Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed)

Ghost

@bored Samurai Cop is a proper noun. The S and C should be capitalized. Samurai Cop is a person.

Understanding this is the first step to understanding why.

Edit: I'm stopping to re-rail the thread now

bored

Ok. I'm pretty sure you're more successfully derailing her thread than I am now, at any rate, but you do you.

Ganymede

@bored said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

Again, while you insist on continuing to read my reference to a very common and obvious MU trope as a personal accusation that HEY GUYS SURR IS CORRUPT, I can't help you.

You're not very good at gaslighting; no one's buying it.

Your truism isn't a truism. It's neither Polonian nor remotely anecdotal. Your statement regarding snowflakes may be true for you and some others, but it clearly isn't for others. You can accept that people will push back against your version of existence or not, but you ought to accept that people's hackles will arise if you suggest that special snowflakes are going to be staff's friends or staff themselves.

That said, I'm a bit leery of the idea myself. In my experience, games that have mundanes (non-narwhals) and specials (narwhals) attract staff favoritism accusations and acts. I agree with you there. I'm willing to give @surreality and @Coin the benefit of the doubt, of course, but I'm wary.

Coming up with a system will be difficult and require careful balancing.

Arkandel

@Ganymede said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

That said, I'm a bit leery of the idea myself. In my experience, games that have mundanes (non-narwhals) and specials (narwhals) attract staff favoritism accusations and acts.

How so in this case though? If all of them are equally available without special approval?

bored

@Ganymede Oh cool, gotta continue the derail for the sake of the hivemind pile on, right! I mean, we'd stopped talking about it and were making jokes about mermaid sex, but no, it's definitely more important you come in and go for round 2, where I'm not simply calling her evil and corrupt, but now I'm trying to make her question her own sanity? Cool story.

Re the part of your post that isn't nonsense, sure, some people might disagree. I think a lot of people don't, especially based on some prior threads on this topic. You can even reference some of the recent Star Wars ones, if you don't want to dig out the more meta oriented versions. In general, the hobby has very little faith in 'staff picks who gets to play the speshuls.' Clearly even @surreality is somewhat aware of this difficulty, given her above clarification on who gets what (that makes your whole comment pretty unnecessary and a very big derail - good work!)

Misadventure

JFC.

Are the exotic races going to be known by how they call themselves, or by how another culture/language refers to them? (See red skin for First Nations as an initially accepted misname that worked anyway).

Do they all belong (in their own minds and or in land dwellers minds) to some category, other than Sea Folk? Like all blessed or ruled by a certain goddess, a common origin event, or just common abilities like the ability to walk land and sea?

ThatGuyThere

@Roz said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

. I mean, do what you want and decide that the thread OP can't dictate what you can or can't reply to, but don't be surprised if @surreality doesn't want to respond to stuff outside of the questions she was specifically posing.

This is how I feel about any thread, this is a public forum, when you start a topic you it is pretty much "you pays your money you takes your chances"
I completely support Surr starting the thread to ask questions and try to get the answers she desires but I also completely support Bored commenting how he chooses on the topic of the thread even if iti s not the direction the first poster wants to go. Much like any conversations just because you start it does not mean you control it. If I start talking to my friend Joe about football but say I only want to talk about the Giants, it is really not out of bound for Joe to bring up the Jets or the Dolphins or <insert a list of the other 29 NFL teams here>

Edit to add: This is not anything against @surreality or the game idea but unless and until the mods post something that changes this, those that start threads here have no special powers over controlling what gets posted in them.

Ganymede

@Arkandel said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

How so in this case though? If all of them are equally available without special approval?

Much like the practice of law, you really can't stop people from making unsupported accusations that are actually not true.

bored

And much like in real life, ~~argumentative people on the internet~~ lawyers casually make up their own versions of events and timelines to suit their arguments and defend their ~~friends~~ clients.

But I know, we have to believe you when you do it. You're a professional argumentative asshole, unlike the rest of us hobbyist argumentative assholes!

Misadventure

So you're saying the reply was framed to suit their end goals. Even if the end goals weren't necessarily the same as yours.

The Court of the Air, from the Jackelian series, had a crustacean people called the Craynarbian. I suspect it is the term used by humans, in the one or more of the human languages.

surreality

@bored said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

In general, the hobby has very little faith in 'staff picks who gets to play the speshuls.' Clearly even @surreality is somewhat aware of this difficulty, given her above clarification on who gets what (that makes your whole comment pretty unnecessary and a very big derail - good work!)

