So, I'm looking at some recent threads and noticing a common current running through them. "Some staff abuse their role as staff, using staff abilities and resources to glorify their own PC; we should discuss the rules/expectations we think should be a baseline that all staff must follow." "Some staff arguably use plot NPCs in a way I think is detrimental to the story; let's discuss the rules we think that all staff should therefore need to follow."

I've been drawn into it, too. But the more I look at that more closely today, the less I become comfortable with this "assume the worst until it's proven otherwise" mindset we seem to have adopted as our community baseline somewhere along the way.

We take the approach upon seeing a situation that we can imagine might be off and default to assuming it is. We culturally seem to go with "guilty until proven innocent" and demand proof that people weren't doing something wrong before giving them the benefit of the doubt, just because someone else in similar circumstances somewhere else has done something we didn't like.

And we try to discuss these things as absolutes. An example of where the assumption isn't true is never a reason to examine the assumption itself; it must either be universally applicable or else it's just "an exception to the rule". A specific example of how an NPC having a relationship with a PC can serve the story may not be a reason to think "maybe saying NPC/PC relationships are bad isn't always true and we should rethink that default assumption", but rather "oh, that's an exception to the rule."

We seem willing to assume the worst, universally; because staff on this other game did things we don't like, we assume that staff on every game will do those things too unless they individually prove otherwise. But an example of where where that bad assumption isn't true? That's the exception. That's "well, maybe that works there, but". It's never a reason to challenge that baseline assumption.

(I think you could argue we do it to other players, too, to a lesser extent.)

And I feel like that isn't a healthy mindset. It's not a healthy world view. And it feels awfully close to a type of judgemental absolutist logic that is way, way too common these days in the real world. "Because some homeless people do hard drugs or buy alcohol when they ask for money, we should assume by default that all homeless people do hard drugs, and make them prove otherwise before we're willing to hand them a dollar." "Because some members of that religion have committed violent acts before, we should assume by default that all members of that religion could be planning to commit acts of violence and make them prove otherwise." And when those individuals can prove in a satisfactory manner that the assumption is false in their case, the conclusion isn't that the assumption itself might be flawed and not quite so absolute, but that this particular individual is "the exception to the rule".

Sure, saying "Because sometimes staffers on games have done shady things with staff abilities and resources, we should assume by default that all staffers who do anything with staff abilities and resources are doing shady things and make them prove otherwise." is an order of magnitude less severe than those examples above; it is unlikely it will lead to literal starvation, or potentially deadly violence. But it's not really a more healthy mindset for us to have, either.

And the more I think about it, the more I find it kind of worrisome that we seemingly have come to just accept this "staff are bad by default and we should make the exceptions prove that they aren't" philosophy as some sort of normalized baseline in the community based on various past examples of folks being lousy, but the examples of people doing otherwise—who prove they aren't lousy—are only ever just "the exception".

No, you know what? Sorry, I'm not actually done. Because apparently I have far more pent-up ire inside me with regards to yet one more instance of something that just happened in this thread than I realized, and—to quote Grog Strongjaw—"I WOULD LIKE TO RAGE!"

(I shall endeavor my best to keep the post productive, as this is not the Hog Pit. I cannot promise that my tone is not going to be somewhat 'spirited' because—as I said—I would like to rage.)

Ark started a thread here suggesting that among the candidates for his team, there were women. He said "if one is hired", suggesting that they're going to be hiring on merits, not that they're going to hire one just to have a woman. He wanted to know how to avoid unconscious biases, and how to provide a welcoming workplace without making things awkward or hostile if the hire happens to be a woman. (Because, shockingly, sometimes the best candidate for the job does happen to be a woman.)

You know what a thread like that does not need? Someone coming in and saying "You should hire the best person for the job. Don't let politics motivate you. If you hire a woman just for politics when there's a man who can do the job better, it will only hurt your team." Which carries the unspoken but extremely strong implication that "the best person for the job" is not going to be one of the women in that stack of resumes, and that if one of those women is chosen it is therefore going to be politically motivated because one of those men could do the same job better. And now suddenly the discussion is shifted from how to make diverse workplaces welcoming to having to defend if the workplace can and should be diverse in the first place; the person has already won, by getting the other group to cede ground.

It is a technique used almost mind-numbingly frequently to derail topics like this, so much so that it's wearing a groove into the collective social discussion. And I've seen it so often I'm honestly somewhat ashamed I let myself fall into that trap with my last post.

