How to Change an Industry

[zhai]

It seems that the feminism issue rears its head on the speculative fiction blogosphere about once every six months, maybe more frequently if you follow specific blogs in question. I'd been meaning, with certain trepidation, to throw my hat in, and now seems an opportune time as I have found myself unwittingly participating in one editor's salvo in

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[zhai]

He's talking about this Gemstone, the Simutronics text-based older sister to DragonRealms, which I worked on. I'm unfamiliar with Gem's combat, but DR, which was based on its engine (all Simu games use a proprietary scripting language called 'Gemstone Scripting Language') did have a pretty unique learning system whereby you could learn virtually any skill, not just those owned or maintained by your character class. So anyone could become a master skinner, though Rangers always had a boost to it and could do special things with the skins. It created a very dynamic environment that to this day offers interesting things to the MMO field. In addition to learning any skill, "Teaching" itself was a skill, as was "Scholarship" (learning by listening or reading), so you could transfer skills between individuals socially, which is a pretty phenomenal roleplaying enhancing design tool. There was also one entirely social non-combat class, Empaths, who literally could not fight, would go into empathic shock if they harmed another living thing, so the entire system was strong enough to sustain an entirely socially dependent class.

For roleplaying and social design I think the Skotos games have an edge on Simu's, being effectively a second generation contemplation on similar concepts, but Gem and its cousins certainly did interesting things.