A healthy game culture

[il-volpe]

I've got this theory that the granular and hierarchical structure of the traditional Masq-of-our-own WoD MUSH is a filthy sodden sock nourishing the trenchfoot that is traditional WoD MUSH toxic fuckery.

What, if any, organizational structures and/or created/encouraged micro-cultural elements have you seen used to in efforts to keep MU fuckery nutritious or at least neutral? Did they work?

[L. B. Heuschkel]

It's not a structural or organisational thing as such, but one which makes or breaks a game for me: The feeling that everyone is as welcome as they want to be, whether that means being on 8 hours every evening or just checking in every other day for a bit.

It's definitely a cultural thing, and it only happens when management and the older players make an effort to make it so. Set a trend of talking to new people, of channels being non-hostile, of answering questions also when they are stupid, and you've come a long way.

From staff's side, this means booting the assholes, but it also means not rewarding unwanted behaviour with attention. It's very easy to fall into the hole of catering to the loudest. But me first, me first behaviour also helps create an A and a B group of players. The ones you want to listen to the most and create stuff for the most, are the large, not particularly loud group of people who just play the game, interact like adults, and don't cause any great ripples. They're not always the most exciting, but they're the ones who keep your game from falling into dramatics and cliquery.

[Carma]

This post is deleted!

[il-volpe]

I think there are some elements of the organisational structure that encourage rewarding unwanted behavior, and/or hide it but not its consequences.

Thinking of catering to the loudest. I have this vague recollection of a game that had 'story points' or maybe they called them something else. You got them by interacting with somebody you hadn't played with in the last week(?) and probably by doing some other things, when you accumulated enough a GM would appear and make something happen that was about you. Most people were talking weasels or wizards or both, but that's beside the point. I wonder if anyone's tried a more sophisticated version of that.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@il-volpe Hmm, Ares has a smidgen of it in that you accumulate Luck by scening, and more Luck by scening with new characters or characters you haven't scened a lot with before. It's a nice little touch -- and probably as far as I am comfortable with it going.

It's a good reminder that the game wants you to meet new people. But it's not enough to make 'farming newbies' viable. Because that's the other extreme of that -- people doing pointless, no-content scenes just to get a notch on the score card.(1)

But that's a thing that applies to any and all game systems: Ultimately, you can't code yourself into good game culture. You can remove some of the obvious hurdles -- favourite example here is pvp style games that actively give you xp for killing easy things such as other players, even the big MMOs learned quick to not reward farming the newbies. But ultimately, game culture is built in spite of game mechanics, not on them.

(1) Disclaimer: A scene is not pointless if you enjoyed it. Bar RP, slice of life RP, chatting sports at the laundromat RP, is all not pointless if you enjoyed it or felt you built IC relationship from it. Pointless means a scene where someone walks in, drops a few poses about being too bored for this shit, and walks out, wasting the space they occupied.

[Ganymede]

@il-volpe said in A healthy game culture:

I've got this theory that the granular and hierarchical structure of the traditional Masq-of-our-own WoD MUSH is a filthy sodden sock nourishing the trenchfoot that is traditional WoD MUSH toxic fuckery.

You need a theory for this?

Any staff hierarchy is comparable to a business' structure. There are owners; there are directors; and there are staff. If your owners are shit, the game will be shit. If your owners are not involved or don't care about the day-to-day operations, the directors can and may get away with murder. Nepotism and cronyism will erode trust between staff, directors, and owners. This is applicable to every game.

Consumers suffer because of the paucity of options.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

I'm going to have to agree that if there is any one (2-3) player(s) who can ruin a game on their own, then that is management, yes.

Game runners don't need to be high visibility, leading everything by hand. In fact, when they are, the game can turn into an attention grabbing competition because players feel the only way to stay involved is to elbow into the game runners' personal circle.

They do, however, need to be trustworthy. That means some level of transparency, and a reputation for fairness. If you can't trust game admin to take your complaint seriously because they're buddies with the guy who harrassed you, then the only way to go there is far away.

[Pyrephox]

Incentivize the behavior you want to see. I've always been delighted when games set up ways to make a player's enjoyment with another player clear in a mechanical direction. Not publicly - that has a tendency to become competitive. And not through XP/votes, because there shouldn't be a reward that people then feel entitled to or like they're losing out on getting. But, like, original Darkwater had a non-XP vote that just sent the person a silly message like "X gives you a PONY" and it was fun and a nice, small way to connect to people.

Why not just take the initiative and say, "Why, X, I found this scene charming and I really enjoy playing with you?" Because when you put a specific mechanic in, you're sharing part of the game's priorities. We care about this. Also, I may be alone in this, but it's often easier for me to essentially 'tell the camera' what I enjoyed about a scene or a character, when I have some chance to think about it, rather than immediately after/during a scene.

Also: have failure mechanics that prioritize making failure fun and rewarding for a player (even if not for a character). Remember as game runners that a character failure is not a player failure, and try to help players internalize this, too. A lot of toxic culture ultimately comes from players' anxiety and insecurity, and a feeling like their characters have to be 'good enough' or they'll get shut out of RP. There's fun in character optimization, but it can become hugely toxic if it isn't managed.

[Derp]

@l-b-heuschkel said in A healthy game culture:

Ares has a smidgen of it in that you accumulate Luck by scening, and more Luck by scening with new characters or characters you haven't scened a lot with before.

