easy to expand this grid successively, by just adding more 400-room pieces, with varying topography. But I'd keep it small, until the ecology system was balanced. Just two basic 400 room zones, one land based, the other water based.
</p>
<p>
To these two basic grids I'd then add all the life forms: trees, plants and animals. Then I'd work at getting the ecology reasonably balanced within these two 400-room zones before starting to expand the world.
</p>
<p>
I am inclined to think that the room descriptions in the basic grid won’t be very important, because all the interesting and dynamic things in the game would happen with the mobs and objects. So the grid descriptions would be short and concise, set by the code, and based on the terrain of each room.
</p>
<p>
This is where the fun starts — because what would also be set by the code, based on the terrain on each grid square, would be a “fertility” value which would determine how much vegetation the square could sustain, and how fast it would grow. This value would be the basis for the entire ecology system. There should be a lot more terrains than the usual stock list, and naturally terrains like “field” or “prairie” would have a much higher fertility value than “mountain” or “desert”.
</p>
<h1>Time, seasons and weather</h1>
<p>
Time would naturally play a big role in the ecology system, and not just day and night changes. There is stock code for seasons, with weeks, months and years, which could be developed further. For instance, when farming you'd have to prepare the soil in early spring, then sow, then wait for the harvest in autumn. The outcome of the crop would depend on good tending and timing, (i.e., if you didn't plough or sow at the right time, there would be nothing to harvest).
</p>
<p>
The existing weather code does not add much to the game, just some messages about how it’s starting, or ceasing, to rain, etc. What I have in mind would have a much larger impact on the environment. It would be cold in winter, so you’d need warm clothes to survive. There would be the normal weather cycles, but also droughts and torrents, and occasional natural disasters, like tornados, wildfires, earthquakes and landslides.
</p>
<p>
The weather changes would affect the cultivated crops more than the natural vegetation, which would be adapted to the climate. For instance, if it doesn't rain for an unusually long time, some crops will wither and die unless you water them. The opposite is also a danger: if it rained profusely during harvest time, the corn would rot and there'd be a crop failure.
</p>
<p>
Seasons would be simulated through the vegetation. Instead of changing the room descriptions, you can work with the objects, showing the vegetation in different stages of development.
</p>
<p>
I've made a pretty simple system of scripts for an orchard, where each tree loads a new version of itself for each new season before purging itself. So there are flowers and budding leaves in spring, green foliage in summer, ripe fruits in autumn, and bare twigs in winter. The fruits can only be picked in autumn.
</p>
<p>
The same system could be used for all vegetation objects, like tufts of grass, herbs, flowers, bushes, trees, etc. These could all be shown in different stages of development based on the season and their life cycle.
</p>
<p>
The drawback, of course, is that you'd need four different objects for each single species, but once those are created, the rest will be automatic.
</p>
<p>
This brings us to the main feature:
</p>
<h1>The ecology system</h1>
<p>
The ecology system is controlled by five parameters:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Fertility: The basic factor, set on each grid square, but also on each species, both plants and animals.</li>
<li>Food chains: Plants → herbivores → smaller and larger carnivores.</li>
<li>Life cycles: Birth → youth → mating → propagating → old age → death.</li>
<li>Time: Most life cycles would equal a year’s time, but some are much longer.</li>
<li>Supply and demand: The amount of food available determines the size of a population.</li>
</ul>
<p>
To start out with the plants, I would make grass, herbs, bushes and trees (with leaves) as food objects, which the herbivores would feed from, and then make predators to feed from the herbivores. Most plants would have a life cycle on a yearly basis, and the fertility factor would determine how many plants of each kind a square can sustain. Some species, like trees, would have a much longer life cycle.
</p>
<p>
I'd make similar life cycles for the animals, so that they would get born, grow up, mate, give birth, grow old and die, all within a set time. Again, this means at least four mobs for each species, but it should be well worth the extra effort.
</p>
<p>
Some species would be bound to certain terrains, or have dens that they’d return to for sleep during day or night, but most of them would roam freely on the grid.
</p>
<p>
I'd make several types of animals: insects, spiders, birds, fish, snakes, frogs and mammals. Each species would have a different set of properties, like size, fertility, speed, agility, tenacity, stamina, ferocity and strength. High stats in one of these factors would be balanced by lower stats in others. For instance, a rabbit would be high in fertility and speed and low in all other properties, while a bear would be high in strength and ferocity, and low in the others.
</p>
<p>
Depending on these properties, an animal would hide, burrow, flee, evade or fight when threatened or attacked. All of them would have to eat and drink to survive.
</p>
<p>
The herbivores would have to roam to find food and water once they’d consumed all the available vegetation in one square. The carnivores would feed from the herbivores, mainly from kids and old animals, and all mature animals would defend their offspring. Kids would follow their mothers, and herd animals would stick together.
</p>
<p>
This could all be done with scripts, but should perhaps better be done by code. The important thing would be to maintain a balance, so that the populations are reasonably stable, unless tampered with by players. A population would be controlled and kept in place by several factors, like fertility, food supply, lifespan, size and strength, evasion ability, and natural enemies.
</p>
<p>
There would also be edible mushrooms, vegetables, roots, fruits, nuts and seeds, which animals and humans would compete for.
</p>
<h1>Human Development</h1>
<p>
To this basic ecology, once it is balanced, I would then add the possibility for the players to farm the land and to fence it in, either to protect one’s farming field from herbivores or to protect livestock from carnivores. You should be able to domesticate some animals, but if you fence them in, you’d also have to feed and water them regularly.
</p>
<p>
Farming a field would increase the original fertility factor with each step (plowing, harrowing, fertilizing, watering and sowing), and if started at the right time would yield a substantial crop to harvest and trade in the autumn.
</p>
<p>
A vital part of the world would be a number of small villages, inhabited by human natives. These would be friendly, if approached peacefully, but they would also defend themselves and their possessions if provoked. Mainly they would serve as trading partners and mentors. They would buy your products, and in some cases help with developing them, or give advice on how you can do it yourself. Rare and hard-to-get items would fetch higher prices, and the more developed a product, the higher the price. Players would also barter and trade among themselves, encouraging player interaction and roleplaying.
</p>
<p>
It would be a survival game, both short and long term, and the players would enter the world as the sole survivors of a spaceship crash on an almost virgin planet. They would be armed with a knife and a gun, which would give them a small advantage to start out with — but only as long as the bullets in the magazine last.
</p>
<p>
To survive and raise their own status, the players can:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Fish, hunt and collect berries, fruits, nuts and seeds for food.</li>
<li>Kill and fillet most animals for food, and skin them for their hides.</li>
<li>Fletch baskets from grass or fibers to be able to carry more items.</li>
<li>Make primitive tools and weapons from flint, wood and bones.</li>
<li>Fell trees and use the timber.</li>
<li>Trade these basic resources with the natives and each other.</li>
<li>Learn magic from the village shaman and become sorcerers themselves.</li>
<li>Collect special plants for medicine and magic, and brew potions from them.</li>
<li>Build willow huts for protection and storage.</li>
<li>Plough and harvest the soil to produce larger crops.</li>
<li>Fence in fields to protect them from roaming herds of grazing animals.</li>
<li>Fence in livestock to protect it from carnivores.</li>
<li>Shear sheep, milk cows or goats, and process the milk to butter and cream.</li>
<li>Process animal skins to leather, to use for shoes, coats and armor.</li>
<li>Card wool, and the stalks or seed pods of some plants, to produce textile fibers.</li>
<li>Spin thread from fibers, weave cloth from the thread, and sew it into clothes.</li>
<li>Pan and sluice for gold in mountain creeks.</li>
<li>Mine for metal ores and melt them into alloys.</li>
<li>Quarry for coal and stone, and cut the stone into blocks, slates and ashlars.</li>
<li>Smelt ore, make alloys and forge them into tools, weapon blades and armor plates.</li>
<li>Make more advanced weapons and armor from leather, metal, horn, bone and wood.</li>
<li>Build carts, wagons and ships, to move heavy cargo.</li>
<li>Build roads to travel faster and more safely.</li>
<li>Build houses and castles from wood and stone, and, in the long term, build cities.</li>
</ul>
<p>
The raw materials form the basis of the craft system, where you develop them into more advanced products which fetch a much better price. Everything you make will also decay over time, so the cycle must be kept going.
</p>
<p>
Most of the development projects would also lay waste to a piece of land. Even building roads and turning grassland into farmland would affect the global ecology, mainly by reducing the available grazing areas for the wildlife and removing it from the ecology cycle.
</p>
<p>
As long as the untouched areas and basic supplies are large enough, though, it shouldn’t crash the ecology system totally — this being one reason you need a really large grid.
</p>
<p>
Still, too many bad choices on a too grand scale might result in a global disaster, comparable to a meteor strike. If the players actually manage to crash the system, it would mean permadeath for everyone and a full reboot of the world and player base.
</p>
<h1>Conclusion</h1>
<p>
Over the years bits and pieces of these ideas have been added to my own home MUD. We have farm fields, garden plots and orchards, a ranch to raise cattle in, and a large, working mine. You can fell trees, milk cows, shear sheep, skin most animals, and scrape and tan their hides into leather. There is also an extensive mob-run trading system in place. But it’s still just “bits and pieces”, and I’m really tempted to try the full ecology system out in a full scale.
</p>
<p>
However, my home MUD — both the code and the world — has grown so large, complex and convoluted that in some ways it resembles the proverbial white elephant that’s so big, stubborn and heavy that almost every change of its course involves an inordinate amount of work. A radical upheaval, such as the basic ecology system I just described, would be next to impossible.
</p>
<p>
It would be a lot easier to start out from scratch.
</p>
<p>
But who’d do that at a time when text MUDs seem to be slowly dying?
</p>
{% endblock %}
{% block article_bio_content %}
Molly O’Hara is Head Builder on <a class="gametitle" href="http://4dimensions.org">4Dimensions</a>.
{% endblock %}

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{% extends "issue/other/index.html" %}
{% block page_title %}Copyright{% endblock %}
{% block other_content %}
<p>
This issue of Imaginary Realities is copyright © 2015 Jennifer Melchert, Matthew Sheahan, Richard Tew, Richard Woolcock.
</p>
<p>
All authors retain copyright to their work, and have made their work available under the
<a href="{{tp.license_link}}">{{tp.license_text}}</a> license, which allows us to publish it.
</p>
{% endblock %}

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{% extends "issue/article/index.html" %}
{% block page_title %}
Dispelling the gloom
{% endblock %}
{% block article_authors %}<span class="author-nick">Akeley</span> (Tomasz Gruca){% endblock %}
{% block article_date %}2nd June 2015{% endblock %}
{% block article_byline %}
{{ super() }}
“So, what was it like?”
{% endblock %}
{% block article_content %}
<p>
This is a question I hear from time to time when I mention that I grew up in a communist state behind the Iron Curtain. - Or should I say “used to hear" — despite the fact that only about a generation passed since it all crumbled down, the Cold War era seems as distant as medieval times, truly ancient and confined to those strange "past centuries". Maybe it’s a function of time and place: flanked by one of the world’s biggest financial hubs on one side and uber-hip yupster’s enclave on the other (the quintessential "rotten West" of communist propaganda) in a once-futuristic year 2015, one might struggle to find people interested in anything other than here and now.
</p>
<p>
The question always left me a bit stumped. It’s an experience nigh-on impossible to describe in a sentence or two in a casual conversation. Partially because people’s expectations stem from descriptions of awful historical extremes, and my area at the time (the late 1970s) was lucky to avoid these, on a big scale at least. So I had no horror stories of gulags, bloodshed and paranoid surveillance to tell, stories that my compatriots from neighbouring states or other (mostly Stalinist) eras certainly would have. The other factor skewing my perception was age when you’re a kid, the grown-up problems do not concern you that much, however awful they might be.
</p>
<p>
Now, make no mistake, life in a communist state was quite awful — and that’s the word reserved for this system’s mildest incarnation, the one I experienced. Lack of freedom to leave the country (unless you’d fancy visiting another communist state) and overbearing censorship would be two major factors here. The more nebulous, but still depressingly real, fact that you’re not living in a sovereign country is another. The ever-present threat of "bad things" happening loomed large — after all, dissidents did die and go to prison, even in our "softer" version. And the Cold War’s nuclear threat might seem distant and bit unreal nowadays, but back then it was truly terrifying.
</p>
<p>
(There was also a more positive side to living in these times — there were lots of good things and ideas amongst the grimness, but that’s a completely different story...)
