Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing

[Auspice]

@gryphter said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I was sad to discover that by the numbers, I am considered a millienial. The fact that I'm kind of disturbed by that probably means I/we bear a responsibility to change what the subtext of 'millenial' is. If I'm one, they're getting a lot of it wrong.

It's why I (driven by a friend of mine, tbh; he got ME to stop using the term to mean 'anyone under the age of 25') try to help encourage people away from it. 'Millennial' doesn't just mean 'young person' (or worse: 'young person I don't understand who is clearly the downfall of everything'). It just means we're the gen after Gen X.

It's that damn iGen that's ruining everything!

[surreality]

I think there's something to the idea of 'I wish I could retire and do one of my hobbies for a living' on a basic level in almost every hobby.

In some, it's more feasible than others. I mean, I've done it half a dozen times art-wise, just not with anything related to this hobby. But, like, this is how you end up making doll clothes or dyeing yarn or making Poser skins for a living for a handful of years, pretty much.

[mietze]

@gryphter no, I am sorry. That may be something some people enjoy dreaming about, but a lot of other people have legitimate concerns about the business aspect of it. Either because that is how their mind works , because they have owned their own business before or have other applicable experience, ect. There was a brief fad of people trying to monetize mushes in the 00s, maybe late 90s. I think it could be done and there was one experiment where it went okay (but nobody "lived off" the game) but I do not think that's a model that is sustainable for how most folks want to run a game.

[mietze]

I do think that generationally some people may have the equivalent of you tube celebrity or successful podcaster "making a living" in mind, but I also think it is forgotten how small of a percentage of people make it, plus just how many subscribers/views you must have, constant need to bring new people in, how to manage advertising since that is a major source of revenue and also underestimating about how hard those folks have to work to constant put out new content.

I am not sure if streaming is the same as far as work/business management but I cannot imagine it is that different.

BUT. I mean if we are moving more to web based playability, I do not see anything wrong with allowing ads, ect. I just do not think the average single game is going to have enough hits, based on successful folks I know personally who have done podcasting and/or blogging before that.

[surreality]

mietze nails it, really. There are a lot of issues with it for this particular hobby.

I've actually done all three of those examples, and done quite well at each of them -- but I did pick them over M* every time, as I was M*ing through all of them. (There are current rather than former ones, too, but nnngh that's talking about work and nah.)

We deal with some horribly entitled people at art shows. One of those jobs in particular had a storm of entitled craziness in it. None of them hold a candle, sadly, to a lot of what I've seen in M*. I was able to weather things better than I might have otherwise in the especially troublesome one based on the M* experience, believe it or not.

[Griatch]

@faraday said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

This is an interesting point of view. Using the command line is generally an important skill to have when doing anything programming- related though.

That's the thing, though -- running a game, ideally, shouldn't require programming. It shouldn't require you to be a server admin. I can spin up a whole website in 10 minutes with Wix or Wordpress or whatever. I can set up a Discord voice chat server or forum or Storium game with a few clicks.

I've made Ares as easy as I can imagine given the tech requirements. You don't need to do any code to set up a game, but it still requires you to ssh onto a server and mess around with the command line occasionally. That is freaking intimidating to a large number of people, and it's an obstacle to having more games. Having (comparatively) few games, in turn, is an obstacle to having more people.

Ares is doing a good job here! It is able to do this by committing to a highly specialized game style and genre out of the box. It's important to separate a game administrator from a game developer I think. For those that have no programming knowledge, a pre-prepared game template is definitely going to lower the point of entry considerably. For those that do have the programming knowledge or willingness to learn it, they generally hate to have to tear down the pre-made stuff since they want to build their own thing anyway (this is really a matter of audience of course).

That said, we have wanted to have more pre-made template-games for Evennia for a long time. The Ainneve project was/is specifically aimed to that goal. Progress has unfortunately been a slow though

@gryphter said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@faraday Power-upvote. There are lots of us who can't code a bit, but we might make badass games, for all the world knows, if we were just empowered to do it.

