Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing

gryphter · Sep 2, 2019, 3:21 AM

I love Ares, but I don't want to forget my love of Evennia either. There's something that feels more like 'game' there, and it's pretty slick and modernized too. I've thought that Ares comes off as more of a collaborative writing tool for RP and Evennia comes off as an RP-centric game. Both of these approaches are awesome and valid, and both can be spawned up easily and functionally in-browser. I feel lucky to have both any time I'm forced to fire up a client program (gross, how 90s).

So we have the systems. Are we just so out of touch we're only playing themes nobody but us gives a shit about? I'm really not ready to believe that either. Maybe we need to slut ourselves out to some new clientele with games that pander to new users, but I think those would draw the little preciouses deeper into our webs and onto our more thoughtfully-crafted settings.

The sort of places we've applied our collective experience over years and decades evolving ideas together to build. Maybe we can do the same thing and put our heads together to come up with game settings that would work and appeal to fresh meat -- get them in the door and twitching our webs.

mietze · Sep 2, 2019, 3:22 AM

@faraday it is super easy. I have no code experience at all, and break out into hives over it, but even though I dont understand the detailed tutorials I have been doing okay and gaining understanding. I think for someone with just a teeny bit more experience it would be a breeze.

SquirrelTalk · Sep 2, 2019, 3:23 AM

@gryphter I've been trying to poke at Evennia, but as soon as it asks me to do something with windows command lines I burst into uncontrollable tears, so.

gryphter · Sep 2, 2019, 3:38 AM

Side note, remember when you used to have to '@lock me=me' to prevent everyone entering you? Those were the days. I seem to recall littering items into many an unsuspecting friend.

Ominous · Sep 2, 2019, 4:54 AM

@gryphter said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Auspice ...what is a Homestuck? Is it a drug?

A very trippy webcomic that started as a forum choose your own adventure game on the Something Awful forums like Kill Six Billion Demons did, only it started on Homestuck's forums.

Griatch · Sep 2, 2019, 5:44 AM

This is an interesting thread. I'm personally of the opinion that there's a huge potential user-base out there that would be interested in some variation of shared text- based multiplayer world for their RP needs. There is also a community of visually- impaired players out there that are specifically interested in those games.

A powerful (and accessible) web presence/client is likely the minimum requirement, but things like marketing would also be important - which brings up the general lack of money in this hobby as a limiter, of course.

@SquirrelTalk said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@gryphter I've been trying to poke at Evennia, but as soon as it asks me to do something with windows command lines I burst into uncontrollable tears, so.

This is an interesting point of view. Using the command line is generally an important skill to have when doing anything programming- related though.
... That said, the Windows default command line is admittedly awful. If you are on Windows10, it's really better to use the Linux subsystem for Windows, which supposedly has a sane terminal and gives you access to Linux functionality and convenience.

Anyway, if you need help to get started, drop into the Evennia dev chat on IRC or Discord, we are happy to talk you through getting set up and beyond.
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Griatch

Griatch · Sep 2, 2019, 7:02 AM

Double-posting here, sorry.

@gryphter said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I love Ares, but I don't want to forget my love of Evennia either. There's something that feels more like 'game' there, and it's pretty slick and modernized too. I've thought that Ares comes off as more of a collaborative writing tool for RP and Evennia comes off as an RP-centric game.

You know this of course, but just to be clear Evennia (nor Ares) is not itself a 'game'. Evennia is a system for creating multiplayer text games and in this it's probably a little more general than Ares (which focuses, at least out of the box, on a specific game genre). Many use Evennia for making RP-heavy games, but quite a few also work to create more twitchy and reflex-based text games.

Both of these approaches are awesome and valid, and both can be spawned up easily and functionally in-browser. I feel lucky to have both any time I'm forced to fire up a client program (gross, how 90s).

Having a webclient is a requirement these days; we just need to keep spiffing it up so as to be a true contender to a stand-alone client - and then go beyond ... somehow.

The sort of places we've applied our collective experience over years and decades evolving ideas together to build. Maybe we can do the same thing and put our heads together to come up with game settings that would work and appeal to fresh meat -- get them in the door and twitching our webs.