</p>
<p>
Still, while it all seems unbearable now, for a child or a teenager it didn’t qualify as such, at least not for these reasons. That is why, when trying to answer the original question with which I started this article, I would say "Well, it was… grey. And… surreal." Yep… grey and surreal, but mostly grey.
</p>
<p>
"Grey" is the word that sums up the communist era best for me — describing a state of mind more than the color itself, though there was plenty of that too. While as kids we were of course aware of major goings-on in the adult sphere, that was more of a high-level dark cloud, looming but distant. Disturbances in our immediate world were more mundane, caused by cramped living conditions,
vodka, religious zealotry, unpredictable shortages of literally anything and other quirks of the commutopian life. But… the Greyness was more vague, yet ever-present, and manifested itself mostly in depressed adults, endless propaganda and military parades on the black-and-white television, oppressive concrete architecture, power-cut-induced twilight zones, and a sense of general helplessness and hopelessness — emotions which were not clearly understood but certainly felt. Contrasted with the beauty of the natural world and simple joys of life itself, it often resulted in a strange melancholy state.
</p>
<p>
Even so, as kids we did our best to battle the gloom. We could and did improvise and use our “local” toys and media, some of which were quite brilliant. Yet, because we were aware of the existence of the forbidden fruit — LEGO (never had any), Matchboxes (had one), Star Wars (saw it ten years after the premiere), Disney cartoons (on TV once a year for Christmas) — our playthings and heroic World War II TV dramas couldn’t compete in the long run, and perhaps even made things a bit more depressing.
</p>
<p>
One thing that proved harder for the governing overseers to control was the written word. Sure enough, books in general were censored, and most of the exciting foreign titles were either banned or printed in extremely limited quantities, fetching crazy prices at second-hand market. I saw <span class="publicationtitle">The Lord of the Rings</span> mentioned in a rare TV program once, and instantly knew I just had to read it, but obtaining a copy was a quest in itself — it took me several years before I finally found a tattered volume in an obscure library. Literacy was very high, thanks to free and quite strict schools, and that, combined with
the unavailability or poor quality of other media, made reading a very popular pastime.
</p>
<p>
It has been my obsession since a very early age — I burned through a few books per week, living in imaginary realities of Messrs Verne, Conan-Doyle, Dumas, Poe, May, Stevenson and countless others, reading with a torch under a blanket at night (if this sounds like it would start a fire, then what I call a torch is what you call a flashlight). I was
once conned by my family into agreeing to an extended hospital stay on the premise that “they have a library there!” (They didn’t.) Books offered an escape hatch to fantasy worlds but also the hope that things could be different in the real one.
</p>
<p>
While reading was a great distraction, we loved games too, same as kids all over the world. But, again, this cultural sphere was rather limited in the late-Seventies Eastern Bloc. There were playing cards and board game staples like chess or checkers, but nothing too exciting (when I was about 10 I was given a Monopoly-clone set for Xmas — I thought it was a revelation). Despite sci-fi and fantasy being very popular literary genres, pen and paper role-playing games were virtually unknown; they only started gradually appearing in the mid-Eighties.
</p>
<p>
Yet, while lacking in all other fun departments, we had arcade games. It’s a mystery to me how they managed to seep through the Iron Curtain; these huge, costly machines must have been quite tricky to obtain and transport into the country. But there they were, appearing to us kids as complex alien artifacts, so totally outlandish when contrasted with our grey world. Found in back rooms and the corners of smoky bars, train stations or converted caravans, mostly surrounded by menacing grown-ups (to a 7-year-old anybody five years older is a grown-up). These places were often dangerous to visit, as you could easily be mugged for change — which you seldom had anyway, since there was no such thing as "pocket money".
</p>
<p>
Of course we went there anyway. The allure of this surreally wonderful medium was simply too strong. We would rarely play ourselves, mainly due to the aforementioned lack of fund, but watching was a joy too. At first the games were mostly pinball machines, with all their mechanical bleeping, blinking and popping wonders. Sometimes we were lucky enough to find a coin in a slot or a hasty traveler had a train to catch or somebody would forget he won an extra ball, and we would swoop in immediately and claim the prize. This was mostly short-lived fun, as our skills were obviously very poor, but it didn’t matter (and if you had a good friend with you, you would share a game playing a flipper each — probably not what designers had in mind).
</p>
<p>
Pinball was great fun — I even recall my DIY-genius uncle building a little book-sized home version from a bit of wood with holes drilled in, a few nails and flippers made of laundry pegs held by rubber bands. (Surprisingly, it worked! It was great fun too.) When the first proper video game machines appeared in arcades, though, pinball was instantly relegated to second tier. From then on, it was all about pixels. Still very rare and hard to approach, especially to a not-even-teenage child, they became a firm feature in our imaginations — though we would never even dare to dream about what was to come and we never knew what was happening in the parallel Western Universe. While our rulers appreciated science and tech very much, the news programs were mostly dedicated to our own local flavor, and reluctant to report on the Evil Westerner’s achievements — especially regarding “decadent” pleasure- and fun-enabling inventions.
</p>
<p>
And “over there”, the entertainment market was being revolutionised — Magnavox and Atari brought video games from arcades into people’s homes. In our world such a thing was still totally unimaginable — an arcade was a kind of shrine, with the bizarre alien machines put there by some higher force for unfathomable reasons. To have one at home? Incomprehensible.
</p>
<p>
This perception changed over time, though. The System couldn’t censor and control all the sources of information, and the political climate was slowly thawing — the Eighties, while still firmly communist, were much less darker and oppressive than the previous decades. The Biggest Brother had a new leader who talked of “openness” and “restructuring”. There was a lot going on in my area too — a certain dissident electrician scaled a shipyard’s fence in my town to join an illegal union strike, an act that eventually led to the ruling party’s collapse, ten years later. The Pope was visiting while the American president was issuing embargoes — all these groundbreaking events being still a distant noise in the kids’ world. Even the Chernobyl disaster was remembered mostly because of the awful taste of the liquid (Lugol's iodine) they forced us to drink at school, that and a supremely eerie atmosphere.
</p>
<p>
We had other, more pressing issues. Dealing with puberty, poverty, and the “greyness” — despite the fact that the Utopian State was crumbling, the gloom was still very much present. But there were new weapons with which to battle it appearing on the horizon — to a youth who first got the video game bug in these hard-to-approach arcades, glimpses of possibility showed here and there. Vague mentions in magazines, <span class="publicationtitle">Soviet Game &amp; Watch</span> bootleg clones (that a rich kid from school would rent for a day in some sort of barter deal), a friend’s dad’s amazing <span class="gametitle">Pong</span> clone with one working paddle, strange machines called "computers" seen at a Trade Expo… yes, the pixels were getting slowly closer and closer.
</p>
<p>
Then one day, a revelation. One cool Saturday my favourite science news program dedicated last 10 minutes to the new wonder in the tech world: microcomputers. Sir Clive’s finest creation featured heavily and my mind was bombarded with nearly unfathomable facts, like that a person could actually own one of these, have it in their room and play video games on it. They showed <span class="gametitle">Knight Lore</span> and <span class="gametitle">Mugsy</span> and I couldn’t believe my eyes. <span class="gametitle">Pong</span> and arcades, however brilliant, couldn’t even come close. These games were totally next level, creating true worlds beyond simple pew-pew of the arcade hits. They saved the best for the last — the <span class="gametitle">Hobbit </span> text adventure, with the tantalizing prospect of "talking to a computer", an interactive book of sorts that would have you read and respond at the same time. It was all a bit too much to take in, but I knew that now I had a goal in life: to obtain one of these machines and "talk to a computer".
</p>
<p>
For a kid with no income and whose most technically-advanced possession was a hand-me-down sometimes-working tape deck, it was quite a challenge — in fact, mission rather impossible — so it took many years before I finally managed to get one. It was a strange period; when others drew logos of their favourite bands on school notebooks, I did the same for micros. I read every available tidbit of information about video games, a subject that inevitably was becoming more and more popular. It started with a mention here and there, eventually reaching the point where dedicated sections in magazines appeared. Sometimes these mags printed game listings in BASIC, which I would try to analyze and imagine what it would be like to play. I went on trips to other towns just to see working models in expensive specialized shops for the wealthy. I also started learning English, mainly to decipher a few of the proper video game mags my friend owned. These tattered copies of <a class="publicationtitle" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Sinclair">Your Sinclair</a> and <a class="publicationtitle" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_(games_magazine)">A.C.E.</a>
were my blueprints for the future.
</p>
<p>
After what seemed like eternity, and a rather depressing quest filled with scraping pennies from odd jobs and pestering relatives (and even non-relatives), my good-hearted auntie finally caved in and "lent" me the remaining sum. I became an owner of Timex 2048 / ZX Spectrum clone. These micros, along with Commodore/Atari/Amstrad models, were very popular in the Eastern Bloc thanks to mass piracy — since we lived in another reality, there were no pesky copyright restrictions (consoles with their hard-to-copy cartridges were virtually unknown).
</p>
<p>
Despite the fact that more than half a decade had passed since my first text-adventure encounter with that <span class="gametitle">Hobbit</span> program, I had not forgotten it and wanted to play it immediately. Unfortunately, obtaining programs for your machine was not easy; while piracy was normal (that term didn’t even exist at first, and we were just vaguely aware that people actually pay for software in the West), the availability was somewhat random. There were computer fairs where you could go and purchase some software from a dude with a micro set up on a table who would copy it to your tape for a fee, or sell you a "set" tape with some games on it. This would require hard cash, though (plus often a train trip to a faraway location) and after the machine itself, I could hardly even afford the tapes. So I had to rely on swapping with friends — but since it was such an expensive and rare hobby, this choice was severely limited.
</p>
<p>
Mostly, I’d get a tape with no description and no clue what was on it (and few programs managing to load anyway — audiocassette is not the most reliable medium for data). The ZX Spectrum library contains thousands of games of varying quality. Text adventures were surprisingly popular, despite the obvious language barrier, but not as popular as action-oriented games. That meant it took me some time before I managed to find <span class="gametitle">The Hobbit</span> itself, but in the meantime I encountered a few others…
</p>
<p>
By then a teenager, I knew much more about how video games and computers work in general — certainly more than my bug-eyed 8 year old self — and the initial fantasy of "talking to a computer" seemed a bit naive by then. Still, text adventures stood out as special amongst the mostly simplistic 8-bit video gaming fare, coming across as rather sophisticated and promising some sort of AI interaction. So, despite the language barrier and total lack of support — no Internet to look stuff up and very limited local literature — I was determined to delve into these mysterious domains.
</p>
<p>
My friend, whose father was a seaman (a profession that not only was well-paid but allowed access to the outside world), had a luxurious ZX Spectrum with a built-in tape recorder, and even some original tapes — a true rarity. One of them was <span class="gametitle">Seabase Delta</span>, a text adventure with graphics and great cover art. I was completely spellbound by it — a very good, atmospheric game but also simple enough to be playable using my (very) basic English. By "playable", I mean managing to move around a few initial locations and lo! even solving some puzzles — something I was immensely proud of, since it was all pretty much terra incognita, both the medium and language.
</p>
<p>
Eventually I got stuck, of course — the age old problem with adventure games. In my case, getting stuck was for good — there was no helpline to call, no mag to write to, no friend who could help. Game over.
</p>
<p>
It was quite tough, and discouraging. The allure of ASCII worlds proved greater than that, though, and I continued playing every interactive fiction title I could find. In some of these I didn’t manage to progress further than the first room due to obscure parsers or complex language used. For example, here’s an unforgettable (for me) quote from <span class="gametitle">Urban Upstart</span> describing the town of Scarthorpe where the action takes place: "Scarthorpe is the sort of town where even the dogs carry flick knives! Where there's a only one road in, and that's a one-way street! The sort of town where rebuilding means a new coat of paint, and where people queue up to queue up for a job!" Most of the humour here was lost on me, but in particular that "queue up to queue up" phrase caused me immense headache — for some reason I couldn’t find "queue" in a dictionary and started believing it was all a mistake or invented English.
</p>
<p>
I ploughed on, though, and sometimes it paid off. My English slowly improved and, as it is with puzzles, some solutions and ideas would come to me later on, after my subconscious mind was allowed to work on them in peace. One day I reread the aforementioned <span class="publicationtitle">Your Sinclairs</span> borrowed from my pal and, amazingly, found the answer to the <span class="gametitle">Seabase Delta</span> riddle that I was stumped on. It involved making a pancake to throw at a security camera, and while I hated the fact that I had to rely on a hint, I had to admit I’d never have figured it out myself.