Empowering people to create is something every engine dev wants I think. Thing is, unless you want exactly the game mechanic as someone already did that you can then just add a world to, you will at some point have to get down to programming. All we can do is try to make that step easier, but the step will have to be made eventually.

@Apos said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

There is an upper bound to how many people staff can invest their time in and entertain, and if they aren't doing this then there is not much difference between MUs and less arcane RP formats. Table top writ large can only be writ so large before people are constantly forgotten and left out.

Someone could advertise hard on all the younger demographic RP communities but there's only a point in doing that if you can support them, and take the time to help get them into the game. I mean the larger RP forums, chat room type places have tens of thousands of users and I'd guess maybe like a tenth of a percent have even ever heard of MUs, but if I threw down ads and had like, 100 people log in as guests to ask questions on how to MU, there's no way I could support that.

It's a good point, a huge influx of newbies need to be properly handled to actually make the best of the new influx. That's where tutorials and easier entry goes a long way, limiting the amount of personal instruction is needed.
(having too many new players is a bit of a luxury problem anyway of course).

@Tehom said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I have a few things on my wishlist for the far off future.

I would love is to have something sort of similar to django-cookiecutter but for game templates out of the box, but even more accessible than that: some sort of wizard where someone who has absolutely no programming experience could enter a bunch of values to customize a game experience out of the box. Ideally we'd configure their settings file for them, then apply some fixture or database seed values for a game genre, and then the rest is up to them. For example, selecting 'medieval fantasy game' might add a 'contribs.fantasy_template' to INSTALLED_APPS which would more or less be what Ainneve is supposed to be, automatically adding relevant commands, etc.

I think the biggest hurdles coming into this hobby are getting started as a game-runner and getting past the text-based interface for a player. Ares is making great strides with both areas. I think it's unfortunately very rare for most people who want to make a game to have both boundless motivation to do both heavy lifting of creative writing work and want to tinker with deployment/configuration/coding on the technical side. Anything that makes either area easier probably would increase adoption proportionally to how painless they are, imo.

Yes, I agree something cookiecutter-like would be great to have for various genres so as to make it faster to get started with a game structure. Ainneve is a step in that direction, albeit slowly moving.

I think there are a lot of improvements that could be done here (certainly on the part of Evennia). But I also think that there is a limit to how much a game engine can help you ('you' in the general sense, not you in particular). We are not anywhere near said limit yet, mind you. But I don't think it's realistic for people to expect to be able to run a multiplayer MMO from scratch without having any technical skills or willingness to pick up such skills. "Just" being creative is all fine and dandy if you have someone else doing the coding, but if you are setting out to make a game on your own you must be expected to actually learn the craft, IMO.
.
Griatch

[Griatch]

@gryphter said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

This raises some interesting points. Are there ways to set up a world so that the players can impact and change it without GM intervention?

This game style is commonly referred to as a MUD
.
Griatch

[gryphter]

Well sure, but I've never been on a MUD where I had a sense of metaplot and storytelling. I'm sure they're out there, don't get me wrong.

It's very true that once you get into the nuts and bolts of what it would be to collect a paycheck to run a game for players, it's not the dream it appears to be on the surface -- 'dream' because of how amazing it would be to focus absolutely on generating content and activity while the bills are paid.

It's not a terribly practical or achievable dream, and as has been alluded to, it almost certainly wouldn't be as much fun as it's cracked out to be.

[faraday]

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Empowering people to create is something every engine dev wants I think. Thing is, unless you want exactly the game mechanic as someone already did that you can then just add a world to, you will at some point have to get down to programming. All we can do is try to make that step easier, but the step will have to be made eventually.

I think you're underestimating the number of folks who are willing to use exactly the same game mechanics though.