I'm not sure a single killer-game is something realistic to achieve, at least not one decided on-by-committe. But I do think that breaking out of the legacy command syntaxes, making sure to always have proper tutorials and offering more quality-of-life features specifically aimed at newbs would go a long way, regardless of genre. Maybe one could make a framework for this that people could easily plug in and fill with their game-specific info. It's something I could probably add to (in my case) Evennia with relative ease, coming to think of it.
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Griatch

gryphter · Sep 2, 2019, 3:30 PM

@Griatch Certainly I would imagine that someone with the code chops could take an Ares or Evennia setup out of the box and do virtually whatever they want with it. I've had more direct exposure to Ares done different ways than Evennia, but I'm sure you could emulate or approximate any function of one within the other if you really wanted to. When I get into combat in FS3 on Ares I'm not not gaming, but when I say 'Evennia feels more gamey' I'm aware it's more a statement about what I've seen either code base do than what either is actually capable of doing.

That being said, Ares out of the box feels like the RP crowd I would've found in the 90's on a less code-heavy, more freeform game. The sort of players who came over from other venues of RP and found MU*. I've really only seen Evennia run Arx, but its resources and item objects in tiers of quality minds me of the code-heavy games where you were more likely to find players that had come from MUDs and RPIs. However they got to MUDs in the first place remains a mystery, but I posit that it has something to do with the large monetized MUDs that were successful and marketing heavily at the time. Your Gemstones and Dragonrealmses.

And once again, we're talking about money and marketing now. What's interesting to me is talking to folks, most of the people I've asked would be comfortable paying a subscription-like fee -- within reason -- to be on a game, provided that the code and admin support felt 'worth it' to them. I think we've all dreamed the dream of a MU* so successfully monetized that its admins can afford to quit their day jobs and focus on pretendy-funtimes whole hog. But there's a slippery slope here. Would you want, as a staffer, to be a literal employee of the game? How chill would players be if they had the mindset of paying your bills, I wonder?

faraday · Sep 2, 2019, 1:11 PM

Evennia is awesome too, and I've pointed folks that way when the kind of game they wanted to build seemed better suited for Evennia than Ares. As @gryphter says, you can do anything you want on either platform with enough code work, but it's a question of what gets you there faster.

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

This is an interesting point of view. Using the command line is generally an important skill to have when doing anything programming- related though.

That's the thing, though -- running a game, ideally, shouldn't require programming. It shouldn't require you to be a server admin. I can spin up a whole website in 10 minutes with Wix or Wordpress or whatever. I can set up a Discord voice chat server or forum or Storium game with a few clicks.

I've made Ares as easy as I can imagine given the tech requirements. You don't need to do any code to set up a game, but it still requires you to ssh onto a server and mess around with the command line occasionally. That is freaking intimidating to a large number of people, and it's an obstacle to having more games. Having (comparatively) few games, in turn, is an obstacle to having more people.

gryphter · Sep 2, 2019, 1:06 PM

@faraday Power-upvote. There are lots of us who can't code a bit, but we might make badass games, for all the world knows, if we were just empowered to do it.

Darren · Sep 2, 2019, 1:20 PM

IMO the real problem is that MUs have become such a niche thing that they are, for all intents and purposes, invisible to everyone that doesn't already know about them. Solve that problem and I think there will be plenty of room in the hobby for Ares' "MUSH-in-a-box" approach, Evennia's "some assembly required" approach, and even traditional MUs.

Apos · Sep 2, 2019, 1:27 PM

There is an upper bound to how many people staff can invest their time in and entertain, and if they aren't doing this then there is not much difference between MUs and less arcane RP formats. Table top writ large can only be writ so large before people are constantly forgotten and left out.

Someone could advertise hard on all the younger demographic RP communities but there's only a point in doing that if you can support them, and take the time to help get them into the game. I mean the larger RP forums, chat room type places have tens of thousands of users and I'd guess maybe like a tenth of a percent have even ever heard of MUs, but if I threw down ads and had like, 100 people log in as guests to ask questions on how to MU, there's no way I could support that.

