How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?

[Roz]

I've never experienced a game that was better for the presence of an OOC lounge. Like @saosmash said, just use channels. A lot of codebases even have a way to gag a channel so that it turns back on when you reconnect so that you don't forget.

[Auspice]

I like having an OOC area to go to because sometimes I am not up to actively RPing or I am preparing for a scene, etc. I don't always engage in conversation in said area, so I'd be fine if it was just a Quiet Room.

However, I feel the concept of 'get rid of all OOC rooms because people need to be RPIng not hanging out!' is dangerous. I have been on games that have taken the 'It's a place to RP, not hang out' too far in that they expected if you were online, you were actively RPing, period. As in Staff would begin paging you and hassling you if you were alone in a room on grid. (I bailed super quick the last time that happened. It was a new 'policy' on said game.)

But, in my jaded opinion, I think if your reason to get rid of OOC Lounges to eliminate the problematic element (like people who give play-by-play of RL or who are being dicks to people), you're not going to do anything but drive them elsewhere. Maybe to Public channel, which is fine, but they may end up doing the same on Sphere channels... which is less so (as those are often used to locate RP).

All in all, those problematic off-putting people are still going to be there and you (as in Staffly 'you') are still going to have to talk to them.

[acceleration]

@Ganymede maybe. I'm aware that most mux-in-a-box games have ooc lounges built in by design, and that's fine, but like op says, it's hard to stop ooc oversharing when there is no actual rule. As for making a rule, where do you draw the line between 'so how's it going' and the type of personal life oversharing that drives players away? How do you enforce it without a constant babysitter present? Most mu*s don't deal with problem players until they absolutely have to. I don't see a lot of staffers enjoying adding an additional arbitrary rule to their list of duties, and the ones who would enjoy it are generally not good staffers to begin with.

You can narrow down the channels for this type of communication and some games do make an effort to make it opt-in or push it outside of the gaming platform, but it's very unusual to see mushes do that. Similarly, it is unusual to see players actively asked to stop making running ooc commentary in the middle of an active scene in these types of games unless they get particularly disruptive, or the reverse but related problem of players asked not to overshare the details of their characters oocly when they should be role-playing it instead. Granted, the latter happens everywhere but some games are better at minimizing it, while other maximize it by encouraging posted logs and wiki's full of ic information.

I guess what I'm getting at is that op's complaint only seems to be recognized as a problem by certain types of games which want to encourage certain types of attitudes, and that's fine. I wouldn't complain at all if ooc lounges were removed as I use them to idle, I just think they are a byproduct and not a primary cause of the underlying problem of driving certain types of players away.

[faraday]

@Arkandel said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Aw, come on. Anywhere. Give them personal rooms or 'quiet' rooms they can idle in without spamming each other. ... Then let channels do what they're there for, with a history function so they can be monitored by staff for abuse (as opposed to 'X said Y ten minutes ago' and sending logs back and forth after the fact).

Personal rooms don't fit every game theme, and as previously mentioned I already have a quiet room if you want to opt out of chit-chat. Also you're assuming the history function is enabled, which not all games do.

I think there are far better RP-finding tools than the OOC room - in fact that's probably a mediocre one, and its function can be easily substituted by ... well, a channel. RP-seeking flags, grid incentives, public +events, hell the +where command, these are all more effective ways of finding a scene.

In my experience, that's not the case. I've had a Looking for RP flag in my codebase for decades and can count on one hand the number of times I've seen it used. "Does anybody want to RP" type questions on public often go unanswered when people de-spam for RP... I could go on with other examples but the TL;DR version is I think our experiences are different.

If you don't like OOC Rooms, that's groovy. I actually prefer to hang out in the Quiet Room myself personally because the OOC chat gets too spammy. But there's a big difference between "I don't personally like X" and "X is a net down-side to a game". Some people like OOC lounges, some people don't. As long as there's someplace for people to flee to so they're driven to a more quiet place and not driven off the game I don't see the problem.

[Roz]

@faraday said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

@Arkandel said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Aw, come on. Anywhere. Give them personal rooms or 'quiet' rooms they can idle in without spamming each other. ... Then let channels do what they're there for, with a history function so they can be monitored by staff for abuse (as opposed to 'X said Y ten minutes ago' and sending logs back and forth after the fact).

Personal rooms don't fit every game theme, and as previously mentioned I already have a quiet room if you want to opt out of chit-chat. Also you're assuming the history function is enabled, which not all games do.

I think there are far better RP-finding tools than the OOC room - in fact that's probably a mediocre one, and its function can be easily substituted by ... well, a channel. RP-seeking flags, grid incentives, public +events, hell the +where command, these are all more effective ways of finding a scene.