Ares isn't just a MU in a box for a single game/genre. I mean look at the games that have been made / are being made with it so far. We've got pirates, modern horror, modern soap opera, modern post-apocalyptic, anime robots, Battlestar, Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, fantasy -- almost all of them done without a lick of custom code.

Storium has a wide breath of games that are done just with their simple card mechanics. PlayByForum/Discord/Tumbler RP uses virtually no mechanics at all.
There is a vast market out there for code-light or pre-made mechanics games.

Where I think we still fall short though is making it easy for the game administrators. Ares goes a long way compared to Penn/Tiny (where you basically need a server admin / coder just to get started) but it's still a long way from Wordpress/Storium point-and-click game building.

[mietze]

In order for me to "make a living" off of a game, I would need to bring in around 75k in my area, which thankfully would still allow the kids to be on state health insurance (if it didnt, probably need to add an extra 10 grand.) This is largely because our house has way more equity than we owe (for emergency purposes), we have retirement and some college savings (plus my college kids will have access to need based $$$)

Assuming that I could deal with 200 PCs now entitled to a full service game, would they be willing to pay me $360/year, per PC, just to make a living myself? I would realistically need to hire staff. Depending on how many, I would need to alter my business license, and be subject to additional fees/collected funds. Luckily setting up an LLC is easy and cheap, in my case I already have one but it's a PLLC so I think I'd get another one.

I mean, it is a lot more work and things to consider than just the fantasy. Would people be willing to subscribe for $30/mo and probably plus if there was staff involved which there would need to be for folks believing themselves to be purchasing a paid game services? I'm sure there are a few but probably not many.

Now, if you were aiming to charge for just a little money on the side, or solely to recoup the costs of hosting? That's more reasonable.

[gryphter]

@mietze I would pay that without blinking. That's not much more expensive than a subscription to Dragonrealms used to be. Granted, I'm not 200 people.

[mietze]

@gryphter as I said, I'm sure some people would. But the numbers is the problem. Could reduce that with ad revenue or little boosts for in game stuff, but in my experience is is where the community gets uneasy about it real quick. And do most game runners want to deal with that sort of nickel and diming? You should probably hire someone who loves it (they are out there) but then that is another expense.

[Apos]

@faraday Yeah, in my mind right now the best approach is to very strongly encourage mentoring and buddy approaches, since I've noticed far and away the people that become acclimated to the hobby and get most involved are the ones that have someone, anyone introducing them and talking them through it in a friendly, patient way. I think it's kind of addressing the symptoms more than the core problems but I think right now it's pretty much the best we got.

@Griatch One important thing that could be missed from my post is I was really only talking a very specific style of MUSH, and this is an important one to know when looking at the design requirements between MUD and MUSH. The MUSHes I'm talking about are ones that essentially have staff acting as personalized storytellers for players, with hands on, one on one development in a table-top type of feel. That just isn't something that scales unless you keep adding more tiers of staff overseeing story development. MUDs, on the other hand, scale essentially infinitely since the environment is automated and could theoretically handle any number of players.

Like comparing say, the MUDconnector or r/MUD or whatever to here, the amount of game owners trying to advertise and push their games is waaaaaaaaaay higher for MUDs than MUSHes for that reason, since there's no real bound on players imo.

[surreality]

One thing I have considered isn't so much a 'game runner/staff' thing, but having a listing of people willing to do X work for others (free or for cash or whatever), but that's things like 'set up a build with descs and details' or 'do some elaborate photoshopping/do character sketches' and similar. Granted, that's as easy as 'set up signup sheet on the wiki where people wanting to freely offer or advertise what they're able to do on what terms', ultimately.

[gryphter]

@surreality This is thought-provoking. A task-based economy that folks could freelance into might very well stand a chance of funding some passion, in whole or part. I'd do building and writing out of things, creation of roster characters, or whatever else for a little extra spending money. I'm sure others would too. It needn't necessarily be a thing where you work for ArxMUSH Incorporated, to pick on a huge game.

