Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing

boop

Look: there just wasn't really any cool shit on the internet back when most of us started. Now there is hella cool shit.

Tv shows sucked and there were lots of reruns - now tv shows are awesome with everything on demand.

Good luck getting the younger folk.

Wizz

@Duke-Nukem said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Ghost So why are you obsessed with this Rick Sanchez guy?

He asked, with a studied nonchalance.

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surreality

@Wizz What's funnier is that he asks that most of the times he does a drive-by, which makes it more of a tell than the dodge he doubtless thinks it is.

Pretty sure it's a desperate ploy to hear how much of an impact he's had on our lives, on some deep, tragic level that it'd take a proper shrink to unpack.

Wretched

@surreality He's a Pizza Cutter, All edge and no point.

TNP

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

@TNP It's Rick, our repeater troll. He created the account under the name 'Weimerican', to give you some idea.

He was my second choice. That one line just gave off lots of Cirno vibes to me.

Auspice

I dunno why anyone engages and doesn't just shrug and move on.

surreality

@Auspice After he changed the name and started off with something vaguely lucid, he had good camouflage, I gather.

Wizz

@surreality

What's kind of depressing is that occasionally he actually does have what appear on the surface to be good ideas -- I really liked the concept for his dream game for example, until he dug in like a tick on some bizarre mechanics to empower abusive players and actively encourage hate speech, at which point he melted down here and did his frothing at the mouth routine. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to learn there actually is some illness involved.

mietze

Bigots are human too, really. I've heard a lot of good and interesting conversations with them about other topics, especially at family gatherings, it's not like they're not people who (usually) have people they love and care for and would make sacrifices for, ect. Just like people who are not bigots can be mean as fuck too, when it comes to how they act towards certain others, and nice people can be dumb.

farfalla

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

IMO the only people who should have MU suggested to are people who are (ex.) "looking to primarily do writing online".

Maybe this is true for a lot of people, I don't know, but I've been known to joke that "I'm not in this hobby to read or write" but honestly... I mean it. I am in it for the in depth storytelling and character development. Narrative over long periods of a character's life. I don't actually enjoy writing (or reading tbh) that much, I just find that this is the setting that best allows me to do those things. Maybe it's just because I'm old and set in my ways, and discord or whatever would be just as good, I dunno. I do know I can't personally find it in table top or mmorpgs.

mietze

It is interesting that most of the mushers I know of that have successfully bridged into success in the fiction writing world or white wolf/other professional rpg writing...often are not looked at as great members of the mushing community, and at least 3 of them are reviled.

So I'm not sure that someone whose talent and interest is in stories and novels that they control wholly is a great candidate for entering the mush community.

surreality

@mietze See, I only know of the one and now I'm deathly curious about the other two.

ZombieGenesis

I won't say I'm "successful" in the fiction industry but I make enough writing short stories and novels to pay a few bills a month and I'll say this; I treat RP entirely different than I treat fiction writing. Just because you are good at one does not mean you'll be good at the other. MU'ing is cooperative storytelling, creating a shared narrative that is created and enjoyed by multiple people. You have to be fluid and enjoy a give and take with the narrative. When I write fiction I'm 100% in control and if I took that mentality into MUing it'd be a disaster.

silverfox

@mietze

I'll admit that I didn't know those three people. The two Mu*ers that I knew that went on to be authors were both AWESOME and stand up people. I missed RPing with them badly when they decided to direct their creative juices towards their professional writing instead of RPing.

Auspice

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

I won't say I'm "successful" in the fiction industry but I make enough writing short stories and novels to pay a few bills a month and I'll say this; I treat RP entirely different than I treat fiction writing. Just because you are good at one does not mean you'll be good at the other. MU'ing is cooperative storytelling, creating a shared narrative that is created and enjoyed by multiple people. You have to be fluid and enjoy a give and take with the narrative. When I write fiction I'm 100% in control and if I took that mentality into MUing it'd be a disaster.

I also approach RP much different than my actual writing.