That's FS3, not specifically Ares.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@derp said in A healthy game culture:

That's FS3, not specifically Ares.

I stand corrected.

I also agree with Pyrephox above about incentive and not taking it too far. I've been on games where people would have wild and massive OOC arguments about when you deserve a virtual cookie for a scene. The cookies had no game mechanics effect. They were just numbers that got posted to a weekly leaderboard. The arguments were rabid.

I am not a fan of 'popular scenes this week' posts or 'cookie leaderboard' posts for this reason. Competitiveness is not necessarily our friends in a community based game.

[GreenFlashlight]

@il-volpe said in A healthy game culture:

I've got this theory that the granular and hierarchical structure of the traditional Masq-of-our-own WoD MUSH is a filthy sodden sock nourishing the trenchfoot that is traditional WoD MUSH toxic fuckery.

Well, yes. Hierarchies inherently separate people from one another, and the powerful from consequences by insuring there's no oversight except among those hand-picked by the powerful to be among the powerful: their friends, in other words. The hell of it is, most people seem to want inequities to continue in the hopes of one day profiting from them, rather than removing them (insert that Futurama meme about how one day Frye might be rich and then people like him better watch out), so I don't know how to solve the problem. Transparent communication between staff and players seems to be the key answer, but I'll be damned if I know how to make that happen.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@greenflashlight I'm going to go with, the staff needs to be players.

It sounds so simple. Nothing is ever that simple, of course. But in terms of importance, it does matter. Some game runners take it on themselves to be game runners because they want something specific and the only way to get it is to run it. This is great. Some then go on to think that having an idea and implementing it somehow makes them a superior segment of the population, and bloody hell, they will not let you forget it.

Running a game does not make you a better human being. It quite possibly makes you a sucker because it's a lot of work, and you certainly deserve kudos for putting in that effort so the rest of us can have fun. But there's one hell of a difference between respect where respect is due, and expecting to have some kind of communal authority and status of visionary.

The best game runners I've played under and/or staffed for have been people who saw themselves as players, just putting in more volunteer work. Some even went as far as to play their own games anonymously in order to avoid sucking up or special treatment because staff or staff adjacent.

It's natural to want to play with your friends. We all do that. In my (let's just admit it, opinionated and not very humble) experience, there is a leap made sometimes where new players cease to be potential future play mates and friends and become annoying pieces of obligation. If you're ever in that last mindset as a game runner -- get another hobby, go on a break, do something else.

I'm not convinced it's transparency (though transparency is good) as much as it's respect. Players need to respect game runners for hosting, running, and maintaining the game. But game runners also need to respect their players. When neither respect the other, the game turns into a horrific cesspit of 'what can I get away with' and 'who cares, everyone's an asshole'.

[GreenFlashlight]

@l-b-heuschkel said in A healthy game culture:

Some then go on to think that having an idea and implementing it somehow makes them a superior segment of the population, and bloody hell, they will not let you forget it.

That does happen, but I'm not even talking about malice. I'm talking about perspective. Your perspective is shaped by your experiences; your experiences are shaped by your circumstances; the circumstances of making policy are very different from the circumstances of having to abide by policy. That is why I think transparency is a big deal.

[lamp]

@lamp said in The Arx Peeve Thread:

Ban abusers, even if they are good writers

[tek]

@lamp said in A healthy game culture:

@lamp said in The Arx Peeve Thread:

Ban abusers, even if they are good writers

And even if they run lots of events.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

Ban abusers, even if they are good writers
And even if they run lots of events.

Zero tolerance for certain behaviours is probably a very important step. I've left more than one game because nothing was done about horrendous behaviour and chicanery, whether towards me or someone else. And entirely too often, that abuse does in fact come from staff or from someone of whom staff will say, 'he's a friend, he'd never do that'.

[Ganymede]

@tek

Especially if they do so, because that’s how they hunt.

[tek]

@ganymede That's part of DownWithOPP's MO. He's a good roleplayer and a good ST and he banks on people not wanting to lose that.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@tek Haven't had the (dis)pleasure but if a player makes you feel like we should probably talk to him but it'd be such a shame to lose all of whatever, then that player is likely doing exactly that. Gut feeling is usually right.

[il-volpe]

@l-b-heuschkel said in A healthy game culture:

I'm not convinced it's transparency (though transparency is good) as much as it's respect.

Just so, it's about respect.

I think lack of transparency generally indicates a lack of respect. Even if it doesn't to begin with, it nourishes disrespectful crap by providing a deep and rich fount of plausible deniability.

e.g. GM had claimed frustration that players won't include others but that he couldn't do anything about it, leaving me sitting there thinking, "Yes you could, just quit adjusting the plot so they can succeed without cooperating or including others and let them fail. Also, quit giving them private GMed scenes several times a week while other players are waiting on you." Discovering that "tell them that staff alts should not be shutting others out," should be added to that list of nothings-you-really-can-do does not make me feel respected. Same GM also expressed frustration over players refusing to engage in cross-faction cooperation. After learning that the same players are dominating action and decision-making in both factions I am forced to conclude that he's either lying or incredibly dense; those players would have to work the plot from only one character if the factions form a working alliance. The mutual respect that I had believed to exist when I began the game appears to have never been there on GMs part, and has been lost on mine.

My personal view of the History of MU*s places Anomaly TrekMUX in this spot where transparency increased but the fuckery remained, but spin-offs did notice the embarrassing levels fuckery made visible and worked to correct them some.