A General Apology from the Guy Who Was Ashur
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Any chance we can dispense with the mean girls routine?
Conversely though I wish I could like names enough to reserve them in advance. That'd be nice. Usually I pick them when I have everything else down in my head, I'm at the login screen prompt and have already typed "create "... but then I need to keep hitting keys. Which keys? WHICH KEYS?
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said:
Any chance we can dispense with the mean girls routine?
Any chance we can get you to avoid using sexist conventions?
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Sexism is bad. But when a bunch of girls are engaged in high schoolish drama, the comparison to Mean Girls, a film about high school girls involved in drama, isn't exactly evil.
I'm a rodeo clown.
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@tragedyjones said:
Sexism is bad. But when a bunch of girls are engaged in high schoolish drama, the comparison to Mean Girls, a film about high school girls involved in drama, isn't exactly evil.
There are a million other ways to describe the hand-slapping than to fall back to a meme that's so fucking gay.
(See what I did there?)
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede said:
@tragedyjones said:
Sexism is bad. But when a bunch of girls are engaged in high schoolish drama, the comparison to Mean Girls, a film about high school girls involved in drama, isn't exactly evil.
There are a million other ways to describe the hand-slapping than to fall back to a meme that's so fucking gay.
(See what I did there?)
No, not really, as nothing said actually has anything to do with either LGBTQ culture nor is particularly happy.
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Gah, are we back on the name thing?
In the other thread this is how you deal with it.
Player Y makes Catriona, Player x makes Catriona Jones and makes a one word alias for ease of logging on, mailing, pages, all the other things. Then Player X and Y both don't act like asshats.
If players X or Y fail at the last step bring down the banhammer. Problem solved.
If people get consistently pissy over names, which would be more then going gee I usually use name but it is taken, I really have no words. -
I was, initially, trying to make the point that assuming staff are monsters by default is a damaging trend in this hobby.
But frankly, if simply making that statement with an example of someone doing it gets me accused of shit, I am going to go for the fucking throat and there is not going to be an apology for it afterward.
It does, actually, demonstrate why it's a problem.
On one hand, you've got the reality that people who work hard to ensure they are being fair and reasonable and all the rest, usually making sacrifices to do so and getting no small amount of abuse for doing so, are not exactly doing it because it's super fun. Generally speaking, they're doing it because other people having fun, for whatever reason, is important to them.
The reason can be a shitty reason, but isn't always the case. Some people might want everyone to like them, or heap praise on them, or whatever else along those lines, but most people I've come across understand the basic principle that the more peaceable the kingdom, the better the odds are that fewer problems will arise and the more fun they will get to have, too, doing the same things everyone else is supposed to be doing: just playing the damn game.
I don't take this quite as far as @Ganymede does in its interpretation, that whichever party is the most grating presence, right or wrong, should be shown the door, but I do think people go too far on handing out the twenty-second chances for some of the worst offenders. (Spider being a prime example.)
There is a point at which being "fair" in the handing out of 'just one more chance' to people consistently doing damage to the well-being of the game community becomes unfair to everyone who is subject to their outbursts, abusive garbage, creeperism, or whatever their particular bit of nasty is.
I don't even pretend I have the solution to this one. While I don't agree personally with Gany's, she has one that works for her, and if it works, it's more than what a lot of places have.
A big difference in how a MUX works vs. a tabletop game is simply this: people generally have to earn their welcome to a spot at the table. We can obviously have invite-only games, and there are some out there, but that still isn't quite the same thing. A MUX needs more people than the average tabletop game does to properly thrive. The closest thing I have to a 'solution' is based on this, to some extent -- that being that some folks, and they're very few in number even after close to 20 years, have earned not a welcome, but an unwelcome. Spider, Jeurg; that class of 'unwelcome presence'. VK -- used as an example since it's all present here for clarity and thus makes a good example -- may have obviously pissed me off and I may be personally wary as hell of her, but she does not even come close to the level of consistent horrible that, to me, would earn an 'unwelcome'. There's nothing she's done that suggests doesn't care about the rules or is eager to break them if she can find means to do so to benefit herself, that she thinks rules don't apply to her, or that she thinks lying to other players to get around no-contact requests or exploiting them for her benefit is OK. I'm talking about people who make consistent practice of these kinds of 'the rules are only there when it's convenient to me or I can use them or staff as a weapon to browbeat others' behaviors, not people who I find personally irritating.
