Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing

surreality

@gryphter Exactly that. And people can still offer to do things for free, but that people could advertise sales commissions and similar directly would encourage the all-important 'no, really, creative work is still work!' principle.

gryphter

@surreality This tickles a not-unrelated concept in my brain where I wish our artistic players were tangibly rewarded for their very real artistic contributions.

The evolving dream, then, is not one of wage-enforced servitude to any given game, but a system that rewards people willing to do tasks. You put more time in the hobby, you extract more reward -- maybe even enough to pay your bills, if that's what you want to do with all your time.

This really has me thinking.

surreality

@gryphter I'm a bit weird in that I like things that create opportunity generally -- I think they work better than 'how can I make a living off this?' specifically from a game design standpoint. Granted... the system I've picked at for decades now on and off I would still release free online somewhere for other people to tinker with.

Task-based setups seem better for this hobby on the whole. And none of that is especially new. I know of someone who charged real money to write descs on a game at one point, for instance, on a game without a wiki where long purple descs were favored. Deviantart is covered in folks who do custom work.

Beyond that, I find that creativity sparks more creativity more often than not. That's a net positive.

Similarly, when people see this kind of very tangible contribution to the game world, most folks will tend toward treating it with a bit more respect, which can sometimes be an issue. Some folks kick over everybody's sandcastles because they don't see the work -- and if that's why they're doing it, this helps to some extent, and it rewards change to the environment through contribution rather than destruction. (Some people will still do it just to be jackasses, but that's what the ban function's for.)

gryphter

@surreality I would really love to see something like this become a thing. I'm sold.

surreality

@gryphter The concept I was toying with for ages had some in-game rewards for things like this, too. Some day I will get back to it! ...some day. Horror kinda ate me and is so comfy it stopped being a pressing thing to work on. A lot of it involved contributions to the urban legends of the place, creating rumors, even things like creating NPCs or businesses and bits of history. None of that was the potentially commercial side of things, but followed the same general principle that the more people can contribute/add to a thing, the more they tend to respect the similar works others have put in. Folks can then really see the way the world evolves with their contributions (and that of fellow players), and get the kind of 'that thing you came up with is super frickin' cool!' feedback that most games have going staffwards only, since there's not a lot that players can contribute in as visible a way.

gryphter

@surreality Certainly tangible in-game benefits and recognition on a game you love playing would be just as good as cash to some.

surreality

@gryphter Pretty much, yeah. Any benefits from things like this were all designed to go to a 'player pool' that the player could then distribute among their characters, start a new character with some extra points, etc.

In part, that setup was to help manage the dino vs. newbie gap, since it'd be possible to concentrate that (within reasonable limits) on a single character to catch up more quickly with the 'big guns' and so on.

Tehom

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

I think there are a lot of improvements that could be done here (certainly on the part of Evennia). But I also think that there is a limit to how much a game engine can help you ('you' in the general sense, not you in particular). We are not anywhere near said limit yet, mind you. But I don't think it's realistic for people to expect to be able to run a multiplayer MMO from scratch without having any technical skills or willingness to pick up such skills. "Just" being creative is all fine and dandy if you have someone else doing the coding, but if you are setting out to make a game on your own you must be expected to actually learn the craft, IMO.
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Griatch

I think the willingness will usually be there if the barrier to entry is low enough. One thing that struck me recently is an informal poll of web developers that showed a pretty significant number of them got their start by modifying html in Neopets or similar games. The key there, to me, is "modifying" - adoption is far higher if they can easily find existing code and change it to produce a result rather than try to create something from scratch.

For example, in Evennia, you currently generate typeclasses that are stub child classes of Evennia's parent classes. You could do the same thing with commands, and have docstrings in the modules that either contain or link to tutorials on where to find the parent classes and how to modify/replace their code in the children in their game directories. Parent classes that are used by default when generating the gamedirs could also be based on prompted values during initial setup: based on their choices, you use one contrib or another. I'm a little ambivalent there: copy and pasting the code in its entirety would probably be easier on people than dealing with inheritance, but would also mean they'd get completely out of date from upstream changes in Evennia. Maybe explicit super() calls with comments that always explain what that means?

gryphter

A sticking point I see with handing out tangible unbalancing rewards in a system like this, though, is making it possible for anyone, at any skill level, to contribute and benefit if they wish. Otherwise you're going to run into the same dinosaur/balance issues and Timmy the burgeoning new hobbyist is left out with an underwhelming character because he doesn't know how to @dig and can't write a desc anyone wants to read. He can't figure out a way to bridge the gap so he gets frustrated and logs off to go play WoW vanilla.