In my experience, that's not the case. I've had a Looking for RP flag in my codebase for decades and can count on one hand the number of times I've seen it used. "Does anybody want to RP" type questions on public often go unanswered when people de-spam for RP... I could go on with other examples but the TL;DR version is I think our experiences are different.

The Public channel is bad for finding RP, true. A dedicated RolePlay channel or something similar isn't. (And when I've been staffing games with one, we would actively nudge people off if they started using the RP channel for chatter, as we wanted to specifically protect it as a non-spammy channel just for finding RP.)

[Meg]

@faraday said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

@Arkandel said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Aw, come on. Anywhere. Give them personal rooms or 'quiet' rooms they can idle in without spamming each other. ... Then let channels do what they're there for, with a history function so they can be monitored by staff for abuse (as opposed to 'X said Y ten minutes ago' and sending logs back and forth after the fact).

Personal rooms don't fit every game theme, and as previously mentioned I already have a quiet room if you want to opt out of chit-chat. Also you're assuming the history function is enabled, which not all games do.

Oh come on, what theme doesn't fit with a 'personal room'? Are your characters literally /never/ alone? It doesn't even have to be a 'room'. You could have a 'barracks' and have a 'bunk' room for each person off it. There are plenty of ways to work in a place where a character can go just to put their bit without having to be around others that would work just the same as a quiet room but also give the player some breathing room to do other things.

(Not TS. I am talking about like-- When I was on Arx, I idled in my room and chatted on channels, and even @emit'd some object formatting to my room to see what I'd get.)

[faraday]

@Meg said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Oh come on, what theme doesn't fit with a 'personal room'? Are your characters literally /never/ alone? It doesn't even have to be a 'room'. You could have a 'barracks' and have a 'bunk' room for each person off it. There are plenty of ways to work in a place where a character can go just to put their bit without having to be around others that would work just the same as a quiet room but also give the player some breathing room to do other things.

Creating an entire MUSH 'room' for a bed seems a bit weird to me. There have been several post-apoc or war themes where you don't have any real privacy. There are RP Rooms for off-grid areas if you want to find a supply closet or something for whatever reason.

But hey, if you want to make bunk "rooms" or places or whatever for everyone just to avoid an OOC lounge - go for it. Someone asked what value OOC rooms might provide and I answered it. I don't really care what other games do.

[SG]

I was thinking about giving each character a little object that they could hop into for a private area something like this. From a coding perspective, is there anything that could go haywire with this sort of thing?

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@Roz said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

The Public channel is bad for finding RP, true. A dedicated RolePlay channel or something similar isn't. (And when I've been staffing games with one, we would actively nudge people off if they started using the RP channel for chatter, as we wanted to specifically protect it as a non-spammy channel just for finding RP.)

I'd never experienced a dedicated Roleplay channel prior to one of @Roz's games, and my experience with it was overwhelmingly positive. It was strictly policed so it didn't devolve into chit-chat and was only used for finding RP or responding to requests for RP. I really wish more games did this. Public channels are wastelands where RP requests go to die, and there's no way to tell when a player tips a 'looking for RP' flag like Arx has unless you're constantly spamming yourself with +where. I'm pretty aggressive about paging specific people when I want a specific scene, but sometimes I do just want general RP and idling in public or sending out a request that'll get lost in spam isn't the ideal way to get it.

As for OOC Rooms, I very rarely use them as a place to chat. When I idle in them, I treat them like they are a Quiet Room (if I'm not in the Quiet Room it's because I was too lazy to take the extra step to go there, heh). I guess I'm agnostic about them. I appreciate places to idle when I'm working, prepping, or occupied with other stuff and can't RP, but I'd just as soon it be a private space or a designated quiet space where there's not a ton of chatter.

[Bobotron]

@SG
I mean, that's no different some someone @creating an object and setting it enter_OK and hopping into it. You might run into them forgetting where it is (and thus having it randomly on the grid) or not knowing how to set it up correctly (which, if you want it to be a private/no nothing room, just enter'ing it is fine). We used to do that for IC personal dwellings on games where building was locked down.

Myself, I think there's use in an OOC Room as a place to wind down/be between scenes; the whole 'backstage' thing mentioned previously in the thread is a great example. What seems to be the PROBLEM is not the OOC Room itself, but peoples' culture and concept of it. People need to be willing to police themselves, and this probably should be implicitly said, not just staff going 'hey, stop, that's a topic that's not cool'. You're never going to get a topic that is weird or divisive, like politics, that everyone has the same views on. Change the culture and fix the symptoms.

Besides, if you don't have an OOC Room? There will be points were people are on the IC Grid, idling, and visible on +where... and that defeats the purpose of marking places IC and, assumable, places they can go to RP direclty and randomly, which is what @faraday meant with her comment.