</p>
<p>
The one and only game I managed to finish completely on my own was <span class="gametitle">Valkyrie 17</span>. It was an amazing game, some sort of espionage mystery that I don’t remember much about, apart from being presented in a true noir fashion and having quite logical puzzles.
</p>
<p>
Eventually I found <span class="gametitle">The Hobbit</span>, the original Holy Grail that started my obsession. Despite the passage of time and impossible expectations, I still loved it, even though I didn’t manage to get very far in the game itself. It wasn’t a straightforward romp like <span class="gametitle">Seabase Delta</span> but more complex fare, involving the passage of time, NPCs, and so on. These more nuanced adventures — <span class="gametitle">The Lord of the Rings</span>, which I had on the same tape, was another example — were still too much for me. Most of the stuff that would come naturally to a native speaker with more understanding of the genre was lost on me, and I was still mostly stumbling in the dark, though having heaps of fun nonetheless. Evenings spent learning English through text-adventure location descriptions and occasionally solving a puzzle were an unforgettable experience, and though I was into all sorts of video games, these were the most cherished.
</p>
<p>
Parsers were a biggest challenge for me, and since I didn’t quite know how they worked, I started building my own private text-adventure dictionary — by scanning a proper one and picking up verbs which I thought might be used by game designers. Later on I would try them in-game, brute-force style. It was a rather tedious process which yielded few results, and I think I gave up somewhere around the letter C — still, wish I had kept that notebook, saved as a token from that strange, surreal era.
</p>
<p>
Eventually I started slowly drifting away from interactive fiction; the times were changing in my little world, and in the big one too. I "grew up", which meant I wasn’t afraid to go into arcades alone any more, started noticing — and being noticed by — that strange, opposite sex, experienced hangovers, and all the other trappings of being a young adult. The Iron Curtain had just collapsed, and so did the communist governments in Russia and all our neighbouring states, replaced mostly by chaos and uncertainty. The Greyness was slowly banished by the loud and brash Nineties and all the grand things they had to offer.
</p>
<p>
I still played video games every day, but now on an Amiga, and with all its bells and whistles it was much easier to abandon the old text/parser territory. There were some of the grandest text adventures available on this platform — modern titles from Magnetic Scrolls and their compatriots, titles that I read about and was awed by — but without feelies and clues these proved only frustrating.
</p>
<p>
After the 3D appeared firmly on the scene with the arrival of <span class="gametitle">Wolfenstein</span> — accompanied by some epic CRPGs like the Gold Box games and the <span class="gametitle">Fallout</span> series on the other flank — I abandoned the text world completely. I remembered it very fondly over the next two decades, but the few times I came back — playing the excellent <span class="gametitle">Anchorage</span> or <span class="gametitle">Lurking Horror</span>, for example — were short-lived. The dazzling world of AAA games took over.
</p>
<p>
The fact that text gaming largely dropped off the radar over the years didn’t help, either. It happened to quite a few of the popular genres from the Golden Era — flight sims, point-and-click adventures, turn-based RPGs and such — but these never vanished as completely as interactive fiction did, and now are enjoying a revival of sorts. Sure, there were always things going on underground — <a href="http://www.ifcomp.org/">IFComp</a> and the <a href="http://ifarchive.org/">ifarchive.org</a> crews keeping the flame alight — but in the commercial world, text adventures ceased to exist.
</p>
<p>
This sad fact makes me realize even more how lucky I was to get infected with the ASCII virus back then, in this now-forgotten realm of communist utopia. It also seems that its lodgement in my neurons was much more resilient than I initially thought — even the glittering world of AAA polygons didn’t eradicate it completely. Over the last few years, dismayed by the state of modern gaming — casualization &amp; monetization being the worst offending factors — I started to gravitate slowly towards serious retro gaming again. That, combined with my gradual conversion to the roguelike mindset and its ASCII aesthetic leads me to an inevitable conclusion: it’s time to complete the circle and delve into the text adventure world again.
</p>
<p>
I felt my brain buzz with emotions, just like back in the day, when I recently started up <span class="gametitle">Border Zone</span> — the fact that its tagline reads "Action and international intrigue behind the Iron Curtain" surely a coincidence? I felt it again, a few months ago, when playing <span class="gametitle">Knight Orc</span> on my phone while traveling on a local train — a train in a country that’s being claimed as a part of this planet’s last communist superpower — but that must be another coincidence.
</p>
<p>
This time, though, I’m better prepared for the challenge ahead, with all the feelies, clues, covers and mags now just a click away. Hopefully there won’t be a need for a self-written dictionary, either. I feel dazzled and incredibly excited by the myriad games available, text adventures I never played yet and which surely will last me at least until another era, whatever that era might be. I’m quite certain that this excitement can’t be easily dismissed just as a severe case of that much maligned middle-aged gamer’s affliction known as “nostalgia”. While there’s surely an element of that, it is different, and I know that the real joy stems from the brilliance of the gameplay itself — the writing, the mood, the puzzles and the process itself. When it’s just you, a few lines of text, a blinking cursor and infinite possibilities, the imagination takes over and nothing can match or challenge that device.
</p>
<p>
I only have one regret — that I would love for others, especially the new generation, to experience the wonders of text adventuring, yet I’m not sure this could be possible in our day and age. The indie scene is booming, and the "retro" style is extremely fashionable, but this fashion doesn’t seem to extend to our forgotten ASCII worlds. How to entice modern gamers, who demand graphical tiles even in very trendy roguelike games and have countless distractions permeating their immediate world, into engaging with this medium is perhaps material for another article or discussion. Here’s hoping, though, that some at least will find their way into these text-based worlds of imagination and manage to get lost in them as much as I did in the days of Greyness.
</p>
{% endblock %}
{% block article_bio_content %}
Akeley (Tomasz Gruca) is currently slaving away as a bicycle courier, hoping to complete his transition into a wuxia swordsman sometime next year. More of his video game adventures can be found on <a class="publicationtitle" href="http://arkhammanor.com">arkhammanor.com</a>.
{% endblock %}

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{% extends "issue/article/index.html" %}
{% block page_title %}
How integral are letters and text to ASCII gaming?
{% endblock %}
{% block article_authors %}Mark R. Johnson{% endblock %}
{% block article_date %}25th May 2015{% endblock %}
{% block article_content %}
<p>
<span>Text, and the letters</span>
<span> which constitute text, are essential to roguelikes. Although their </span>
<span class="c3">roguelikelike</span>
<span>, </span>
<span class="c3">roguelite</span>
<span> and </span>
<span class="c3">procedural death labyrinth</span>
<span> brethren have, in recent years, espoused a non-ASCII philosophy and gone the (for some people, blasphemous) route of developing non-textual graphics in a roguelike, all the classics were originally created using an ASCII-only console display, and many players argue in favour of continuing to play them in this mode, even after the advent of a range of tilesets. This piece is an exploration of some of the functions textual characters and text more generally serve in the genre </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> beyond the obvious function of aesthetic nostalgia and visually defining a “classic roguelike” </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> as well as an examination of some of the more cryptic and obscure uses of that same text, and the way I’m attempting in my own game (</span>
<span class="c0">
<a class="c10" href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ultimaratioregum.co.uk%2F&amp;sa=D&amp;sntz=1&amp;usg=AFQjCNG5ueFN2PHitNBo8Hd-_HiBbUf8sw">Ultima Ratio Regum</a>
</span>
<span>) to move the roguelike preference for text into interesting new directions.</span>
</p>
<h3>Glyphs as representation</h3>
<p>
<span>One of the most important function text and letters serve in roguelikes is to identify the differences and the class relationships between monsters. In ASCII-mode classic roguelikes we find that all monsters are typically depicted with the letters a-z or A-Z, sometimes the numbers 0-9, and sometimes a number of other additional characters (most often </span>
<span class="c2">:</span>
<span>, </span>
<span class="c2">;</span>
<span> and </span>
<span class="c2">&amp;</span>
<span>). As I’ve talked about in a forthcoming paper for </span>
<span class="c3">Games and Culture</span>
<span>, the nature of roguelike semiotics and the translation of roguelike semantic codes is a surprisingly complex process, but suffice to say that these letters </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> or “glyphs”, as we tend to call them </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> are used to display everything the player needs to make sense of in the in-game map. They are not, in this regard, used as letters, but rather as abstract signifiers of various monsters or items, which in almost all cases (the use of </span>
<span class="c2">s</span>
<span> for snakes in many games being a rare exception) bear no visual similarity to that which they depict. Comparably, in Lisa Gotto’s (2014) exploration of the game </span>
<span class="c3">Type Rider</span>
<span>, she notes that in that game the original meaning of each letter is separated from the design of the letter: they function only as abstract shapes, stripped of any associated semantic meaning. Although roguelikes do attempt to link the letter to the class being represented </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> </span>
<span class="c2">h</span>
<span> for humanoids, </span>
<span class="c2">a</span>
<span> for ants, </span>
<span class="c2">W</span>
<span> for wraiths and other wraith-like monsters, and so on </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> the precise connections in each game are challenging to divine for a new player. Choosing which letter to use to represent which class results in a range of different categorical ontologies (again, see my </span>
<span class="c3">Games and Culture</span>
<span> piece) with few clues ever given to the player about which letter adheres to which logic until these have been learned by rote. Making sense of what glyph represents what monster is crucial </span>
<span class="c7">— </span>
<span>few if any visual cues are offered, but this remains a central and essential function of letters in roguelikes.</span>
</p>
<p class="c9 c13">
<span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 568.00px; height: 320.00px;">
<img alt="http://a4.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple4/v4/e3/50/86/e3508644-9fbd-feed-eb6f-2067f661df59/screen568x568.jpeg" src="images/image00.jpg" style="width: 568.00px; height: 320.00px; margin-left: -0.00px; margin-top: -0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""/>
</span>
</p>
<h1 class="c6 c5">
<a name="h.h985xgwoo8pt"/>
<span>Text as agential information</span>
</h1>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>The second use of ASCII, where we see “text” come to the fore instead of “glyphs”, is in the message log. This is a list of recent happenings in the game (generally since the player’s last turn) where information which cannot be readily displayed in a glyph-based interface is listed for the player’s perusal. This includes information about which monsters moved last turn, who they attacked, who was killed, any magical spells launched, weapons thrown, weapons picked up or dropped, new enemies who strayed into the player’s sight, messages from the player’s deity, and many other pieces of non-visual information not easily depicted for the player using an interface which can only display a foreground colour and a character (or, in some rare and particularly daring cases, those and a variable background colour). Message logs are designed to be extremely clear, but in some cases a player will encounter messages whose meaning is not immediately apparent. Examples might be the “level feeling” messages a player gets upon entering a new floor in </span>
<span class="c3">Angband</span>
<span>, designed to give the player some idea of what awaits them on that floor, or some of the “You feel” messages in </span>
<span class="c3">NetHack</span>
<span>. These range from the fairly clear </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> “You feel wide awake!” means that to you have acquired sleep resistance </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> to the less obvious </span>
<span class="c7">— </span>
<span>“You feel in control of yourself” for the acquisition of “teleport control” </span>
<span class="c7">— to</span>
<span> the rather difficult to decipher </span>
<span class="c7">— </span>
<span>“You feel more claustrophobic than before”, which indicates that a damaged wall in a shop has been repaired whilst the player is standing within that same shop, </span>
<span class="c3">but</span>
<span> didn’t see it actually happen. In these slightly stranger messages, we begin to see another purpose to which text has been put: as a form of puzzle, or something approaching one.</span>
</p>
<p>
<span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 601.73px; height: 361.71px;">
<img alt=" photo 24cleanoutminetown.png" src="images/image02.png" style="width: 601.73px; height: 361.71px; margin-left: -0.00px; margin-top: -0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""/>
</span>
</p>
<h1 class="c6 c5">
<a name="h.n9vuq5encec9"/>
<span>Cryptic Roguelike Messages</span>
</h1>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>Taking this idea of cryptic messages even further, some roguelikes have used text to offer clues, hints or puzzles to the player, without generally explicitly stating them as such, and relying on the player’s intuition and understanding of how roguelike designers think to get them through safely. </span>
<span class="c3">ADOM</span>
<span>, for example, contains a massive range of possible statues the player can encounter. These all have a unique description, and the majority also contain a written inscription which, along with the description of the statue’s (often unusual) appearance, forms the second part of an implicit riddle. Take, for example, this statue description from </span>
<span class="c3">ADOM</span>
<span>:</span>
</p>
<p class="c4">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c9 c14">
<span>“This is the statue of a tall human magician, clothed in a long tunic. A decided expression is on his face, and a beautifully-sculpted flame raises from his extended hand.”</span>
</p>
<p class="c4">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>The statue bears the inscription </span>
<span>“Ubun, the fire elementalist. Igne nature renovatur integra”</span>
<span>, which translates from Latin approximately to “nature is renewed by fire”. Similarly, consider another statue, described thus:</span>
</p>
<p class="c4">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c9 c14">
<span> “It resembles a huge egg, hewn from polished granite.”</span>
</p>