Now maybe it genuinely is just an idle philosophical exercise to some people to shift discussion of "how" to "if" instead. But to a lot of us in the STEM fields? It is part of our daily professional life in some way or another, not just some abstract thought exercise.

Please keep that in mind, people, and strive to do better.

Bringing a long-term code project for a game to completion, and being ready to unleash it on a bunch of guinea pigs to test. In particular, I love reaching the point in a system where it's functional and you can start to really tweak it or add new features, rather than still constructing the basic functionality.

One month from my mother finishing chemo. We got back the bloodwork yesterday... and based on the numbers, she is officially in remission!

She has to have this bloodwork done every 6-8 weeks for the rest of eternity, to make sure that number doesn't start climbing again, but for the moment the news is good.

Honestly, the issue is that we kind of tried, as an experiment, to engage with the thread as a primary source of system design feedback when—as @Thenomain says—it was more a theorycrafting thread and not meant for Arx staff. (This one's largely on me, since I'm the one who really decided to try to engage with folks in hopes of getting concrete feedback before redoing the system.)

However, a lot of this thread has not been actionable suggestions, which... well, after all, it's more a theorycrafting and analysis thread, rather than something focused solely on how to improve things to make stuff more fun for players, which is the focus I needed in my redesign work.

(This isn't to say there haven't been some good suggestions in the thread—definitely ones that we'll be taking into account for prestige/modeling/etc. reworking—but it's not the focused type of feedback that I was looking for.)

Further, it's kind of occurred to staff that "let's pull suggestions from threads on a random forum out there on the internet" isn't really the best path, since that excludes anyone on the game who doesn't have an account here from weighing in on the conversation. Whereas there's a system discussions board on the game itself where everyone on game can, well, discuss systems, which makes a lot more sense to use.

(Plus, beyond the system discussion board on game, I certainly try to always be accessible via page when online, as does Apostate. We may not always be unidle—especially me, if I'm working on code, since I can get Very Deeply Engrossed in my PyCharm window—but I usually try to keep an eye on the staff window when online. So there are avenues to offer suggestions that aren't just 'Discord one of the staffers' or something similar.)

This isn't to say that people can't distill ideas from this thread and post 'em to the system design board on game as suggestions—in fact, that would be awesome, so that really good feedback doesn't get missed—just that we really shouldn't be acting like this thread is a good 'main feeder source' of suggestions on system design, when—again, as Thenomain said—the thread isn't really meant for us.

Staff more formally bowing out is meant more because we kind of had been engaging to a degree that some folks kind of had gotten the idea that this thread was the primary avenue of feedback on system design... which it really shouldn't be.

@Ghost said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

@Arkandel I've been in my current IT Ops group for over 7 years now, and here is my advice:

Build a team who can do the job.

What you're in is a Catch-22 with your politics. At the end of the day, IT is about skills and experience. It's a Catch-22 because if you take a female candidate who isn't as skilled as another male candidate, your team will suffer.

Ok, honestly, this was probably not what you meant to come across as, so forgive this minor rant.

But I'm getting really tired of the implication a lot of people in the tech field throw around that if a woman was hired into a technical role, it's because of 'politics', and that there's a man who could've done the job 'better'. I'm tired of people assuming that 'white dude' is somehow the default, and that any deviation from that needs to be justified.

I'm tired of women in engineering positions having to work harder than a man in the same role just to prove to guys out there that we actually deserve to be in the positions we were hired for in the first place. I'm lucky that I don't generally have to do this at my actual job; the 'talking over the woman in meetings' does happen, but the folks who do that are genuinely trying to do better, and have asked the women in the company to please call them out when they do it so they can be more self aware.

But I have dealt with that 'prove yourself worthy of your position' elsewhere. At my current job, I have dealt with it from clients sometimes. I am not the only one, either; every woman in the engineering department has had it happen to them at least once. It's not as bad as it used to be, but that attitude is still out there, and more common than people want it to be.

There's a fairly stark difference between "I'm hiring based on criteria that are not actually related to suitability for the job because I want to look fair" and "I'd like to ensure I am not unconsciously biased in my hiring, and I'd like to know how I can get more diverse candidates to apply in the first place." I read Ark's question as the latter. Which I firmly believe companies should aspire to. That's not politics, it's just good sense.