ETA: I don't know how disturbed I really am that people who contribute to the game get to benefit more from it. I really just want Timmy to have a way to participate.

Ghost

People.

Young people can (and do) Google "online games".

I can tell you from experience that I've known people in the 18-25 range from time to time in this hobby and can tell you why they aren't in the hobby today.

Antiquated format versus new: Fan of it or not the younger generation is into innovation. Some into retro stuff like cherry py and retro gaming aren't piling into the hobby as it is, but most 18-25 are into NEW tech. They're into doing more in less time. They're not into slaving themselves to one laptop for 6 hours for a coffee scene when newer forms of entertainment give bite-sized, guaranteed rewards. They're also into...
The Elder Factor: ...not hanging out outside of their own age group. The MU community has a big problem with elder guard types being very judgmental about peoples knowledge, experience, roleplay styles, and not everyone is willing to take the time when someone logs in and asks "I'm new, can someone walk me through chargen?" The 18-25 crowd also has their own language older people like us laugh about. Millennials right? Let's target a bunch of post-teens typing in texting lingo and invite them to write long-form novels with us.
New people are eyed with suspicion: A while back I had the pleasure of having a few newer players complain to me that people kept harassing them in pages about who they were. They got drilled by so many players as to whether or not they were X or Y player, because the reality is that anyone who claims that they're new gets screened for safety and if they're not doing it right they tend to get avoided. Or...
P newperson=What's your kink?: 18-25 people also arent big fans of sexual harassment, nor are they fans of sexual harassment from people old enough to be their parents. Sad to say, there are a number of people who approach this hobby like a swinger's club, and most players have a list of experiences with being creeped on.

So, I don't want to be the negative one, here. I get that a lot of you love this hobby, but the reason why it's not attracting or keeping younger players is also why the same reason why it's not keeping/losing newer players in a higher age bracket. Slapping a fresh coat of paint on it or dying out the gray hair and putting on a Von Dutch cap on your wiki isn't going to attract or maintain a newer, younger player base.

There are some very weird, regularly-crossed, and cultural issues in the hobby that make it somewhat of a Country Club filled with judgmental, particular older people who want more people around so that they can enjoy their Country Club more but aren't really prepared to let these people be who they are. They spend so much time judging and critiquing each other that some new blood would be great...provided that they act maturely, follow the cultural trends, don't make stupid decisions, etc.

So...having said that, I hate being the guy to show problems without offering solutions.

Community Standards: Yes, each game has policies. Yes, the games do their best to weed out creepers and racists with arguable levels of support for the LGBTQ+ community. This isn't enough and the community as of current has problems with people being avoided for roleplay outside of clique, etc because the reasons for that aren't tackled. There are some assholes. There are some judgy, pedestal-sitting assholes who clearly haven't followed some people's better examples as to how to be prevalent without being elitist. If you cant figure out how to get everyone playing together nicely now, you're only inviting new people into a dysfunctional household.
Do. Not. Monetize: This is the worst idea. The worst. Period. I get that some people would love to have more money coming in, but monetizing for an archaic entertainment format makes it less attractive. It's suggested on Twitch feed advice that it's better to monetize after you have a decent viewerbase, not right out the gate, and this applies here, too. It's a hobby, and while for some people it's 70%+ of their day, its still a hobby and not a job. Don't monetize contributions, advertisement, or bringing new people into the game like some church/pyramid scheme.
Build web interfaces supported by code: By this I dont mean a web interface that connects people to the command line environment. Build web interfaces that never get to CLI. If you want the player base to evolve, then the hobby itself needs to evolve. Evennia and python are a good start, but ultimately the command line environment and clunky unix format needs to evolve. Move away from "commands" and do things like create an API interface that will take the arguments from the commands in easier web-based interfaces. THE CLOSEST YOU CAN GET TO A WEB PAGE THAT IS 90% TYPING AND SOME LOGGING, THE BETTER. To evolve, there are simply a number of things that need to be automated, and the things I've seen are a good start, but the constant return back to the command line (even if there is a web interface to connect to it) is rough. Mush clients. Etc. They're godsends compared to telnet back in the day for us, but not attractive compared to other formats out there.

Anyway, this was long, but it needed to be. In my opinion it's naive to take an approach that this hobby is great and you just need to get the word out. I think that's the path of least resistance to tackling issues that are harder to solve. There are other issues that keep people away and keep them from staying. Best to just be direct about that, because hours upon hours of work in one direction may be pointless unless the hobby itself evolves, too. That means taking some of the elder guard out of their comfort zone.

