Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing

[Ghost]

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

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

Every few months or so I get really loud and shake my cane in the air

Only every few months? ... oh oh, just on this topic, gotcha.

I kind of rotate. I have a circle of life of topics; I'm aware lol.

In my defense, though, I think if you spend enough time on MSB you see various cycles.

Edit: It's like...(roll a d20)

1 Social Dice?
2 Creepers
3 Where in the world is Spider San Diego?
4 The Clique
5 Metagaming
6 Community social issues
8-15 Argue with someone you disagree with until they are dust.
16 Pedophilia on games? Let them do their thing or Kill It With Fire?
17-19 Completely misunderstand some shit but respond with venom, then reroll.
20 People who are cool.

[Thenomain]

I was having this very interesting discussion with a bunch of Mudders on the Evennia Discord about if Mush is a culture or a codebase.

I kept trying to explain that Mush is not a culture.

So.

Here we are.

[Darren]

@Ghost
SHAKA WHEN THE WALLS FELL

OMG did you really make a Darmok reference? Two demerits!

[Ghost]

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

@Ghost
SHAKA WHEN THE WALLS FELL

OMG did you really make a Darmok reference? Two demerits!

Let me make myself more clear.

Rai and Jiri and Lungha.

and by that I mean...

Rai. And. Jiri at....LUNGHA

[Lychee Bae]

This post is deleted!

[surreality]

@Ganymede In all seriousness, I did work on files from hell regarding these sorts of things wayback (oh, gods, it's been years now) just so 'this game's definition of these things' was clearly outlined, and people new to the hobby would have an explanation of a term or issue, with examples of how, why, and when it is problematic.

And people freaked the fuck out about it, because 'why should you even have to mention X!' as if there was some universal means of defining and handling any given X going on in the hobby. (Spoiler alert: this almost never happens. )

So, I do believe this can be helpful, and I do think it's necessary to do it on any given game. I also don't believe it's going to happen any time soon, because folks were very bizarrely hostile to this happening at all, for any reason.

[faraday]

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

I was having this very interesting discussion with a bunch of Mudders on the Evennia Discord about if Mush is a culture or a codebase.

It's an interesting question.

From a technical perspective, there is obviously a set of codebases - Penn, Tiny, Rhost and Ares - that call themselves MUSHes, and share a base set of commands (more or less) to navigate a grid and communicate.

But the codebase definition alone feels insufficient.

If I code up an escape room simulator or informal chatroom, I don't think most people would say I've "opened a MUSH" just because I used PennMUSH to do it.

And what about games coded in other servers that don't call themselves MUSH servers? Is Arx not a MUSH because it's using Evennia?

I disputed the earlier assertion that MUSHes share a culture, but I guess it comes down to what you define as "culture". Certainly MUSHes share a general philosophy of emphasizing roleplay over code (which differentiates them from MUDs) and having a 24/7 persistent IC world that tracks with RL time at some set ratio (which differentiates them from forum games). Beyond that, though, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any universal MU constants.

[Auspice]

Honestly, I think 'MUSH' has become akin to 'bandaid' or 'kleenex' in that what was a brand name (a specific type of codebase) is now a common-use term.

I used to always differentiate (MUX, MOO, MUSH, MUSE, MUD..........) and I still often just say 'MU*' in the sense one might '*NIX' as a catchall for Linux/Unix/.....

@faraday may have hit it on the head: a MUSH is a game that emphasizes RP over code.

[Ghost]

I kinda love that there are people out there that don't like it when people call it "mushing" because of all of the other codebases. It's such a UNIX DORK thing, which reminds me of the old BBS systems back in the day. UNIX guys get all kinds of elitist about HPUX, AIX, using bash, kornshell, perl, etc. All the different codebases are (MUD, MUCK, MOO, etc) are really just customized shell environments built using different approaches with different binary commands, which is exactly what happened through the years with UNIX (AIX, HPUX, VR4, BSD, Linux, etc). Each one of those was "like AIX, but doesn't suck because I wrote commands that compensated for it's lack of...".

