Posts made by Apos

@faraday said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I disputed the earlier assertion that MUSHes share a culture, but I guess it comes down to what you define as "culture". Certainly MUSHes share a general philosophy of emphasizing roleplay over code (which differentiates them from MUDs) and having a 24/7 persistent IC world that tracks with RL time at some set ratio (which differentiates them from forum games). Beyond that, though, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any universal MU constants.

I think you're right on using the word philosophy. I might tweak the word 'emphasizing' about roleplay, since I immediately think of RPI MUDs that roleplay is a core focus, but are dramatically different than MUs because there's a lot of gameplay in MUDs that are tangential to or basically unrelated to fostering RP. So I might just say that code in MUSHes is there only to foster and support roleplay, and provided coded tools for roleplay, which probably distinguishes them from MUDs that have roleplay but want to have a lot of other gameplay elements that are distinct and separate from RP.

Like what distinguishes MUs from other RP environments like storium, discord, tumblr, boards, googledocs, etc is the relative ease that staff can track very divergent storylines and help keep a cohesive, continuous world as a play environment, where players can relatively seamlessly go from one story with a group of friends to a different group of friends with a different story, and all of it is happening in the same world with a larger overarching story. Other RP formats just don't do that well, and most don't even try.

MUSHes in my mind take it a step further MUs in de-emphasizing the world as an interactive character and wanting to make sure no single-player game elements can get in the way of RP interactions between player characters. Just a more streamlined, story driven and character interaction focused experience. I was hesitant to call Arx a MUSH, not because of the technical definition that's inaccurate about codebase, but because I think philosophically it doesn't quite fit right. Since I definitely do want some MUD-like elements of an interactive environment as a way of spurring on spontaneous RP, and automated ways of having game-like interactions that can organically act as RP prompts, and that's leaning away from a MUSH philosophy that can see those things as distractions, imo. It just is still different from a MUD philosophy that wants those things as gameplay elements for their own sake, rather than how they create RP.

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

like, I basically agree w your points but I think it's important to realize that an environment that's "safe" by the standard of some ppl in this field is still going to be something that just, has a magnetic repulsion to a ton of normal people and i think people are so tunnel vision on what's become acceptable in MU culture that they fail to consider how insane it is to people who aren't in that milieu and when it gets brought up it usually just provokes sneering and gatekeeping when it gets acknowledged at all

I think it's important to understand that a lot of MUs, like Faraday says, have reeeeeally different cultures. Like reading the different comic MU threads are horrifying to me. The whole, 'it's just a joke bro!' or 'they are just misreading things!' from suggestive pages to me is mind boggling that it is tolerated, because of how creepy and offputting it is, and I would not be comfortable on games where that is accepted culturally.

So a couple quick comments, first I want to echo @faraday with her comment of:

Tech is not the only answer, but I wholeheartedly believe it is an important part of the solution.

I think we should remember that tons of people aren't RPing in google docs, or an MMO client or some random chatroom or something because they think it's the best format for roleplay. It's just easy and accessible. There's an awful lot of good people that could be amazing game runners, but they both know running a game takes a tremendous amount of time, and even if they have that time, the initial investment of effort into setting it up is huge. Game in a box is the best counter to that. Most people aren't going to create a game unless they can do it as easily as they can open up a google doc or make a new server in discord, and what a MU format offers to make it worth it past that has to be pretty clear cut to people.

I think it's important to also realize that our hobby is really driven by enthusiasm and how willing people are to pour their creative energies into it. So games tend to have sudden bursts, as an idea takes root and everyone is excited by it, pours into it, and then tends to move on, the same way tabletop campaigns can build and wane. It's important that game setup is simple and easy enough so people that have that excitement can capitalize it, and not run into factors that stall it out. Ares is an excellent step in this direction.

@Thenomain said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Just ping @Apos to give his top, mm, three to five things people should do or not do. Or one. I have confidence he could get it down into one.