Griatch

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

@faraday Yeah, in my mind right now the best approach is to very strongly encourage mentoring and buddy approaches, since I've noticed far and away the people that become acclimated to the hobby and get most involved are the ones that have someone, anyone introducing them and talking them through it in a friendly, patient way. I think it's kind of addressing the symptoms more than the core problems but I think right now it's pretty much the best we got.

@Griatch One important thing that could be missed from my post is I was really only talking a very specific style of MUSH, and this is an important one to know when looking at the design requirements between MUD and MUSH. The MUSHes I'm talking about are ones that essentially have staff acting as personalized storytellers for players, with hands on, one on one development in a table-top type of feel. That just isn't something that scales unless you keep adding more tiers of staff overseeing story development. MUDs, on the other hand, scale essentially infinitely since the environment is automated and could theoretically handle any number of players.

I don't think there is anything stopping you from incorporating automated help systems and tutorials in an otherwise very GM-run game. You could even have a simple little bot echo a few cookie-cutter emotes to the new players (being clear it's a dumb bot) so as to give them a chance to test out how emoting works in a safe environment. That will still run into a limit when it comes to the plot and the storytelling where human GMs are needed. But with a little planning one could still do a lot automated work here, I think.

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

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

It spawned (and keep spawning) games that all feel the same. People patch DIKU with layer upon layer of hackish C code in order to make their games stand out from the baseline DIKU. It doesn't change the fact that the out-of-the-box nature of DIKU has made it a very, very successful engine.
Griatch

It also resulted in an endless wave of stock MUDs that people have been griping about for as long as I have been playing.

Don't I know it.

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

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

I think there are a lot of improvements that could be done here (certainly on the part of Evennia). But I also think that there is a limit to how much a game engine can help you ('you' in the general sense, not you in particular). We are not anywhere near said limit yet, mind you. But I don't think it's realistic for people to expect to be able to run a multiplayer MMO from scratch without having any technical skills or willingness to pick up such skills. "Just" being creative is all fine and dandy if you have someone else doing the coding, but if you are setting out to make a game on your own you must be expected to actually learn the craft, IMO.
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Griatch

I think the willingness will usually be there if the barrier to entry is low enough. One thing that struck me recently is an informal poll of web developers that showed a pretty significant number of them got their start by modifying html in Neopets or similar games. The key there, to me, is "modifying" - adoption is far higher if they can easily find existing code and change it to produce a result rather than try to create something from scratch.

For example, in Evennia, you currently generate typeclasses that are stub child classes of Evennia's parent classes. You could do the same thing with commands, and have docstrings in the modules that either contain or link to tutorials on where to find the parent classes and how to modify/replace their code in the children in their game directories. Parent classes that are used by default when generating the gamedirs could also be based on prompted values during initial setup: based on their choices, you use one contrib or another. I'm a little ambivalent there: copy and pasting the code in its entirety would probably be easier on people than dealing with inheritance, but would also mean they'd get completely out of date from upstream changes in Evennia. Maybe explicit super() calls with comments that always explain what that means?

This is maybe getting a little bit too technical, but overall - yes, this is the conundrum we have faced since the dawn of Evennia: Are the default commands contribs or a part of core (they started out as contribs but moved to core since we update them so often)? Are they meant to be overridden like a typeclass or are they just placeholders that you are expected to replace wholesale? The issue with copying code straight up is, as you say, that you are throwing away all free upstream support you get from Evennia development. In contrast, the drawback of using an empty child class (or super() calls ... what a nightmare to maintain!) is that it doesn't really offer very much functionality over just copying just the stuff you need.

You are not the first one to point out that there are a few too many steps to adding a new command though; and there is some merit in that adding empty class templates might aid discovery some more.
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Griatch

surreality

@gryphter The main thing is having as broad a range of ways to contribute as possible. Some things were as simple as 'write a rumor about this NPC/business/etc.' or 'make up an account of someone coming across this creature for players to find', and similar, that are at roughly the same level of complexity as writing a pose or two.

It often isn't the things that require a ton of skill, precision, or knowledge that help build the environment in an immersive way -- it's things like 'that creepy warning painted on the wall of the abandoned house' or 'that local news report about the fight at the bar last week that the cops had to break up', which are relatively accessible for everyone. They're also the things that, omg, build up FAST as a to-do list if that's something you want to be able to provide for folks on the game and will keep you busy 24/7 even if you don't do anything else if you're flying solo on it as staff.

gryphter

@surreality Solid points here. Personally if someone is STing at me and giving of their time and creativity, I don't give a shit if the grammar and spelling are off and it's riddled with typos. I'll look past it to the story you're gracious enough to include me in.