Kinda makes me feel like the OGs (as in, not the person who's played of 50000 games, but the ACTUAL godfathers of the hobby) are still out there.

[Tinuviel]

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

All the different codebases are (MUD, MUCK, MOO, etc) are really just customized shell environments built using different approaches with different binary commands

Well, sure. If you stick with the strict definition then that's true. But it can't be denied that MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs, etc all have fairly distinct cultures to go along with them. I don't like using "mushing" to refer to them all, in the same way I don't like using "Asian" to describe any number of different cultures that share an arbitrary geographical area.

[bored]

I feel like the whole 'omg MUSHing culture is so ridiculously horrible' thing is... I don't know, in comparison to what? Other online venues? In person tabletop?

My anecdote here is that a friend and I joined up for Storium back when it was the new hotness, and that place had a pretty distinct set of dysfunctions as well, including 'that guy' who joined every game and generally stank up the place but no one seemed to be willing to get rid of. I don't know how antisocial behavior is something we have a unique grasp on.

In my eyes, MU*-dysfunction is distinguishable from generalized internet RP dysfunction only in facets that have to do with the medium itself: we have 'garbage pub chat' and 'OOC room toxicity' because we have public channels and OOC rooms as unregulated commons. Our cliques organize in certain ways because the games structurally encourage it (through factions, online tt-like ~6 person plots, etc), but people are gonna stick with their friends everywhere. And, proximity to Shangrila aside, I've seen more egregious 'hey this sounds like statutory rape' while playing FF14 of all things.

The one thing we definitely are is old and established. At least in our little corner. Once again, the other little corners are all similar.

[Ifrit]

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

But it can't be denied that MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs, etc all have fairly distinct cultures to go along with them.

I think this is an interesting point, and the nerd within me assumes that this is probably to do with the fact that when people who have previously MU'd and maybe staffed/coded for a game, they'll then create a game using the same codebase and some of the same people and the culture will follow along ad infinitum.

THAT SAID. I play both on Gray Harbor and Spirit Lake, both on Ares, with similarity in themes and shared players and I find the cultures completely different.

So, YMMV.

[faraday]

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

THAT SAID. I play both on Gray Harbor and Spirit Lake, both on Ares, with similarity in themes and shared players and I find the cultures completely different.

And both are wildly different from the old TGG (heavy code war game focus) and Maddock (pure consent Western sandbox), which were also MUSHes.

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

@faraday may have hit it on the head: a MUSH is a game that emphasizes RP over code.

It's more than just that though. Storium and forum games and Discord also emphasize RP over code. What is the common thread that defines MUSHes?

One could argue it's the grid room concept + text-based command interfaces. But then does that mean someone playing Gray Harbor solely from the Ares web portal isn't MUSHing? What about a game on PennMUSH where everything was done in temprooms via some custom scene code and had no real "grid" to speak of?

I still think it's the persistent 24/7 world with mostly-live scenes that is the principal defining quality of MUSHes compared to other online RP, but that's just me.

[surreality]

Timescale isn't necessarily it, either; some consent games don't bother tracking it at all, others change it up from time to time, like HorrorMUX, which has different stories at 1:2, 4:1, etc.

[faraday]

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

Timescale isn't necessarily it, either; some consent games don't bother tracking it at all, others change it up from time to time, like HorrorMUX, which has different stories at 1:2, 4:1, etc.

Even 1:2 games are tracking compared to real time though. There can be skips (BSGP jumped forward a year) or chapters/campaigns (like in HorrorMU or TGG), but generally speaking time is passing in the game as it passes in real life. Contrast that with PbF or TTRPG where a single IC day could span a month of real time.

I've never been on a MUSH - even a consent MU like Maddock - where there wasn't some kind of time ratio.

