Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?

[faraday]

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

All my char wikis are pointless because the only info on any of them that is not out of date withing a couple of months is the basic details like PB, DoB, splat, and name.

But all of that is still just as useful as +finger, but in a (to some of us) much more accessible and easy-to-read format. You may not find value in them, totally fine, but that doesn't make it pointless. Also, integrated website/wikis like Ares and Evennia make it easier to keep that information in sync with the in-game info. Now it still doesn't help if you don't set any in-game info. Some folks just can't be bothered to set supplemental info or relationships, just as some folks couldn't be bothered to do it when it was optional +finger fields. Those issues haven't changed, only the presentation.

[ThatGuyThere]

I would argue my wikis are worse than pointless since they contain information that is out of date. I have gotten pages about hooks that were no longer valid for example.

[faraday]

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

I would argue my wikis are worse than pointless since they contain information that is out of date. I have gotten pages about hooks that were no longer valid for example.

My point though was that if the information on the wiki is auto-synced with the game (which is eminently possible with some of the new servers and some tricks that places like Marvel63 have done with existing servers) then the problem isn't a wiki problem but a stale information problem. If their desc gets out of date, their last name changes because they got married but they forgot to update it, their RP hooks changed and they didn't use +hook/update... yes, that happens even in the game itself. Technology can't force people to update information they don't care about.

[ThatGuyThere]

True but my point was I miss the old days when it wasn't an issue because for the most part the info was not out there at all.
I freely admitted in the first post that the rose colored glasses on my part were not because I thought the old days were better in anyway way other than me getting to avoid a tedious job as part of making a character.

[mietze]

I have not seen a decline in writing quality, it seems to have greatly improved over 20 years.

Probably because things have opened up and there's less of a novel-for-bg and useless 6 paragraph description barrier to entry and things are more focused on play with each other, than people getting more fixated on indiviudal only, static things like descs.

There's nothing wrong with them, but they don't contribute to mutual storytelling. I think that perhaps the over focus on stuff like that as signifying "great rp" is one of the reasons why the quality wasn't as good. People can be wonderful individual writers where they don't have to pay attention to anything but themselves and what they want, but still suck ass at roleplaying and being a player.

[mietze]

Also, honestly, I find the quality of written descriptions when they are long to be better now, because the only people who write them are those that enjoy them, rather than people thinking they "have to" and molesting a thesaurus in the process.

I guess I must not be a very visual person because wiki images don't disturb me at all, as far as dissonance with a character, I tend to have my own minds eye view of a pc based on their rp rather than a picture on a wiki.

[faraday]

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

True but my point was I miss the old days when it wasn't an issue because for the most part the info was not out there at all.

I guess our "old days" were very different then, because supplemental information like "RP Hooks" existed long before wikis in the sorts of games I played on. They were an in-game construct (usually in +finger or +profile or sometimes a separate command like +hooks) that later got reflected on the wiki.

[ThatGuyThere]

Yes they existed but I was not pestered about them, where as today if you do not make a wiki you do get asked a lot about not having a wiki, granted often with offers to assist in the making there of.

[faraday]

@thatguythere Fair enough. I think that's where technology becomes useful though. On my games, I've had a +wiki command that let me create someone's "starter" wiki page as part of chargen approval. If they never updated it again after that, that's fine. At least it's there. Now with Ares you don't even have to do that much. The instant someone's approved, their web portal page appears.

Folks like @ghost who don't like wikis for philosophical reasons... yeah, totally get it. But lots of folks just don't like them because the existing implementations of wikis have been a PITA. We can do better.

[Nein]

Wiki should be optional. I guess I'm an old fart in that I prefer to have everything you need on the MU*. You're there to play a game, not fill out a TPS report for the privilege of pretend adventures.

[ThatGuyThere]

Yeah I have no philosophical issue with wikis, my answer for where info should be is honestly both. I want in on game so if I need to know something in a scene I don't have to leave the window to find it. Nothing takes me out of my characters head faster than leaving the window. I can read or do off computer things and stay in the characters head. Hell in college I could take a smoke break and talk to people RL and stay in the characters brain, but the second I open a web browser my brain shifts to out of character mode.
Though if it is down time looking for info the wiki is usually easier to navigate than mush commands.

[Ghost]

@faraday Your wiki-fu is strong and badass btw. Pleaaaaaase don't take any of my feelings about the philosophical whatevers about wikis to be a negation of your hard work. Your MU-to-Wiki integration is a beautiful piece of work and you should be damned proud.

I understand entirely that my stance is some kind of Walt Whitman "close your eyes to the visual and enter the state of the descriptive subjectivity of life" prattling on.

And while it works for me, it doesn't work for a lot of other people, and in the end I enjoy having RP partners to not having them.

