Optional Realities & Project Redshift
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@il-volpe said:
It also should have some sort of connection to a MUDlist such that you can essentially click 'add this game' and away you go.
This exists, it's called MSSP (Mud Server Status Protocol). It's not a single button, since you need to fill in your game's details, genre, codebase and so on, as well as register with the list in question, but from there on it will keep updating game listings with current player count, server status and so on automatically.
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Griatch -
@Griatch Unless I am completely missing what this does (and since you say it's not a single button, I doubt it) it is not relevant. Really, nor is writing plug-ins for MUSHclient.
See, "You can do that," isn't the point. Newbies can't/won't do it. What's wanted is a situation where I can say, "Try playing a MUSH, you'll enjoy wasting your time in this way, here, install this," and My Friend Who Has Never MUed installs the software, and starts up the software, and it opens up 'find a game' and MFWHNM can browse a list, then click 'join this game' or 'visit this game as a guest' and connect, with a bunch of buttons that let MFWHNM know, by poking buttons, the basics of MU communication and even (if it's a no-approvals game) just start to play right away. Finding a game, figuring out how to connect, and learning basic command-lines to interact with the game should all be melted together into a dicking-around-clicking-buttons experience. If the user has to already know what she's doing to achieve this effect, she doesn't need this effect anyway.
"... you'll find the story doesn’t end how you think, and the most important characters aren’t who you expect.” - Penny 40 to Derek, The Magicians S04E07 ‘The Side Effect’
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I think I misunderstood you then. You are describing the experience of a MU* player. Then no, MSSP is certainly not for them, that's for people running the server itself.
What you are describing is more reminiscent of http://www.mudportal.com/play . Note though that making buttons available is something that is game-specific; each game in such a "list" needs to support UI enhancements specifically as soon as you go beyond simple stuff like a button for look and the like.
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Griatch
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Griatch -
@Griatch Yep. Mudportal is less than halfway there, though.
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One of my more vocal/angry/forceful posts apparently (I am inferring) caused a regular poster to quit, so I am no longer going to share my opinion on the Optional Realities boards.
This also means I'm not going to be reading the articles. It was one of the articles that I flipped my shit over, due to how poorly thought-out and limited it was. I imagine my response was the kind of response that causes people to not want to engage with.
I suspected that my assessment of the articles was going to remain on the 50/50 (solid 'C') range for what I would expect in content; the quality of writing was about what I'd expect for a fan 'zine so eh who cares about that. The good articles were good. It's up to you, the reader, to decide if it's worth finding content that interests you.
Best of luck, OR.
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That quitting poster needs to learn how to ignore something.
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@thenomain I wondered how long that would take. You lasted longer than I had pegged.
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The reason I tapped out was because I was treating them there like they were us here. I don't see enough interactivity there to disrupt the ideas that they might have. Nascent communities don't need that.
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It's all very shocking.
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If that "Leah" is who I think it is, there's no way Thenomain drove her off. She's too self-involved for someone else's opinion to do that.
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Perhaps I am off base posting this NOW, but I do want to bring up that reading OR? I cannot help but snicker ever so slightly..
All this discussion on.. RPI staffing and the Community posts made on OR about staffing and ethics.. are... how do I say, questionable at best? Not because the discussion is needed, but because the people who tend t o be discussing it are often times the worst offenders of the bunch, or may have, but nobody knows, because there has been consistently 0 transparency with the authors and writers.
. Sure there might be some merit in the discussion about how Mush's evolved as a game code wise, yes. Ethics and Staff Culture however? That is another cookie entirety. It's funny to see these posts to me. Especially with SOI's recent outburst of anxiety and anger towards their staff, the closing of their forums, and the migration of those groups to other forums, how far the mushing community has come in comparison. Whereas Mushs have constantly had to compete with this problem, and answered this question by trying to be more transparent, developing new systems to be inclusive to newer players making them more relevant, and generally just a philosophy of staffing focused on the appearance of justice, if not justice itself..
RPI's and perhaps Evennia I've noticed, seem to be in constant risk of slipping further and further down the corruption hole. The lack of staff-player communication, except through a one sided system. Total Staff Anonymity, Obscuring mechanics and systems intentionally, and never necessarily revealing their existence. Then of course, the fact that when a problem blows up in their face, because players are unable to complain- they have to 'deal' icly with staff hissy fits for what can sometimes be legitimate complaints... well..
I've got to jet here in about 5, but I wanted to put this out here.
I'll do a comparison of RPI vs Mush character advancement to underscore the differences in design philosophy and staffing principals that I find why RPI systems to be fundamentally misguided on creating a fun, inclusive game. -
RPI's and perhaps Evennia I've noticed, seem to be in constant risk of slipping further and further down the corruption hole.
Not sure how Evennia suddenly got clumped into a discussion on ethics and staff corruption.
