Posts made by crayon

Something being a common trend or approach in MUSHes doesn't necessarily make it definitive of the genre any more than using 'levels' would be definitive of roleplaying games.

That said, most MUDs have built up a culture of roleplay around preexisting MMORPG style gameplay, and idealize a sort of "organic" approach where roleplay is something that occurs in a happenstance fashion. In a lot of ways it's clumsy and inefficient, but it's interesting in its own right.

On the other hand, many MUSHes involve a great deal more collaboration and organization of roleplay. This often allows for a lot more potential where storytelling is concerned, and focuses on player-driven stories.

While neither of these qualities is definitive of either genre, and at times both MUDs and MUSHes borrow ideas that have evolved from each other, or have gone through some degree of convergence, I think that player-driven storytelling is something that's significantly more common in MUSHes than it is in MUDs, in no small part because of a lot of the tabletop inspiration behind a sizable percentage of the MUSHes out there. Haven, for example, mirrors this in many ways with its Storyrunner system which encourages that sort of roleplay.

I'm not saying nor would I say that that makes the game a MUSH, but I do think it's an interesting development, and something I'd really like to see more of.

Haven: Mist and Shadows has an interesting setup with influence and reputation wherein influence points are obtained throughout the course of roleplay. It's a pretty interesting system that adds another layer to gameplay that I find compelling, and I feel like it adds a more meaningful dynamic to interactions.

The present iteration of the system is... kind of a complicated monster, wherein one's social rank (reputation really) is calculated by a pretty wide number of factors. Said social rank then generates a hidden quantity of influence that's given out to people that you interact with in roleplay, to sort of incentivize interaction with more reputable characters. This influence can then be converted into experience or a few other things, or else used in a scheme system, or on praising or dissing other characters, which can in turn effect their social rank.

I've generally enjoyed these sort of systems in games I've played, as I'm not always all that interested in playing a muscle or combat oriented character. Most of my background in roleplaying started in Shadowrun and I was always a fan of playing "Face"-type characters, and I think systems like this are great for that.

Just to be clear here...

@surreality said:

I... have to shake my head.
These terms are for the codebases, they are the names of the codebases, not 'philosophies of game design'.
I don't call a black and white spotted cat a Holstein just because of their color patterns, either, and it's for a reason.

I actually agree entirely with you. I'm not trying to define what a MUSH is. When I say that the type of code doesn't matter so much as the design philosophy behind the game, what I meant was that it's a more important distinction for what we were discussing in the context as far as defining a scope of interest and focus in the OR community, and I get the feeling this has been getting taken out of context or misunderstood. As far as I'm concerned, it's a term for the base engine/codebase style and little else. There are some common approaches and some culture that's built around the codebase, but none of that is really integral.

@Thenomain said:

since you're ready to redefine how we describe things

Where did I ever try to do this? All I had to say was that our criteria for partnership are standard and have nothing to do with whether a game is a MUD or MUSH. Unless you're talking about me redefining that seven does not equal nine, but it sounds like we cleared that up, after half-a-dozen posts that didn't even give me sufficient reasonable doubt to even look to see if what I was saying was the case was. It's certainly an interesting topic and one I'd like to look into, but it's not one I'd really contribute to because I'm not really looking to define what a MUSH is personally. I don't feel that I'm an authority, personally, on the genre to really understand the full nuances. The purpose of such a thread of conversation, for me, would be education rather than debate, because I don't have many, if any, firm opinions except what I've seen observationally from my own play and interactions.

@Thenomain said:

Can you explain to me where I said there were 9 MUDs on that list?

@Thenomain said:

Final Count. Mush-types: 2. Mud-types: 9. Moo/Muck-types: 1.

Did I misunderstand this in some way? Also the sum of games above would be 12. I'll look for your What Is A... thread because it's interesting, but I'm not sure if I'll have much to contribute to it personally, though we'll have to see when it splits.

I never said that I think some MUDs are MUSHes, though I do think some have cultivated design systems similar to what is pretty typical within the MUSH community, or have designed around philosophical approaches to roleplay more common in the MUSH genre than in the MUD genre.

I'm not sure how you really expect me to convince you that nine is not seven.