[Wavert]

I think most people in the hobby-at least on the places I've frequented years, expect to have a sense of community on a MU beyond just the part where you 'play the game'. I think, if I took some of the earlier comments in this thread as intended, the idea might be that if you don't have time to RP you shouldn't even sign on to the game in the first place. I feel that's more a sentiment more suited that MUDs (If you don't have time to xp/craft/whatever, then indeed why are you getting on?) but against the spirit of MUSH/MUX, whose whole purpose is to have a more a social experience in mind for the player.

So that's why I still like having an OOC lounge /in addition/ to channels, to provide that sense of OOC community around the game. In my experience RP happens when people hang out OOC, find folks they like, and talk about getting a scene going rather than wandering the grid and just happening into it (I don't think most games are big enough for that to be viable anymore). Players want to hang out with one another in that capacity I find, so if you remove it they're just going idle on the grid in more selective hangouts instead, and I'd say I've encountered "The grid should really be IC activity only" as an attitude among staff way more than "People should only log on if they're going to play the game".

Anyways, the point of the thread wasn't to discuss whether or not people like OOC lounges on a game, but how to deal with certain people who, frankly, abuse them (along with channels) in a way that is not easily flagged as breaking any sort of hard rule.

If I had to boil it down I suppose it's about something more fundamental on games: How do you discourage the lonely, attention-seeking person a MU always seems to attract from engaging in negative activity in the OOC chatspaces of a game? I have seen people who pretty much only have ever negative things to say (Talking about a video game? Here's why I don't like that, and I'm going to derail the whole subject about why Thing In General does not work for me. TV show? Same deal. Had a fun scene? I had fun once and it was terrible). They can do this on a public channel as easily as an ooc channel, and it in general brings the mood down without edging things over into nebulously defined toxicity because some people who don't know better will just engage them on it while everyone else throws their hands up in frustration and quietly retreats into pages or other more private places where they can vent about the venter.

I like having a community on the game, but I've seen so many instances where someone takes what is meant to be a playspace and turn it into their critical outlet for whatever they can't deal with or handle in life, and just wonder if there is any way to cut that off without making people feel like they are overly policed.

[Ganymede]

@Wavert said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

I like having a community on the game, but I've seen so many instances where someone takes what is meant to be a playspace and turn it into their critical outlet for whatever they can't deal with or handle in life, and just wonder if there is any way to cut that off without making people feel like they are overly policed.

I got this text from someone yesterday who said, basically:

"After taking a break from my phone yesterday, I decided that I need everyone to invest more time in their friendship with me. I can't do it on my own."

The thing is, I barely ever spoke to this person. I don't even know how the fuck they got my number; I know who they are, and I know why they could have her number, but we never hang out and I never bothered to get to know her. Because I didn't want to.

A part of me wanted to text her back and point out how unreasonably narcissistic it was to demand that any friend invest any time into anything because of your needs. Part of me wanted to shake the fuck out of this unwitting idiot who doesn't seem to realize that I don't know why she bothers.

But if I spent my life fixing the lives of people that simply demand it without payment, I wouldn't have time for the people I actually care about.

If you want to be part of a local MU* community, you don't need an OOC area to do it. How about just chatting like a normal, well-adjusted human on channels?

[Wavert]

There is nothing about what I just described that cannot (and does) just as easily happen on OOC channels as a lounge. I really don't think there's a difference and it feels kind of like splitting hairs instead of talking about the actual issue, frankly.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Gilette said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

If you log on, you should be there to play. I'm not actually sure what the purpose is with these spaces beyond some kind of thought that games must have a place to "hang out."

While I will agree most OOC rooms/lounges whatever you want to call them are pretty bad places and even the best of them have very toxic moments. I do see them as serving a purpose.
First and most obvious they provide a place to park your bit while you check boards, handle any job stuffs, and read mail. True I can do these from a grid room but often I log on when I have an hour free to do things like that but you really can scene in a hour of time, so if someone entered the room I would have to be all like sorry not here to RP just do other things and feel like an ass, the OOC room solves that issue. (So would a private build but I rarely make one of those on a game unless my char runs a business or something.)
Second I am one of those people that thinks creating a OOC game community is very much a necessary and good thing on a game. The OOC lounge is one way of facilitating that, one change I would make is that I would have the base +ooc command drop folks in the quiet room and then have the ooc lounge as an exit off there. So people just wanting to leave the grid for a bit can do so without being annoyed but those wanting to chat/ have a bs session/ what have you can do that with only the added effort of one command.

[Arkandel]

IMHO.

It's very hard to assign blame to something with as unquantifiable an effect as the OOC lounge on a game. Is it that they 'become trash' due to their design? Or would anything replacing it - such as the public channel - under the same culture and staff have become the same thing? Maybe it's better to at least give an outlet to toxicity so the administration is aware of it as opposed to it happening in pages and Skype?

Perhaps?