Because there is demonstrable value in diversity. There are studies about this, and I have observed it firsthand at work. If you have a team of all straight white dudes put into a conference room for an engineering brainstorming session? A group of people with generally similar viewpoints will consistently produce a smaller variety of ideas, because... well, they have generally similar viewpoints. Once you start introducing people of different backgrounds—people who, due to those backgrounds, often look at the same thing in different ways—a brainstorming session produces a wider and more varied set of ideas and approaches.

Similarly, a diverse engineering team means problems that arise during actual development of the particular device we're working on can be approached from several different angles, and we often find solutions in a diverse group that a homogenous one blows past.

The benefits diversity brings to our various engineering projects have been genuinely observable in ways we can measure; the reason the company wants a more diverse workforce is not politics, it's because we get more shit done and make more money because our clients are happier with our work than our competitors.

This doesn't mean you should go "Oh, here's a candidate that's a woman, we should hire her." or "We absolutely have to make certain our engineering department looks like a Benetton advertisement." But it does mean you should work on dealing with unconscious bias. And it does mean you should work on attracting more diverse candidates to apply in the first place, so that the pipeline offers more diverse options anyway.

Because, frankly, if someone thinks that hiring a woman means it was 'your politics' that forced it, because 'a man could do the job better'? The implication that the hiring decision even has to be justified as not politically motivated when hiring a woman, whereas it doesn't when hiring a man? That attitude's politically motivated, too. And those ones are shitty politics.

(ETA: Okay, turns out that was not a "minor" rant.)

iRL, I'm a asexual demiromantic, which is a concise but fancy way of saying "I have zero interest in mashing squishy bits together with anyone, regardless of what bits those are, but I can still feel romantic attachment to people based on an emotional connection".

And in the past few years, I've played different characters with a wide variety of sexual preferences that don't match my own—although admittedly way less male characters than I used to—but it's almost never been a problem, as their sexuality is often not super key to their day-to-day RP. (Save, admittedly, for one character who was bisexual but internally terrified of making emotional ties to anyone, because then she'd feel anchored in one place and unable to pick up and run if she had to. So she played it off as 'I just have fun' and had a rule of "I will sleep with basically anyone once, and never a second time." And for that one character, the strings-free on-a-whim once-only sex with anyone was actually a fairly key part of her never-let-anyone-too-close characterization.)

There's only one situation that really stands out to me where someone was terrible to me about my character's IC sexuality (on which, more later).

However, I have a friend who ends up playing trans women fairly often when the setting allows for it; and wow do they get some flak for that choice in various places. People are like, "This is an imaginary character, why would you do that to her? Just make her a woman outright." "I'm not transphobic, but... that's just such a strange choice. What's wrong with you that you'd want to put your character through that?" and things like that.

And I have also personally actually gotten flak OOCly from some people for my iRL sexuality when it comes up, because there are definitely not a shortage of people out there who don't think asexuality is actually a thing. "Oh, you just haven't met the right person; have you tried online dating?" "Oh, everyone loves sex. There's just something chemically wrong with your libido; you should look into medication to correct that!." "You're just afraid to try it; trust me, I promise you'd love it if you just gave it more of a chance." And so on. (Sadly, this is not remotely limited to online interactions.)

I'm sure many of them even think they're trying to help by basically going "Here, let me assure you that your sexuality isn't a real thing, and can even probably be cured!" Because, hey, they figure sex is awesome, right? But... try to envision telling a gay or lesbian person that their sexuality could be 'cured' by just sleeping with the opposite sex enough times, or with medication/chemicals. It's not a good look.

And when I played an asexual character on a game, I did have someone get OOCly mad at me that my character wasn't up to smash squishy bits even though he was not attached and thus 'up for grabs' and how that was 'unrealistic' that someone wouldn't want sex at all; that's the one incident that stands out in my mind about someone being terrible about my character's IC sexuality. (Bonus that it was one of the few times I've actually openly played my own sexuality as a character, so, y'know, great feeling there!)

So I've definitely observed people being terrible over someone's sexuality or gender identity, both secondhand and firsthand, regardless of whether it's IC or OOC. I like to think that's not nearly so widespread—or necessarily as deliberate—as it used to be, but yeah... there is still definitely some really awful behavior I've seen out there in the RP community in general to trip over.

...also this post was a little bit verbose and rambling, for which I apologize.

Please don't take this as criticism of anyone, but it might help to imagine this whole exchange on a MUSH instead of this forum.