Culturally encouraging new players -- or less outgoing older players, because we're not getting everything we could out of everyone in the hobby already now -- to step up and boldly contribute is certainly part of what we need to do. Our modernization efforts incorporating the things we've learned along the way have helped that a lot, but there's more yet to go.

Griatch

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

Build web interfaces supported by code: By this I dont mean a web interface that connects people to the command line environment. Build web interfaces that never get to CLI. If you want the player base to evolve, then the hobby itself needs to evolve. Evennia and python are a good start, but ultimately the command line environment and clunky unix format needs to evolve. Move away from "commands" and do things like create an API interface that will take the arguments from the commands in easier web-based interfaces. THE CLOSEST YOU CAN GET TO A WEB PAGE THAT IS 90% TYPING AND SOME LOGGING, THE BETTER. To evolve, there are simply a number of things that need to be automated, and the things I've seen are a good start, but the constant return back to the command line (even if there is a web interface to connect to it) is rough. Mush clients. Etc. They're godsends compared to telnet back in the day for us, but not attractive compared to other formats out there.

You have some very good points in your post; let me single out this one, since it's the one that most closely relates to things I can affect.

The combination of "moving away from commands" and "A web page that is 90% typing and some logging", makes me guess that you are referring to some sort of natural-language input syntax. I can certainly see that for some things, like emotes.

Ditching Commands altogether is not a self-goal in my opinion however. Commands remain in use (also outside of MU*) because they are highly efficient ways to tell the computer (game) what to do. Some things can be offloaded to buttons in a GUI, and that could get you some part of the way, but only for very simple inputs without arguments. Trying to replicate complex command functionality with a GUI will quickly build up complexity in that domain instead.

I would say that an input line that offers command suggestions as you start typing, including which arguments applies in the location as well as with a simple way to pop up a help tip, would go a long way towards discovery for a new player. A webclient could certainly offer that. In the same way, one can and should other conveniences from the chat-program world. Like seeing "..." when a player in the same room is typing, for example.

(More contributors are welcome ... alas I'm not personally as much of a web-dev as I am a server developer.)
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Griatch

Ghost

@Griatch I think I'm thinking more in terms of an API approach, or really the same logic that was in place when Apple went from CLI to GUI. Sure, us nerds will always love (and live in) the guts behind the pretty interactive screen, but its the pretty interface that made personal computing thrive.

So stuff like...

Why is chargen still so "type: +attribute set Dexterity 4" and not "table selection on a website"? I can see where the CLI will always be relevant in terms of emotes and writing poses, but the evolution of computing was to place an attractive API/GUI/Interface on top of the convoluted CLI, and let the experts worry about the codebade while developing the user experience.

Things like sheet management, combat, inventory, etc being roped into web interfaces that keep the user from having to memorize a shitload of + commands because the ones that are hardlocked have been provided as buttons or drop-down options, and then the ones that require string inputs are offered text windows to type into.

faraday

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

Why is chargen still so "type: +attribute set Dexterity 4" and not "table selection on a website"? I can see where the CLI will always be relevant in terms of emotes and writing poses, but the evolution of computing was to place an attractive API/GUI/Interface on top of the convoluted CLI, and let the experts worry about the codebade while developing the user experience.

Yeah, I mean I don't disagree, but... I have all that already? Some things are more refined than others, but Ares is pretty much at the point where someone can play the entire game through the web portal without opening up a MU client or typing a single command. https://aresmush.com/web-portal

Tech alone doesn't solve the problem though. As you mentioned, there are significant cultural issues at play too. And having a slick web GUI still doesn't help the game staff who need to play server admin.

surreality

@Ghost This is all possible in mediawiki. (I know because I've done all of that in mediawiki.)

It's connecting it and integrating that to the game that's nontrivial, whatever codebase or setup you're using.

The reason I keep bringing this up whenever this topic comes up is that plenty of people already know mediawiki and it is relatively easy to learn compared to most else.

From what I gather, mediawiki is fully compatible with Ares, but not directly integrated in the way I'm describing. It's not as compatible with Evennia last I heard, though that may have changed since. Not sure on integration.

faraday

@surreality Ares doesn't work with mediawiki at all. It has its own internal wiki.

surreality

@faraday Gotcha, I think when last I checked it was possible. Good to know, though!

faraday

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

@faraday Gotcha, I think when last I checked it was possible. Good to know, though!

I think maybe you're thinking of wikidot. There was an extension that posted logs and character pages to wikidot, but it was deprecated with the further development of the web portal. There's never been anything for mediawiki.