Optional Realities & Project Redshift
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@Jeshin said:
I think that Crayon (and some of the other OR staff) just question my insistence in dedicating time to musoapbox. Compared to every other community we have approached for advertising this one is by far the most "hostile" or at least the most suspicious.
I imagine you are used to communities on which sharing is their goal.
Not here. At
Aperture ScienceSoapbox, we are a hotbed of debate. Most of us don't care if you can defend yourself because most of us realize that this doesn't really matter.We are old hobbyists in the realm of make-believe. Who would take this seriously? Not us. (Note: Unless we're taking it seriously, in which case someone else makes fun of that person and all is well and good in the land.)
As for engagement, as community lead he is supposed to engage with you guys.
I dunno, he's calling us names now thereby helping me form a more specific theory that Mudders and Mushers are pretty much the same everywhere.
As to hostility, chest-beating, and elitism. I (for some reason) was accused of being snobbish or looking down on the community early in this thread
If I accused you of being elitist, I apologize. I can't remember at this point, and I would have been absolutely wrong.
@crayon said:
There's a lot of hostility, chest-beating, and elitism going around
Hold on, I think I ... hm, yeah, sec...
@Thenomain said:
I would like to point out, right now, that "a pretty extreme MUSH perspective" is the kind of reason I don't like these discussions. I work pretty hard not to cast stereotypes even when I'm talking with my Mocking Voice. Look into the broader world to find examples of behavior.
Yeah, I'm going to say I called it.
@Thenomain said:
I would be tilting at windmills.
Whether you choose to tilt at windmills in a place in which you feel comfortable and secure, or elsewhere, you're still tilting at windmills.
You missed the rest of that paragraph. Heck, second time in your post that you responded not to the criticisms but to say "no, you". You may be throwing around epithets to the posting culture here, but I'll be the first to say it: One Of Us.
@Thenomain said:
It has an application process that I believe to be ridiculous and not at all representative of quality RP.
We're not looking to define quality roleplay so much as collect a group of similar games that happen to have quality RP.
Let me quote your mission statement, home page, first thing people see:
Optional Realities is dedicated to all text-based role-playing games of this nature [being RPIs].
Emphasis mine. There is no, repeat no indication on the connections page what the criteria are, but if they are not "all RPIs" then you're misleading—probably unintentionally—the community you're trying to form. If as you say here the goal of OR is to "play with people like us" then say that.
Please stop burning straw men, they can't fight back, you know.
Please stop cherry-picking your arguments to make your perceived opponent look bad. Also, the twee isn't helping the "finding common ground" part, if you're interested in one.
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From what I've seen, and admittedly I just glanced through 'the big ones' on Mudconnector and TMS the threads about your site either got mostly no response on forums, or some gentle questions about whether the frequency of posts met guidelines. So yeah, not the same 'backlash' there was here. Here there was questioning about the 'inclusion policy' some flat out just dragging for it, some criticism, some discussion. Too much? I dunno, up to you guys to judge. Like I said, I've had interesting conversations with @Jeshin about games and different games and game design as a result, I don't come out with guns blazing. I also had a conversation with him about how perhaps the group on the forum who called themselves 'rape enthusiasts' as an official title on their sidebar avatar things might be offputting to new members looking for mature discussion. Or the discussion topic I never mentioned, started by someone who appeared to be a MUD runner/staffer called "Female Players Can't Get Along: It Is A Thing."
It's a new community, finding its footing, deciding who it wants to be and what tone it wants to take, and in that I wish it well. The MUSH 'forum' community cannot claim it hasn't had worse going on.
So you've picked what games you want to highlight, and perhaps the staff and players of those games will bring you the innovative, productive discussion you are yearning for. Where's the argument? Isn't it over?
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That group was actually removed prior to Crayon taking community lead. The person who formed it (Leah) admitted she was having a laugh and that all the members save 1 didn't even know they were being volunteered for it. I took the opportunity to disallow groups in the future and remove that one which the community took with a bit of laughter and a point that maybe Jeshin's pure no moderation policy needed to be tweaked. Which Crayon is now doing.
