I'll start by saying this: I don't fundamentally approach games as a private space. They're taking place online, where no reasonable expectation of privacy really can exist. So, by extension, if its online anywhere, its not going to be private because by its fundamental nature, it just can't be.

What you are doing by logging into games is taking part in a sort of calculated risk. You're essentially acknowledging that in order to participate you're giving up your claim to true privacy in this matter and that the benefits of a good story and some fun times outweigh your need to keep it all beyond the notice and evaluation of other people.

And that's just kind of life, y'know? You give to get something, no matter what it is. And if you don't want something to be shared online, in any online medium, don't do that thing or say that thing or share that thing.

This is not justifying spying, persay but I do think its important to define what we mean by spying and privacy on games. Dark staff in a private room on grid watching two players typesex at each other? Yeah, that's fuckin' creepy and inappropriate and a violation of a certain fundamental trust that players assign to staff to demonstrate that they have good judgement and not do shit like that. And that to me is really what we're talking about when we negatively talk about privacy and spying on games:

We're basically saying that the staff on this game doesn't have good judgment, which is to me a much bigger problem than just dark watching people typediddle each other.

Watching actions as they take place in IC areas, either as a visible staff member or a dark staff member? I'm less bothered by this. You're in a public grid space on a game and much the same way backgrounded NPCs who are assumed to just be in public ICly with you; it seems odd to me that you draw the line at staff not being allowed to be there and be a bystanding witness to shooting fireballs out your eyes or whatever it is you're doing in a public space.

Years ago, I was staff on a game where NPCs could be used to watch goings on in game. The reasons for that were related solely to this game. It was a RP-enforced MUD and players had a relatively frequent habit of attacking NPCs for their trash drops. It got to be a big problem because while it was a MUD; it was consciously and explicitly designed not to function that way. And that wasn't some unspoken thing. It was written into game policy, so players knew what they were and weren't getting into.

So, when the NPCs were modified to allow for 'spying', it was to monitor people abusing them. The NPCs also were written to defend themselves if they were attacked, but never instigate an attack. (Well except one but the NPC was actually nuts, all its environmental messages made it clear that it was nuts, and that if you molested it, it was going to attack you.) If we were feeling up for it, staff could also control the NPC to RP with people. The players actually liked this because you never knew what you were getting: a dark NPC or a staff piloted NPC who might do more than deliver a few repetitive action messages or muttered character phrases at you before they sold you something or whatever their basic function.

Occasionally, you'd forget to turn off the ability to watch through the NPCs. I never kept it on all the time because many of the NPCs had an IC grid circuit that they wandered and it was spammy as fuck. I'd also like to note that these NPCs never went anywhere private unless a PC player grappled and dragged them into that grid space. And we'd basically have to tell players not to do that and port the NPC back on to a public grid square to resume its wandering around on a limited route.

And occasionally, I'd see things that I didn't want to see: people boning each other ICly in public cafes or bars or stores was usually the thing no one wanted to watch. Places where anyone can walk in at any time for any reason and see this thing going down. So to me, if you're going to get up to something that you shouldn't probably be doing in a public grid space, then... you can't really get weird about being watched.

YMMV.

Just today, I was reading another story on Gawker media about the impotent, entitled nerdrage being hurled George RR Martin's way because he hasn't yet finished The Winter Winds.

There are enough of our brethren that operate with the unhinged notion that Mr. Martin owes them a book on their preferred schedule due to a set of negative emotions that lands somewhere between 'expectations so high not even God can sing in that key' and 'an unhinged grip on the fabric of reality'.

Now, apply that to a pay-for-play MUSH.

Can you even imagine?

People who don't understand the theme and just need a little help to 'get it', aren't really the problem.

People who don't under understand theme and make it clear that they don't want to be bothered, generally have a difficulty with accepting consequences for their IC behavior whatever it may be.

