Hi, As for me personally I don't agree with the general tone of his announcement, but I can agree with many of the points he made in that announcement. He pointed out that MOOs are technologically out of date. That to a large degree is true. We have now reached the point where pvp and good roll playing games are done through 3D graphical clients capable of doing far more for a sighted gamer than text based MOOs. Like everything else that is computer related the sighted users tend to go where they can get the best visual and graphical effects, and those left behind are those with visual impairments that can't use the new graphical software, or those geeks that like the text based MOOs for their own personal reasons. As far as creativity and imagination goes I think he may have a valid point. Far too many mud players tend to use ship and character names from their favorite television shows instead of actually thinking up something a little more unique and personally creative. If, for example, you are playing a mud and discover the ship you are about to fight is named Voyager, Enterprise, or Defiant you would naturally assume the player is a Star Trek fan, and he is most likely pretending the mud is an extention of Star Trek. If you were to engage a ship with a name like the Exicuter, Milennium Falcon, etc you might then assume the player was imagining himself to be in the Star Wars universe. This isn't really all that creative, unique, and may detract from the mud for those players wanting something specifically related to the mud universe and not bring in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battle Star Galactica, etc. As a game developer myself I can understand the developers desire to complain about having to compete with big name science fiction ships and characters as he probably wants the players to use there creativity to improve the mud. To make the mud universe more interesting, more creatively diverse, and not mix and match big name science fiction people, places, and things in the mud. His complaint about players coming up with generic or common names like the Salvager is understandable, but a bit over critical. Not everyone is as gifted with creativity and imagination as he thinks he is, and people just joined to have a good time. Trying to think up a cool ship name and unique character profile does take time, and careful thought. I am guessing the majority of the players just signed up, put any old name they felt like on there ships, and got on with there adventure. Yeah, it might b boring, drab, but for that player it is acceptable. He or she was not informed in advanced they had to think up something cool or unique before joining the mud, and then the developer gets angry at them for their lack of creativity and imagination. Finally, the developer does bring up the issue of people with physical impairments as a type of player that frequents his game. Putting us down as he did was just flat out wrong. We aren't able to move on to bigger and better graphical RPG style games, and he knows that. Treating me or anyone else with a physical impairment as a seperate species of human not worth his time is unfairr, but not really surprising. After all, the majority of the people on this list already know what sighted people generally think of blind people anyway. They either think we are inferior to them and can't do anything they can do, or they see an item on the news about a blind musician and collectively assume that blind people are all going to have equal musical talents. There are all kinds of eronious assumptions sighted people make about blind people, and what we are seeing here is some of that coming to the surface in a negative way from a sighted software developer ready to get out of his current business Do I find his message offensive? No, I don't really find it offensive. I have known for a very long time that many sighted people secretly have negative opinions of people with physical impairments such as blindness. In some cases the opinion is justified when their only encounter is with a blind person who has an attitude of being very winy, complains a lot, or gets angry when things don't go his/her way. As a game developer myself I have encountered a handful of such a group of blind gamers that were very winy, do nothing but complain endlessly about this or that, or were very verbally abusive when requesting information about one of my game projects. If they take that same attitude and point it at a mainstream sighted developer they will find they simply won't put up with it. They will also will find they will have left that sighted developer with the opinion that blind gamers have no life, that they are winy, have bad attitudes, and aren't worth helping. So if that happened to this developer I can't find what he said too offensive. One last thought before I go. His point about the 27 players that got back on Meriani 7 minutes after it was restarted does make one wonder what were those 27 people doing prier to its restart. Did they get an email or advanced notice it would be back on or were they trying and trying to connect until they got on. Either way it might suggest to me as with him that some people have an obsession with their muds, and there lives must revolve around there alternative identities. I love gaming, but there is a time to quit, read a book, or do something else more constructive with your life than play games 24/7. Cheers.
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