That everything is open to everyone has never been remotely secret or obscured.

That game I rant on about doing as much as possible to take power out of staff's hands, and make sure the only staff only info is alts, IP info, the resolution of plots in progress (by players or staff), and complaints to remove as much of the power disparity between staff and players as possible? Yeah, that'd be this game.

That game I rant on about being open sheet? With all sheets on wiki, where if and when anybody changes any stats on it, absolutely everyone can read the page history and see if there is any funny business going on? That is this game.

Yeah, totally how shit goes down when somebody's keen on playing favorites: make absolutely everything as public as you can so if anybody has something shady on 'em, the whole world can see it.

And no. I was not joking around about mermaid sex, because frankly the initial gif thing came off pretty rude and dismissive in combination with all the negativity. I gave an answer because sooner or later, someone else was going to ask again, and like I said, I prefer to only answer something once whenever possible.

I am also still not buying that it wasn't an accusation. If it was a concern, you could have asked a question about accessibility instead of slinging that shit. No, I didn't ask @Ganymede to bring it up. No, I still don't buy your logic. That the guy who pulled this (confirmed, btw) is the one upvoting you there? Should maybe tell you something about how you're coming across.

bored

@surreality

I started typing a peacemaking version of this, but reading your post another time... I can't even begin to feel like you care about re-establishing civility. So I will be more brief:

I am not familiar with your post history. Your post here did not include any such information.
I support some of your stated transparency concerns.
I was joking around with the gif and subsequent posts were an attempted return to levity. It was intended in the spirit of 'lulz, we MUers and our TS.'
Based on everything else, you will not believe the above. I suppose the ~~paranoid~~ likely and reasonable alternate theory is that I was pre slut-shaming your game to defame it so no one would play there! In b4 Ghost.
Believe what you want about my 'accusations.'
Or, I dunno, try reading comprehension. The 'accusation' is a parenthetical, and the conclusion of that sentence is that everyone will probably be allowed to be fishmen.
I am apparently now accountable to the posting histories of people who upvote me. Does this work in reverse? Can I upvote your stuff elsewhere, and that means you support me? (also, it means several people who dared express any kind of agreement with me in the thread are also terrible people by association, they better watch out!)
But seriously, you're monitoring upvotes and care enough about them comment on it? Maybe take a break from the internet popularity arena.

surreality

@bored Fine. I'll go point by point on this.