Tehom · Sep 2, 2019, 4:33 PM

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I'm not sure a single killer-game is something realistic to achieve, at least not one decided on-by-committe. But I do think that breaking out of the legacy command syntaxes, making sure to always have proper tutorials and offering more quality-of-life features specifically aimed at newbs would go a long way, regardless of genre. Maybe one could make a framework for this that people could easily plug in and fill with their game-specific info. It's something I could probably add to (in my case) Evennia with relative ease, coming to think of it.
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Griatch

I have a few things on my wishlist for the far off future.

I would love to have something sort of similar to django-cookiecutter but for game templates out of the box, but even more accessible than that: some sort of wizard where someone who has absolutely no programming experience could enter a bunch of values to customize a game experience out of the box. Ideally we'd configure their settings file for them, then apply some fixture or database seed values for a game genre, and then the rest is up to them. For example, selecting 'medieval fantasy game' might add a 'contribs.fantasy_template' to INSTALLED_APPS which would more or less be what Ainneve is supposed to be, automatically adding relevant commands, etc.

I think the biggest hurdles coming into this hobby are getting started as a game-runner and getting past the text-based interface for a player. Ares is making great strides with both areas. I think it's unfortunately very rare for most people who want to make a game to have both boundless motivation to do both heavy lifting of creative writing work and want to tinker with deployment/configuration/coding on the technical side. Anything that makes either area easier probably would increase adoption proportionally to how painless they are, imo.

faraday · Sep 2, 2019, 3:07 PM

@Apos said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

if I threw down ads and had like, 100 people log in as guests to ask questions on how to MU, there's no way I could support that.

I'm not keen on being overrun with hundreds of millenials either, but there are a couple of things to unpack here, mostly around why would it require so much support.

MUs are highly social, but the unwritten rules are obscure and wildly variable from game to game. Also we're not the most newbie-friendly bunch, as a general rule.
Traditional MUs are not very user-friendly, from custom clients to obscure command-line syntaxes, to very basic things being done differently from game to game. Ares' web portal, new clients, etc. can help with this, but only to a point.
MUSHers still come to games with the GM/TTRPG mindset, expecting to be entertained instead of expecting to tell their own stories. That creates a heck of a lot of workload for the game admins, which is not scalable to hundreds of players.

Can we combat these issues without veering too far away from what MUs are at their core? If so - how? I dunno. It's an interesting question.

gryphter · Sep 2, 2019, 3:06 PM

This raises some interesting points. Are there ways to set up a world so that the players can impact and change it without GM intervention? I think that's the core thing we need -- to know that our stories are canon and exist in the interconnected world, and can change the broader story.

Then there is the babysitting. There will always be issues between and with certain players. Somebody has to deal with that stuff. Arguably it could be made a little easier by putting the tools to control what they have to see in the hands of the player. There seems like lots of momentum in that direction, in fact.

If you can put a game in place that the players can guide and change without a GM and empower them to deal with their own conflicts somehow, then you'd eliminate a lot of staff work right there.

Auspice · Sep 2, 2019, 3:20 PM

@faraday Fara, I love you, but I gotta call you out on the millennial thing.

Millennials are in their thirties now. Anyone born after about 1994 is Gen Z and that's the group we're largely talking about.

gryphter · Sep 2, 2019, 3:28 PM

I was sad to discover that by the numbers, I am considered a millienial. The fact that I'm kind of disturbed by that probably means I/we bear a responsibility to change what the subtext of 'millenial' is. If I'm one, they're getting a lot of it wrong.

mietze · Sep 2, 2019, 3:30 PM

@gryphter no, we havent all dreamed of how great monetizing would be. In fact it is a topic that comes up now and then as something that many people see a lot of pitfalls in and would never want, either on admin side or player side.

gryphter · Sep 2, 2019, 3:33 PM

@mietze It falls apart on the mechanics, but the idea of making a living running a game people enjoy is attractive.

faraday · Sep 2, 2019, 3:33 PM

Yeah I mean really - it doesn't matter what generation they're from. I was just being flip. A single MUSH running on current infrastructure with current levels of tutorials/expectations/gameplay models getting overrun by hundreds of any kind of player would be pretty crushed.