Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?

[WildBaboons]

Putting info on the MU itself does not necessarily make it easily accessible.

For example, at a MU I was recently trying out I was trying to find out the switches for the events system. It took 7 attempts of various combinations (help) and (events) before I finally got the help file for the +events command to come up.

[Ghost]

@faraday I'm not going to wrongfun people for doing it. It's just my personal preference that people make a life of their own rather than borrow that of a PB. My main reason for this is because, over a period of time, the characters blend into immemorable efforts because they were all one shape or another of the same mannerisms and appearance to me.

To each their own, but I've hung out with Chris Pratt and Amy Adams a lot.

As to my decline comment, we didn't use to lean so heavily on PBs and pictures to do what we seek to do through words. I think we got a lot more creativity out of things back then, as well as more variety of concept.

I do believe that some of the negative byproduct of wikis, such as wikistalking and metagaming thru posted logs (the latter being a necessary hazard) have led to a great deal of negativity and hyperbole. Things like the infamous Fallcoast BANG LIST where a guy stalked wikis and make his own wiki pages of female PBs his character planned to sleep with.

[surreality]

@faraday I get where you're coming from on the desc samples, save for one bit. Namely, the second of each pair actually contains more information. If written in the first format, the amount of information conveyed would be much, much longer -- so it's actually a shortening method rather than 'here's why I want to write a ninety-miles-long desc'.

'she has a stubborn chin' is simple, and a lot shorter and cleaner than 'she has a defined jawline, and her default resting expression gives the impression of stubbornness', which is what the first actually conveys. (The previous example, just 'she has a defined jawline', doesn't have this much info available.)

With the jewelry example, both convey that the character is wearing a lot of jewelry. The second gives a lot more subtle detail -- it's 'dumped' on, it's maybe all she's got, it probably isn't well-coordinated and doesn't match or necessarily make sense together, may appear cluttered and overdone, etc. Again, adding all of those elements to 'wearing a lot of jewelry' would expand the one quick line into multiple charmless sentences when one simple phrase with easy inferences will typically accomplish the same thing.

Hopefully that makes sense. It isn't any issue of length preference so much as trying to pack personality and characterization into the words you're using, no matter how few or many of them there are. The more wisely you use them, the fewer you tend to need.

[Sunny]

@ghost

It used to be way way way way way way way way way way way way way worse. The BANG LIST was absolutely terrible, don't get me wrong, but this is in no way, shape, or form worse than it was before the advent of wikis. All of that behavior was always happening, but now it's in the light where it can be seen, addressed, and stomped on. The culture around our hobby is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR less negative and hyperbolic than it used to be. Man, there were people on WORA that cheered on someone posting pictures of aborted fetuses on somebody's damn personal livejournal. Trust me. Things have improved, they are NOT declining.

ETA: Before wikis were used, people had game livejournal communities where the same (and way way way way worse) behavior as happens on the wikis happened. Wikis were a huge improvement for a chunk of people, because now they didn't have to either keep a dummy LJ account or use their RL stuff to engage with games, but instead had a game specific account and identity that was way easier to use and much less risky. People pulled the crap like a BANG LIST back in the day, staff on the game had little recourse. Now, if it's on their actual game wiki, staff has an administrator and it can be immediately addressed.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@sunny
This is pretty much where I'm at. There's a lot of rose-colored glasses going on about pre-wiki MUing. What I remember is lots of the same stuff, only disconnected on player's individual Geocities pages and livejournals. Wikis just provide a community portal for people to do the things they were always doing, and hopefully they'll use the available templates so it doesn't look like ass. Maybe the players disinterested in this stuff SEE it more now, but none of this strikes me as new. Just more organized into a user-friendly platform that actually serves the game as well.

Anyway, my preference is wiki/website, with the caveat that I want to be able to do quick stuff like look up profile/finger information and quickie command references on-game.

[Ghost]

Fair ' nuff. I'm in no way arbitrating what is right or wrong. Just ideas and I'm a fan of prose-before-shows.

[Sunny]

@ghost said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Fair ' nuff. I'm in no way arbitrating what is right or wrong. Just ideas and I'm a fan of prose-before-shows.

I have the same preference. I just don't think that it's a sign of anything declining, because zomg. I cannot imagine what would happen NOW if somebody came to MSB to brag about defacing somebody's Facebook like they did with the livejournal thing.

[Arkandel]

@sunny Well, they wouldn't be on MSB any more, just for starters.

[Sunny]

@arkandel said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@sunny Well, they wouldn't be on MSB any more, just for starters.

Right. The times, they are a'changing. When we compare it to the actual things that were happening in the hobby 15 years ago, there is no basis to claim that things are more negative / hyperbolic now.