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=138.0 <--- specific thread which the OP edited to joke and asked me to lock.
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I know. You talked to me about it then. I like you @Jeshin. Lots. Honest. My point is more that someone new coming in and throwing stones here as if this entire group is unreasonable and nasty for questioning some things is a bit late to the game, and that the discussions and tone that are over in your arena aren't exactly consistently scholarly. Why is this a thing still? We have clearly heard your inclusion policies stated. We don't all agree it is the best measure for inclusion in discussion/community building regarding quality text games, but we also know you didn't come here to ask us, we discussed it anyway because it was a discussion thread. It's done!
I know I stated before that I felt it was a bit of the RPI vs Non-RPI MUD snobbery (Going Strong Since 1998!) and 'lets add a MUSH or two so it doesn't look exactly like that' but you talked me down from that angle so I let it go, and really who even cares what I think! You and/or @Crayon have I'm sure accepted you are not going to convince the bulk of a MUSH forum that your ideas about what makes an RP text game 'quality' are the 'right' ones. Or 'worthy of being listed' or whatever. It's cool.
ETA: I should stop saying the same thing over and over no matter how many espressos I've had, so that is a thing I will do now. I will totally at least skim Brody's stuff though when its up, I
him. Best of luck. Also female players can get along, I met many of my best friends (girl ones) on MUDs. That is all. -
@crayon said:
@Alzie said:
So again, the definition appears to be any command that a player types which then produces an output. So either we're not as stupid as you want us to be or you're not as smart as you think you are.
[Other Stuff]
Most nonconsent MUShes, and several MUSHes in general, probably qualify. While their automated systems are more Risk and less, say, Crusader Kings 2 or Civilization V, usually, they're still automated systems.
Okay...So, both the Risk and Crusader Kings of our example would qualify. That took 240 responses to get.
@crayon said:
I'm really not sure where all the talk of snobbishness, nepotism, elitism and the like came from, but for all of the complaining about our requirements, I don't believe anybody's actually applied and been rejected.
Areeee you suuuureeee? I can remind youuuuu.
@crayon said earlier:
There's a lot of hostility, chest-beating, and elitism going around, and it really turns me off from wanting to try to engage with anybody here, because people only seem to be interested in debating with straw men.
Generally speaking, the tone of debate here has seemed on the combative side, and I'm not really one to flinch away from debate or being combative in it, so if that's off-putting, I'm sorry, but when somebody repeatedly torches the same strawmen or spears the same windmill forty consecutive times and then starts calling people stupid, I'm perfectly capable of pointing out the fallacy.
I don't think we're combative. I just don't think you were prepared for a community that would challenge your vague ideas. This is such a community. A lot of us have been in this a long time. Nobody here wants you to fail, but nobody here wants to hear your bullshit either. We've already heard it a million times before.
The automated systems requirement has less to do with 'roleplaying' and more to do with 'game', specifically different classes of and approaches to design.
I guess i'm confused. If your mission is to collect good RPI's, then why create a criteria that has nothing at all to do with roleplaying. Those are your words now, not mine. That seems entirely counter productive if not even you can tell me that Automated Systems have anything to do with Roleplaying (Which is what most of us have been saying for 13 pages).
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RPI is the term for a heavily automated (code moderated) text game that purposefully includes roleplay.
If you aren't self-designating as an RPI, then you likely aren't one, and have no interest ion being on this list?
It's not adjectives, it's terminology.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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There are only three RPIs on the list. Armageddon MUD and Shadows of Isildur, and Evolution of Esos. None of the others (to my knowledge) represent themselves as RPIs.
LabMUD isn't released yet (but will be an RPI probably).
Project Redshift isn't released yet and weill be an RPI technically but we're billing it as a text-based RPG. -
@Jeshin said:
RPI technically
What are the community standards to being called an RPI? You have been taking a stance of "technically correct is the best correct", so show me on the interwebs where RPI is defined.