Project Redshift - Evennia
Shadows of Isildur - Diku
ArmageddonMUD - Diku
HavenRPG - Custom
Sindome - MOO
Evolution of Esos - Diku
The Sea of Storms - Smaug
Otherspace - Penn
No Return - Penn
The Burning Post II - Diku

MOO/MUX-types: 1, MUDs: 7, MUSH-types: 2.

If you're classifying MUDs as an umbrella type that includes MUSHes and MOOs/MUXes I can see how you'd get the number you did. It also seems our partners link is out-of-date which probably needs to be fixed. However, treating "MUD" as an umbrella is wholly inconsistent with some of your rhetoric previously, eg. differentiating between a "MUDder's perspective" and a "MUSHer's perspective" which implies the two are distinct concepts.

That said it's certainly worth discussing what you think distinguishes a MUSH from a MUD, or a MOO, and what in general you feel is the criteria for that. My understanding of what makes a MUSH is probably a good bit different from Jaunt's, and both perspectives are seemingly different from yours. That distinction, however, has nothing to do with whether a game meets our criteria for partnership, which is why I'm not really sure where the hell it's coming from. Personally, I think the MUD/MUSH/MOO distinction has gotten to be kind of archaic, except insofar as each has evolved a similar but different culture.

@crayon said:

I believe you mathed wrong?

@Thenomain said:
Then math correctly, please.

I did. You didn't. Your sum isn't even accurate to the number of community partners we have, total.

@Thenomain said:

Explain?

We don't especially care what engine the games in our community use as a distinction, though the merits and uses of different engines and classes of engines are interesting in their own right, we care what that engine's built or has been built upon to provide in terms of basic gameplay, via design philosophy. Why don't we care about the engine distinction? I think @Jaunt already hit this, but the relevance of whether something is a MUD or MUSH is borderline nonexistent, except insofar as MUSHes have evolved a few common cultural approaches to roleplay. I think the burden of proof is actually on you, here, to explain why it does matter in this particular context. Because this has never been about MUDs vs. MUSHes or anything of that sort, and this is the third or fourth time I've seen you bring it up for seemingly no reason at all. What argument are you trying to make by counting the games in our community partnership, and miscounting at that?

@Thenomain said:

Final Count. Mush-types: 2. Mud-types: 9. Moo/Muck-types: 1.

I believe you mathed wrong? In any event, the type of code being utilized doesn't really much matter so much as the design philosophy behind the game. Haven's actually an interesting case in that while it's exceptionally heavily automated and almost certainly a "MUD", I want to say, its design takes a lot of prototypically "MUSH" approaches in terms of how roleplay happens. Tangential, really.

In any event, I haven't been active through here for a few days, but I'm going to try to respond to some of the points I've seen as best I can.

Yes, we're working to revise both our criteria and our mission statements to make it a little more clear what our target audience is. Part of the source of the confusion, I think, may be in that while we're not trying to be all-inclusive, in the sense that we have a specific focal group, we're not actively trying to be exclusive, either; we're open to and encourage discussion well outside the range of our focus group and a large portion of our user base is from outside of the focus group.

Others have expressed concerns with us having the focus group that we do at all. I admittedly don't think this is a valid argument. You're welcome to try to convince me, but you're going to have to be more convincing than using diction with loaded connotation to try to emotionally sway others, like making racist and discriminatory analogies.

I'm yet to have found concerns about our update posting here to have much validity, either. Communities aren't static things, and it's possible at any point that some of the discussion happening on OR might appeal to people here that it didn't a week ago. Additionally, the argument that MUSoapbox's community is unilaterally and wholly not our target audience doesn't seem all that convincing. Some members of this community have been active on OR in various degrees, and no I'm not going to name them because that's their business. Repeatedly asking us to name them is kind of bizarre. What I feel happening here is that, as valid as @Thenomain's mention of hive mind fallacy has been, a few people have actively been trying to argue as if the community here is a hive mind, while eschewing arguments directed towards said (nonexistent) hive mind.

I'm also yet to have really found the arguments that we're being particularly sleazy by advertising here, because this community has a different focus, to be all that compelling. I haven't actually seen anything about this community that indicates a specific focus besides the interests of its user base. Among members of that user base are several present or former players of games in our target genre. There is a lot more overlap here than the majority are perceiving. I think the OR community has ideas that could be useful to the MUSoapbox community and that the MUSoapbox community has ideas that could be useful to the OR community. Maybe many of the ideas we've been hashing out on OR have been hashed out ad nauseum here, or have little to no application to the games the majority of this community's members are involved with. But at the same time, I think it's unreasonable to assume that new discussion of a previously discussed concept can't bring out new ideas, and I think that any exchange of ideas, even where one in ten of the ideas is interesting to the one in twenty people actually interested in the exchange, is good.