Worse yet, is the above happening and the staff running the game try in heavy handed, shark jumping stripes attempt to drop theme on the game like a tone deaf anvil while all their personal PCs are theme exempt.

The problem too with passive avoidance is that I think its well intended from the avoiders, too. Too often, there have been experiences that go like this:

Avoidee: I keep asking for RP and no one responds. I used to be more involved in plots but I'm no longer included. Do you know why?
Avoider: Uh... wellllll.....
Avoidee: Tell me! Please! What did I do wrong?!
Avoider: Your PC seems to have trouble integrating into RP of x nature/You have a habit of doing x thing and it's made other people uncomfortable/Some other reason delivered as honestly but kindly as possible
Avoidee: <Massive Freakout Melt Down Butthurt Drama Explosion>

It's tough because no one wants to be told they're not fitting in even if the reasons are valid and fixable. It's tough because no one wants to be the one to do the telling especially when you don't know this player and you have no idea how they'll take it and then if you do, you get shot at as the messenger so you're not anxious to repeat that experience either.

A good number of people in our hobby probably struggled with feeling included and socially accepted IRL growing up or even now. They didn't have or don't have the social skills in their offline lives to cultivate a sense of feeling included or popular or accepted and/or they were bullied a lot by other individuals who sensed some sort of 'apart of the herd' quality and went after these individuals, often pretty brutally. So I think now as a adults and as a community we're really reluctant to participate in dynamics that do this to other people in really obvious and on the nose ways, because the line between addressing something constructively and destructively tearing someone down is often very blurry and the topic is just so loaded.

So the person who has alienated themselves continues to do so without understanding how or why and a lot of us understand the how or the why but don't feel like telling this person will actually empower the situation and unfortunately too often bitch amongst ourselves.

So it just gets weirder and divisive as time goes on.

A co-worker just gave me their Pax Prime pass.

Eeeeeee.

I think college is good for some people but there are a lot of people who are going to college not because they think they need to, its because they think they should. Often, its because of applied pressure from family or friends, when the pressure being exacted isn't being at all examined as to why its necessary for this person to be in college.

Does this person really want to be a dentist? Well, then, yeah, college is a necessary thing.

But there are a lot professions out there that don't require college and you can make a comfortable happy living. So I think it just depends on what it is you want to study and whether having a degree really makes a difference. There are plenty of trade schools out there will get you set up and moving towards a comfortable profession, most of these are more manual positions.

But shit, if someone had told me what electricians make when I was in school? I probably would have re-thought the necessity of my needing a college degree.

Dogs In the Vineyard

I am angry because it is unreasonably hot and no one here has air conditioning.

I am angry because some poopstick is going to buy a bunch of fireworks from the rez and set them off into some tinder dry brush and burn down this stupidly hot land.

And we still won't have air conditioning.

In my experience, there tends to be a certain constantly recurring pattern with complainants on games. Or, rather, a certain kind of complainant.

There are definitely people who legitimately do something dumb and have to be talked to because you get a preponderance of logs from more than one unrelated source reflecting this or they're just stupid enough to do it on a channel or in a public area where the staff member sees it themselves.

But I'm not talking about that kind of player. I'm talking about the player who is perpetually tattling on a player or a group of players they've decided is the sole source of every woe on the game, real or imagined. Usually imagined and it usually roots down into a classic case of sour grapes grindy axe because they got outfoxed or outclassed or were socially rejected or not picked for some IC kickball team or some combination of these things (in or out of character) by this player/group.

Asking for logs is a nonstarter because they just don't have them and are working off heresay or the logs they do provide when read by a third party not layering a certain kind of tone in an interaction aren't actually reflective of anything other than the player just not liking the outcome of something. At that point, the error is really more about this case of sour grapes grindy axe that this player has come down with and won't be cured until they use every fit of pique until the object of their scorn is run off the game by staff.