We have a lot of people that have really different ideas of what they want out of games, and not everyone is going to be entirely honest even with themselves about what they want. I think with some people coming up on 30 years in this, most of you all with more experience have seen what makes healthy games probably more clearly than I have. But I think we could sum things up as like:

1. A safe, friendly environment that's welcoming. Feeling like a friend won't be creeped on if they invite them to the game. Being able to establish boundaries that are respected. Creating an environment that players feel comfortable in, and know they won't be abused.
2. Respecting the time and effort of everyone involved. It's a collaborative hobby, everyone is investing their time in it. Fairly recognizing it, never being dismissive of someone's contributions however invisible it might be to others. Whether someone gets into a game or stays in it often just comes down to whether they feel their time will be respected, or if they'll get invested only to have someone stomp on it.
3. Facilitating story and people finding RP. Creating an environment that makes it feel rewarding to be proactive and get stories going, where people feel comfortable reaching out to others. Whether it's completely organic of happenstance or whether it's ooc contact and building, there's healthy ways to encourage this and unhealthy blocks that have to be pushed back against.

These are pretty fragile things. If someone isn't invested, a single bad experience will usually sour them. If someone is invested, they could become very soured and become an active detriment to the game environment that's makes it unfun for other people and kills the environment.

People are just asking that because they want to know what will make fun people seek them out for RP, and feel valuable and important. If something is needed but no one plays it, it's because the RP they get isn't fun, and they don't feel valuable and important despite being needed.

@saosmash Yeah lemme give an example. So my job deals with internal customers and external customers (general public). In 13 years, I've never had a coworker or internal customer be so much as slightly rude to me. I've never even heard of a conflict at my old office. Not once. If it was entirely inward facing, I would probably forget the incredible assholes I deal with for the other part even exist. Internally facing jobs with good teams and good environments? Sure.

@mietze What I more meant was there might be an expectation that MUs are much better structured and more tightly policed than they usually are. Anyone coming from a different RP environment might be expecting something that's more cohesive and friendly.

@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

And that's ignoring just, the usual social maladaptive shit that's so common on games that it's just taken for granted, the people who have no idea how to interact with anyone who isn't broken the same way they are and the way that geek social fallacies are like burned into the fabric of everything and not to be questioned

I’m going to say this in a non-repulsive way in response.

If you think you can avoid MUSH maladaptive behaviors in real life, you are either tremendously naive or stupidly optimistic. You might as well admit that you live in a box if you can honestly and introspectively believe that real life is any less dysfunctional.

I think this one is worth talking about.

For anyone that works with people in conflict- anyone involved with the law, bouncers, people that field complaints or work in customer service or terrible parts of retail. Yeah sure, you see maladaptive behaviors on a daily basis. And for leaders or managers responsible for organizing other people and making them get along, they see social dynamics and the same atrocious behaviors of the worst aspects of MU communities.

But most people honestly don't. A lot of 20 somethings trying to get into an RP community for the first time might have never been seriously creeped on before, or stalked, or had someone be violently combative for no good reason. Yeah, these people are out in the real world, and a lot of us have to deal with them in our day jobs, but that can also make us easily forget how many people go about their day to day lives and work jobs where they almost never meet the worst aspects of humanity over and over again.

Some of us definitely have to run into those behaviors time and again, day in and day out. Others just don't. And we shouldn't let that skew our perspectives and make us tolerant of it on MUs, imo.

@Prototart pretty much the entire reason Arx is as big as it is was because of the hardline stance that @Kanye-Qwest took against many of those elements. Like people assumed that banning early and often would shrink a game but the opposite is true when those elements alienate regular players.

I don't think it's constructive to adopt a dismissive approach towards one of the most popular features that people use as a creative outlet, and therefore is taken as a reflection upon their approach to the hobby in general. It implicitly says their way of approaching the hobby is incorrect, and the way they enjoy the hobby is not welcome and should not be supported.

I mean. That would be one definition of wrongfunning, I guess.

@Tehom said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Could you elaborate on what you think should work differently (apart from adding a RESTful API as a new input in the first place)?
.
Griatch

What I was more thinking about was the response rather than the request, if that makes sense. Evennia does support using input_funcs out of the box to call commands: but those commands do not currently have a generalized way set up to generate a response afaik, it assumes that the only meaningful output needs to take place in-game. If we're assuming that the text response is just one type of View, that's not necessarily the case - we want any sort of action to generate some sort of JSON response which we'd pass along to wherever. So what I was picturing was commands calling methods in objects that'd return some dict-like structure that could be converted to JSON for web responses, though you could do the same thing with commands directly as well.