I also like you, @Jeshin, as you are taking my more abrasive comments as comments first, abrasive second, and my views about what is and isn't Muds and what Mudders are about is mostly because of your existence here.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Misadventure said:
RPI is the term for a heavily automated (code moderated) text game that purposefully includes roleplay.
If you aren't self-designating as an RPI, then you likely aren't one, and have no interest ion being on this list?
It's not adjectives, it's terminology.
I know, RolePlay Enforced (though why that was shortened to RPI who knows) Mud. Muds feature automated systems. In the context of a mud, I could have defined Automated System by myself in a second. However, if your goal is to collect RPIs, but you turn around and say that automated systems aren't important to your goal, there's a disconnect somewhere. That was the point I was trying to make.
@Jeshin Then maybe the goal should be to collect Roleplay Enforced Mu's? You don't seem too held up on the RPI term and Crayon has stated that automated systems are unimportant. At this point you have so far stated that RPI games are not intrinsic to the goal of your project.
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RolePlay Intensive because RolePlay Enforced can still allow for non-permadeath.
Don't ask me I didn't make up these names. Also if they've changed don't ask me, I dropped out of this argument in like 2005 (except for that accidental joining in again here last week OOOPS). But I played on RPE games mostly, not RPI games, because I was just not as 'intensive' about my rp. Or because I liked them.
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@Thenomain said:
What are the community standards to being called an RPI? You have been taking a stance of "technically correct is the best correct", so show me on the interwebs where RPI is defined.
RPI is mostly just a MUD codebase (or small collection of similar code bases) that's evolved over several iterations and into numerous divergent and convergent games, to be completely honest. It has some traits that tend to be consistent from game to game, usually the lack of a who list, a general style and syntax, and the lack of OOC communication in-game. Those are just arbitrary features that tend to be in common over iterations of the codebase, as far as I can tell. By this point most RPIs are fairly divergent cousins, and one or two no longer even have those same common features, but that's all really besides the point. The focus of the community as far as I can tell is on games that couple automated systems with roleplay centricity, with the automated systems being built to support that roleplay rather than just being a side feature. Permanent death is a somewhat arbitrary part of the overall combination of requirements, but there's a reasonable debate to be made that roleplay without permanent death can be very jarring or otherwise diminish the realism of players' roleplay. Moreover, permanent death as a feature helps to distinguish between play communities where everything is IC, always, and where things are sometimes OOC. This isn't quite as relevant to the MUSH community as it is to the MUD community. In the MUD community there are a lot of stock codebases on which people roleplay, but the automated systems and code are actually completely separate from roleplay, and mostly hack and slashy. Not all of our games actually have strict or pure permadeath, and we're actually debating the merits one way or the other at the moment, though I'm not sure we've heard from anybody playing on a MUSH in that thread yet. I would imagine most MUSHes are permadeath to begin with? Most that I've played on have been, at least, though I'm not sure I've experienced a non-consent MUSH, yet.
@Alzie said:
I know, RolePlay Enforced
It's actually 'Roleplay Intensive'. And as mentioned above, it's a pretty arbitrary name for a group of similar and presumably related codebases. When people casually refer to RPIs, and they're not speaking about a game that utilizes the codebase, it's usually just a catch-all for games on whatever codebase that have a generally similar methodology and approach, as far as non-consent, roleplay-focus, mechanics for roleplay, etc.
The general RPI 'tree' as a codebase goes far enough back and has enough branches or lookalikes from converging design that it's hard to really tell sometimes. Unless I'm mistaken, BurP2 is actually a distant, heavily-modified, almost unrecognizable cousin to SoI. When people talk about RPIs as a 'genre', rather than a tree of similar and often related codebases, it gets really subjective because people are generally talking about a certain sort of game climate, and there's actually nothing about that game climate that would preclude many MUSHes that have those sorts of features. The requirements Optional Realities utilizes are generally considered to be standard for that climate and play culture, which isn't to say that the 'quality' of roleplay on those games is inherently 'better' than on games that have different approach, so much as it has different but likely occasionally overlapping appeal, except insofar as the term 'RPI' itself is a little pretentious, but hey, I didn't make it.