[Arkandel]

@sunny I think 15 years ago (or even earlier...) there was just... a sense of the unknown. No one really knew how things were supposed to be done, and that allowed for a lot of things which have been normalized since to not happen today any more.

When it comes to borderline antisocial behavior though the most fertile ground for truly horrid behavior is the promotion of the idea we are all terrible people but only some of us admit it or are brave enough to act on it. I don't know that even WORA started out they way it turned out in the end, but it was coopted by certain people as a venue to try and claim their attitude is commonplace and thus somehow acceptable. We certainly didn't know each other - there was no... history there. No reputation, nothing. We were just letters on someone else's CRT screens.

These days... well, we don't all have to like each other here; I'm sure I'm not some misguided souls' favorite person myself, and I don't cherish every single one of you the same either.

But that doesn't mean we are bad people or that we can't work together to help identify and isolate the fuckheads who sneak into our hobby and try to screw it up.

[Sunny]

@arkandel WORA actually was created by one of the worst offenders of the antisocial behavior. It was a website, and while there were definitely good things that resulted (there was some terrible behavior that was rightfully called out, the calling out being given a platform was super good), in general it was awful. It started out as the sort of thing that encouraged people being harassed in other platforms (livejournal, primarily) and so on. It was not co-opted by those people, those people are the ones that started it all.

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

But different people have different opinions about what constitutes "essential".

And as a game creator, you often have to look beyond your own preferences in order to create a better experience for your players. What I think is a foundation, not the whole of the design.

[surreality]

@sunny It's probably worth a mention that the original creator eventually got called on that stuff when he trolled a game for lols wayyyyyyyyyback many board incarnations ago, and he knocked that off (and started a lot more self-examination/worked toward much more self-awareness after that). More or less since then, he grew up a lot and was pretty uncomfortable even with the kinds of things that were going on on the immediately-pre-MSB WORA, from what I recall, as being pointless, counterintuitive, and damaging.

He grew up a lot faster than a lot of the people who more fully embraced being assholes for the sake of being assholes across the board or for the lols, since 'we have become our own worst enemy' became pretty glaring, and it was pretty much counter to the original intent. And that bugged him.

[Sunny]

@surreality I have not spoken with him in recent years, so I didn't/don't have that experience/context to draw on. I'm speaking to how it all started, not how people behaved later on, but yes, it's certainly worth mentioning that even he grew up. The hobby has matured. It's better. The history people are looking at is TERRIBLE, it's certainly nothing to aspire towards or look at with nostalgia.

[surreality]

@sunny Definitely. He and I have kept in touch some, since I had sent him a silly rant about TS descs that went up on the pre-forum website, and we always got along OK. (It was more silly than mean, things like 'if two dudes with descs describing their dicks as 'the biggest you have ever seen' were to stand in the same room naked, would their wangs magically just keep growing to out-do the other until they blotted out the sun? Don't do this!' and such.)

[Arkandel]

@surreality I still remember the first time I saw an R-rated description. She became a legend on Tyme, years ago, but there were nipples in her description and omg.

There was a scandal around the player in the end which got three staff fired then the game's owner giving up on the game overnight, but I digress.

... Then I played on Shang for a while, and whatever innocence I still had in me was nuked from orbit. Oh, the things I've seen.

[WildBaboons]

Yes. When I made the jump from MUD to MUSH any innocence was lost. You all are terrible.

[faraday]

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

And as a game creator, you often have to look beyond your own preferences in order to create a better experience for your players. What I think is a foundation, not the whole of the design.

Sure. I never said otherwise. We're just talking preferences here.

At the same time, though, you can't please everyone. There are people who won't play on a game with a wiki. There are people who won't play on a game without one. There's nothing wrong with drawing a line in the sand and catering to a subset of people with similar interests to your own.

[Sunny]

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

There's nothing wrong with drawing a line in the sand and catering to a subset of people with similar interests to your own.

This needs to be said more until people start hearing it.

[ThatGuyThere]

@sunny
I think part of the reason for the rose colored glasses was that with things farther from the game, such as random websites and LiveJournal those of us who are anti-wiki didn't have to deal with it.
Back in the day even though some chars had pages and journals just like today some have their own twitter, it was not a general expectation. today a character wiki page is on most games. (All I have seen recently but i don't claim to have seen all hence the use of most.) So unlike in the past I have the added chore of making a pointless wiki. (All my char wikis are pointless because the only info on any of them that is not out of date withing a couple of months is the basic details like PB, DoB, splat, and name.) So while I admit things might not have been better in general as a lazy person I will always desire the path of less work for me.