Just to translate for everyone that is wondering what Tehom is talking about in his discussion with Griatch and isn't familiar with the coding terminology, let me briefly (and maybe at least partly accurately) summarize:

He is saying that since people trying to create their own games using evennia would probably instinctively first go to changing commands (you know, the really common ones shared across games that Evennia has out of the box also), it should probably be a lot easier for a coder to learn to do that. Since there's an awful lot of ways something can be coded and implemented, he was debating about ways to set it up so it's a lot more accessible for new coders to do it, rather than very experienced ones, since a new coder sitting down to try to learn python and django and use Evennia is going to want to do that early on, and it probably shouldn't need more advanced concepts. That's why it's such a technical discussion, because they are basically coders talking about what might be easiest out of a wide range of choices.

@faraday Yeah, in my mind right now the best approach is to very strongly encourage mentoring and buddy approaches, since I've noticed far and away the people that become acclimated to the hobby and get most involved are the ones that have someone, anyone introducing them and talking them through it in a friendly, patient way. I think it's kind of addressing the symptoms more than the core problems but I think right now it's pretty much the best we got.

@Griatch One important thing that could be missed from my post is I was really only talking a very specific style of MUSH, and this is an important one to know when looking at the design requirements between MUD and MUSH. The MUSHes I'm talking about are ones that essentially have staff acting as personalized storytellers for players, with hands on, one on one development in a table-top type of feel. That just isn't something that scales unless you keep adding more tiers of staff overseeing story development. MUDs, on the other hand, scale essentially infinitely since the environment is automated and could theoretically handle any number of players.

Like comparing say, the MUDconnector or r/MUD or whatever to here, the amount of game owners trying to advertise and push their games is waaaaaaaaaay higher for MUDs than MUSHes for that reason, since there's no real bound on players imo.

There is an upper bound to how many people staff can invest their time in and entertain, and if they aren't doing this then there is not much difference between MUs and less arcane RP formats. Table top writ large can only be writ so large before people are constantly forgotten and left out.

Someone could advertise hard on all the younger demographic RP communities but there's only a point in doing that if you can support them, and take the time to help get them into the game. I mean the larger RP forums, chat room type places have tens of thousands of users and I'd guess maybe like a tenth of a percent have even ever heard of MUs, but if I threw down ads and had like, 100 people log in as guests to ask questions on how to MU, there's no way I could support that.

@faraday said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

@Ganymede said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

Unsurprisingly, I enjoy playing both bridge and poker.

There's nothing wrong either game, and certainly nothing wrong with liking both.

What happens too often in MUSH land, though, is that you have people who are:

a) Showing up to a bridge tournament expecting to play poker and then getting disappointed.
b) Trying to play both bridge and poker simultaneously with the same deck of cards and acting shocked when that doesn't work out.
c) Badmouthing those who prefer a different type of card game than they do.
or some variation of the above.

MUSH games are not very good about setting expectations of what kind of game they are, and players are not very good about respecting those boundaries even when they are established.

I've had so many headaches with players just not being able to understand cultural differences at all and game styles, even without the headaches of boundary violations. Just the very basic, 'how does someone find RP', 'how much ooc communication is appropriate here', 'how does the game handle conflict resolution', 'how formal is ooc communication', 'how much handwaving happens in the game', 'is it immersive and organic or more scheduled in style', etc, etc, these vary so wildly from game to game that the potential for misunderstanding is just enormous and pretty much nothing most players think is 'common sense' for unspoken MU rules are universal.

I think the baseline behavior in the hobby is pretty good, and a lot better than I expected. If you have clear guidelines for what's reasonable and a well defined culture, most people line up to it well. I wasted a whole hell of a lot of time early on trying to design around countering exceptions for bad behavior that people have just never attempted, when just saying, 'No one do X' would have been fine.

