@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
Stylistic -- MUSHing is not friendly to casual players. People leave you out of plots if you're not around. You quickly lose track of what's going on. And even just a single scene requires a 3-4 hour chunk of continuous time. It's very demanding. Also, it falls into a weird void between writing and gaming, and even within MUSHing people are very polarized about where on that spectrum it falls.
Yeah, that's one of the biggest hurdles - in fact it's one of the reasons I got out of raiding on WoW, since I could/would no longer handle 4-hour blocks of focusing on gaming. MUSHing does have the turn-based element working in its favor (you have a good 5-10 minutes between poses to take care of your dog or do things around the house) but it's still a hefty requirement.
Cultural -- let's face it, we're really not a very welcoming community. We stick to our cliques. We turn our noses up at people who don't play by our definition of "right" (their poses aren't the right length, they do too much or too little metaposing, they don't page before entering a public scene, they want control over their characters, they're too powergamey, etc.) And many games are frighteningly toxic in their culture or staff abuse.
Aside from behavioral culture issues which I'm hoping can be tackled through staffing to the degree any other kind of game can, we also carrying a lot of jargon new players need to swim through.
Did I say new players? I meant all. I've been MU*ing for twenty years and I still don't know wtf MUX, MOO, etc all mean.
Most of us play because we've been doing it for decades and we've got friends who play. But I'll turn your question around and ask: Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?
I think they wouldn't do it, not so much because they'd be mistreated but because they'd be sooo lost. That's an interface thing and I promised/asked to not go into it, but yeah... that'd be the first major hurdle.
Then finding RP would be the second one. The process of finding it isn't easy and many games are simply not frequented enough around the clock - and the etiquette of entering RP isn't obvious, either. I'd not be surprised if a newbie friend of mine entered a scene by talking about his background story for example ("Hello friends! I am a traveller beset by orcs who killed my family and...") and you can imagine how well that would go over.
I don't know that there's a way to learn these things without making every mistake in the book and getting corrected, though.
But yeah, I do think other players would treat newbies well and help them out. Come on, we're not all assholes. I've had a lot of help before offered by people who didn't know me - that's not the problem. Few people will be mean to you until your presence costs them something - until they're competing with you for a rank or some shit - at which point you're probably self sufficient enough.