The only real experience I've had with MUDs is Relams of Despair, which wasn't all that interesting but remains popular nonetheless. In a way, a MUD is just a text-only Massive Multiplayer Roleplaying Game. You get the serious players, the power gamers, and the clueless idiots like me who can't type TIE SHOE correctly. After wandering around for 15 minutes or so I closed it for good, not understanding what my friends saw in it. But it wasn't until Star Wars Galaxies that I appreciated the MMORPG genre anyways, so MUDs or any online roleplaying game wasn't my type. I was always more of a pen-and-paper kind of roleplayer. Give me dice or give me death!
On the subject of chatbots, sometimes they can go awry. A prime example is of a learning chatbot, Nicole, got sabatoged by the forum members of Something Awful and now Nicole's responses, besides forum in-jokes and singing Queen and Andrew W.K., involve insults and ethnic slurs. It's fun to see how quickly you can teach a program if you have hundreds of people hammering it nonstop.
Dealing with the chatbots that people assumed were real people, the world of psychology is pretty simple. One could make a bot for every type of thinking and responses. Looking back at the text adventures, didn't they do the same thing at times frustrating people and generating an emotional response out of simple base words?
Posted by TimothyTraini at October 15, 2004 01:12 AM