<p class="c4">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>Its inscription reads “Only a fool would try to break me”. If one prays at the base of the first statue, a fireball is generated upon the player; if one kicks the second statue, the player receives a small amount of damage whilst the statue remains intact. In both of these cases, the descriptions of the statues are obviously intended to offer a minor puzzle to the player, and encourage them to think about what might happen when that statue is interacted with.</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>A trickier statue to decipher is this:</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c9 c14">
<span>“</span>
<span>Delicately carved from granite and smoothly polished, a young, lithe woman lies prostrate on an ornate settee. She is clothed in thin, revealing attire, with one hand resting wearily against her forehead, and the other reaching languidly outwards. Her posture suggests great personal despair.”</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>Its inscription is “...and 'lo that wench, upon this bench, her fate was sealed in stone”. The information about the statue and the attendant inscription suggest that nothing good is likely to happen upon interacting with this statue, but no obvious clues are given as to what fate might befall the player; in any roguelike there are quite a few reasons why a character might be in such a sorry state. As it turns out, if you step on the statue, your player character becomes deafened by a howling screech, meaning that you can no longer hear the words of others, nor interact with them yourself (since you “don’t know sign language”, as the game somewhat sardonically notes). There is, however, a clue here </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> and a benefit to being deaf </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> but a far more obscure clue than the other two. On a late dungeon level the player will encounter a unique monster, the Banshee, who will instantly kill an unprepared player with an unearthly wail. Upon entering the floor containing this monster, a message about “sorrow and death” (as the </span>
<span class="c3">ADOM </span>
<span>wiki page puts it) will be printed; similarly, the Banshee’s mythology emphasizes (or at least implies) the death of a husband, and recurring themes of despair and tragedy. It does not seem like such a leap to suggest that this statue depicts the Banshee, before her death and transformation into a ghost but after the death of her husband. With that said: this is a tenuous connection (even though stepping onto it aids one against the Banshee!) and requires the player to have encountered, or at least heard about, the Banshee to make sense of it, followed by a logical leap.</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 601.73px; height: 352.68px;">
<img alt="http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2015/05/Bansh.png" src="images/image01.png" style="width: 601.73px; height: 352.68px; margin-left: -0.00px; margin-top: -0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""/>
</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>We can therefore see that whilst the first two examples are pretty clear </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> assaulting a statue of a fire elementalist seems unlikely to result in the player being doused with cool, refreshing water (unless that kind of reversal had been set up elsewhere!), whilst an egg statue seems to be almost begging to be broken </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> the Banshee statue is far more cryptic, and I would be surprised if many players were able to decipher it before interacting with it (although perhaps there is an </span>
<span class="c3">ADOM </span>
<span>“way of thinking” which can be cultivated by experienced players?). Nevertheless, it sets the groundwork for an interesting use of text </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> albeit fixed text where a player who knows what Statue X does on one playthrough will also know what Statue X does on the next playthrough </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> and it is this use I’d like to explore a little more. We’ve seen that glyphs are used to display monsters and the interrelationships between them, while full textual sentences are used to both further flesh out an ASCII world, and in some cases offer minor puzzles and riddles for the player to ponder over. All well and good </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> but what else could be done with text? At this point we drift into my own work, and future intentions, for my game </span>
<span class="c3">Ultima Ratio Regum</span>
<span>.</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c6 c5">
<a name="h.2h8dd1vwxjx2"/>
<span>Text as integral gameplay</span>
</h1>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span class="c11"/>
</p>
<p>
<span>Anyone who has been following </span>
<span class="c3">Ultima Ratio Regum</span>
<span> a little while will remember a short lived version, 0.3 I believe (0.4 also?), where the player could explore ziggurats within which lay procedurally-generated puzzles. These were puzzles where the player was offered a range of blocks each bearing a design of some sort </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> a sun, a moon, a spider, a tree (with four possible seasons), a piranha, a jaguar, various other animals and physical objects </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> and the game offered a number of slots into which these blocks could be fitted, along with cryptic messages like “the spinner lurks to the east of the new growth” (which means that the block depicting a spider should be placed to the right of a block depicting a tree in blossom) or “the lifegiver rises north of the silent stalker” (sun above a jaguar). The game was able to generate an immense number of such puzzles (ranging from simple 2x2 grids of blocks needed for the solution up to 4x4 grids) and simultaneously work out the absolute minimum number of clues required for the puzzle to be solvable, therefore making each puzzle as challenging as it could be while ensuring it could be completed. Back then, the goals of the game were somewhat nebulous and unformed, and these ziggurat puzzles have since been removed (though they may return?), and are now best understood as a</span>
<span> kind of proof of concept for the quest</span>
<span>ion “can I get the game to generate its own </span>
<span class="c3">textual </span>
<span>riddles and puzzles, albeit in a very small and contained environment?” In this case, of course, as soon as the player understands how the puzzle is solved once, it can be solved that way every time, even if the clues, locations and “layers” of clues may increase, and therefore in some sense the true “puzzle” is only there once, until the player understands how they are expected to make sense of the clue, and subsequently manoeuvre the component blocks. It was an interesting experiment, and received very positive feedback, but ultimately only pointed the way towards scaling this type of system up to the entire game, which is what I now aim to do.</span>
</p>
<p class="c9 c13">
<span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 461.00px; height: 445.00px;">
<img alt="http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2013/08/Bpssrooms.png" src="images/image04.png" style="width: 461.00px; height: 445.00px; margin-left: -0.00px; margin-top: -0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""/>
</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>The intention is to have the game generate a range of different forms of text. For example, as it stands now, the world contains a vast history, but this is crucially a history put into </span>
<span class="c3">narrative </span>
<span>rather than simply presented as “fact” a la </span>
<span class="c3">Dwarf Fortress</span>
<span> </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> different nations will produce competing histories, and histories must be uncovered, and will continue to resonate in the world the player explores. Settlements and individuals are replete with </span>
<span class="c3">informative </span>
<span>nicknames that speak to their history, ideologies, or achievements, without simply resorting to piecing together two random words; procedural books will generate telling of historical events, or narratives which give the player hints (so a novel about a certain city’s jail might give the player some subtle information about that jail, which may prove useful); procedural poetry will speak to important figures from the world’s past and present; the conversations one has with NPCs should yield useful data about their nations, cultures, religions, social norms and biases, and the like, without ever being too obvious about it. I should note I in no way mean the comment earlier in this paragraph to disparage </span>
<span class="c3">Dwarf Fortress</span>
<span>, glorious masterwork that it is, but rather to emphasise my interest here in semantic procedural generation where </span>
<span class="c3">the player can divine deeper meaning</span>
<span> from everything they read, rather than a procedurally-generated world where meaning and ideology are not the focus of the game’s design (since obviously </span>
<span class="c3">DF</span>
<span> has a thousand other design goals which </span>
<span class="c3">URR</span>
<span> does not). Equally, by making this all procedurally-generated, the player should never be able to learn that Inscription X is guaranteed to refer to Secret Y </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> this should be unique each time (though the player can of course learn the meta-rules which govern this type of interaction, which is an important part of roguelike mastery). A core part of this is the development of what I am loosely calling a “semantic converter” </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> still in development (but coming along nicely) at time of writing, this is a section of code which needs to be able to take any piece of </span>
<span class="c3">data</span>
<span>, and transform it into any possible type of </span>
<span class="c3">clue</span>
<span>. What I mean by this is the game must be able to input a date, a time, a person’s nickname, the design on a vase, the colour of brick in a particular civilization, the name of a painting, a historical battle, or anything else, and then </span>
<span class="c3">convert</span>
<span> it, regardless of what it is, into a piece of poetry, a novel, something an NPC might say to you, a painting, a symbol or a sign, a holy book, a shop sign, or anything else which hints the player towards the underlying meaning and origin of what they read.</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>This, suffice to say, is no easy task.</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c5 c9">
<span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 601.00px; height: 394.00px;">
<img alt="" src="images/image03.png" style="width: 601.00px; height: 394.00px; margin-left: -0.00px; margin-top: -0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""/>
</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>However, despite how fantastic this all sounds (at least, I think it does!), one obvious issue arises: roguelikes are (normally) famed for their gameplay and the attendant </span>
<span class="c3">lack</span>
<span> of narrative, storytelling, thematic elements, etc. Narrative and storytelling generally means text, and have roguelike players not perhaps come to expect games which are comparatively devoid of text which is</span>
<span> not immediately essential? </span>
<span>By this I mean that all roguelike players of course acknowledge the importance of a detailed and comprehensive message log (for there is nothing more painful than the feeling of an “unfair” demise in a permadeath game) but is anything beyond that seen as something more suited to other genres?</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>This is a complex question, and beyond the scope of this piece to unpick, but I’d like to offer some brief concluding thoughts which suggest the answer is that this kind of dense textual content I’m proposing for </span>
<span class="c3">Ultima Ratio Regum</span>
<span> will certainly be alien and novel, but not disliked or against the rationale of prior classic roguelike design. Firstly, we can look to </span>
<span class="c3">Tales of Maj’Eyal</span>
<span>, currently one of the most well-played “classic” roguelikes out there. </span>
<span class="c3">TOME</span>
<span> contains a large volume of plot information. Most of the in-game quests are story arcs in their own right or tell their own stories, and there are many tens of thousands of words of lore information for the dedicated player to read. However, the obvious objection arises: this is optional content! One does not have to read it, let alone understand it, if the player endeavour to success in the continent of Maj’Eyal. I propose making this deciphering of, and interaction with, a game’s narrative elements an essential part of the game’s success: it should be impossible to complete unless the player understands deeply the procedurally-generated world they find themselves within. The gameplay </span>
<span class="c3">is</span>
<span> understanding the lore.</span>
</p>
<p class="c4 c5">
<span/>
</p>
<p>
<span>Secondly, </span>
<span class="c3">Ultima Ratio Regum</span>
<span> is designed as a game where combat will be extremely rare. Various roguelike players and designers have noted that a player basically massacres the entire population of the dungeon on a given playthrough, and an average playthrough in most classic roguelikes will result in a death count in the thousands. By contrast, I imagine no more than a dozen combat situations in the average successful playthrough (and obviously far fewer in an unsuccessful playthrough), where combat is something rare and significant, rather than something which is primarily a grind before then offering a rare challenging fight (so, in effect, I have removed all popcorn enemies). What therefore takes the place of combat? </span>
<span class="c3">Decipherment!</span>
<span> Investigation, exploration, examination, deduction. Is that really so distinct from what roguelikes ask of us already, even if we don’t tend to conceptualize this as a core gameplay mechanic? What I’m proposing here is undoubtedly a new kind of “riddle”/“investigation”-based gameplay, but is it that different to other roguelikes and their use of text? We are used to scrutinising every message log and decoding every glyph, and I’d suggest that </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> although taking this point to its logical extreme </span>
<span class="c7">—</span>
<span> what I’m building in </span>
<span class="c3">Ultima Ratio Regum</span>
<span> is a continuation of this venerable tradition, not a shift towards the quagmire of story and exposition that we seem to think the quotidian roguelike player is so terribly fearful of.</span>
</p>
{% endblock %}
{% block article_bio_content %}
Mark R. Johnson is the creator of <a class="gametitle" href="http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk">Ultima Ratio Regum</a>.
{% endblock %}
{% block article_references_content %}
{{ super() }}
<ol start="1">
<li>Gotto, L. (2014). “Types and Bytes. Ludic Seriality and Digital Typography.” In <span class="publicationtitle">Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture</span>, 8:1, 115-128. Retrieved from <a class="publicationtitle" href="http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewArticle/vol8no1-8/8-1-8-html">http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewArticle/vol8no1-8/8-1-8-html"</a></li>
</ol>
{% endblock %}

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{% extends "issue/other/index.html" %}
{% block page_title %}Introduction{% endblock %}
{% block other_content %}
<p>
What a pleasant surprise this must be for you? An issue of Imaginary Realities unexpectedly appearing wherever it was you were looking for whatever else it was you were wanting. But instead you got another issue, bonus! I only wish we had more articles for you, not just the two great ones we do have. But that's merely an opportunity for you to step up and write one for us.