Imagine the game has one of those 'unmoderated' free-for-all channels (the closest equivalent I can think of to the Hog Pit). Someone on that channel shares a story during a discussion, and a staffer—on their staff-bit, the same one they do administration from—remarks, "Maybe this isn't the time and place for that story."

Their intent notwithstanding, I think a lot of players would assume the staffer was speaking as staff.

Now, that's just a misunderstanding, and can be cleared up. But imagine instead their response was, "I thought you were all intelligent enough adults to know when I was using staff voice and when I wasn't. But apparently you're all idiots."

If someone then replied with "Wait, what? No, you're the idiot for thinking that was clear!" and another staffer came in and said "Hey, no personal attacks; leave Staffer 1 alone!" I think we'd very shortly see a thread about the entire exchange in the Hog Pit.

And if they raised a fuss and staff closed ranks, saying, "We'll discuss this internally, everybody please drop the topic", that thread in the Hog Pit would be howling about how staff on this hypothetical game are just defending each other and calls for more transparency or logs of the discussions.

I'm not going to judge whether that's right or wrong—I often feel uncomfortable with the 'attack dog' mentality people seem to adopt in the Hog Pit—but that's irrelevant to the fact that it kind of is what MSB is.

The community likes to talk—a lot—about how staffers need to hold themselves to a higher standard than players, because they have more power and more is expected of them. Like it or not, our mods are now in that position. Even when you're posting as 'just Auspice' or 'just Ganymede', it's going to be seen as a moderator speaking.

Realistically, I think if the mods act like 'just other posters' most of the time, it's just going to lead to pain—the same way that a staffer can't act like 'just one of the players' on a game. By accepting the responsibility of active moderation of the board, you've to some extent given up the ability to act as just another poster; anything you say has the implicit weight of the moderator flag behind it, especially when said as your moderator login.

Okay, so. I think I've finally managed to actually figure out why this topic is bothering me.

I enjoy GM'ing. I enjoy GM'ing as a bodiless omnipotent narrator who sets the scene, and I enjoy GM'ing with a recurrent NPC. But not all enjoyment is equal.

Maybe I find that GM'ing for Susan is absolutely wonderful. Susan always is engaging. She actively throws out things for the NPC to respond to in the scene; she talks about topics other than just whatever favor she wants from the NPC in question. In short, she makes the scene really enjoyable for me as a GM. I look forward to GM'ing for Susan.

Now let's look at Fred. Fred's a nice guy! I don't dislike Fred. Maybe he's even fun to talk with on channels! But Fred... RP'ing with Fred on an NPC is excruciating. Fred is single-minded. When we get into the scene, Fred sits listlessly, poking the NPC with questions and waiting for an answer to fall out, then poking the NPC with another question. RP'ing with Fred is not fun for me. RP'ing with Fred makes me think of the many, many other things I could be doing at that moment. Writing a story. RP'ing with someone else. Cleaning my bathroom.

I, personally, as a GM will run scenes for both of them. I, personally, as a GM like to try to spread plot and RP around. But make no mistake: in this scenario, RP'ing with Fred is not fun, it is an obligation. It is an obligation I have set myself, but an obligation nonetheless.

I want to point out we've also just had a whole different thread where various people spent time expounding on the belief that the joy and pleasure derived from staffing should be reward enough for staff. And now people are saying that staff should be scrupulously fair and give equal access to NPCs to everyone, regardless of considerations.

That if I do not RP with both Susan and Fred precisely equal amounts, I am being a bad staffer and doing it wrong.

You know what you're doing by that logic? You're telling me that if I do my job 'right', my pay gets docked. If my pay is the joy derived from staffing, then RP'ing with Fred is actively reducing my metaphorical paycheck, because I do not derive joy from it. It is anti-joy. It not only does not bring joy, it kills joy that already exists.

Would it be a better hobby for players in aggregate if everyone got equal plot access everywhere? Sure! Is it something we can aspire to? Absolutely. Do I think games would benefit if people held to the guidelines I've put out in this thread earlier? (I.e., pretty much every interaction with an NPC should try to advance story—or at least offer the potential for advancement—whether on a personal or game level, NPCs should never get to be the protagonist of a plot, etc.) Yes. Have I, in the ungodly long amount of time I've been in this hobby, seen behavior on NPCs that I would not personally have felt comfortable doing? Also yes.