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality said:
thing I have to a 'solution' is based on this, to some extent -- that being that some folks, and they're very few in number even after close to 20 years, have earned not a welcome, but an unwelcome. Spider, Jeurg; that class of 'unwelcome presence'.
See, the problem with this is that hindsight is 20/20. Both players you name here have at times being highly regarded by many - I remember when I was first interested in rolling a Mage on HM knowing very little about it I asked @EmmahSue to recommend someone to get points from and she offered Juerg. VAS had been lauded at times as an accomplished ST, was given the reigns to factions voluntarily and people actively tried to get in her coterie/packs.
What I'm saying is that telling the difference between "person who rubs me the wrong way" and "plague who destroys everything they touch" can be a very hard to distinguish at the time. People, even the worst players, have people who really like them and others get pretty bad press without actually doing something horrible just because as a community we can be fairly mean to people if there's a bandwagon pointing their way. "Woo-hoo, I'm in the in-crowd, evidenced by the fact there's a we, and we hate <X>!" is very much a thing.
So sure, after a couple of years patterns emerge and we can have a better idea who's batshit and who's not based on their track record but until then I wouldn't trust any subjective metric other than specific actions to demonstrate it's time to get rid of a player altogether.
In other words, banning a player because he demonstratively sexually harassed someone after being warned to cut it out is perfectly legitimate. Banning them because of general badness... that's another story altogether.
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(I find it so cute VK is still downvoting me.)
Frankly, if people demonstrate the behavior I've specifically listed more than once -- and I don't particularly care where -- in recent years, I would happily tack their IP onto the 'don't even bother' list before the doors open.
That, from my perspective, is a lot more fair than letting even a jackass invest their time -- everybody's matters, even that of shitty human beings -- and then yanking the rug out from under them. There's simply a point at which the pattern is too obvious to NOT shift the scales from "it's more fair to give this person a chance at redeeming themselves" to "it's unfair for the other people here to have to tolerate this person's bad behavior in the name of giving them a twenty-second chance to behave like they were supposed to in the first place".
There's a salient difference between 'annoying' and 'has proven themselves to be consistently unethical in their dealings with others'.
Annoying varies based on tolerance to whatever it is the person does that makes them annoying. "The rules don't apply to me" is another animal entirely.
Jeurg, for instance, didn't make it onto my 'unwelcome' list for his creeperism or mind control panther fetish. He made it onto that list because, on another game, a player clearly informed him they wished to have no contact with him IC or OOC again, anywhere. On another game, he determined who this player was playing, and actively sought them out to interact with them, and later gave them extensive grief for not being nice enough to him, and kept flinging drama in that player's direction. This isn't hearsay or guesswork; he said all of this himself without any prompting or inquiry -- proudly, even. He clearly figured it was perfectly all right to continue doing the things that had made him persona non grata the first time simply due to a change of venue; I somehow doubt the other player in this situation feels the same.
This is precisely the sort of bullshit the hobby does not need, but that's my opinion. No one person dictates that to the hobby at large. You can bet on it, however, that a game I run will operate on that principle, with full disclosure to that end. Enough games have died the death of a thousand papercuts thanks to Geek Social Fallacy #1 already.
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He also had a habit of running off players he didn't like or saw as competition for his BDSM eHarem. That's kind of shitty behavior at minimum.
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@silentsophia said:
He also had a habit of running off players he didn't like or saw as competition for his BDSM eHarem. That's kind of shitty behavior at minimum.
Well, yeah. But a lot of people do that. It's shitty, but different than what amounts to practically stalking a real person from game to game and thinking 'it's a new game!' means there's a clean slate to do the same things to the same person (player-level aggression) that you know were inappropriate before.
A game is a game; it isn't designed to be a platform for somebody's real life redemption story. That so many people treat places as precisely this, no matter how good their intentions, causes a considerable measure of needless grief.