</p>
<p>
If you're interested in writing an article on text-based gaming, please <a href="request-for-content/index.html">get in touch</a>. Most offers to write articles come from people who suggest ideas they could write about, and I say "They all sound great! Write any of them and send it in! Write two!" Okay, I don't say "Write two!" But you could, if you really wanted to.
</p>
<p>
Anyway, enjoy the articles!
</p>
<p class="authorbio">Richard Tew</p>
{% endblock %}

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<html>
<head>
<title>Hugo Zombiestalker - Legend and the lore</title>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type"/>
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</head>
<body class="c12">
<p class="c1 c3 title">
<a name="h.axfz49v103ph"/>
<span>Legend and the lore</span>
</p>
<p class="c5">
<span>by Hugo Zombiestalker, 3rd May 2015</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>I'm convinced that point-and-click games are a thing of the past. For a long time I held out hope that they weren't an out of date design, that the world simply favoured action oriented games. But with the string of faithfully recreated point-and-click adventures, such as </span>
<span class="c2">The Whispered World</span>
<span>, </span>
<span class="c2">Broken Age</span>
<span> and </span>
<span class="c2">Dead Synchronicity</span>
<span>, I've come to the conclusion that the glory days of adventure games are long gone, and rightfully so.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>There remains something about this genre that intrigues me, though, something that steps outside the realm of merely being a genre from the past. There are a handful of classic adventures that can still hold my attention, but outside of their themes and beautiful artwork (</span>
<span class="c2">Escape from Monkey Island, Grim Fandango</span>
<span>) I think it’s because I know all their puzzles and I can jump straight into the world and narrative. I will speak about this a bit more below.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Historically, adventure games probably followed the puzzle narrative because no one else had thought of a better reason to advance the story. Game development has opened many doors since then, and many adventure game developers have gone in only two directions: give up entirely, or plow ahead with the same archaic game design. I’m not an open critic of archaic ideologies (quite the opposite), but if the knowledge base around the mechanics of a thing, such as the adventure game, progresses over time, then naturally that thing should, if its nature allows it, progress to a better state.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>The point-and-click adventure game is dead, and I’ve seen now that it cannot be recreated in its original format without appealing to the early crowd; moreover, point-and-click games are dusty and creaky, and the greats today are merely mimicking a style that was dusty back then, too, we just couldn’t see it. I don’t pretend to know the direction this genre should take, only that to have a future as something more than a retro niche, it needs to adapt alternative advancement within its undoubtedly fascinating framework.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>This article talks about what interests me about adventure games and how they have inspired my creative writing and online game development, and how new MUD mechanics have arisen from this.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>So what is it about point-and-click adventures that attract me, and why is it relevant to modern game design? Let's take a look at a small list of elements I think are important to these types of games: story, atmosphere, and dialogue.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span class="c7"/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>You may wonder why I haven't included “puzzles” on that list. The truth is, that's a debatable question. I'm sure there are hardcore fans out there that flock to adventure games for their puzzles, or that they are advertised for their puzzles, but in fact I've never really been attracted to them </span>
<span class="c2">because</span>
<span> of the puzzles. They are a by-product, simply an obstacle in order to advance the story, as noted above. If you want true puzzles, then there is an entire game genre dedicated to that, so I think puzzles in adventure games aren't a true drawing point, and that they existed and continue to exist purely as a way to move the game along.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Growing up, I was a point-and-click kid. I wasn't much interested in anything other than simulation games and adventure games. When I played adventure games, I constantly had the walkthrough by my side. This thought process stayed with me as an </span>
<span class="c2">Epitaph </span>
<span>developer. I'm not a fan of throwing huge amounts of text in the players’ faces and expecting them to read it. Games like </span>
<span class="c2">Dragon Age: Origins</span>
<span> and </span>
<span class="c2">Pillars of Eternity</span>
<span> are notorious for this, and I think it's a distraction, maybe even lazy writing (the dialogue succeeds at being voluminous while failing at being interesting). That's where game mechanics come in, and why it's important to slowly trickle information to the player through a variety of means.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>What part of MUD design uses the old point-and-click formula? Well, the quest system for one. The quest system is a form of this game design. There are some who view quests as the “puzzle” system of the game, and while I don't disagree with this, for me it is a continuation of the classic adventure. I'm not puzzle-minded. In fact, I'm terrible with puzzles, for both designing and solving. When I make quests I try to focus on what I believe is important: the story. There are varying thoughts on how best tell a story, but in games it's nearly always important to tell them through meaningful activities, similar to how the Communicative Approach in ESL teaching handles the learning of English. Below I will outline what I believe is important to quest design. Before continuing, think about what you consider is important, and see if my list matches yours.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.w5xrkgpqp4jw"/>
<span>Story</span>
</h1>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Story is arguably the most important part of the quest. Even the most heavily puzzle-oriented quest, where one may not even think the story is important, has a story. It can be as simple as flicking a switch on a breaker (because you want to try and restore electricity to a survivor stronghold) or as complex as sending a message using bells in a church. Both of these quests utilize a story, a motivation, an objective, no matter how easy or complicated, and yet the quest puzzles are miles apart </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> the first hardly even being considered a puzzle.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.9ue84atpgplt"/>
<span>Atmosphere</span>
</h1>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Atmosphere should never be a conscious thing. It’s a difficult thing to create and I believe it takes a certain amount of skill. The player should never be thinking about this; it should simply enter the subconscious and elicit an emotional response. Classic horror used atmosphere to drive the plot. If you've ever read Algernon Blackwood, you would know that his stories are all about the atmosphere. This is an underestimated point in quest design and one that should never be omitted. I will provide an example, by Mr. Blackwood himself, from </span>
<span class="c2">The Willows, Algernon Blackwood:</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span class="c2"/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c10">
<span>“The melancholy shrill cry of a night-bird sounded overhead, and suddenly I nearly lost my balance as the piece of bank I stood upon fell with a great splash into the river, undermined by the flood. I stepped back just in time, and went on hunting for firewood again, half laughing at the odd fancies that crowded so thickly into my mind and cast their spell upon me. I recalled the Swede's remark about moving on next day, and I was just thinking that I fully agreed with him, when I turned with a start and saw the subject of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me. He was quite close. The roar of the elements had covered his approach.”</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span class="c2"/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Here’s another one from Mr. Blackwood, from a John Silence novel called </span>
<span class="c2">Ancient Sorceries:</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span class="c2"/>
</p>
<p class="c5 c10">
<span>“As once before, he saw her tall and stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of clothing.”</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span class="c2"/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Powerful. His tension is presented to us through the environment, and the actual horror is conjured by our own minds. This is the best approach for purposes of atmosphere.</span>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.5y2w0ebva52m"/>
<span>Dialogue</span>
</h1>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Dialogue is not nearly as important for MUD quests as it is in adventure games, but if you've got a quest where there's dialogue, it needs to be impactful. I think mild humour is important even in the most serious environment. Don't let dialogue slide, and don't think you should remove humour simply because your story is dark and gritty. Humour is natural, and it helps bring players into your world. It's sort of the masseuse your mind needs in order to get through the really hard stuff. The reverse is also true. I read a book on how to write humour, and a key feature was about presenting serious situations and letting ridiculous things happen. The film </span>
<span class="c2">Death at a Funeral </span>
<span>(UK) is a great example; it's a black comedy, but the same idea applies. The serious situation: the funeral. The humour: pretty much everything that is said. Here’s an excerpt from the video game </span>
<span class="c2">Grim Fandango</span>
<span> that mixes comedy with the macabre:</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c5 c10">
<span>Hector LeMans</span>
<span>: Oh Manny... so cynical... What happened to you, Manny, that caused you to lose your sense of hope, your love of life?</span>
</p>
<p class="c5 c9">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c5 c10">
<span>Manuel Calavera</span>
<span>: I died.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0 c11">
<span class="c6"/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.qicfbdm75uvn"/>
<span>Puzzles</span>
</h1>
<p class="c0">
<span class="c7"/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>It's important to be clear what I mean about a “puzzle”. A puzzle is simply the obstacle you need to overcome to complete the quest. Everything is going to be a puzzle, more or less. But my quest philosophy takes in the three points above </span>
<span class="c2">first. </span>
<span>Once I have a story, atmosphere, and if needed, dialogue, then the puzzles are laid out. My puzzles have included things as simple as finding an object in a room, ranged from there to mildly complex tasks like finding the correct name of a guest at a hotel in the registry book in the lobby. I think quests can definitely follow the old pattern of simply exploring and finding and discovering, if the above points are all done well.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.c2mtyumk9281"/>
<span>Natural progress and the Z-Files</span>
</h1>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>While designing quests on </span>
<span class="c2">Epitaph</span>
<span>, and writing lore, and working with the various factions and world-building and characterizations, I came to the conclusion that a new system needed to be installed, one that bridged the gap between “achievements” and “quests”. I don't always think a good story means you should make a quest out of it, but you still need interaction in order to make it meaningful. What I needed was a way to make story elements important and rewarding, but easier to create than a full-blown quest. Thus, the codex system was born.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>The codex system on </span>
<span class="c2">Epitaph </span>
<span>is a way to present our lore to the players in a rewarding way. It's important to keep the game interesting through dynamic mechanics. Being an apocalyptic survival horror game, there is ample room for survivor tales, background information of places and buildings, and other story interests. I wanted a way to make players feel that the lore was important, that it wasn't just there or not there. I wanted to bring lore and story back to the forefront, and it's not as simple as saying “this place has a lot of story: people </span>
<span class="c2">died</span>
<span> here!” Who cares? But what if we let players build the pieces together themselves, from finding old items, diary pages, even biological substances that can be researched? How about putting in some emotional value to the story, so that while the story is said and done, it can be presented through dedication by the player?</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Part of this inspiration came from old horror novels where characters believed items contained emotion from those who owned them. Some of the codex system is about items in the game world retaining a memory of what happened to the place where they existed or who had possession of them. Also, the game </span>
<span class="c2">Murdered: Soul Suspect </span>
<span>has a vague mechanic called “</span>
<span>Ghost Stories”</span>
<span> that is similar in function to our codex system; however, I feel their system could have been much bigger than it really was. I’m not usually a collector in games, but I completed nearly all the collection achievements in that game (including all the Ghost Stories) just because of a few of the points I talked about above </span>
<span class="c4">— </span>
<span>atmosphere and setting being a big plus. So in some ways the codex system is a continuation of a simple yet interesting system used in said game. (Incidentally, </span>
<span class="c2">Murdered: Soul Suspect </span>
<span>is overpriced but underrated. If you can pick it up for</span>
<span class="c4"> </span>
<span>less than </span>
<span class="c15">€</span>
<span>10</span>
<span class="c4">, </span>
<span>grab it and play it. It’s very interesting. Just don’t expect combat.)</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.xsik6eglnhvy"/>
<span>How does it work?</span>
</h1>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>The codex system is quite simple mechanically. There are X amount of entries per “collection”. When you discover and unlock all the entries of a collection, you gain rewards that can include faction reputation, titles, experience points, and so on. Each entry the story</span>
<span>)</span>
<span> varies in length, so if a story contains four stages, you must unlock that entry four times to get the complete story. You find and loot items from around the game world (usually in the location stated in the entries’ category) and use these items to unlock the narrative. Let's take a look at the entry </span>
<span class="c2">The Foul Within [3/3].</span>
<span> As you can see, it has three stages. The material below is from the first stage, and it tells us what is required to unlock the next part:</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c5">
<span class="c7">Entry:</span>
<span> The Foul Within</span>
</p>
<p class="c5">
<span class="c7">Text:</span>
<span> It always starts off bad and turns worse. Some could say my case started worse and turned bad. Who can tell? We've all lived and lost in this crazy thing we call the apocalypse, but one thing we can all agree on is this: some lose more than they deserve, and others live more than should. When I looked at the remains of my three year old daughter, I knew then that life was never the way I had imagined it, and that for all my years I had been living behind an illusion illuminated by spotlights and shadows on the walls projected by invisible creatures none of us would ever like to see.</span>
</p>
<p class="c5">
<span class="c7">Next unlock:</span>
<span> 1x sleeping pill with a quality of misc, 1x faded photograph and 2x diary entry with a quality of misc.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span class="c7"/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Each unlock reveals the next part of the story until all the story has been revealed. The collection categories are quite varied, and at the moment contains categories from the main game areas (Dunglen, Braellen, Silent Hollow), but also from our factions, as well as some general categories. I hope to use this system for talking about background stories of world bosses, and as the main platform to advance faction-based stories that may be critical to the game as a whole. At the moment it's still in the early stages and will release with only a select few collections, but it will be something that certainly will be expanded in following patches.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.yyzl5fnvtlj2"/>
<span>Conclusion</span>
</h1>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>My hope is that every new game area added will contain a few of these codex stories, which currently range from poems to flash fiction, and hopefully one day will include short story serials. I'm not intending to replace background storytelling (for example, stumbling upon a cassette tape from some mad scientist); it's merely to give focus to certain stories that lie around the game, to build a bigger picture through actual game activity.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>At the time of writing, the codex system has not yet been released to </span>
<span class="c2">Epitaph</span>
<span>, but I hope that it is received well, and that players will get to understand the world they're playing in, and see that it's not simply kill this, die to that, that there are other lives involved, lives that have perished, just like your own will one day. Mechanically, we’re talking about a “collecting” system, and that’s okay. I’m a follower of the notion that it’s not all about uniqueness or unnecessary complication, but about heart and soul. The great James Lee Burke said that the best stories are the ones told by the heart, and I believe that. This system isn’t just a gimmick thrown in to please a certain crowd </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> it’s a system I want to use to express the lore side of a game. I’ve already got notes on how to expand this system further, but for now let’s see just how the first incarnation works out.</span>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c0">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span class="c2">Hugo Zombiestalker is a developer on </span>
<span class="c2 c8 c14">
<a class="c13" href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdrakkos.co.uk%2F&amp;sa=D&amp;sntz=1&amp;usg=AFQjCNHofsJbIOjAU5I4n8p8FWuP-bxV2g">Epitaph</a>
</span>
<span class="c2">.</span>
</p>
</body>
</html>

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{% extends "issue/other/index.html" %}
{% block page_title %}Request for content{% endblock %}
{% block other_content %}
<h3>Articles</h3>
<p>
Would you like to write an article for the next issue of <span class="publicationtitle">Imaginary Realities</span>?