Addition: Is my stance outdated and romanticized? Quite possibly. It's important to evolve with the times and not forget the problems we had in the years before the wiki (issues with proving things with logs, etc). But I like to think that I encourage people to step out of the use of visual aids in lieu of what is typed out in the present tense. I love being challenged by good writers; it's my favorite thing in this hobby.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

“You can’t please everyone” is not a replacement for discussing merits and foibles of a policy, especially not if that policy is “this is my preference”. It’s redundant; if you don’t care to have a policy outside your personal preference, then there’s nothing to discuss. There is only one person to please any of the time.

[Pandora]

I miss the days before wikis were a standardized feature. Back when you remembered a character's birthday or favorite color or the name of their pet because they told it to you once and you remembered, not because you checked Facebook(the wiki). I miss when people put more effort into their descriptions because they didn't have a picture to fall back on. I miss when you had to talk to people IC to learn their background story.

I don't like character wiki pages at all, but it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere, they're just too convenient, which is most unfortunate.

[faraday]

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

“You can’t please everyone” is not a replacement for discussing merits and foibles of a policy, especially not if that policy is “this is my preference”. It’s redundant; if you don’t care to have a policy outside your personal preference, then there’s nothing to discuss.

Uh... okay? I mean, I don't disagree with your underlying point, but...

I'm not sure how "This is my preference" got taken as "That's the policy on my games". And I'm really not sure how "You can't please everyone" got taken as "I'm unwilling to even discuss policies outside my preferences."

Tangentially, here's a little anecdote that may be interesting: BSGU requires you to set a desc in chargen but hardly anybody uses the 'look' command. It does not require you to set a shortdesc, but 93% of characters have set one voluntarily.

So I think, empirically it can be asserted that in this particular group/setting, shortdescs are valued more than "real" descs.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

Sorry. After the fourth time of saying how nothing is perfect and chocolate isn’t vanilla, I wasn’t sure what the goal was. My fallacy may have been mistaking repetition for passion, and if anyone is not staffing to their passions then I feel very sorry for them.

There may be no wrong answers, but as someone focused in usability, some answers are more correct than others. It’s harder because those situations change, but often share similarities. Like vanilla and chocolate.

I know a lot of people think of discussions like this as pointless, but I’m not one of them. There may be no conclusion, but each time we hit this level of preference versus utility, I become a better game designer. We also learn more about the culture as a whole, as it is always changing. I don’t think anyone can run a game well without even a subconscious understanding of this.

[Ganymede]

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

So I think, empirically it can be asserted that in this particular group/setting, shortdescs are valued more than "real" descs.

I think it would also be fair to say that, since most of our IC action is on the ship or in the field, everyone's got a good idea of what the uniform looks like; all that matters is the short bits of appearance.

Again, a quick jaunt to the wiki would show my PCs as looking like Felicity Jones or Ashley Johnson. Add a standard uniform to that, and hot dog.

[Bobotron]

@pandora
I find a wiki to be useful as OOC information and a 'gathering place' of data. But I like using wikis for base information, and then revealing other stuff in play. If someone is posting huge, sweeping swathes of information on their wiki, that's a bit beyond what I feel the scope of a wiki is for. Sucky action.

As far as descs? Eh. I'd rather have simple descs that might reference an image for an outfit, rather than WALLS OF GRANDILOQUENT PURPLE PROSE.

Regarding newsfiles, they're good to have on the game, but there has to be a consistency in staff to keep them updated, especially if they're mirrored on the wiki. Personally, I am not good with trying to use other peoples' MU*-to-wiki integration, and so having at LEAST the wiki updated where everything is one-shot is good to me. But I don't mind having multiple windows open and flipping back and forth.

[Pandora]

@bobotron Re: purple prose for clothing, I don't much spend a lot of time on games that are so bare bones they don't even have clothing objects. So that bit of the argument is ruled out for me.

Have a wiki if you like, but make sure all of the information there is accessible through telnet as well for those who signed up for a MU, not a second social-media presence. I can make Mushclient look like legitimate work activity in my office, but uncropped pictures of your vajazzled vampire club-owning hooker are less convenient.

[Apos]

About descs and clothing objects, there's a few interesting consequences of design choices there. Generally speaking, the more information about current state that's available passively, the more organic the Rp tends to be. In other words, if you have information that isn't readily available to someone passively, and has to be mentioned in a set each time someone comes in, the less organic I find the rp. This is just a stylistic difference and not good or bad, but I should mention I never even heard the term 'pose order' until I tried a WoD game, several years after playing routinely on other MUs, and sets tended to be extremely minimal in other places due to current state-of-play being accessible on 'look' in other games. So I definitely am more in the minority (which would probably be closer to a majority for RPI type games) of using 'look' regularly, paying close attention to descs, using clothing objects to change the current state-of-play, and not really paying much attention to wikis. It's just a stylistic difference, not right or wrong imo, like Faraday said.