Alternative Formats to MU

ThatGuyThere

What do you do now between poses? Honest question. I feel like everyone I know also has a web browser open while they're RPing, so I don't see how what you're saying it's actually different.

Mostly house work or dishes, basically things I will be happy to leave to check the client window. I do not have a browser open, if I do it does quickly lead to RP death.
I would postulate that everyone having a browser open is likely why 10 minute waits even in a small scene have become the norm, which at least to me is not to me a good thing.

Edit to add: though I will freely admit my preferences do not necessarily match most peoples, since I would prefer an average pose delivered in 3-5 minutes to a great one that took 10.

Lithium

I personally prefer to have two maybe 3 games open depending on the speed of the RP going on in the windows, sometimes I don't have anything else going. I typically listen to music while I am MU*'ing, or I will maybe code in between poses.

Roz

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

What do you do now between poses? Honest question. I feel like everyone I know also has a web browser open while they're RPing, so I don't see how what you're saying it's actually different.

Mostly house work or dishes, basically things I will be happy to leave to check the client window. I do not have a browser open, if I do it does quickly lead to RP death.
I would postulate that everyone having a browser open is likely why 10 minute waits even in a small scene have become the norm, which at least to me is not to me a good thing.

Edit to add: though I will freely admits my preferences do not necessarily match most peoples, sicne I would prefer an average pose delivered in 3-5 minutes to a great one that took 10.

Idk man, I always have my browser open and regularly take just 3-5 minutes to pose. I'd be way slower if I were doing housework.

Ganymede

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I don't think telnet is a requirement for real time, but in the current MUSH environment things have drifted to the point where things move slower than I would like, I can't see how moving the way to play the game to a program that presents literally thousands of other things to do while RPing will not adversely affect response times. It is not a tech issue but a human behavior issue.

So, your complaint is about players, not the technology being discussed.

Got it.

ThatGuyThere

@ganymede
And I do think the technology will make the problem I have with the players worse.

Meg

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@ganymede
And I do think the technology will make the problem I have with the players worse.

Disagree. I am with @Roz. I /for sure/ am slower doing housework between poses than browsing the internet. So it is on /me/ to either a. do something where I can be attentive and fast in responding or b. if I absolutely have to do something that will make me slower, warn for it.

It's a people problem. You have a people problem where people aren't using basic etiquette, and then blaming it on something else entirely in this thread.

ThatGuyThere

@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It's a people problem. You have a people problem where people aren't using basic etiquette, and then blaming it on something else entirely in this thread.

You have a much higher faith in humanity than i do, basic etiquette is not a common thing, so yes I am against shifting to a technology that makes it's lack more glaring.
Right now some number between 0 and 100 percent are slow due futzing around on the web while rping, I think if the game was web based that number would rise. If it rises because people are rude or because the technology changes makes no difference to me, I care about it rising.
I don't see how this would be different than cell phones in daily life, I was in a line yesterday, multiple people were dicking around on their phones. No biggie. Two people causes the line ot me slower because of this because they didn't move promptly when it was their turn. Yes those folks were rude but the technology allowed their rudeness to have an effect.

Meg

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It's a people problem. You have a people problem where people aren't using basic etiquette, and then blaming it on something else entirely in this thread.

You have a much higher faith in humanity than i do, basic etiquette is not a common thing, so yes I am against shifting to a technology that makes it's lack more glaring.
Right now some number between 0 and 100 percent are slow due futzing around on the web while rping, I think if the game was web based that number would rise. If it rises because people are rude or because the technology changes makes no difference to me, I care about it rising.
I don't see how this would be different than cell phones in daily life, I was in a line yesterday, multiple people were dicking around on their phones. No biggie. Two people causes the line ot me slower because of this because they didn't move promptly when it was their turn. Yes those folks were rude but the technology allowed their rudeness to have an effect.

And if it was 1948, those same two people would have been slow because they were reading a newspaper.

Again. This is a people problem.

ThatGuyThere

@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It's a people problem. You have a people problem where people aren't using basic etiquette, and then blaming it on something else entirely in this thread.

You have a much higher faith in humanity than i do, basic etiquette is not a common thing, so yes I am against shifting to a technology that makes it's lack more glaring.
Right now some number between 0 and 100 percent are slow due futzing around on the web while rping, I think if the game was web based that number would rise. If it rises because people are rude or because the technology changes makes no difference to me, I care about it rising.
I don't see how this would be different than cell phones in daily life, I was in a line yesterday, multiple people were dicking around on their phones. No biggie. Two people causes the line ot me slower because of this because they didn't move promptly when it was their turn. Yes those folks were rude but the technology allowed their rudeness to have an effect.

And if it was 1948, those same two people would have been slow because they were reading a newspaper.