On the flip side, how well people handle conflict or loss of anything they are invested in is way, way, way worse than I expected. Like by orders of magnitude.

I started worried about trolling and bad actors, and almost never found it. But people going apeshit over setbacks from individuals that are normally 100% fine and even positive was way worse than I ever anticipated.

@Selira said in The Esports thread:

@Apos While they still had Pobelter, and thus 3/5 of the MSG team, I was casually referring to TL last year as CLG.Horse. Regi has made some really baffling roster moves lately.

My suspicion is that NA has always placed a silly amount of value on scrim results, and been inclined to bench people that underperform in scrims or have weak communication in those. This has led to NA as a region having some mind bogglingly dumb strategies, like during the ardent censer meta, I ran the numbers and NA lost like 21 out of 23 games where they let the other team draft janna, or prioritized drafting ryze (who had an incredibly high bar for execution in that meta). I think TSM is probably the worst team about this, in putting super high emphasis on watching how things perform in the looser scrim environment and then trying to put it on stage, where teams just play more conservatively and crisper.

@Selira I'm going to be salty af if TSM doesn't make playoffs and the 3 teams going to worlds all have former TSM members, lol.

@Selira said in The Esports thread:

Personally, I'm watching to see if TSM is going to fail to make it into playoffs in League this summer.

I've literally been a fan since before the season 1 worlds at Dreamhack, never missed a single game, and I'm about the saddest I've ever been.

@faraday said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

@ZombieGenesis said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

Third, sometimes I fail.

I also think that we as a MUSH Community often have a very narrow definition of success. Like the only games that have perceived value are ones with a zillion logins like Arx or that run for years and years like Elendor.

If five people showed up to a game and had fun for six months, it's okay to consider that a success. Heck, that's more than some TTRPG groups get out of a campaign. Certainly more than the longevity of your typical PbPost or Storium game.

It's okay to want more. But let's not sell ourselves short either.

Number of logins is an incredibly silly way for people to define success, since I think virtually everyone would far rather play a game of 20 people that are enthusiastic and having a wonderful time making stories for one another, than a game of 300 people where everyone hates one another and logs in only out of a grim sense of obligation and habit. I mean sure it can be a benchmark of activity, but I think anyone that's had scenes with the more toxic members of the community can say not all activity is a net plus.

And while I like games that can tell long stories, I just don't see longevity as really a hallmark either. I think HorrorMU's design is brilliant. The games we talk about here are run entirely off of people's enthusiasm and creative energy, and that's a hell of a hard thing to sustain indefinitely. There's nothing wrong with creating something that people want to play, experience, and then do something else. That's not a failure. People are just worried about investing their time and not having a pay off for that investment, by failing to find RP or having fun stories abruptly end, but really as long as people make a good faith effort and a lot of people have a good time, I don't really see what the problem is.

@Ganymede Saying, "hire the best candidate" is one of those things that makes me raise my eyebrows because... I mean, of course they will. It's like if someone invites you into the house and then as you enter seriously warns you,"Hey, don't steal anything." It's one of those things that's already well understood, and saying so says a little bit more about the person saying it than the person being told.

@Warma-Sheen said in Fandom and entitlement:

@insomniac7809 said in Fandom and entitlement:

"We wrote a gay couple but didn't acknowledge it" doesn't stop being chickenshit because it might annoy China or Russia.

You make it sound like producers are hiding in a corner scared, instead of making decisions that make money. These decisions aren't driven by fear. They're driven by greed.

Someone is making that decision. You have screenwriters, you have a director, you have producers. All these people have input into the final product. You think they're all scared of something? That seems downright silly. You must have a very, very different world view than me. If so, that's cool. To each their own.

But I doubt it.

It is often self-defeating though. Look at how often very mechanically trope driven, completely derivative works are blasted and unpopular because they are checking boxes and play it completely 'safe'. Check out the interview with Chadwick Boseman where he mentioned that they wanted to have Black Panther's Wakandan characters talk with a British accent rather than an African accent because they didn't think it was marketable. Those kind of very safe, low grade decisions would have made a much worse, and almost certainly less profitable film.