I have a hardline view about that sort of thing in that part of the reason why that kind of person poisons the game atmosphere for as long as they do is because game staff collectively lets them. They don't want to police feelings or social slap fights but in doing so, they empower this player to hold OOC court among other players to rumormonger and witchhunt. The conversation that can avoid this kind of situation probably shouldn't be 'please provide a log'; it really should be 'if you're struggling to just be mildly content with your lot here; maybe this game isn't for you'.

@Miss-Demeanor Why does anyone want a pointy hat position in a game? They are all bullshit meetings, being the social cruise director, and being unable to meet expectations that are put on you by various individuals, even the people who like you a lot and have the best of intentions. It's often just some masochistic exercise in running a mental marathon. Some people flourish in these roles; most people flame out because the nature of the thing sets them up to fail.

ETA: They want them anyway because there no matter how tedious and friendship pyre inducing; a title has a significance. It suggests you deserve the role even if you don't. We all want to feel like we're good enough at what we do in these games to warrant this kind of recognition. It's not solely about ego but that's a big part of it.

@Groth said:

@AmishRakeFight said:

This also works because MUDs are generally hardcoded for combat. Garbage mobs spawn as part of code and you run at them and your PC dies or the NPC dies and if so, you pick up their drops or their pennies or whatever the reward. Or Arrgh! The Ninjapirate attacks you by typing in 'attack Bob' and you either defend or mash your keyboard as hard as possible as you frantically attempt to flee.

The key thing about making PvP work in a MUSH environment is to make sure that the conflict isn't about stabbing the other characters to death, but rather about trying to get some advantage and while killing your opponents might be helpful, it's also likely not.

On RfK this worked by the fact that killing another vampire was against city law, however murdering all their friends, family and businesses was not and torpor provides a good means to prove you could kill someone but choose not to.

The problem that RfK ran into was that the administration of territories, allies, influence etc didn't scale well at 100+ players, which is something a future conflict centred game can solve during the design stage.

I support this best practice in theory. Punch someone all day long if its justified in character. If you're being a heinous shitlord in character, then you should expect that other people's reactions to this behavior in character could very well include getting clapped about the ears for being a giant asshole.

But.

I don't think the practice gets a lot of successful play. I don't think it has a lot to do with scale. We, as a species, are not good at conflict. We're not programmed as overdeveloped mostly hairless apes to avoid the nuclear button in conflict. Socialization and cultural expectations have conditioned us to appeal to logic and reason in order to avoid conflict. A lot of that of goes straight out the window on the internet, though. Honestly, I think the reason why people avoid PvP in Mushes is because its a total pain in the ass to deal with most of the time. One party rarely if ever takes it well and almost any interesting things that might happen IC are totally washed away in the flood OOC anger and upset that generally results.

So all that's left is negotiated PvP which neuters the entire thing. This neutering isn't a bad thing but it does sort of require people to invent artificial reasons why your PC wouldn't just end this conflict, up to and including straight up murder. That might be fun for a while but a fatigue sets in and it becomes a boring sort unpleasant drudgery. There's little interesting things to be had after a certain point if all you're doing is retreading the same toothless bickering and shade throwing in scenes. You eventually just give it up or avoid each other all together.

Lastly, and I think this is key: I recently read somewhere that as people we want the maximum penalty when people wrong us and the maximum of understanding and forgiveness when we do wrong. I'd say this very much applies to MU conflict.

It's a rare player who can say 'yep, my PC is terrible and deserved what happened'. Most are blind to the effect that their PCs behavior have on other people and its often a shock when they're not responded to as a precious and beloved flower even when they're being a rancid asshole. So, when the pushback comes, they are often upset and stung by another player not being in agreement with their perceptions about how they behave in character.

I've gone back and forth on this in my own thoughts for a long time and I don't think there's much of a middle ground for PvP in Mu. You either plunge forth and take it as it comes or just avoid it entirely.

PVP is more of a MUD focus.

