A healthy game culture

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@greenflashlight said in A healthy game culture:

Vampire is kind of intended as a deconstruction of vampires as a concept, and god knows deconstructions tend to attract fans who totally miss the point and just think yeah man killing people for food is awesome!

To be fair, Vampire was marketed from day one to the people who loved to dramatically wallow and try to be more edgy than one another. Ah, the Vampire LARPers of the early 90s. XD

[faraday]

@ganymede said in A healthy game culture:

I’m sorry, but whereas the majority of gamers may not be dicks I can tell you from almost 25 years of experience that Vampire, as a game, seems to tease out the worst of them.

I don't see how that contradicts my point? Vampire brings out the worst in people. Battlestar games, on the whole, tend to be pretty laid back, friendly communities where most people aren't jerks. One could try to make subtle inferences about the differences between the two fanbases, but I think the correlation is more obvious: Battlestar games are PVE and cooperative, and Vampire is PVP and backstabby. Historical games are another area where they're not generally regarded as cesspools of toxicity. Why? Is it something about the types of players who are drawn to that kind of game? Maybe. But I think it has more to do with the lack of OOC competition.

[tek]

@faraday we definitely need a new battlestar game. Not saying. Just saying.

[Ganymede]

@faraday

Your point was how community is the primary factor. You used your own experience in TT as an example of a competitive WoD game working well.

My point is that community has little to do with it. The combination of the system and the medium turn a great TT game into something horridly toxic. My years of experience with the systems and the medium guide my perspective.

You have to wrestle and purge the shit out. It takes a lot of work to do. And frankly I don’t think it is worth it.

[faraday]

@ganymede said in A healthy game culture:

Your point was how community is the primary factor.

No, my point was that certain systems and themes bring out the worst in people and can contribute to a toxic game culture. Which I think is the same point you're making?

The fact that my specific tight-knit group of friends made it work is not an argument that it will work in general, especially when you have an open game with no control over who comes to play.

I really don't think this is specific to WoD, though WoD might be the most obvious and extreme example. I bet if you took a Walking Dead MU and made it PVP with some folks being the crazy pscyho crew, you'd get a similar effect.

[il-volpe]

I wonder if the conversation here is muddied a bit because "community" and "set of people" aren't really equivalent. I can think of a group of RL people who could be a community of information professionals, a community of gay men, and the community of a table-top game. They're the same bunch of guys, but also three different communities.

[Pyrephox]

I'm not even so sure it's PVP, itself, as a blanket thing, but rather how PVP is organized and run within the game.

For example, when I played WoD games, it felt like the prevailing OOC opinion was that PVP had to end in the destruction or utter submission of one of the parties involved. I think there were even arguments on WORA at the time from pretty prominent players that there was no OOC reason to leave an IC opponent in any position to ever be able to fight back against you - which usually meant killing them - no matter how minor the conflict...because if you did, the OOC assumption was that they were going to get their revenge and destroy your character, and you'd kinda deserve it for not taking them out when you had the chance.

Which did seem to play into an OOC atmosphere in a number (not all) WoD games I was on that, no matter how rare PK was in practice, you always had to assume that any conflict with another character was going to eventually end in your PC getting ended unless you 'got there' first, or managed to make the PC largely invulnerable. So there was a whole lot of IC and OOC posturing about how tough your PC was, how well connected they were, how sneaky/assassiny they were - any sort of 'protective coloration' people could find to put out there. And when conflict did happen, people tended to assume 'this asshole is trying to end my character' and respond accordingly, IC and OOC.

Now, those are only my observations. But possibly the least toxic game I was on was Requiem for Kingsmouth, and I think part of that is because the methods of PVP explicitly expanded beyond 'murder the fuck out of that guy' and had interesting and satisfying mechanics for fighting for territory, etc. (Mechanics that I believe were adapted from LARP rules? Which was a good decision, I think.) There were also some notable de-escalation points of PVP, and reasons to spare people (you could grab a boon from them instead, etc.).

I'm not saying RfK was perfect. People still threw shit fits about stupid things, and there was certainly bullshit on the micro and macro levels. But it's one of the games that really tried to engage with wanting to facilitate a specific TYPE of PVP, and making sure that the mechanics made that feel powerful enough to draw people into using it, without having an end game of 'kill your enemy'.

I've come around to thinking that if you're going to have a game with PVP, you need to be as explicit as possible about the mechanics of those conflicts, open about potential consequences to characters at each level, AND build in 'de-escalation' points along the track that ICly and OOCly incentivize being a gracious victor and not pursuing an opponent's utter destruction.

[mietze]

@pyrephox It also relied heavily on staff intervention, mediation, and quality control. As soon as that was replaced by staff who were not as invested in ooc quality control as far as channeling players' learned and natural tendencies into more constructive pvp it devolved very quickly.

[il-volpe]

@pyrephox It seems like a lot of the PKs I remember and have chatted about had OOC motivations first. Someone saw a chance to PK somebody who pissed them off in pages and get away with it IC, and did it. We all decided to play Let's Hunt and Kill Darke and damn the consequences, he was ruining the game anyway. Ones between players who are friendly or neutral to one another much much more often included either a warning and an out or hiring a third party to do the dirty deed.