But the fact is if there are threads asking "how do we keep $thing from becoming trash?" where enough people are scratching their heads for an answer, combined with the secondary facts the $thing in this case doesn't have a quantifiable upside to it either, probably suggests it's safer to scratch the notion.

[surreality]

@acceleration said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Similarly, it is unusual to see players actively asked to stop making running ooc commentary in the middle of an active scene in these types of games unless they get particularly disruptive, or the reverse but related problem of players asked not to overshare the details of their characters oocly when they should be role-playing it instead. Granted, the latter happens everywhere but some games are better at minimizing it, while other maximize it by encouraging posted logs and wiki's full of ic information.

Here's the thing: the games that post logs and wikis to share information do not consider sharing information OOCly a problem, and not everyone agrees that it is one.

@Bobotron said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Myself, I think there's use in an OOC Room as a place to wind down/be between scenes; the whole 'backstage' thing mentioned previously in the thread is a great example. What seems to be the PROBLEM is not the OOC Room itself, but peoples' culture and concept of it. People need to be willing to police themselves, and this probably should be implicitly said, not just staff going 'hey, stop, that's a topic that's not cool'. You're never going to get a topic that is weird or divisive, like politics, that everyone has the same views on. Change the culture and fix the symptoms.

This is pretty much my take on it. I have a 'no RL political discussions' rule for the place I'm working on, for instance. It isn't just 'keep it to designated areas', it's 'no discussions of current RL politics, period'. Want to discuss the politics of the era of the game? Have at. Want to have that same argument about things we can't escape anywhere else on the internet? No, sorry.

Heavy-duty PDA is another issue in OOC lounge spaces (and channels generally) and that has its own designated space as well. I am not inclined to be the person who says, "Ew icky gross don't do that!" but considering how genuinely uncomfortable it makes many people, disallowing it on non-Adult public channels and in the OOC lounge gives players a space free from those antics pretty easily. There's an 'adult lounge' to go with the 'adult channel'. I don't mind if these things go on generally, but I am not keen on them being crammed down everyone's throats, everywhere. IC is IC -- if people are going to be lewd or snugglefucky IC it can be dealt with IC -- but OOC, that stuff's gotta get corralled off of channels with other purposes, because it quickly diminishes the usefulness of those channels and/or spaces by making others uncomfortable or just drowning out useful content.

...so some of us make rules. I am a tyrant, though. I even made a 'no snugglefuckery ever from a staff bit' rule. Of course, to me, that's common sense, since there's no better way to create an appearance of favoritism than to be engaged in snugglefuckery from a staffbit, even if it's only directed at other staffbits. And you know? That is not what staff is there for. I have never, ever been so uncomfortable as being on a staff that creates 'cuddle piles' in the staff room or spams half the staff channel with glomps and licks. Want to talk 'problem behavior'? Whoooboy, that one is a real can of worms. (Civil and respectful is important; so cuddlyfluffy snookum-boo-boo-kins your teeth rot to aching nubs in seconds and everything rings so shady and false and high school fluff-my-ego game... is bad news for many reasons.)

[ThatGuyThere]

@Meg said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Oh come on, what theme doesn't fit with a 'personal room'?

Off the top of my head Battlestar Galactica after all look at the show unless you were fairly high up you lived in a communal space.

[Wavert]

@surreality said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Here's the thing: the games that post logs and wikis to share information do not consider sharing information OOCly a problem, and not everyone agrees that it is one.

OT from the thread, but straight up this. The MU cultures I come from (anime BS games mostly, but sometimes comic games) have pretty much /always/ operated under a sense of IC/OOC transparency where you pretty much know OOC if someone is secretly a werewolf because they put "Is secretly a werewolf" on their wiki page or finger profile. This is considered a good thing because with that knowledge you might identify hooks for your own character you otherwise wouldn't have known about and can then discuss with the other player come cool ways they could interact/develop a plotline. In general you're on the honor system for not 'metagaming', which I would describe as immediately figuring out on your own that said character is a werewolf/spy/alien because you happened to see it in their ooc files.

I have been on games where people are /incredibly cagey/ about sharing IC information OOC and it is a weird experience for me, like "American visiting North Korea" weird.

[surreality]

@Wavert Yeah, pretty much my take on it, too. The stuff I'm working on now is pretty over the top on transparency re: characters and the game world. There are spoiler tags people can set up for the folks who want to preserve secrecy for themselves, but otherwise, almost everything but alt data and complaints are public information. World lore? Character sheets? It's all out there, because I want people to be able to find the RP they want. That's easier to do when you have information about what that is, and can brainstorm up something fun to do together.

I've seen people use this to good ends more than abuse it for bad ones. The bad eggs can be handled if necessary.

[Bobotron]

@Wavert

American in Noth Korea

Holy shit, that is the BEST Analogy. The BEST.