This works in MUD because many (but not all) MUDs have thin at best requirements for RP or plot. There are some MUDs that enforce and require RP but there plenty out there that set up a basic 'theme' (i.e. we are in the badlands of Made Up Place-ia where everyone is dressed liked a ninjapirate and slays shit! Good luck!) and that's it.

This also works because MUDs are generally hardcoded for combat. Garbage mobs spawn as part of code and you run at them and your PC dies or the NPC dies and if so, you pick up their drops or their pennies or whatever the reward. Or Arrgh! The Ninjapirate attacks you by typing in 'attack Bob' and you either defend or mash your keyboard as hard as possible as you frantically attempt to flee.

This lastly also works because MUDs either make true player death less likely (your PC respawns in some way) or there's so little basis to form an attachment that you can just make another Loknar The MurderFist and keep hitting things.

This works less in MU* for the opposite of these reasons. MUs are plot/story based and people mostly don't want to be Red Shirt 7 in a plot. Most death in plot is pre-planned; there are much rarer occasions when PCs die because of shit rolls. MUs are not generally hardcoded for combat. The outcome requires a judge and players making the rolls and there's a lot of back and forth inherent to that. MUD code administrates the entire fight based on stats and generates the outcome. If you die, a lot of places temp disconnect you for a small time out window so you don't start screaming obscenities about it on public channels or in pages at the person who killed you right away. MU* death is generally permanent unless your game has some themeatic reason why your PC wouldn't be all the way dead forever and ever.

ETA: I don't know why some of this is showing in italics but it won't let me change it back.

I woudn't mind a GoT mush that focused on some other not terribly yet visited in the GoT verse. A less established part of Esos or something of that ilk. That way, the goings on, in Westeros can shape the game but you're not yoked to events there specifically.

Shakey Graves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4LF7vx9oSk

Bon Iver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWcyIpul8OE

Typhoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg4c0RA2DJQ

@Ghost said:

@Sovereign TBH I think my logical response, at the time, was Jesus what kind of shit did this guy pull?!? It was weird, yeah, and a large part of me wanted to tell them look, I'm an adult, if I said I'm not the guy, I'm not the guy, knock it off, but you know people. Being blunt sometimes quickly turns into OMGURTHEWORST, and I really wanted to RP at the time.

The whole situation came to an end about 3 or so months later when the currentGirl player started to harass me and detail how I was damaging her depression diagnosis because I wasn't doing what she wanted. I then told her, nicely, that I was gonna take a break from rping with her, which she then took to staff about how I was trying to wreck her RP experience.

Guess what? I am probably now either believed to have been lying about being EvilBobRPer, or I am now EvilBob2.

She's the reason for my quote line about ruining your life that one week on a Mu.

I guess I take both solace and the temptation to smoke crack in the notion that we have all ruined it for someone else at some point on a game somewhere.

ETA: Generally, our role in this is often so batshit and convoluted it requires a white board, some markers, and someone from MIT to explain what the fuck you're looking at.

@Ghost It honestly just I think it comes down to the player's intentions and overall theme grasp. There are some players who think dramatic explosion entrances are just a way to flag ST attention or honestly, they think they're being hilarious and don't understand how tone deaf or showboat-y it is. A gentle pow-wow about how its not actually funny or that they have the STs attention because they're in the scene in the first place, is enough.

There are some players who enter scenes like that because they honestly don't grasp the game they're actually playing in versus the one they think they're playing in and that's a theme issue:

The guy who drags a sword everywhere in a modern first world city where people get strangely freaked out about people showing up at Starbucks with their claymore?

The guy who chronically wastes ammo by firing his guns into the air for dramatic effect when ammo is really hard to come by in the game?

The magic user who is slinging fireballs around a shopping mall in the middle of the day, where magic is a veiled/shadow society sorta thing?

That's a theme issue that staff really needs to address and if the player won't amend their actions, they need to be prepared for imposed IC consequences. Sometimes, I think the only way some of these theme refusers learn is the hard way.