One of the mentioned things above is a specific style of text-based game, the other is a computer program, not even targeted specifically at making RPIs?
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Griatch -
@Griatch said:
RPI's and perhaps Evennia I've noticed, seem to be in constant risk of slipping further and further down the corruption hole.
Not sure how Evennia suddenly got clumped into a discussion on ethics and staff corruption.
One's a specific style of text-based game, the other is a computer program, not even targeted specifically at making RPIs?
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GriatchThat's just Kireek. He gets confused about which hole to talk out of.
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I'm definitely talking myself into the hole.. but I'm by that same token, noting that the same exact group of people who are at risk in the RPI systems are the ones designing Evennia. To not notice this connection, and to not equate them in some way.. runs the risk of completely missing the flaws that the designers of the RPI system might program into Evennia if they are not made aware of why they are problems in the first place.
It's not a false equivalency, there is a connection between the two- perhaps not system wise, but people wise, who value different ideas of what should or should not be transparent in their game.
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There seems to be a misconception as to what Evennia is. The folks over at OR are using Evennia as the game engine to make their new game. And we love that they do! But that their game happens to be an RPI is only because that's the style of game this particular dev team likes to create.
Evennia is an open-source project that existed long before OR and Planet redshift. I don't think there is any particular overlap in our manpower - nor is theirs the only development team using Evennia. Our involvement in their project is technical support on Evennia specifics and them reporting (and sometimes fixing) bugs in the core if they find any during development. We have nothing to do with whatever choices they decide to take on staff-player policies, nor is that any business of ours.
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Griatch -
@Thenomain said:
One of my more vocal/angry/forceful posts apparently (I am inferring) caused a regular poster to quit, so I am no longer going to share my opinion on the Optional Realities boards.
This also means I'm not going to be reading the articles. It was one of the articles that I flipped my shit over, due to how poorly thought-out and limited it was. I imagine my response was the kind of response that causes people to not want to engage with.
I suspected that my assessment of the articles was going to remain on the 50/50 (solid 'C') range for what I would expect in content; the quality of writing was about what I'd expect for a fan 'zine so eh who cares about that. The good articles were good. It's up to you, the reader, to decide if it's worth finding content that interests you.
Best of luck, OR.
Just to be clear over here, because we posted as much on OR, Leah didn't leave OR because of anything you said. I'm not going to discuss a private issue, more than to say it had to do with OR's moderating of off-topic threads, and her feelings towards the policy.
Obviously, like I've said in the past, it's totally true that the quality and accessibility of the articles is going to vary author to author. For instance, I put a lot of thought into the three articles that I've written for OR, but they are largely specific to people interested in designing their own game and thus not all of them are universal. That's okay, in my opinion.
OR is an ambitious hobbyist effort (while some of us are writers, none of us are game journalists -- except for @Brody), that primarily gets used for two reasons: conversation between developers that wouldn't often communicate otherwise, and player feedback and discussion about various games that help paint more specific pictures of those games for folks who might be considering playing them. A lot of players in our community weren't aware of how many games there are that are similar to their main game, and it's a great thing to be able to refer them to a new game when they need a break from their current play-space. It can only help with player retention in the community -- or, at least, that's the idea.
I don't think you really ruffled any feathers over at OR, though. You were a little aggressive sometimes, but mostly reasonable. No flame wars started over what you posted. I wouldn't worry about you having a negative impact on OR at all: you didn't.
My personal involvement with the running of OR and its articles is pretty much over at this point, if only because I needed more time for the development of my current projects. Running the October contest was sort of my last big involvement on the staff side of OR for a while. That said, I'll still write articles from time to time, and I still participate in the conversation there. It's a good community of people that are doing things. In an era of MU* stagnation, there's something to be said for that.
I have no idea who you are, or what you're talking about. I get that you're talking about me, and Project Redshift, but what don't I value in terms of transparency? I'm ... actually, like, one of the biggest proponent of transparency in ethics culture on Optional Realities, to the point where even my fellow Redshift team thinks that I'm too pro transparency.
I'm curious as to how you think my/our (probably my, as the designer of the game systems for the engine) policies on ethics/transparency might negatively impact my design of the Evennia-based engine that we've built. If you've thoughtful concerns, things that I haven't considered, that might be helpful to me. If you've concerns built on misconception or something along those lines, I'd love to have the chance to set you at ease.
Beyond that, there wasn't a whole lot on OR in October that I felt was particularly of interest to MSB in terms of articles ... but I do think some folks here might find our three winning short Interactive Fiction games interesting, from October's monthly creative contest:
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=339.0
To note is that @Griatch walked away with the top prize in last month's contest.
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Did this die or something?
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@WTFE said:
@ThugHeaven said:
Did this die or something?
Please don't tease like that!
I can't go to their site at all or is it just down?
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It looks like they took it down. The server is still there, just not accepting connections.