The way I'd put it is the difference between Magic Online and a lot of free multiplayer Magic: the Gathering game clients.
That's actually the exact analogy I was going to use initially, but I wasn't sure everybody would follow. I think there are actually a couple of graphical tabletop simulators along those lines too, or maybe it was for board games.
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Heyo,
Was out getting a drink. Yeah I know what this community is I've likened it to the Armageddon MUD shadowboards which serves a similar albeit much more focused purpose. I watched as that one Game of Thrones MUSH got a bit of a black eye with the whole GRRM intent and yada yada yada.
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Very tired, not focusing well, will assume lots of words meant "by mud centric view for mud centric viewers don't understand other views". Will point out irony-slash-inconsistency of this when contrasted to the word "all" in mission statement. May clean up this post later for accuracy and content.
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I've become pretty fond of this community, and I was Not A Fan of a community that existed before it with some of the same members, but a very different tone. There are discussions here that can get heated, but I find most of them intelligently heated...if people have questions they ask them. They're usually not even related to personal choices people made on personal games, unless they relate to larger issues, like yeah, Intellectual Property intent....or that thread on sexual themes that turned to a discussion of rape rp and that can get people emotional for lots of reasons.
There are going to be people who come and get some backlash...whether they have history with others here (I don't, I'm a 'community n00b) and my gaming experiences have gone on for years but been too spotty in some places (WoD) for me to have the strong opinions others do about some aspects of things. I'm glad that Optional Realities isn't clinging to the RPI label, because whatever it was meant to be way back in the day, what it became was just a huge MUD vs MUD, battle of Which Kind of Geek is Better that went on for more than a -decade- and those of us who watched, or even piped up, are probably all just donnne.
Most MUSHes are permadeath, yeah. I do -agree- that there is some OOCness on any game where permadeath doesn't exist, that you have to do some suspension of disbelief to still have characters properly 'scared' of death, but some do it well. And the MUDs that don't have permadeath are some of the ones who have become actual commercial successes...looking at IRE and Threshold/Frogdice entertainment in particularly. I can't tell if the 'listing' of games matters overall, but when reaching out to people for contribution about what makes a game last over time, where roleplaying is part of the game and part of what makes players say they keep coming back, it seems to me like those who levied this 'hobby' into full time careers are valuable people to have contributing, writing, talking, whatever. Though I don't know how far they have even branched from the text game genre at this point into indie gaming...they'd still have information.
As for here, this to me hasn't struck me as a 'shadowboard' for whining about mean staff or bad games or whatever. There's parts that are, but that isn't the bulk of what I've seen or I wouldn't be into it, because that isn't my thing so much. I find the conversations about what people like and don't like in their games interesting, it has provided me with insight and ideas, and shown me more of what is out there for when/if I do get the time to try new things.
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@Gingerlily
I don't know what you mean that there is "OOCness where there is no permadeath." There is OOCness everywhere. As far as I can tell, there is no multiplayer computer game so complete that there is a perfect lack of OOCing.That is, there is also OOCness where there is permadeath.
Were you talking about something more specific?
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain said:
Were you talking about something more specific?
I think they're saying if you OOC know your character isn't going to die, you need to stretch a bit to have the PC act like they're afraid of death anyway.
I don't see the difference between that though and any number of things I know that my characters don't.
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I assumed it was partially what @Arkandel said, and also how characters who reappear after being "killed" are dealt with. Like, there's no RP around Bob's death ICly, since Bob just respawns.
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@Three-Eyed-Crow Wait, that happens? I assumed this was a matter of "Bob somehow survived being drop-kicked from the side of that building into the harbor" as opposed to "I shot Bob five times in the head until his skull was turned into paste".
Theme better have an answer to this if it's what the approach is otherwise how the hell would you explain it IC?
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The same way superhero comics explain it.