I've been yammering on at length for about a year or two now about working up a wiki-based system that would, because it's the way wiki works, provide incredible measures of transparency. Essentially, even XP spend logs would be visible, since every change to a sheet would be viewable by all and sundry. I also really like the idea of creating tools that enable players to access to and ability to add to all of the game info other than the specific resolution to plots-in-progress, because nothing sucks harder than 'no you can't run that cool thing you put a lot of thought into that would be piles of fun for a bunch of people because OMG GAME SEKRIT THAT CANNOT BE DISCLOSED, because this is the ultimate in suck. I get yelled at about this enough that I figured this is not exactly a mystery or secret to anybody.
Cool!
No, slut-shaming isn't the concern at all. People are absolutely going to go there, and... honestly I genuinely just don't care if, when, or how they do. There's a 'don't be a slut-shaming douche' policy file on the game, but the bigger and more important file on the game is 'please do not make us ever have to care about what TS you or someone else is having, it's not our business and if you're not one of the people typing it it is probably not your business either'. Will there be notes on how/if/when/why various non-human things reproduce? Probably a sentence or two. It can be summarized pretty easily: there's one kind of fishypeople that has a snowball's chance in hell at interbreeding with anything human because they're the closest to still being human themselves, but it's still a pretty slim chance. This is the Lovecraft stuff in total: the concept of something akin to the Deep Ones bribing a human society with shinies for broodstock and slave labor. Translated, that means this location is 'the most recent place where the thing that directs that shit decided to go about it', but since it was a few hundred years back by now, there's already enough of a population of the fish things to self-sustain for the most part and as that happens, the inter-compatibility drastically fades. (This is also because the first time somebody goes all 'sweet and precious human hybrid merbaby d'awwwwww' all over the channels and drags it into every scene on grid I might actually have to shoot myself in the head; we only have airsoft guns in the house, and that would take a really long time to accomplish the desired end.) That's the sum total of the Lovecraft inspiration, other than the really old mer-things that are, after thousands of years of this crap, really pretty good at making shiny objects that are useful to bribe us greedy humans with. No end of the world, no giant tentacle gods, no Cthulhu (unless @Coin still wants that as a staff name), no Misaktonic University, no Necronomicon, just that vague concept, which is a variation on the Innsmouth/Merrow/Deep Ones theme without any the other Lovecraft universe dragged screaming and unwelcomely along with it.
I'm fine with that explanation. I'm also a little frustrated that the first words posted were 'hey, I am not crowdsourcing all the things, please don't do that here, when stuff's ready to be discussed I will happily post that' and immediately... nope. Since part of what I'm doing right now is trying to determine, specifically, how to write directions on the various wiki forms so they'll be as fool-proof and clear as possible, this is especially discouraging, really. Do you all know that? Naw, but dang, if somebody says, "I am focusing on specific questions and am not interested in everybody's universal game wishlists or demands for how things must be or all is lost", it is pretty irritating for that to be more or less the first pile of stuff that appears. Have I been my own worst enemy in this thread somewhat? Sure, and I'm cool letting that stand and letting people draw their own conclusions. It is also a case of 'being your own worst enemy' to completely disregard things like the above, because usually, if someone says, "I am not prepared to go there, when I am I will let you know," and you still go there? You are, actually, being somewhat disrespectful of what's being asked (which is not a good sign) and potentially being a self-important 'I'm an exception, clearly' sort of dick. When this behavior occurs on a game, or pretty much anywhere else, there's a reason people roll their eyes and groan, why it makes everything take ten times longer than it needs to, and why it makes what should be happy fun exchanges of ideas an exercise in frustration and annoyance. This is like going to the annual business budget meeting and insisting that before anybody can get down to brass tacks of discussing ideas to improve the budget, everybody needs to get their uniform sizes for the company softball team to the guy in the mailroom that's going to pick them up next week. Conversation will wander where it will, but don't be shocked if the people trying to discuss the budget at the meeting just sorta stare at you with an irritated squint.
If we're going to talk about paranoia? The assumption that staff is going to give a pile of perks to their friends before there is even a game or before there is even an actual staff is pretty high on the list. Here's the quote: "(and everyone will be magic whatsits unless you make them snowflake staff-friend only)". Did it ever occur to you that there might be magic things human characters can do that fish-things can't? 'cause that's a thing. Or that there might be drawbacks to being a fish-thing that not all players may not feel are worth it? 'cause that's a thing, too. Nope, just the race to all the cliche assumptions. There is a reason it is annoying to have the worst assumptions slung around, and have to sit here for hours on end trying to say, "Uh, no, there's no Cthulhu... " because that shit is being slung around so much and so on when I would really rather be getting shit done so it can be shown to people and the actual issues with the actual material can be addressed, not this fear-based mental construct of what it surely must be or entail. If you can't understand why that's annoying, I can't help you, and you can keep calling me defensive, paranoid, desperate to be popular, or whatever else.
Nope. But when the person who decided to upvote your attack posts is someone who has admitted to actively trying to harass me over the past few days? Maybe that's something to take into account when it comes to how you're coming across. (The moment I mentioned it, he apparently upvoted more or less every other post in the thread -- seriously, that is a bit more the target you're looking for in terms of people being hyper-reactive to that sort of thing. Also, frankly... creepy as fuck.)
If I was worried about that, I would have deleted this post instead of saying, "I'd really appreciate it if this could be locked, I'd delete it but if people want to review this thread and decide I'm an asshole because of it for some reason, it should be left on the record for them to do so." Definitely the behavior of someone desperate for approval and afraid of criticism, to be sure. (Again, with the accusations and assumptions, though. Dude, seriously.)

bored

@surreality

(Intro deleted, it was mean and I wrote it without really digging through all your points).