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality True. He just had a lot of time, power and ability to do so.
Thankfully all I got from Juerg was mistreated because of my depression and completely shunned from his little clique. I think I remember that poor person.
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Hey now, running a BDSM harem takes a lot of effort. +butterfly-clips doesn't code itself.
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@surreality And yet - again at the time - I was in a cabal with someone who had Juerg issues, who had been told in no uncertain terms sleeping with him would have made them disappear and who went to staff - with logs - repeatedly asking for them to do something. The staff member responsible for it never did, and in fact they accused her of trying to avoid the consequenes of her character actions because they liked him more than her, and staff members over them in the chain of command backed the decision because they didn't want to get involved.
Does that sound at all like something we've been discussing in the thread? That's not an example, it's a thing that actually happened. I was there to see her leave the game over it.
It's not easy to be a good administrator. That's why there are so few of those well regarded by their peers - on top of actually being adept at game-things, being proactive and creative over a period of time they also need to stay impartial and get their hands dirty. That's not the kind of practice which wins friends, and in some cases it can alienate the ones they already have.
But even then telling a jerk from an abuser, someone you don't like from someone who's legitimately harming your game... that's the hardest thing. Putting a stop to what someone you might actually like is doing, knowing it'll piss them and their friends off - some of whom might be staffing as well - is plain rare.
It's easy to chastise or punish someone without ties to anything else. Going after well connected players requires actual conviction.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said:
@surreality And yet - again at the time - I was in a cabal with someone who had Juerg issues, who had been told in no uncertain terms sleeping with him would have made them disappear and who went to staff - with logs - repeatedly asking for them to do something. The staff member responsible for it never did, and in fact they accused her of trying to avoid the consequenes of her character actions because they liked him more than her, and staff members over them in the chain of command backed the decision because they didn't want to get involved.
Does that sound at all like something we've been discussing in the thread? That's not an example, it's a thing that actually happened. I was there to see her leave the game over it.
It's not easy to be a good administrator. That's why there are so few of those well regarded by their peers - on top of actually being adept at game-things, being proactive and creative over a period of time they also need to stay impartial and get their hands dirty. That's not the kind of practice which wins friends, and in some cases it can alienate the ones they already have.
But even then telling a jerk from an abuser, someone you don't like from someone who's legitimately harming your game... that's the hardest thing. Putting a stop to what someone you might actually like is doing, knowing it'll piss them and their friends off - some of whom might be staffing as well - is plain rare.
It's easy to chastise or punish someone without ties to anything else. Going after well connected players requires actual conviction.
I agree with all of this.
I know I've lost friends over disagreements with them about policy issues, or because I've called them out on crap that shouldn't be happening (as players or staffers). It doesn't mean I like them any less -- but dang if plenty of them haven't liked me less for it.
To some extent, you need 'robot mode'.
- If you're pissed off, don't handle the thing then if you're the one who absolutely must handle it.
- If there's an impartial party willing and able to handle the matter, assign it to them to handle.
- If you're not impartial and you fail to realize this, problems are going to arise fast. (I've been on the receiving end of a similar situation to the one you describe and have seen this in action.)
- You can't think about how this is going to impact your friendship (if one exists).
A lot of people have trouble with this because they make it about themselves. "Will my friendship be harmed if I... " or "Will this bother my friend?" and so on. This isn't actually about the other person and what the other person is doing; it's a case of self-interest, that interest being the preservation of whatever relationship one has with the offending party (or friends of the offending party).
Being cognizant of that makes an enormous difference. Most people aren't. When it's about 'what am I going to lose?' it's harder. You can't let that be a factor, because it's not about you.
This is common sense to me, I dunno.
Clarification: '...this isn't actually about the other person... ' means 'these concerns are not the relevant concerns you should be having, you should be caring about the wellfare of the game, not what is important to you personally'.
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Mushing would be so much better if we didn't have players.
I'm a rodeo clown.
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@tragedyjones said:
Mushing would be so much better if we didn't have players.
Systems would be so much more secure if we didn't have users, either.
I think you might be on to something here.
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Don't worry. MUSHing is well on the way to being the greatest, most secure thing ever.