</p>
<p>
Text-based gaming related articles are currently accepted on these topics:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Browser games</li>
<li>Gamebooks</li>
<li>Interactive fiction</li>
<li>MUDs</li>
<li>Roguelikes</li>
</ul>
<p>
Articles should not have been previously published. If they have been previously published, they should be substantially revised to be made current, perhaps to address a changing situation, or even a changed viewpoint. Fiction will be accepted, as long as its relationship to the above topics can be determined by a reader.
</p>
<p>
Articles should be in the range of 1000-4000 words. Longer articles are possible for serialisation, with approval required.
</p>
<h3>Letters</h3>
<p>
In the past, <span class="publicationtitle">Imaginary Realities</span> has featured a “Letters” section. If you have something you would like to write (perhaps to address past articles, or for whatever reason), please send it and we may publish it, if it is suitable.
</p>
<h3>Content Ideas</h3>
<p>
If you have an idea for content you would like to see, please let us know, and maybe we can solicit someone to write about it.
</p>
<h3>Licensing</h3>
<p>
Contributed content is required to be licensed by you under the
<a href="{{tp.license_link}}">{{tp.license_text}}</a> license.
</p>
<h3>Contact Information</h3>
<p>
Please contact Richard Tew (<a href="mailto:richard.m.tew@gmail.com">richard.m.tew@gmail.com</a>) for approval before proceeding to write an article, to ensure that your intended subject is suitable.
</p>
{% endblock %}

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{% extends "issue/other/index.html" %}
{% block page_title %}Staff{% endblock %}
{% block other_content %}
<div class="mainsection inline-blocks">
<div class="aligned-examples">
<div class="aligned-example text">
<div class="mainheader stafftitle">Managing Editor</div>
<div class="mainbody">
<img src="images/image03.png" width="112"/>
<div class="staffname">Richard Tew</div>
<div class="staffbio">
Richard Tew has worked on one
<a href="https://code.google.com/p/sorrows-mudlib/">Stackless Python mudlib</a>
and two
<a href="http://www.disinterest.org/projects.html">LP mudlibs</a>, as well as a telnet-based
<a href="https://code.google.com/p/sorrows-mudlib/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fgames%2Froguelike">multiplayer roguelike</a>.
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="aligned-example text">
<div class="mainheader stafftitle">Editor</div>
<div class="mainbody">
<img src="images/image00.png" width="120"/>
<div class="staffname">Matthew Sheahan (Chaos)</div>
<div class="staffbio">
Chaos has been lead developer of
<a class="gametitle" href="http://lostsouls.org/">Lost Souls</a>
since 1998. He curates
<a class="website" href="http://mudseek.com/">MUDseek</a>
and has published an
<a href="https://github.com/chaosprime/lpc-astar">LPC implementation of A* search</a>
as open source. In real life, he is a Web software architect.
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="aligned-example text">
<div class="mainheader stafftitle">Associate Editor</div>
<div class="mainbody">
<img src="images/image01.png" width="100"/>
<div class="staffname">Richard Woolcock (KaVir)</div>
<div class="staffbio">
KaVir is the owner of
<a class="gametitle" href="http://www.godwars2.org">God Wars II</a>
and developer of the GodWars and Gladiator Pits codebases. He has also written several MUD-related snippets and articles, and is an auditor for
<a class="website" href="http://www.mudconnect.com">The Mud Connector</a>.
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="aligned-example text">
<div class="mainheader stafftitle">Copyeditor</div>
<div class="mainbody">
<img src="images/image02.jpg" width="100"/>
<div class="staffname">Jennifer Melchert (jenphalian)</div>
<div class="staffbio">
jenphalian is a literary assistant for a New York Times bestselling author and one-time first reader for a Hugo-nominated literary magazine.
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
{% endblock %}

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<html>
<head>
<title>Clint Knapp - The bonds of mudding</title>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type"/>
<style type="text/css">ol{margin:0;padding:0}.c2{orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:justify;direction:ltr;height:11pt}.c3{orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:justify;direction:ltr}.c7{background-color:#ffffff;max-width:498.6pt;padding:56.7pt 56.7pt 56.7pt 56.7pt}.c8{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit}.c10{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline}.c9{font-size:10pt;font-weight:bold}.c0{font-family:"Courier New"}.c5{font-style:italic}.c1{font-family:"Arial"}.c6{margin-left:36pt}.c4{page-break-after:avoid}.title{padding-top:0pt;color:#000000;font-size:21pt;padding-bottom:0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.subtitle{padding-top:0pt;color:#666666;font-size:13pt;padding-bottom:10pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;font-style:italic;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}li{color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial"}p{margin:0;color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial"}h1{padding-top:10pt;color:#000000;font-size:16pt;padding-bottom:0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h2{padding-top:10pt;color:#000000;font-weight:bold;font-size:13pt;padding-bottom:0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h3{padding-top:8pt;color:#666666;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;padding-bottom:0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h4{padding-top:8pt;color:#666666;text-decoration:underline;font-size:11pt;padding-bottom:0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h5{padding-top:8pt;color:#666666;font-size:11pt;padding-bottom:0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h6{padding-top:8pt;color:#666666;font-size:11pt;padding-bottom:0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;font-style:italic;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}</style>
</head>
<body class="c7">
<p class="c3 c4 title">
<a name="h.us8h1vjbxtjo"/>
<span>The bonds of mudding</span>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span>by Clint “Itan Kuranes” Knapp, May 10th, 2015</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c9 c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Let's take a moment to consider this world of </span>
<span>m</span>
<span class="c1">udding for a minute. MUDs come about by an act of creative inspiration shared by people with a common interest. We all know a good MUD has a whole host of technical requirements that must be filled: the codebase on which it runs, the area design that makes it unique in a sea of similar code bases, and the people who come together as family to make it all happen.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">It's that last group I want to talk about.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Whether formed by a core group of friends who met in real-life or some other online forum, a MUD is as much about the people and the motivations that drive them to keep going as it is the size of the world, depth of immersion, or playability of the code itself. That handful of real people, often separated by miles, leagues, and countries are the heart of the MUD itself.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Once upon a time, in a dark age known as the late</span>
<span> 19</span>
<span class="c1">90s, a core group of online friends came together around their love of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and set out to create a MUD they eventually named </span>
<span class="c5 c1">As The Wheel Weaves</span>
<span class="c1">. They took a stock D</span>
<span>IKU</span>
<span class="c1">/ROM codebase and began to modify it to fit their vision of that world, and it was to this world that I first set down on my fourteen year journey through </span>
<span>m</span>
<span class="c1">udding.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Time and the stresses of ever more complex personal lives took their toll on </span>
<span class="c1 c5">AWW </span>
<span class="c1">and eventually the administration changed hands</span>
<span>, </span>
<span class="c1">the MUD </span>
<span>being</span>
<span class="c1"> renamed to </span>
<span class="c5 c1">Prophecies of the Pattern</span>
<span class="c1">. In those days I saw at a distance how the interpersonal connections between that initial group of friends changed and evolved. Some fell into relationships with one another that went beyond the text world they'd created, and some of those relationships broke down with disastrous results, but through it all many more people came and went who'd joined in on the fun only to find themselves embroiled in some of the deepest and most personal ways imaginable.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">In this world of social media, dating sites of every flavor, and the unending cycles of human relationships spawning from the various ways the Internet can bring people together and tear them apart, this may seem like common sense now, but in the pre-Facebook era this was something of a new world for a guy like me. It's hard to look back on how a simple love of a book series and a few thousand “rooms” of mobs to kill could cause some of the most interesting and compelling relationships in a person's life to happen, but they do happen. Every day.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Mudders, by and large, are a strange breed of people who for one reason or another seek escape from their daily lives to live in a fantasy world for a time where they can be whoever they want to be. Be it the housewife mother of three who needs a break now and then from parenting, the brooding wannabee writer who seeks an audience of like mind, the quiet nerd coder who wants to experiment with new ideas and </span>
<span>hone their</span>
<span class="c1"> craft in a practical application, or the outgoing teenager looking to make some new friends who can share </span>
<span>their</span>
<span class="c1"> love of any given world, these are the people who make up the worlds we all enjoy and keep coming back to year after year.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">MUDs provide an outlet; plain and simple. They allow us to become someone else, to interact with people we might never meet in the real world, and to come together to create something everyone can share in. Even when coders fail to live up to expectations or the leader of an important guild disappears into the swamp of real-life drudgery, the MUD goes on. New people come in to share their talents and in doing so form a bond with one another over the game they love.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Often that bond flows easily into sharing their daily lives and dreams as the anonymity of their character names allow them to speak more freely of the things they hope for and the things that trouble them. Some of these people will spend their entire careers hiding behind those assumed names or only sharing the truth of their identify with a select few people who they've come to spend the most time with. Others will freely express themselves and their identities with anyone who will listen.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">I was one of the former for many years. Even the people I'd spend the majority of my time talking to about game things, book things, loves and interests, and the hardships of any given day were just names on a screen for a long time. Even those closest to me who I thought knew me better than almost anyone else were by and large only character names. Even to this day I think of some of them in character-name terms just out of habit even though those names have changed several times over the years.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">It's just a fact of MUD life, really. We use the names and images we build of one another more readily than trying to picture the person on the other end of the connection. It happens to everyone and should be easy to understand in this age of screen-names and Twitter handles, but MUDs predate those things by decades and the relationships that form over them tend to stick with us for many years.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Eventually in the MUD world those cliques of close-knit friends might decide to come together to meet up once every year or so just to hang out and enjoy one another's company in the real world, but it doesn't have to happen because the MUD is always there. The MUD doesn't care who has money to travel, who has the bigger house to meet in, who can make it on any particular date; the MUD just exists all the time as a ready communication tool to sit around as long as one can get a stable Internet connection.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Mudders around the world spend countless hours interacting with one another; hours that if they tried to achieve in the real world would likely lead to a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing else with their lives but talking to each other. Maybe they're only interacting superficially. Maybe the most you'll ever get out of a person is a game stat or a sharp dagger in the back before they run off cackling after looting your corpse. Maybe, though, you'll find someone you connect with on a level so deep and understanding that you'll call them your best friend. Maybe even you'll meet that person in real life and date. Maybe you'll even get married.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">It happens all the time, you know. Even before </span>
<span class="c5 c1">Ever</span>
<span class="c5">Q</span>
<span class="c5 c1">uest </span>
<span class="c1">was reaching new heights of online relationship-building and causing entire groups of people to have mass weddings because they'd met that special someone in the game, MUDs were there doing the same thing on a smaller, less visible scale. With nothing more than words.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">What words they can be, though!</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">With a simple “How's it going?” an entire conversation might arise between two people who never had anything to do with each other that can find one spending hours recounting all the trials and tribulations of their lives. I can't count the number of interesting things I've learned with those three words alone, and some of the most amazing and fulfilling relationships I've ever had have arisen from just taking the time to ask the person behind the character how they're doing.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Maybe the next time that high-level rogue sneaks up and stabs you in the back and makes off with some of your hard earned loot you could just ask him those three words. Maybe he'll tell you he's been laid off and is feeling depressed and taking it out on you makes him feel better. Maybe he'll just cackle and run away again, but even if he does: try to remember he's still a person and that how you react to him in any given moment might set off a lifetime of closeness or hate that will shape the way you both interact for years to come.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">It can, of course, be incredibly difficult to really get a sense of a person by the way they type. Words on a screen don't really convey the powerful emotions that drive a person to express themselves in all the myriad ways we do every day. The lack of emotional subtext can often be supplemented to a degree with the omnipresent emoticon or the MUD's in-game social actions, but the fact remains you might not be coming across in the way you intended to.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">When this happens, we fight. Simple as that. People are very emotional beings and anything can set them off. Gauging this reaction is often difficult unless those people have spent a considerable amount of time getting to know each other by the way they speak, the actions they take when they do, or that nasty little web of smiley faces and frowns and winky faces and smirks.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Mudders, however, always manage to find a way to express themselves more completely. Each person is different in how they'll express themselves, but the longer a MUD runs the more likely a sort of </span>
<span class="c1">pseudo</span>
<span class="c1">-language will develop between players becomes. In my MUD of choice, for example, we have a habit of describing actions within a bracket structure as we speak. It grows out of the MUD's own coded socials and often might only describe a word of a given social, but that little bit of action might denote an entirely different meaning than the text of what is said might normally allow.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Consider a little theoretical exchange:</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c3 c6">
<span class="c0">Aes Sedai Ali says oocly, 'How's it going?'</span>
</p>
<p class="c3 c6">
<span class="c0">Dreadlord Dan says oocly, 'It goes. You?'</span>
</p>
<p class="c3 c6">