Again, that's nice. but again, I'm not familiar with your history. It makes the fact that you think I have such a hateboner for you all the weirder because I'm pretty sure we've barely ever interacted.
... Ok? I mean, that bit of text seems like it belongs in a non-derail post, as it's stuff about your actual theme. I posted the gif because the thread made me think of that and I love Futurama more than probably anything ever. Some of the people who've met me IRL can attest to my 'Good news, everyone' notification sound.
I think the numbers stopped lining up and I'm not sure what you're referring to. My intention has never been to derail your thread, and I felt my initial reply was indeed on-topic (because again, 'I don't like fish people' seems a relevant answer to 'What fish people do you all want most?'). I disagree that I'm being disrespectful of you. If anything, you're being somewhat willfully ignorant to how a forum you spend tons of time on works. Other posters have put it better but posting here is an invitation to fairly free for all conversation, and you've surely seen it 1000 times before. You may not be asking to crowd source, but you're talking to us, so we're going to talk back, and we're entitled to our own opinions, which you may or may not find valuable or total garbage. The good news (re: your wiki) is that your wiki is not WORA 2.0 and you can set different expectations there. Beyond that, will say that I am not trolling you, though I am (at this stage) effectively trolling the people who think they're defending your thread from derails by derailing it much worse themselves. Between the two of us, this would have probably ended 2 pages back.
You know what, I'll admit to the first part of this one. I am paranoid about staffers being trustworthy. I totally am. I have basically zero faith in anyone who isn't a years long friend, because I've seen far more shitty behavior in the hobby than I have good. And those close friends I trust? Well, that just goes into the nepotism thing, which I know even I'm not immune to. It is exceedingly hard, even for people who are on the whole ethical, non-asshats, to tell friends no when they make small requests. But these add up and the result is a culture we're all familiar with. This is why I have a pretty hard line stance that boils down to 'features are always nepotism'. Me and Gany fought about it in another thread (she said she's OK with someone casting a MU like a play, I think that sounds like nepotistic BS too). But yeah. I have little trust. This probably fgures into the 'does not play' thing from the Meta thread, too. But all of that said... I still wasn't accusing you, @surreality, the specific person distinct from the general culture of MU-dom, of anything. Again, that sentence ends with the assumption that you will let everyone play what they want (reading!) and the paranoia is a parenthetical aside.
That's nice. I believe that he was upvoting me in lieu of downvoting you because that option doesn't exist and the internet is full of trolls and dicks. But creating any sort of equivalence between me and your stalker because he happens to upvote my post? Yeah, no, fuck that noise and fuck you if you're essentially likening me to some sexual predator.
I'm not sure I even understand this or what it's referring to. But yes, there are some accusations in the last post, where, as I made clear, I was responding to what I felt like was a total abandonment of civility on your part as well. Again, being likened to some sexual predator is pretty much universal gloves-off time, no? It's like Godwin'ing.

surreality

@bored said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):
...I think three and four might be swapped, I dunno, eyes crossing at this point. I am tired as hell, because all forum whatever aside, this week is special, so I'm just going to stick with this:

That's nice. I believe that he was upvoting me in lieu of downvoting you because that option doesn't exist and the internet is full of trolls and dicks. But creating any sort of equivalence between me and your stalker because he happens to upvote my post? Yeah, no, fuck that noise and fuck you if you're essentially likening me to some sexual predator.

That wasn't what I was in any way trying to imply. Dude was never any kind of sexual predator, just a very mean-spirited troll. There's a link to his trolling craziness... somewhere in scrollback at this point.

"The person who seems to think fucking with me for sport thinks your posts are super awesome, maybe think about that." is as far as that goes. Zero sexual anything about anybody... at all. Not even pretend fish people. As in: the person who has been a trolling asshat for sport thinks you're doing a great job right now. I am not alone in reading things... not so kindly here, in your posts, either. I dunno, man. 'Maybe check your tone some if abusive trolls are cheering you on and you don't intend to be coming off as accusatory and hostile' is something I figured was clear enough on its own without getting into any psycho-sexual stalker territory. (In all seriousness, that is not a subject I have any desire to go into with anyone this week in particular including close RL friends and family, and would not be bringing it up even abstractly here, least of all for some vastly misplaced hyperbole.)

And quite frankly? Yes, you're annoying the shit out of me today because instead of actually getting to work on the game, I've had to spend a pile of time playing whack-a-mole addressing all of the worst case scenarios and fear-based assumptions you keep shooting off like you filled a potato gun with buckshot and pointed it at the thread. This is the kind of stuff I am talking about:

@bored said in [Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed)]

I'm not sure how personally hyped I am on aliens and Cthulhu (it's overdone to hell and always = vague world ending plots which are basically the stupidest plots)

@bored said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

'What is that, lieutenant? (pronounced with a suitable British f)'
'Ah, sir, I believe it's a small band of fishmen riding seahorses'
'How terribly uncouth. Very well, you may fire when ready.'
'Jolly good, sir.'

I dunno. Then there's what someone already mentioned about it basically being a proven MUSH law that you cannot split up your playing population so I don't know how you have PC versions of any of these things that aren't just traipsing around town with everyone else, also leading to the above.

@bored said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

Even if everyone is a werefish (and everyone will be magic whatsits unless you make them snowflake staff-friend only), well, then its a game about werefish.