Again. This is a people problem.

Funny I don't think newspapers allowed you to text back and forth with people which is what both were doing.
I will agree they would likely have been inconsiderate at any time but my point is that greater technology for the most part just allowed a greater impact for the inconsideration.

Apos

Really small differences in game environment make dramatic differences in the RP pacing. If a game enforces a sequential order and runs at the pace of its slowest contributor in a scene, that game is going to develop glacial RP unless a game takes means to counter that.

Edited to add: Think of how different MU rp in a scene would be if we saw a typing indicator for someone that was posing.

Lotherio

Technology isn't the issue, @ThatGuyThere noted it, it can help/hinder, but really its the players; players and admin alike?

I think that's what I was after. There are tons of places for immediate on-line text based RP. IRC places, IRC like places hidden as places for RP. Chatzy, Omeagle, Roleplay.me, RP Nation. In the three to four day spectrum, there are a lot of forums with way more players already, RPoL, RP Nation, etc. All with more players with more immediacy of getting RP.

People start on those places and go to messengers on site and off.

What is updating MU really doing to bring them into the fold. Its not the technology, its the admin I think - Arx uses Evennia and the web portal, but I'm more certain its the combination of the admin there helping to bridge the gap into learning to MU.

I honestly want to know, what are 'we' doing better that will lure the numerous on-line RP'ers from those places to MU. And inversely, what is it we're gaining by taking the limited number of MU'ers and trying to get them into a new environments? I think that's a design 101 idea, purpose to provide direction?

It goes back to what OP was asking, what other forms are out there were a persistent game can exist? I think on the options for on-line RP (Chatzy and talkers to forums like RPoL) persistence of world without a hundred other games competing for attention is a draw certainly, but can't it be done on a site using chat windows dedicated to a sites persistent world were logs could be stored with simple clicks, or character data stored.

Multi tabs in one window, one is the IRC, the second shows char info, the third a clickable map to get around the 'grid' which is just rooms to RP in that can be locked to X number of users for events as needed? I think this is all stuff already out there without re-inventing the wheel?

As noted by someone else, the other places have draw backs.

Some places have too much RP. Forums where people expect 5+ paragraphs of pose (miss the '90s when pose bombs to take up someone's buffer was like some weird competition?), which needs to use forum cause partners walk away and come back when they have time read all and pose.

Or not enough literacy. IRC with too many trolls or dealing with txt'ng sp3k3 or too many one-liners that is supposed to be RP and we, MU'ers only, prefer a little more in our immediacy of RP.

In some ways I feel the barrier to entry was what sort of what got us at least near in terms of preference of play as MU'ers with each other somehow? I don't know though. Literally, that one barrier: read the text on the screen. From 'create guest' and 'type 'help' for help', one can learn everything right there by just taking a couple minutes to read. Does everyone but us have short attention spans and won't read the text or skim it or tl;dr tell me how to play now please? Are we trying to take out a lot of the reading part to learn to play to draw in better writers?

I don't know, just food for thought maybe, I'm probably way off base, and still bad at articulating. I love Ares and Evennia; of late, I would give kudos specifically to Arx for their ability (not Evennia, but the admin of Arx) to draw in and retain new players. Of places I've seen where people say I'm new to MU*ing, Arx was their gateway drug, so yes, something new is needed to breath more life in, I don't disagree.

Sorry for so much spam.

Lithium

@lotherio I honestly think the barrier to entry, for this day and age, is that it's not point and click. I know in this country at least, technology is making people less intelligent, not more intelligent, if they're not spoon fed with a few clicks then they can't be bothered. I've even seen this when it comes to some gamers, where console is better for them because all they have to learn is the controller, there's no real customization, or changing response rates of the mouse, mapping macro's or key strokes, etc.

Facebook, Instagram, etc, these all provide simple point and click interfaces, same with messengers, and reddit, and everything else.

For those who /wouldn't/ find a telnet client such as potato, or whatever, a barrier to entry it's probably just lack of exposure.

In the early 90's when MU*'s were exploding, there was a wild west feel of the internet, you never knew what you could find, people were explorer's... now, everything is just handed to them and the explorer is a rare thing.

faraday

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I honestly want to know, what are 'we' doing better that will lure the numerous on-line RP'ers from those places to MU. And inversely, what is it we're gaining by taking the limited number of MU'ers and trying to get them into a new environments? I think that's a design 101 idea, purpose to provide direction?

I, personally, am not trying to lure the masses to MU. What I would like, however, is to see the medium I love continue beyond another generation. I mean people can naysay all they want about how MUSHes aren't dying, but I just flat-out don't believe them.