If I'm wrong about that, then I'm at a loss to even define any common characteristic of all MUSHes, lol

[Auspice]

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

If I'm wrong about that, then I'm at a loss to even define any common characteristic of all MUSHes, lol

Unfortunately, I don't think it'll happen either way. It seems to me another of those scenarios of 'without a perfect description that covers even edge cases, we cannot have a consensus and thus must quibble over minutiae.'

[faraday]

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

Unfortunately, I don't think it'll happen either way. It seems to me another of those scenarios of 'without a perfect description that covers even edge cases, we cannot have a consensus and thus must quibble over minutiae.'

Yeah true. And I think it's okay to have something that's like... "This is a MUSH except we're doing this one thing differently."

[Tinuviel]

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

'without a perfect description that covers even edge cases, we cannot have a consensus and thus must quibble over minutiae.'

Hey, that's my career you're talking about.

[Auspice]

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

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

'without a perfect description that covers even edge cases, we cannot have a consensus and thus must quibble over minutiae.'

Hey, that's my career you're talking about.

Get your RL out of our game.

But no, I was thinking about this more on the way to work and I actually found myself really annoyed. Not at the idea, but at this board.

Are we really trying to convince each other that not having a common lexicon across our hobby is why people don't play?

If I log into Fortnite, you bet your ass there's gonna be slang and acronyms that make zero sense to me. And it's sink or swim. No one's gonna hold my hand and explain every single one. But that game is popular as shit.

Take two MMOs and they will have a ton of differences: from how they do PvP to how the story is presented to.....

...but no one is sitting there saying 'Well, clearly ESO and FFXIV aren't MMOs because they're different than WoW.'

They're an MMO because they're a 'massively multiplayer online RPG.'

(And each of THEM is going to have its own 'culture,' set of terms, etc... even if there's crossover.)

I think we're inserting patent stupidity where there is none by thinking that we absolutely need must have agreed-upon terms for people to have fun and play.
(And yes, I know some of you will joke 'oh but people are stupid,' but I am talking a level beyond usual. If we treat all new people like they're too dumb to pick things up in context or simply ask 'Hey can someone explain 3PR?' then no fucking wonder we can't keep new players. No one wants to be treated like they're too dumb to tie their own shoes.)

[Apos]

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

I disputed the earlier assertion that MUSHes share a culture, but I guess it comes down to what you define as "culture". Certainly MUSHes share a general philosophy of emphasizing roleplay over code (which differentiates them from MUDs) and having a 24/7 persistent IC world that tracks with RL time at some set ratio (which differentiates them from forum games). Beyond that, though, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any universal MU constants.

I think you're right on using the word philosophy. I might tweak the word 'emphasizing' about roleplay, since I immediately think of RPI MUDs that roleplay is a core focus, but are dramatically different than MUs because there's a lot of gameplay in MUDs that are tangential to or basically unrelated to fostering RP. So I might just say that code in MUSHes is there only to foster and support roleplay, and provided coded tools for roleplay, which probably distinguishes them from MUDs that have roleplay but want to have a lot of other gameplay elements that are distinct and separate from RP.

Like what distinguishes MUs from other RP environments like storium, discord, tumblr, boards, googledocs, etc is the relative ease that staff can track very divergent storylines and help keep a cohesive, continuous world as a play environment, where players can relatively seamlessly go from one story with a group of friends to a different group of friends with a different story, and all of it is happening in the same world with a larger overarching story. Other RP formats just don't do that well, and most don't even try.

MUSHes in my mind take it a step further MUs in de-emphasizing the world as an interactive character and wanting to make sure no single-player game elements can get in the way of RP interactions between player characters. Just a more streamlined, story driven and character interaction focused experience. I was hesitant to call Arx a MUSH, not because of the technical definition that's inaccurate about codebase, but because I think philosophically it doesn't quite fit right. Since I definitely do want some MUD-like elements of an interactive environment as a way of spurring on spontaneous RP, and automated ways of having game-like interactions that can organically act as RP prompts, and that's leaning away from a MUSH philosophy that can see those things as distractions, imo. It just is still different from a MUD philosophy that wants those things as gameplay elements for their own sake, rather than how they create RP.