I RP because it makes me think on my feet (I don't know what your PC is going to do!) and lets me try out new things. I might have a character idea bouncing around in my head that doesn't fit any of my personal efforts, but I can let them out on a game.

faraday

Like @Auspice and @ZombieGenesis, I also approach writing stories/novels completely differently than I approach writing MU scenes. One is improv, give-and-take with other people. The other is a solitary endeavor where you have complete control. Sure, you need to have some interest in writing -- it is a text-driven genre -- but it's a very different experience. Which is why I don't think "advertise only to creative writing types" is the answer either.

Certainly you could pick any individual aspect of MUs and find it elsewhere. It's all online roleplay, after all. MMO RP has the "live" scene aspect, but the storytelling is limited by the game engine. Storium and PbForum games can have deep characters and even some light mechanics, but they're sloooooooowwwww. Etc. Etc. But nothing I've found really comes close to MUs.

mietze

I will fully admit that I derive a lot of amusement from people assuming that because someone got their ass kicked off of a few games and/or they are loudly hated by some segment of the MUSHing community, that therefore they must be a talentless loser or cannot function in the real world.

There's lots of successful people who are dicks. There are a lot of people who can hold in their dickishness when they're in the presence of people who "count'. Of course, I'm sure it's helpful if one is NOT a dick too! And there's lots of truly genuinely caring and wonderful and normal people out there too. But it's not like people who are real assholes on games don't get to enjoy a real successful run and lots of attention/accolades ON games sometimes too, at least for awhile.

Personality aside, I think that MUSHing is kind of a unique environment, where if you approach it from a pure "I am going to write this story, and do whatever I want," you're going to quickly run into trouble, probably just as much as the people who think that all they need to do is just react once in awhile to what other people have written. I would never recommend it to someone who doesn't seem to understand that it's not just THEIR story that they'll be part of, or who doesn't seem to be able to relate well to other people or at least be able to maintain a level of cordial-to-polite ooc behavior towards others (even though that's always been a problem since way back when).

I don't think that it's really age that is the issue in regards to people in the hobby. While I don't run into this every week or anything like that, I regularly meet mushers new and experienced who are under 30. I do think there are more options available than before, I think that the early worker/starting career age of folks have to work a lot harder in a less stable environment with less RL protections than I had to at their age, so time is a factor too and that isn't often talked about. The technology/code is not harder to use than someone like ME trying to figure out Trello. I just think it's a unique sort of thing that is not going to appeal to everyone even if they like RPGs or tabletop systems or even group storytelling, and I think that's okay.

I also don't think mushing will die out for awhile. After all, some of us are reaching retirement age in less than 10 years! Which means there will in theory be just as much time or more for the dragons to be online as they had when they first started out as young whippersnappers. I'm kind of looking forward to that, actually. My two favorite players on TR (who were the nicest, most sane, and actually pretty kick ass storytellers) were pushing 60.

gryphter

I always dreamed a little dream of something that would look like an MMO but would give you the level of control over your character's movements and facial features that would lend itself to our immersive style of RP. Maybe you speak through a voice changer? I dunno. Anyway, someone invent this now please, kthxbye.

Ominous

@gryphter I'm waiting for interconnected holodecks myself. I'd accept Sword Art Online too.

Ghost

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

It is interesting that most of the mushers I know of that have successfully bridged into success in the fiction writing world or white wolf/other professional rpg writing...often are not looked at as great members of the mushing community, and at least 3 of them are reviled.

So I'm not sure that someone whose talent and interest is in stories and novels that they control wholly is a great candidate for entering the mush community.

I don't see how 3 people who have gone from mushing to novel writing being dicks should be a cause for people with interest in writing being avoided for inviting to mushing. That those people were assholes is really just on them as people, and not related to their interest in writing stories that they control. As for the people I know who are still writing, they've had no problems separating the stories they control from the stories they share on mushing.

But my point was this hobby is less "tabletop RPG experience" and more "group writing", so the people with interest in the latter would likely be more interested than the people looking to get into the stuff on Critical Role. Mushing simply is not that. The people looking to play a fully sheeted dungeon crawl version of D&D or who want to utilize the systems in gaming books made by Modiphius are less likely to stay in the hobby, but people with more of an interest in writing itself would.