Is this hobby on it's last legs?

[Arkandel]

@Auspice said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

so drunk from the Nth iteration of this discussion

Just because many of us here have seen or been part of it that doesn't mean it's not relatively new to others.

Also circumstances change; this conversation wasn't the same before Ares and Evennia became popular.

[GangOfDolls]

Time was, WoD/CoD was a popular and dominant genre. And to an extent, that is still true. However.

WoD (especially oWoD) is suffering from looking like your demented paw-paw who yells casually racist things at PoC baristas at Starbucks. And it's suffering from that because a lot of what WoD based it's theme/tone/identity on was a lot of a hot ass garbage ideas about women, minorities, transpeople, various cultures, PoC, and many other vulnerable groups. It's the Edgelord Manifesto.

And that material has aged poorly and it's pretty difficult for most people to engage in that material and pretend that it isn't. And it still struggles with that even as it tries to come along but for every team of writers that tries to update one of the facets of CoD, you have literal fucking nazis who know better but on purpose are trying to propagate the same bullshit that they were writing in 1989.

All that really suggests is that Onyx Path has a very dissonant way of managing these IPs and it can't seem to figure out how to avoid leopards eating its face, every time they don't vet who they hire for content creation enough or in some cases, at all.

I think the general appetite for this content has modified in that there are still a lot of people who love both WoD and CoD but are trying to reconcile how to play it without contributing the problem and enjoy it with a more critical eye. But there are also a fair number of people who are just exhausted from the garbage parade and don't want to engage with it anymore.

That has knock-on effects, including less of these games, and when these games do turn up or re-open as is the case with Fallcoast, people tend to be a little more choosy about how these games are handling problematic baseline material and if they want to participate in that.

[Caryatid]

The first time I heard someone pose this question was in 1999. If they perfect gene therapy in my lifetime, I expect to hear it asked in 2099 too and maybe, just maybe, by then I'll have a schedule that allows me to RP whenever I feel like it.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Caryatid I remember people asking this question when the first Vampire: The Masquerade came out in the late 80s. XD

[Apos]

We're a hobby that feeds off the creative energy of everyone around us and waxes and wanes, and that's a fragile thing. A few lukewarm or bad attempts at trying to stir something up is enough to discourage an awful lot of people in the hobby, and that goes for a format with hundreds of thousands of roleplayers or ten.

Really all it comes down to is just a few things. Are people able to find roleplay they enjoy when they want it? Are they left alone while doing it? Are they able to draw on the creative energy of others and combine it with their own? Are they confident they'll be treated fairly? Are they confident that the stories they get invested in won't be ended capriciously before they are ready for them to end?

Some of these things benefit from a large playerbase, but a lot don't. Just energized and active other people.

[Pacha]

Like many people, I have been low energy during the last few months, especially about RP. However, today I was 'in the mood' and got three good scenes pretty much back to back other than a pause to eat and was offered a fourth I had to turn down because I was tired.

There is definitely RP to be had, but I think a lot of people just don't have the energy to go and find it right now (and rightly so).

[il-volpe]

@Enoch said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

You only need to go to the Hog Pit to see Arx is the only real representative of the hobby, at least for now

Hahahaha.

GoB went on happily with barely a peep heard about it here.

The games that were talked about on the old WORA and SWORA and now in the Hog Pit are probably not representative of the hobby. To get consistently talked about here, the game must not only be big enough that multiple readers here are playing it, it must also be bad enough that multiple readers here want to bitch about it and hear the bitching of others. But a game does not have to include multiple pit-crew members to be big enough to provide RP on demand, and it doesn't have to be bad enough for people to want to bitch about it every week to be, uh, good enough to play. Though obviously the larger the group of players the more likely it is that somebody'll have a gripe.

[Enoch]

@il-volpe Do not take this as an insult, my guy, but if the hobby came down to twenty GoB-like games, I would consider it way past dead. Nothing against anyone who enjoyed it, but just because you can keep it open forever, it doesn't mean it is what anyone would consider a healthy game.

[mietze]

If you want to find a place to play, and are feeling down because you can't connect on the games you have tried, due to timing or whatever, it's okay to just ask for that support.

There really is not a need to extrapolate and carastrophize to OMG HOBBY IS DYING. Just like if you are struggling on an individual game with finding a place or consistency in RP it probably will not gain you anything by going on pub and saying THERE IS NO RP ON THIS GAME NOBODY IS DOING ANYTHING WHY AM I EVEN HERE.