[Lotherio]

@l-b-heuschkel said in A healthy game culture:

Tempted to say that if you want to run a genuine pvp game you need to take it all the way and make no illusions of 'supportive community' or 'team play'. And also make it so that losing a char is not a big deal -- roll a new one, get back in the game, this is not the game for long, deep stories.
Which is fine. Again, boiling down to being bluntly honest on the label.

AKA - make a MUD? The only thing to determine: on death is the new char from scratch, is there partial XP return, or go to the temple and lose a few XP/Skills/Whatevers.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@lotherio Yes and no. I came to the MUSHing world from MUDs, and it's not my experience that people are any less attached to characters in MUDs. In fact, almost the opposite -- if they've invested hundreds of hours in grinding skills and gear, they don't want to start over because of a couple of unlucky rolls.

[reversed]

This post is deleted!

[Pyrephox]

@il-volpe said in A healthy game culture:

@pyrephox It seems like a lot of the PKs I remember and have chatted about had OOC motivations first. Someone saw a chance to PK somebody who pissed them off in pages and get away with it IC, and did it. We all decided to play Let's Hunt and Kill Darke and damn the consequences, he was ruining the game anyway. Ones between players who are friendly or neutral to one another much much more often included either a warning and an out or hiring a third party to do the dirty deed.

I think there's definitely an OOC aspect to a lot of PKs. Sometimes, it's because people are trying to correct an OOC problem through IC means (the 'this guy is ruining the game' issue where the game doesn't have a way to say 'this player is actively making the game unfun for a lot of players, can we uninvite them' but it DOES let you just kill any of their PCs who cause a problem until they give up trying to play), and sometimes because people get caught up in the Righteousness of a PK (the 'this guy dumped my BFF - HE MUST DIE' issue), etc.

I tend to think that the most valuable PVP is not fatal to anyone's PC. I'd rather see PVP that focused on competing desires and rivalries where it isn't 'winner take all' but characters could have wins that aren't stable and losses they can recover from - and where IC losses don't translate into OOC assumptions that the player doesn't know how to play/the character isn't competent.

Which, again, comes back to that culture issue and - as mentioned above - staff that are invested in setting up that culture and spending their time mediating and promoting it. And that's a hard thing to find. There's not a lot of people who want to spend their time herding angry, anti-social cats instead of having pretendy fun times.

[Tinuviel]

@mietze said in A healthy game culture:

@pyrephox It also relied heavily on staff intervention, mediation, and quality control. As soon as that was replaced by staff who were not as invested in ooc quality control as far as channeling players' learned and natural tendencies into more constructive pvp it devolved very quickly.

The entire game required heavy staff intervention. From one staffer, at least for the majority of the time.

While it had some good points, it's important to remember just how heavily invested the game-runner was in every inch of it. It's not necessarily feasible for anyone to do that.

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in A healthy game culture:

No, my point was that certain systems and themes bring out the worst in people and can contribute to a toxic game culture. Which I think is the same point you're making?

Then I clearly misunderstood; thank you for clarifying.

My point, succinctly, is that Vampire is a toxic game. Knowing this, it is important to go above and beyond in order to tamp it down and make it playable as a MUSH. Requiem for Kingsmouth is an excellent example, where the game was enjoyable for most but it required almost-unprecedented levels of staff involvement and restriction, all of which likely contributed to its shutdown.

So, if RfK is the level of supervision and maintenance necessary to make the system and setting "work," then the system and setting are the culprits for the failure of games based on it.

[Tinuviel]

I mildly object to the idea that a game can "bring out the worst" in people. People are the problem, not the game. The game is just an excuse people use to be toxic. It's the "what was she wearing" of our little community - along side the actual "what was she wearing."

ETA: I'd also like a moratorium on the word 'toxic'. We have plenty of other adjectives we could use.

[Coin]

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

I mildly object to the idea that a game can "bring out the worst" in people. People are the problem, not the game. The game is just an excuse people use to be toxic. It's the "what was she wearing" of our little community - along side the actual "what was she wearing."

Even FATAL doesn't bring out the worst in people. It just brings the worst people out, which is different.

[Roz]

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

I mildly object to the idea that a game can "bring out the worst" in people.

It seems short-sighted to refuse the idea that different structures and environments bring out different behaviors in humans. Yes, the problem is still the people, but insisting on a sort of universal view wherein all game types/settings/etc. are the same and generate the same results and behaviors seems like it would hamper the overall goal of trying to develop a healthy game culture. There are some universals, but the challenges of different games are -- well, different.

[Sunny]

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

I mildly object to the idea that a game can "bring out the worst" in people. People are the problem, not the game. The game is just an excuse people use to be toxic. It's the "what was she wearing" of our little community - along side the actual "what was she wearing."

ETA: I'd also like a moratorium on the word 'toxic'. We have plenty of other adjectives we could use.

I've seen it enough times and have enough personal experience / data to say that it's incredibly weird to say that the specific games (and their attendant cultures, which is impacted by the subject matter, though not defined) do not in fact have a significant impact on how people behave in the associated environments. While one can hardly blame the games wholesale, competitive games drag competitive streaks out of people, paranoid games draw out anxiousness, and so on.

eta: missed a not. Games DO impact the behaviors of the players, particularly in the course of playing the games in question.

[silverfox]

I have to agree with @Sunny that the game can bring out different aspects of people.

The way the game is set up can absolutely steer people acting differently from the norm.