We've limped along so far in large part because most of the community grew up with crappy computer tech. But then I look at my kids. The touchscreen generation. The mobile generation. The generation that has never seen a command-line tool in their entire life. Expecting them to download a special desktop client and learn +bbpost <title>=<message> strikes me as something approaching insanity.

Not to mention the countless times I've been approached by people wanting to make a game who can't because of the ancient technology we're stuck with. You can create an entire freaking website with a few clicks, but a text-based game requires a system administrator and programmer with significant chops. It's just silly.

So that's my direction. Enable more games to be built. Don't turn off potential new players with ancient interfaces.

Miss Demeanor

/start2CENTS!

I think its less of a technology thing and more of a people thing. Some folk just cannot handle multitasking, and especially cannot handle too much 'input' at one time. Me? My job is multitasking. I constantly have multiple things occurring simultaneously and I need to be able to keep track of them all. So for me, having a MU client up, a browser with Facebook and MSB running, a movie playing on VLC... none of that is really any different than I do all day already. Some people couldn't handle having all that distraction and extraneous input coming at them. Its not wrong its just how they're built.

/end2CENTS

Three-Eyed Crow

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Edited to add: Think of how different MU rp in a scene would be if we saw a typing indicator for someone that was posing.

One of my favorite Ares features is that you can hit a command and see how long it's been since everyone in a room has posed (not idle times, actual time-since posed). It is a fine piece of social engineering I would love to see spread.

Apos

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

In some ways I feel the barrier to entry was what sort of what got us at least near in terms of preference of play as MU'ers with each other somehow? I don't know though. Literally, that one barrier: read the text on the screen. From 'create guest' and 'type 'help' for help', one can learn everything right there by just taking a couple minutes to read. Does everyone but us have short attention spans and won't read the text or skim it or tl;dr tell me how to play now please? Are we trying to take out a lot of the reading part to learn to play to draw in better writers?

I'm of two minds.

First, let's be elitist for a second. Numbers, in and of themselves, are not helpful to a MU at all. If a MU is a collaborative game, where everyone involved is essentially a writer creating content, then there are going to be people who even if aren't malicious, are not net positives for a game. I've had a number of apps from people that clearly couldn't speak English at all or were completely unable to understand theme. It sounds mean to say that we shouldn't help them, but if I approved them and let them play, and well meaning players spent hours and hours out of their day trying to help those guys instead of having fun themselves, it could potentially drive off the most proactive, positive people on a game for very little return. So I haven't exactly been in a huge rush to smooth out some of the barriers for entry because we don't have the support structure available to handle people that would need that kind of help in order to be a net positive for the game environment.

Now let's not be elitist. It would be a mistake to think of those other formats whether it's google docs, discord, any of a million chat programs and the like all being strictly inferior to MUs. It's telling that they are all more popular, and there's strong reasons why. We can capture the features that make things vastly more convenient and easier to use without necessarily compromising the game environments that could be easily disrupted by opening floodgates.

Griatch

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Edited to add: Think of how different MU rp in a scene would be if we saw a typing indicator for someone that was posing.

Hey, that's not too bad an idea ...
.
Griatch

faraday

@lithium said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I know in this country at least, technology is making people less intelligent, not more intelligent, if they're not spoon fed with a few clicks then they can't be bothered. I've even seen this when it comes to some gamers, where console is better for them because all they have to learn is the controller, there's no real customization, or changing response rates of the mouse, mapping macro's or key strokes, etc.

I think that attributing that all to laziness is oversimplifying. People might like console games because they're simpler, but for casual players the dizzying array of controls and options in a desktop game can be overwhelming. That doesn't mean they're dumb or lazy. It just means they maybe have better things to do than to learn all that.

Similarly, I think if you present someone with a program that is radically different from everything they've ever seen before, it's only natural that a great many will turn their nose up or be intimidated. That's true whether you're talking about keyboard users presented with a mouse for the first time or touchscreen users told to download this special app, find this mystic address, and learn these puzzling commands just to try out a type of game they may or may not like.

Like it or not, we live in a world that values good user experience. The traditional MUSH experience fails on virtually every level for a new player.

Lithium

@faraday I never said they were lazy, I said they couldn't be /bothered/ to.

There is a huge difference there.

A bother indicates it's a hassle, which indicates work, which indicates barriers getting in the way of pretendy fun times.

That's it.

RnMissionRun

I honestly don't think that the requirement to download and install an app in order to play on a MUSH is an issue at all. Millions of smartphone users understand the concept of "you need an app for that", as do most computer users.

The issue of people not wanting to type complicated commands, well that's a little different, but I look at it like this. You're communicating with others in a text-only medium. You're using words to convey visual information, emotion, sounds, moods. If you can handle all that, but are stymied by the syntax for the command to make a bbpost, then you're probably in the wrong hobby.