[Griatch]

@faraday Actually, I don't under-estimate the power of this - DIKU is by far the most commonly used server of all, probably mainly because it comes with a full game system - vanilla fantasy with classes and everything. It spawned (and keep spawning) games that all feel the same. People patch DIKU with layer upon layer of hackish C code in order to make their games stand out from the baseline DIKU. It doesn't change the fact that the out-of-the-box nature of DIKU has made it a very, very successful engine.

(I'm not trying to compare Ares to Diku per se btw, just noting that I'm aware that providing a playable base game will help adoption). It's quite possible that you are right and that a highly opinionated server is a much faster way towards making people get going with your platform.
I picture Ares and Evennia in many ways cater to different user demographics though. I see Evennia catering to developers first hand. It's their job to in turn cater to players with the games they create. The stuff we add to the core library to help get them going is bonus stuff as far as I'm concerned.
I think (from what I understand) that your primary audience are game runners primarily and developers second. Which are perfectly fine and parallel approaches.
.
Griatch

[mietze]

I also think that it's vastly underestimated the strength of the response that people have when something previously run by volunteers is made for-profit, or where it is expected that the community financially support a couple of professional staff. Having been through that conversion process--it is very ugly. You run the risk of turning off some of your best and most loyal supporters and audience for a new one (which is fine, sometimes it needs to be done).

So it's very important to weight the losses that you will invariably have for the gains you will make. Yes, it would be great to get more under 30s in. Are you willing to say "fuck you bye!" to a huge amount of older people who have been the mainstay and who have been involved for decades, for people you aren't sure will stay out the year, just for the sake of improving your game demographics?

What problem are you trying to solve by monetizing or encouraging monetizing as a whole? Will this lower or raise the barriers to entry both for the person trying out the hobby, and the problems faced by game creators or potential game creators?

The truth is, that while it is important to get new blood in, it's actually pretty important to keep old blood in too. Might not want to shit too much on the nostalgia/current players, in the hopes that you might somehow find the formula to bring in a handful of extra younger people (who may or may not be great assets to the community, just like everyone else).

Personally out of all the ideas here, I think someone creating a MUSH with a theme that younger folks would recognize/respond to is the best one. I know a ton of young players that started trying out new-to-them but old fogey themes because they really got into mushing based on something that they did like.

Also, frankly, 20 somethings are not aliens from another planet who can't relate to older people or who are less capable of trying new things? It doesn't mean we can't/shouldn't adapt to the tools we have now (AGAIN THANK YOU FARADAY, even 10 years ago I /never/ would have thought I'd be able to be working on my own place, and now that is a goal that I can actuall achieve), I love all the incorporation of web based stuff on Arx, ect.

I think continuing those innovations and empowering the young folks IN the hobby to set up /the games with themes that they would like to see/ (and checking them out/supporting/playing there when it happens) might be the best way to get more people in. Rather than thinking they need to be spoonfed. In my experience, they need it less than older people.

[surreality]

@gryphter Pretty much. There are a lot of talented people in the hobby, and the talents are pretty broad-ranging. Giving people a platform to network -- with a few reasonable CYA provisions -- is the sort of thing I'm always keen on.

The number of people who are highly gifted in photoshop and illustration alone is mind-boggling, and it'd be cool to see more games with genuinely custom artwork crowdsourced and provided this way, without anyone getting screwed in the process -- and that's just one aspect of it all.

[gryphter]

@surreality I like this because contributors continue to do so on a volunteer basis, yet are rewarded tangibly for doing so.

[Darren]

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

It spawned (and keep spawning) games that all feel the same. People patch DIKU with layer upon layer of hackish C code in order to make their games stand out from the baseline DIKU. It doesn't change the fact that the out-of-the-box nature of DIKU has made it a very, very successful engine.
Griatch

It also resulted in an endless wave of stock MUDs that people have been griping about for as long as I have been playing.