<span class="c0">Aes Sedai Ali says oocly, '-flops dramatically- it goes.'</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Dan's not giving any real information, but Ali's added that little bit of flair to show that she's probably exhausted, mentally or physically, and wants Dan to know it. Dan can take the bait and go on to ask more and probably get a pretty in-depth answer, or he could just throw out a game social of comfort or polite chuckling and they'll just go on as usual. Maybe they'll get into a discussion of the next time they're going to roleplay a scene together, or go out leveling, or try each other in a fight. Maybe, though, they'll spend the next six hours until sun-up delving into the issues that Ali has to deal with in her life. Maybe they'll become fast friends because of it. Maybe it'll take years to even get around to telling each other their names or what they do, but that little moment of sharing a peek behind the character? That's a powerful moment.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">That tiny glimpse is the MUD equivalent of catching a stranger's eye in a bar and deciding to talk to them based on their body language or the way they're checking you out. It's bumping into someone you only knew on the periphery in high school and deciding you'd been wrong about them all along and want to know more about their life and dreams. It's being introduced by a mutual friend and discovering the love of your life was just a connection or two away. That little thing is the foundation on which a lifetime of friendship might build.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">And boy do they!</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Do you remember the moment you met your first real friend in your game of choice? I do.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">I sat around in the bank in the city of Caemlyn (our equivalent to a central hub through which everyone comes and goes around the world) just waiting those ten agonizing minutes between chances to request a quest to get up the </span>
<span>q</span>
<span class="c1">uest </span>
<span>p</span>
<span class="c1">oints to buy a new skill that would raise my stat cap to twice its normal level. A Mentor in the game came in, an Aes Sedai of the Yellow Ajah, and asked how it was going. I don't know what happened after that exactly. I probably spent a lot of time asking some basic questions, but the end result was the same: that line of communication was open.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">We'd talk from time to time about game stuff or theories about where the series was going, or complain about our relationships in the real world, and that bond just formed and grew. We had a lot in common, but a lot of differences too that made us interesting to each other, and fourteen years later? I talk to that person every day and consider her my best friend. I can't imagine a world where the random chance of my computer lab time coincided with her logging on and just hanging out in the game didn't happen. Even without ever meeting in real-life, that person became closer to me through the random wanderings of our conversations and sharing the ups and downs of our lives than many of my oldest friends in the real world.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">That's the power of words, and it happens all the time. It's only even one example. I could go on for hours about the friends I've made who became a second family to me; or the ones I thought were going to be important and lost contact with overnight in a single flurry of angry ranting. There are people I can't imagine not being a part of my life because we came together over a singular shared interest in this archaic little world of text-based gaming. Those people are the core around which our game has continued to persist, but even if the game went offline tomorrow they'd remain a deeply important part of my life and continue to inspire me with the openness with which they share their lives.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">I'm not alone, either.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Everyone reading this has probably got countless stories of that best-MUD-friend who they can't go a day without sharing their lives with. Some of you probably even married those people. Some might have married and divorced and married someone else they found through the game you play. Some might even be bitter enemies with someone they met in a MUD and spend every day seething at the merest appearance of </span>
<span class="c0">“*** Soandso joins in looking for some adventure.”</span>
<span class="c1"> across the black space between two </span>
<span>hit-point</span>
<span class="c1">-prompt lines.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">Whatever the case may be, the relationships we form as </span>
<span>m</span>
<span class="c1">udders who come together over a shared interest can be as real and fulfilling as any other in life. Perhaps you're an introverted, chronically depressed person in life who just needs a shoulder to cry one from time to time in the relative safety of anonymity. Perhaps you're just looking for someone to spend a little time having fun with and then go about the rest of your life never really giving that other person another thought. Perhaps you'll even fall in love and move </span>
<span class="c1">halfway</span>
<span class="c1"> across the globe to be with that special person you spent so many hours talking to and getting to know.</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span class="c1"/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c1">You never know unless you take that chance and ask those three simple words: “How's it going?”</span>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c3">
<span class="c5">Itan Kuranes (Clint Knapp) is a 14-year veteran of Prophecies of the Pattern and its predecessor As The Wheel Weaves, and blogs at </span>
<span class="c5 c10">
<a class="c8" href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclintknapp.wordpress.com%2F&amp;sa=D&amp;sntz=1&amp;usg=AFQjCNHmBxZ4XqzfBmSk9SnDozv2UE0v6w">clintknapp.wordpress.com</a>
</span>
<span class="c5">.</span>
</p>
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<title>Drakkos - The mercurial temperament at the end of the world</title>
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</head>
<body class="c6">
<h1 class="c1 c5">
<span>The mercurial temperament at the end of the world</span>
</h1>
<p class="c1">
<span>by Drakkos, May 25th, 2015</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>The following extract is taken from a large, popular MUD. Not mine, because mine is currently neither large, nor popular. I won't mention the name, because it's not my intention to “call out” anyone about this problem. This is just to indicate that it's a norm that we expect within our games:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; attempts to tidy up the shop a bit.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; occasionally mutters something about a lawsuit against a certain &lt;NPC2&gt;.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<a name="h.gjdgxs"/>
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; says: Do you have a voucher? You can exchange it here.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; says: I'm sure I'll win if &lt;NPC2&gt; takes me to court.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; says: Feel free to browse the stock.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; says: Feel free to browse the stock.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; rearranges his hat.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; says: I'm sure I'll win if &lt;NPC2&gt; takes me to court.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; exclaims: That spell was mine, &lt;NPC2&gt;stole it!</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>The NPC says the same few things, on a loop, forever. You can try to get a rise out of him:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&gt; push &lt;NPC&gt;</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">You push &lt;NPC&gt; over making him sit down.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; stands up.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; says: Please ask about talkers if you're not sure.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Or violate his civil rights:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&gt; slap &lt;NPC&gt;</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">You slap &lt;NPC&gt;.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; says: Please ask about talkers if you're not sure.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&lt;NPC&gt; rearranges his hat.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>It rarely seems to make a difference. The NPC just stands there, wittering through the same tiny collection of chats </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> a bit of window-dressing that is utterly, irrevocably disconnected from what's happening around it. It's unsatisfying. It's hugely unsatisfying, and on </span>
<span class="c7">Epitaph </span>
<span>we were as guilty of it as anyone. More, in fact, because I never really saw the point of these “vend a chat” type NPCs having much to say. Spending too long in the same room with such an NPC, it would grate painfully on my nerves and I'd find myself having to move elsewhere. As such, our NPC value came from their collection of responses. Each of our NPCs have keywords that, when you ask about them, give a little bit of lore and guidance. Those who played the Ultima games will recognise the conversational style:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">&gt; ask shawn about winchester</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">You ask Shawn a question about "winchester".</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">Shawn whispers to you: This is perhaps the safest place in the entire city - we're far enough away from the hotspots that the zombies rarely wander this far, and even when they do we have enough people here to keep them out. You could think of us as something like the Switzerland of Dunglen - we're neutral in everything so everyone finds us useful enough to support.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Our NPCs also had “vend a chat” characteristics, and they'd go through the same tired set of six or so chat strings on a semi-random basis. It's a convention that is deeply ingrained into CRPGs </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> the memetic “arrow to the knee” in Skyrim is the same problem writ into the bones of a game that prides itself on how immersive it can be. You need to look beyond our usual conventions of RPG game-play to realise why this is such a poor state of affairs if you want a world that genuinely feels alive </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> truth be told, we're mostly numb to it. So, within </span>
<span class="c7">Epitaph </span>
<span>we resolved to find a way to make our NPCs more passively interesting. We wanted to have NPCs that felt as if they were engaging directly with you, remembering who you were, and also maintaining relationships with the other NPCs around them. We've now put the first version of that in the game, and we're working hard to improve how versatile and interesting the system is.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>I am, perhaps, getting ahead of myself. So let's look at this problem from first principles. Let's look at how we put together the system that eventually became known as Mercurial.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c5">
<a name="h.38hv7ybev5j8"/>
<span>What do we want from our NPCs?</span>
</h1>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>If you don't really care about having a game world that feels alive, vend-a-chat NPCs are fine. All they need to do is stand there and make the world look as if it has people in it. If you're happy with that, fine </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> you don't need to put any more thought into how they should behave. On </span>
<span class="c7">Epitaph</span>
<span>, though, we're putting together a strongholding system that makes the presence of NPCs within a constrained space a major gameplay system. You </span>
<span class="c7">can</span>
<span> have that with vend-a-chat NPCs, but I wanted something more. I wanted living with a group of survivors to be more like a soap opera than a hack and slash </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> I wanted them to fall out, develop grudges, have arguments, make up, and pass on the day to day gossip of what was happening. I wanted the selection of an NPC for joining your stronghold to be a complex decision, weighing up skill-sets versus personality types versus the ongoing drama in your stronghold. I wanted played players to think “Wow, this new survivor has amazing skills at scavenging, and we really need that </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> on the other hand, she seems to be pretty aggressive and that won't work very well with my stronghold dynamic”. I wanted managing NPC moods to be an active task, requiring you to calm and soothe, bully and cajole as needed to get everything working. Rapidly I realised that what we needed was not an extension to our existing NPC chatter systems, but a complete redesign.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>I wanted NPCs to have memories of interactions, and I wanted those memories to impact on what they did in the future. I also wanted them to be able to refer to things that had happened to them in the past, and explain upon questioning why they were behaving the way they were. I wanted them to have set vend-a-chats, because sometimes these contained cueing information for followup keywords, but I wanted most of their chat to be contextual. I wanted their mood to change too on the way they'd been feeling lately </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> if they'd been persistently in a bad mood, I wanted it to exacerbate to create a kind of depression cycle. If they'd had a string of good moods, I wanted them to have a relatively sunny disposition that made everything more likely to keep them happy. Then I wanted external events to cut into their moods like a knife. I wanted them to get upset if someone stole from them, or depressed at being surrounded by corpses, or fearful around players that had killed them in the past.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>I also wanted it so that not every NPC worked the same way </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> I wanted them to be a kind of puzzle to solve. I wanted some to respond favourably to certain kind of events and not so favourably to others. I wanted some to brood on past injustices, and others to focus more on the here and now. I wanted some NPCs to be homophobic and others to be homophiliac. I wanted xenophobia and xenophilia all stitched in. I wanted you to have to consider how each NPC responded to you, and work out how best to manipulate their moods accordingly. I wanted NPCs to remember you, and how you'd treated them.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>I wanted a lot.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c5">
<a name="h.fhmiut1l02v8"/>
<span>What did we need to make that happen?</span>
</h1>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>There were several things we needed to slot into Mercurial to allow all this to happen.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>First, we needed NPCs to have a mood. For a long time we'd had a “wellbeing” system for hunger, thirst, health and energy. Along with that was a measure called “resolve”, which represented essentially your overall mood. It went down as you encountered zombie moans, it went up as you got drunk or ate good food or whatever. We removed resolve as a wellbeing measure and replaced it instead with a dynamically calculated “mood”, on a scale from 0 to 100. Every NPC had a baseline of 50, which meant largely “on an even keel”. They were neither in a good or bad mood </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> they were just okay.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Next, we needed ways to manipulate that mood. For this, we created “mercurials” which were little packages of data that represented specific things that could happen. “About to die”, for example, was a mercurial that could be applied when an NPC's health levels were very low, and would give a significant negative modifier to mood. “Ate good food” was a mercurial that could be applied which gave a small boost to mood. The positive moods were summed up, the negative moods were summed up, and then both of these were applied to the mood to give the overall disposition of the NPC. If more good things than bad things had happened, the mood would be higher, and vice versa. Then, when dealing with a player, we averaged out their current mood and the sum of interactions the player had had with them recently to create a “mood for that player” value. This then becomes the baseline for working out how an NPC should respond to player actions.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>That gave us a way to give NPCs variable moods, but we also needed to solve the vend-a-chat problem. We did this by associating chat strings on a mercurial basis, rather than on a mood or NPC basis. NPCs started to say things depending on which mercurials they had applied. An NPC with the “hungry” mercurial might complain about a rumbling stomach or ask if anyone has any food to spare. An NPC that had to spend the night sleeping on the floor might complain about aches and pains. An NPC that gave a player a mission they failed might mutter about their unreliable allies. However, to make sure that the mercurial chats were appropriate we also added a “mood context” which included “what added this mercurial”, “when did they add this mercurial”, and “what other information do I need to know about this mercurial”. Thus, a chat string within a mercurial mood might look like this:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">"say I would like to kick $cap_applied$ right in the backside."</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>When the game says to an NPC “it's time for you to say something”, it'll look for which mercurials have been been applied, what contexts it has for those moods, and then it'll construct a chat that is appropriate:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">"say I would like to kick Drakkos right in the backside."</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>In addition to the </span>