But do I get to dictate or demand that rules be imposed on staff? Sure, if it's my game. Otherwise? The more I think about it... no.

The more I think about this more I'm realizing, what's bothering me isn't with the scope of the rules. I think some of what's suggested is maybe overly broad, but there's plenty of rules I think are beneficial. But what's been bothering me on some level is the implication of these rules: that staff are inherently obligated to do certain things, whether or not staff themselves have pledged to do so.

Because it feels manifestly unfair to say "the joy you take from doing this is your reward and payment", then also demand "and also you should do things this way which we have decided is Universally Correct and are guidelines for everyone, regardless of whether it makes you personally miserable to do." That part sits wrong with me, no matter how much we can claim those demands are For The Greater Good.

My corgi when she was a puppy:

My corgi as an adult, pre-wheelchair:

My horse:

Hi.

I haven't been around for a while. And after this post I will likely immediately go back to being not-around. But someone mentioned elsewhere that Discord handles were being thrown around, so...

Packetdancer#4441 is me, in the off-chance anyone was looking for me in the past geological era. Or whatever it's been.

That's all, I guess?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bye again.

@macha said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

And then there's the snob in me, that will be like... "No punctuation? Are you ill?"

Truthfully, if I'm not using punctuation, yes, I either am ill or borderline seriously depressed. If I cannot muster a "Hi!" instead of a "hi" something is wrong to a dire degree.

...which means I freak out when other people are just being lazy or on a phone where they don't want to bother with capitalization or punctuation.

@roz said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:

Mira Furlan from Babylon 5

I hope as she goes to the sea and passes beyond the Rim, she has a chance to say hello to Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas.

Sleep in light, Ambassador Delenn.

@too-old-for-this said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I have bounced from job to job to job to decades because the repetition KILLS ME. I get so bored doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I'm afraid, because my current job is nothing but repetition, and I've just passed the one year mark, and I'm feeling antsy. Its a great company, I could get really far... except I don't know if I'll last long enough to get there.

Belatedly...

This is, I think, the entire reason I love my current job. All my previous job hops were trying to do something new; from data modeling to video game development to cryptography to working at a microchip company to telecommunications to... etc.

But it turns out that being part of what basically boils down to the engineering equivalent of a mercenary company is amazing for ADHD; people run into difficult tech situations their own company can't solve, and come to us to make a working Thing X for them. So I could spend six months working on a video game console, then another eight on a medical device, then six on a satellite, then another six on an industrial sensor array...

I can stay in the same place, at the same company, with the same people, and still be functionally hopping from one thing to a different new one!

@ZombieGenesis said in Dead Celebrities 2020:

Diana Rigg

One of the best parts of Game of Thrones.

And the Avengers.

(No, not that Avengers, the other one.)

@Kanye-Qwest said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

sensory sensitivity is an ADHD thing, yes. I cut tags out of clothes, and I can't wear any tshirt or anything that puts even the slightest bit of pressure around my neck. Above my collarbone, really. I feel like it's choking me. Also, I chew my lips constantly. Which I never thought of as a symptom, before. OH BOY.

Okay, people need to stop making me have "wait, that's another ADHD thing?" moments, 'cause I gotta get actual work done today.

(I always assumed the 'gah, this collar is above the collarbones so I feel like I'm being strangled' thing was just another Random Rachel Quirk.)

I have a partially-done drop-in (well, drop-in provided you have the other Pax<whatever> libraries on which it depends) Ares-style scene system for Evennia that I started writing, uh... like last fall. I just have had no time/energy to really work on it lately.

I probably should finish it...

@Auspice - A Polish artist by the name of Aleksandra Wojcik. Her Artstation page is at https://intq.artstation.com/ — I saw her post that she was open for commissions on /r/HungryArtists over on Reddit, and commissioned her.

I highly recommend HungryArtists if you're looking to commission art.

When you have a character you've invested time and energy in, and then you get some awesome artwork of it, that can feel great. It's true on MU*s, and it's true on MMOs, and I'm very happy with this artwork I got of my FFXIV alter-ego.

(Put under spoilers to avoid smacking people with big artwork.)

***=Aaaaart***

click to show

I... uh. Just assumed most people didn't like layered fabrics, other than maybe sufficiently loose sweatshirt/hoodie/jacket over a t-shirt type thing.

Is that... not a thing for most people? *insert nervously grimacing blob emoji here*