User Interface, and why MMORPG SU><0RZ D00D

entrippy ranted recently about the crapness of Internet gaming community... I figured I'd reply over here.

I have this suspicion that it boils down to user-interface. Think about it... the interface for user-to-user text communications in most games is tiny in comparison with the rest of the interface, whether you're talking about screen realestate, number of hotkeys/menu items, whatever.

In the days of LPmudding, everything was prose (usually), and plenty of it, and that was the important bit. And since it was all prose all the time, players generally took the time and effort to type good prose to each other. Even more so on the MOOs and MUSHes and MUCKs, where stats-fu and level gain was not so much the focus. UI-wise... everything was text. Commands, communication, whatever, everything text, so, well, text is important, so people "spoke" in prose.

These days? It's mouse mouse mouse clicky drag clicky poke-a-key drag clicky poke-a-key drag, oh hey three lines of text on the screen, click skip, drag poke-a-key drag clicky drag poke-a-key drag poke-key, drag poke-a-key poke-a-key drag clicky... There's no need or desire to type long messages, or even to consider serious inter-human communication. So of course people are utterly thoughtless (especially the teenyboppers, who have on the average, far less personal consideration for others than adult humans).

NWN is relatively good in this respect. The voice hotkey system is reasonable, and almost all alphanumeric typing is communication related, with item use relegated to Function Keys rather than the main keyboard. And in multiplayer, the scrolling team/player message window covers nearly 4% (25% horizontal 15% vertical at a rough estimate) of the screen by default and you can resize it to be bigger vertically with no trouble. That's an awful lot compared to most games. There's also a focus on textual information, what with the scripted NPC conversations, plus scrolling textual data (dice rolls, etc) which is generally somewhat important to actually pay attention to. This adds up to a UI that encourages the use of text, rather than discourages it. For a Role Playing Game (rather than simply multi-user graphical nethack), that's crucial, I feel.

Sure, not everyone is going to write nicely, but at least the UI doesn't get in the way of it, and in fact makes it relatively easy to do so. And regarding gaming communities that practice this? NWN Wednesday recently profiled a NWN Online Guild called Ancient Mystic Order of Old Fogeys.