<span class="c0">$applied$</span>
<span> token, there's also extra information that we can provide. We provide a hash-table of these when we apply the mercurial, so we might have the following available: </span>
<span class="c0">([ "argument" : "stealing from me" ])</span>
<span>. That permits chats such as:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">"say I would like to kick $cap_applied$ right in the backside for $argument$."</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>That becomes:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">"say I would like to kick Drakkos right in the backside for stealing from me."</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Now, none of these chats are great literature, and that remains true of the chats we currently have in the game. That's a small problem, though </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> the key thing is that our NPCs can now start to act like they are connected to the game world. If they pass a skill check, they might say something like “I didn't realise I was so good at climbing over obstacles”. If they critically pass, they might say “Nobody in the world is better than me at climbing over obstacles”. If things have been going good for a while, they might start humming cheerfully or cracking jokes. If things have been going badly, they'll be waspish and snap at people, and be less likely to look on the bright side in their own random interactions.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Some of these mercurials also came with new behaviours </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> for example, an NPC with a “hungry” mercurial will accept food from players if it is given. Eating that food will adjust their hunger, which in turn will alleviate the mood. This gives us a framework for not only having NPCs “talk the talk”, but also “walk the walk”. The way you interact with them is altered by the moods they have available.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Mercurials also come with responses, and so NPCs can respond based on what mood they're in. If I ask an NPC with the above mercurial about Drakkos, it might respond with “Drakkos is an asshole. That's all I can say about someone stealing from me”. These responses allow all the tokens to be used, and also for variation to be given when the mercurial is added. The NPC will say the same thing each time you ask, but another NPC with a different mood context might say something different.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c5">
<a name="h.qeblspxikufy"/>
<span>What did we want from our chats</span>
</h1>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>In addition to the chats being drawn from NPC moods, we also wanted them have little bit more naturalistic variability, as they are in real life. I didn't want it to just be “I would like to kick </span>
<span class="c0">$cap_applied$</span>
<span> right in the backside” every time, I wanted that to have natural modifications. So, in addition to the global tokens applied from the mood, each chat also has some local tokens that give potential variability that can be slotted in in place of fixed text. For example, this is the (almost) full code of one of our existing mercurials (I removed some of the naughty words, and unset fields; </span>
<span class="c7">Epitaph </span>
<span>is mature content, so NPCs that need a cigarette are likely to swear at you):</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::item "needs a cigarette"::</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;description:: "You really need a smoke."</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;chats:: ({</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  "I could really do with $a_smoke$.",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  "I need $a_smoke$ to $calm$.",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  "I'm $tense$ - need $a_smoke$.",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">})</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;actions:: ([</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  (: 1 :) : ": hums tensely.", </span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  (: 1 :) : ": stomps around grumpily.", </span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">])</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;categories:: ({ })</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;duration:: MERCURIAL_DURATION_SHORT</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;mood:: MERCURIAL_MODERATE</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;intensity:: MERCURIAL_INTENSITY_LOW</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;random_assignment:: 0</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;can_stack:: 1</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">::-&gt;local_tokens:: ([</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  "smoke" : ({</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "smoke",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "fag",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "cigarette",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "good hit of nicotine",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  }),</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  "calm" : ({</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "calm my nerves",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "calm myself",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "take the edge off",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  }),</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  "tense" : ({</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "tense",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "on edge",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">    "all jangly",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">  }), </span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">])</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span class="c0"/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Inside the chats are local tokens such as </span>
<span class="c0">$a_smoke$</span>
<span> and </span>
<span class="c0">$tense$</span>
<span>. When a chat is selected, a random element from the right hand side of the </span>
<span class="c0">local_tokens</span>
<span> mapping is selected and put in place of the original token. So, a selected chat may be:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0"> "I'm $tense$ - need $a_smoke$.",</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>When this is selected and processed, it might end up being parsed as any of:</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">I'm on edge - need a fag.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">I'm tense - need a good hit of nicotine.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c3">
<span class="c0">I'm all jangly - need a smoke.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span class="c0"/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Thus, a single mood may only have a small number of chats attached, but each of those chats may have dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of possible variations. We're only limited in that respect by our imaginations. This system has been so useful for providing small variation around a theme that it has been ported over to our room chats </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> that's another area in which I've long felt MUDs don't do things well enough, and also another area for discussion in a later article.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c5">
<a name="h.5apiw2thrlvh"/>
<span>What did we want from our players?</span>
</h1>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>After a while, the mood system became sufficiently mature that I wanted to make it a thing for players too. So, not only did NPCs get their resolve surgically removed, players received a transplant of the mood system to go with it. Now, mood management became an active task rather than just keeping an eye on what had up until now been basically a “sanity meter”. But I also wanted players to take an active role in the management of NPC moods.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Soul commands, or socials, or emotes, are another common aspect of almost all online games. Rarely do they actually do anything </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> they're just a little message for players. I wanted them to do things, and so in connection with the mercurial system we wrote a new, powerful “interactions” framework that allowed you to manipulate NPC moods, and have them manipulate yours, through social interaction. This is a complex topic in and of itself, and will likely end up being a separate submission to </span>
<span class="c7">Imaginary Realities</span>
<span> in the future. Suffice to say for now that hugging a sad NPC, and being hugged in return, are ways for you to manage your moods. You also have pharmaceutical aids (a nerve pill, for example, which gives you a long lasting “feeling pretty mellow” mercurial). You can rely on alcohol to numb the edges of your mood (although sometimes drowning your troubles only shows you that they know how to swim). Or you can seek out positive encounters, or engage in activities you know to be psychologically healthy. Reading a book gives you a resolve boost depending on how good it has been set to be. You can manage your mood with chocolate, or home-cooked meals, or even just wearing nice clothes.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Players were something of an afterthought for this system, but in the end it turned out that I liked how it worked for NPCs so much that I wanted it for myself when I play. Mood management now is an interesting task in the game, in a way that it wasn't previously. It's not a perfectly implemented task, of course </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> we are constantly revising and expanding and redesigning bits of the system </span>
<span class="c4">— b</span>
<span>ut it has a good set of bones on which we can continue to meaningfully build.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>What I wanted for players was two-fold </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> I wanted them to feel as if the NPCs in the game were actually paying attention, and developing their views of what was going on based on the world around them. I also wanted to provide players rewards for paying attention to NPCs, such as quests for feeding the hungry or giving those craving cigarettes a fix. I wanted them to have an opportunity, and a motivation, for developing long term social interactions with their NPCs. Much of the real benefit of this is still to come, since it's tied to a game-play system that is still under development. We can however see the first steps of that in the game already, and I'm very pleased by the options it has given us as developers. We can now have quests, and missions, and achievements that pay as much attention to social skills as they do to combat skills, and we can fully support a play-style that allows someone to focus on diplomacy rather than death-dealing. It's always been one of my key design goals to make activities other than hack and slash viable for advancement </span>
<span class="c4">(</span>
<span class="c7">Epitaph </span>
<span>really isn't a hack and slash game unless you explicitly build a character for it, so if you try to kill everything you see in </span>
<span class="c7">Epitaph</span>
<span>, you'll rapidly find yourself in a very sorry state). I think this offers a new way of doing just that.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c5">
<a name="h.kw9734ijfkdy"/>
<span>Where do we currently stand?</span>
</h1>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>The Mercurial system is still in its infancy </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> I class it as being in its 1.0 state, but there's still a long way for it to go before it does everything I want of it. What's remarkable though is the level of flexibility it gives us. According to our internal stats, we now have 291 discrete mercurial data files, each handling a particular kind of mood. These get triggered from commands and situations all over the game, from solving quests (for players only), to killing zombies (everyone). It's easy to add a mercurial and its trigger </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> an act of maybe 60 seconds of technical time. However, none of those data files are currently where I want them to be in terms of richness, complexity or significance. More than anything else, they hold placeholders for a larger and more exciting set of NPC conversations. We're still to do a proper pass over that to ensure that the moods are as deep and involving as they can be </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> we've been running in the system in the live game for a few weeks, and our key focus has been on making sure it works as a mechanic before it works for thematic dressing.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>There's a lot of tweaking that still remains to be done, too </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> NPCs and players at the moment are somewhat bipolar, switching wildly from positive to negative moods as mercurials time out and are applied. That however is an issue of polish </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> functionally speaking, we've added a lot to the game, in my view, with this new system of managing NPC conversation and ambient chat.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>More than that though, Mercurial has given us a framework for making stronghold social management as important a game element as putting up barricades or fighting off raiders. It allows us to model the kind of cabin fever that would be important to mitigate within a tightly constrained, geographically fixed group of survivors. It allows for tactical decision making, such as “Oh, Billy is in a huff because Jessica slapped him. But he's our best scavenger, so do I want to send him out to look for food regardless? Or do I send out Jessica and take the risk of losing her because she's been causing a lot of trouble recently”. Or, “Do I go spend the next ten minutes calming Billy so that he's in a fit state to send out on this mission?”. That kind of thing was always going to be a major part of what I wanted from a stronghold system, and I am very happy that it's not going to be constrained purely to there. This kind of thing makes the whole game richer, and I won't be satisfied until I can sit in any populated room in the game and watch my NPCs play out social soap operas in front of me.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<h1 class="c1 c5">
<a name="h.ozayhxdut6km"/>
<span>Conclusion</span>
</h1>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span>Version 1.0 of Mercurial has given us a compelling proof of concept for a new way of thinking about NPCs in our world. The next stage is to develop that proof of concept into a fully fledged game system. It's already adding considerable value to the game, but I'm conscious that the value is limited until we have both a wider range of mercurials being applied, and a more consistent approach to how they are written and configured. Primarily, our next job with Mercurial is to flesh it out, adding more chats, more responses, and more sense of consistent behaviour for our NPCs. I want them to separate people in fights, or warn their allies about someone sneaking around. I want them to mourn for the deaths of their friends, and celebrate the deaths of their enemies. As sad as it is, I want people to be able to feel the same attachment to the NPCs in their strongholds as they do to characters in works of literature </span>
<span class="c4">—</span>
<span> I don't want people sending off a package of statistics on a perilous mission. I want them to send their friend. The Mercurial system has given me confidence that, given enough time and evolution of the system, we'll be able to accomplish that.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1">
<span class="c7">Drakkos is lead developer of </span>
<span class="c7 c8">
<a class="c9" href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdrakkos.co.uk%2F&amp;sa=D&amp;sntz=1&amp;usg=AFQjCNHofsJbIOjAU5I4n8p8FWuP-bxV2g">Epitaph</a>
</span>
<span class="c7">.</span>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
<p class="c1 c2">
<span/>
</p>
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