But as mushing is full of people who really can't ask for help without making it a big deal of the hobby/other people failing, i do think this is why this conversation comes up frequently and has in the last 26 years I've been mushing.

The hobby has been on its last legs since the 90s. I am sure that at some point it will be replaced when everyone just jacks into the cybersphere and can have the full experience of being whoever they want for a couple of hours, cheaply. Until then there will always be a subset. Yeah a lot of us are dying out of middle and old age people diseases and health issues. But i have also RPed with players in the last couple of years who are young enough to be my kids, and more than one as well. And I have yet to play any game in the last 10 years where I did not meet many people that I'd never rped or met before.

I do not think it's growing, but im not sure why it would or needs to. I do wish there was an easily accessible list with no commentary, since I think places like msb can and do create issues for good games due to hyping up expectations or sometimes problems, but that will always be with as as well.

[Kanye Qwest]

yes, rp is dying, soon no one will ever do it again. f's in the chat

[Coin]

Man, even if the hobby were dying, what exactly are we supposed to do different?

We're all putting as much of ourselves into the hobby as we can and want. Nobody's going to redouble their efforts because the hobby might be slowing down or whatever.

Maybe we'll be playing in twenty years.

Maybe we won't.

Just fucking enjoy the good bits and pieces amidst all the dumb fucking drama while you can.

[reimesu]

This entire conversation reminds me of someone I used to RP with, occasionally. Every time he didn't get his way about something on a game, he'd start complaining that the game was dying and soon there'd be no RP and then he'd sulk for a while and then quit.

And invariably, the game would go on.

So, no. The game isn't dying and the hobby isn't dying.

[Arkandel]

I don't think the hobby will die. It's got a niche - there's nothing quite out there like it, and that alone gives it some pretty good odds.

What's quite likely is that someone else out there will create a real paradigm shift at some point, or that an existing implementation (such as Ares) progressively becomes something only loosely resembling what we would recognize as a MUSH even if it shares many fundamental characteristics. And that may take off.

Us oldbies may even look at that new form and wrinkle our collective noses at it ("that ain't no MUSH! Get off my lawn!") but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

[faraday]

@Arkandel said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

Us oldbies may even look at that new form and wrinkle our collective noses at it ("that ain't no MUSH! Get off my lawn!") but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

That's how I look at it. I think MUSHers tend to fixate on the hobby as being defined by the technology rather than the core concepts of the gameplay. MMOs of today don't look or play the same as the original Ultima Online, but we still consider them MMOs because there's a certain core that they share in common.

Though just as there are some people still playing old Nintendo NES games via emulators, there will probably always be people playing Penn/Tiny games via SimpleMU for as long as there exist computers capable of running them.

[Lotherio]

@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

Nintendo NES

FF I is the best, the rest are bad copies with pretty shiny eye candy only.

[thesuntsar]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

yes, rp is dying, soon no one will ever do it again. f's in the chat

man thanks for letting me know

deletes clients

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

MMOs of today don't look or play the same as the original Ultima Online, but we still consider them MMOs because there's a certain core that they share in common.

Heavens, I remember the whining on LegendMUD when Ultima Online's Designer Dragon took off to become, well, Designer Dragon.

Yep, that's when the hobby died fo sho. It's just taking a little while to realise it's dead.

[Ganymede]

@Coin

Exactly.

[Arkandel]

Here's a different question I think belongs in the thread.

If the hobby 'progressed' in whatever shape or form that might mean, do you think we oldbies would move with the times or is it likely we're more fixated on the form of what gameplay means to us after all this time (black backgrounds with white letters on telnet client screens, long scrolling texts, the slash-based command driven interface) than the concept itself?

I've already read some debate on whether people prefer web interfaces, some asking for more integration and some differentiating the kind of scenes they have on them compared to the classic ones.

Do you think the hobby might outgrow our community even if it maintains some or most of its core tenets and concepts? Would nostalgia be a blocker?

[mietze]

No more than it is now.

If people can adapt to no ooc masquerade and having wikis, various versions of rules, and now non-"live" scenes, more open sheet games, ect...

I mean will some people throw tantrums and some even quit, sure?

But of course people would adapt. Would it bring in a ton of new people I do not think so.