@bored said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

I started off saying you'd likely have me as a curious player despite the flaws, I don't know that anything I'm saying is mean or nasty. I don't know how I'm saying that your game is doomed to fail (I'm pretty sure I've literally implied no such thing anywhere). This is getting to 'simply cannot criticize at all' territory.

...seriously. Buckshot. I could keep going here, but I think maybe you'll begin to see my point. Every one of these things you are flinging out there as a 'truism' not only either is not a truism, or is just a worst case scenario about content. Notice none of the 'I don't like it!' stuff is singled out here -- because, hey, cool, that's fine. @il-volpe said as much and notice how that was fine? Because he wasn't firing off the insistences that everything's going to be end of the world or trite bullshit or Cthulhu or or or or or or or or... and so on. Buckshot made of hand-wringing worst case scenarios, which tend to be things that need to be addressed in some fashion, because otherwise, people assume, 'oh, yeah, that again', whether that's true or false, and then everybody just assumes and nobody ever reads.

This is not being defensive. It is being annoyed as hell that instead of waiting a little while to see what the thing is and how much that sucks, you seem eager to begin a bashing based on what you assume it will be and the worst aspects of all of those things. This sticks me in the position of badly explaining shit on the fly that I've already had to budget 2-3 RL months toward getting down in a draft form that I think will be ready for a rough review, and that is a shitty position to be in.

There's a reason I asked folks to not go galavanting down those roads yet: they aren't even leveled, let alone paved, there are no maps or street signs, and the best answers anybody's going to get on those subjects are going to be about as useful as the directions you'd get mumbled out in broken English in a heavy accent by a drunken old coot at the gas station who uses the places where things didn't used to be as their landmarks. (Read: good luck getting anywhere with it.)

Bash it to bits based on what it actually is with wild abandon if you want to. Seriously. Sledge at will when the actual information is available.

Slinging shit around because of what you're afraid something might be is crap, though.

Edit: FWIW, this is totally nothing compared to what I expect when people see the wiki. Anybody who likes minimalism, yeah, there'll be a second minimalist skin for it, but holy shit will the minimalists hate me like burning for the default. It is seriously apt for the baroque era to the extent that its nickname is 'baroquen'. (Read it out loud if you gotta.)

surreality

New question: The majority of reference imagery available for a variety of things -- a lot of it art -- includes painted bare breasts. While most are like the one in this thread, this is... not exactly porn.

I do not personally have any issue including imagery like the example of the squid lady from earlier in the thread in the main pages of the wiki.

I, however, work from home. I could put XXX material on there and not get yelled at, so I am not a fair judge of what might present an issue for others.

Usually, it's subtle, and it's obviously painted -- sometimes it's barely there. That may or may not make any difference to someone's employer, however, and they may not give a damn that it's an old Rackham fairy tale illustration or similar artwork (it may be the same as Hustler or Penthouse to any given boss).

This is especially an issue for this project because it's very interconnected with the wiki.

While I can photoshop some of this, that, too, is work I need to know if I should be budgeting hours for. Concerns? Comments? Do you have any guidelines or examples from your workplace that could be shared?

Paris

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

** DO NOT TRY TO FUCK THE ANGLER FISH.

I want to play an anglerbro who won't date women because he's 'just not ready for that kind of commitment.'

Arkandel

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

While I can photoshop some of this, that, too, is work I need to know if I should be budgeting hours for. Concerns? Comments? Do you have any guidelines or examples from your workplace that could be shared?

As long as the first page isn't too NSFW I wouldn't worry about it for a wiki. I'd never go browse random people's wiki pages from work anyway since there's no telling what amount of nudity (even if it's just a bikini-clad model or guy stretching his abs) will pop up, and actual pages I might 'need' to view - say, house rules - tend to be very image-light anyhow.

surreality

@Arkandel That's kinda what I'm wondering -- does anybody think something like squid lady would be typical of NSFW? I mean there are technically technicolor boobs.

Arkandel

@surreality Well, it's not porn, but for most of us it's not safe for work either. But that's my point - very little is safe for work.

IMHO this material is inoffensive but whereas people ought to be opening anything of the sort from work is up to them, since they're the ones who have to know what's considered acceptable in general. For example some workplaces wouldn't approve of anything that looks game-y at all - it's not about the boobs, per se - but others openly have Facebook tabs open since that's the company culture. But they are the ones who should know what's right for themselves.

Seriously, it's not worth worrying about.