The problem too with passive avoidance is that I think its well intended from the avoiders, too. Too often, there have been experiences that go like this:

Avoidee: I keep asking for RP and no one responds. I used to be more involved in plots but I'm no longer included. Do you know why?
Avoider: Uh... wellllll.....
Avoidee: Tell me! Please! What did I do wrong?!
Avoider: Your PC seems to have trouble integrating into RP of x nature/You have a habit of doing x thing and it's made other people uncomfortable/Some other reason delivered as honestly but kindly as possible
Avoidee: <Massive Freakout Melt Down Butthurt Drama Explosion>

It's tough because no one wants to be told they're not fitting in even if the reasons are valid and fixable. It's tough because no one wants to be the one to do the telling especially when you don't know this player and you have no idea how they'll take it and then if you do, you get shot at as the messenger so you're not anxious to repeat that experience either.

A good number of people in our hobby probably struggled with feeling included and socially accepted IRL growing up or even now. They didn't have or don't have the social skills in their offline lives to cultivate a sense of feeling included or popular or accepted and/or they were bullied a lot by other individuals who sensed some sort of 'apart of the herd' quality and went after these individuals, often pretty brutally. So I think now as a adults and as a community we're really reluctant to participate in dynamics that do this to other people in really obvious and on the nose ways, because the line between addressing something constructively and destructively tearing someone down is often very blurry and the topic is just so loaded.

So the person who has alienated themselves continues to do so without understanding how or why and a lot of us understand the how or the why but don't feel like telling this person will actually empower the situation and unfortunately too often bitch amongst ourselves.

So it just gets weirder and divisive as time goes on.

People who don't understand the theme and just need a little help to 'get it', aren't really the problem.

People who don't under understand theme and make it clear that they don't want to be bothered, generally have a difficulty with accepting consequences for their IC behavior whatever it may be.

Worse yet, is the above happening and the staff running the game try in heavy handed, shark jumping stripes attempt to drop theme on the game like a tone deaf anvil while all their personal PCs are theme exempt.

He'll die literally humping your PC's leg, @Cirno

@Thenomain said:

@AmishRakeFight said:

One more innocuous reason is that player behavior does tend to change in front of staff members, in and out of character.

But why?

If this can be addressed, maybe the rest will seem more like a bandaid?

Maybe?

I guess you first have to determine that you have an actual problem. If staff are monitoring @mailboxes, eaves dropping on pages, darkwatching private grid spaces on the off chance that they might see a savory bit of grist, and reading +jobs that they're not cc'ed on just to be inappropriate and creepy, that's an actual problem. That's a level of unacceptable we can all agree is deservedly extinction level event in terms of allowing that staff regime or maybe even the game to continue.

But much of the time, while nebulously strange and uncomfortable, its not really a problem. (ETA for clarity because otherwise this sounds like I'm advocating the above.) It's not really a problem, I mean, if its taking place on a public grid square. At least to me, its really not if there's an awareness of staff presence to observe something or not.

People as human animals moderate their behavior in front of authority figures . The way we behave in front of our boss is differently moderated than the way we behave with the people we hang out with at the bar on Friday nights. While some of this a conscious choice (like boss v. bar friends), for a lot of people there is not a lot of awareness that they're editing behavior based on who is present, most especially when this person is not a peer.

Put another way:

I currently play on a game where there's a dude who is in deep abiding love with his sword. I mean, not really, its not a character affectation that's meant to be twee or cooky. He just drags this damn sword all over the place, often into mundane and public IC spaces where walking into a bar with sword should rightfully make people freak the fuck out. Generally, when staff aren't around, he's pretty into pulling his sword everywhere and on everything regardless if its necessary or wise. Often its neither and other PCs sensibly tell him off IC for it.

If a staff member is not present for scenes, his normal response is to get super butthurt IC and bails. If staff are present, that sword gets pulled a lot less frequently and there's a whole lot less butthurt bolting. I'm pretty confident the player has no self-awareness of the degree to which his behavior moderates when staff is around.