And so, here's the weekly update:

Read and discuss an article on breaking away from fundamental RPG gameplay in text games!
http://optionalrealities.com/text-based-gameplay-breaking-the-mold/
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=327.0

Contribute to discussion on the nature of the staff-player relationship!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=299.0

Send a submission in for our September Monster/Antagonist concept contest!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=301.0

Contribute to discussion on the merits of recasting characters to new players!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=300.0

The article's mine, and as is usual with my articles, is a little bit on the conceptual side and not all that concrete. It's about the ideas and inspiration behind the games we make, moreso than the concrete information that goes into their creation, and this might not be all that useful. Still, I think it's an interesting thing to think about, and it makes me wonder when we'll see a bit more diversification in text-based gaming. I think that one of the questions that implicitly comes up, thinking about the idea behind the article, is what really makes a game an "RPG", and if it's roleplaying, why do we attribute all these other concepts to the genre like progression, combat, loot, et cetera.

I'd be interested in hearing what this community thinks about recasting characters when one player is no longer interested in playing them. It's something that Haven's recently implemented in a sort of roster, and that a fair number of developers have been weighing the pros and cons of. I'm told that this particular approach was used on FiranMUX, but I can't say I ever experienced it firsthand. It would certainly seem to remedy some problems that crop up from time to time, but I have to imagine it creates others entirely.

@WTFE

My own first forays into the consumption of hard liquor were more pain than flavor. Miserable experiences with dirt-cheap tequila and other unsavory selections in a culture that is so repressed where it comes to teenagers drinking had unfavorably colored my perceptions. Forced to drink surreptitiously and at significant legal risk the flavor half of the intertwined flavor and pain promised by drinks like your fruit brandy was denied to me until many years later, unfortunately, by a combination of fiscal and legal concerns.

Stubborn and persistent, however, I was very committed to making the most out of very little, which is how I came to discover one gem, in particular. Topping out at an idyllic 8.0% ABV, Olde English High Gravity 800 offered a cost-to-alcohol efficiency I wasn't likely to find anywhere else. A 'malt liquor' by definition, and at that a silly definition I suspect exists mostly for legal reasons, OE was effectively beer. And not beer beer, but the worst of the cheap piss-flavored swill that is so abundantly common in this particular country. In 2010, in fact, the 3.2% ABV version of this particular brew was decried as "the Worst Beer in the World" by a major beer rating website.

This beverage was a travesty in a big glass bottle. Forty ounces of carbonated piss to swig through, with high enough alcohol content that the combination of condensation and glass would usually ensure that you dropped it long before you finished it. Thankfully, I discovered that wrapping the big ugly bastard in a paper bag would not only conceal the shameful contents, but provide a surface with significantly more friction for the owner to grip onto. Still, though, the taste was unpleasant at best, and the malt liquor had a particular knack for inducing especially nasty hangovers.

Enter the Sunny D. Though glorified by the Beastie Boys' 1986 hit "Brass Monkey" that peaked at 48 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for 1987, hardly anybody is familiar with what comprises an actual 'brass monkey', and in fact many cocktails lay claim to the name, with the only shared thread being the inclusion of orange juice to give the beverage its iconic 'brass' coloring, a coloring that I found to be particularly beautiful with my tasteless friend Olde English, once one-third of him had been drank and replaced with an equally classless orange "juice": Sunny Delight.

The addition of the orange "juice", or more aptly orange "drink", significantly altered the flavor of the beverage. Combined with the crisp and carbonated feel of the piss-flavored malt liquor, it created a silky texture while masking the worst of the metallic and musky taste. The fruity addition added a certain zestiness to the beverage, which helped with staying alert, but also compensated for the deleterious effects of the low-quality alcohol by offering a good amount of hydration and vitamin C.

The combined cost of both beverages came out to roughly $3, and I found that I could drink one to four of the forty ounce drinks in an evening and range from a jovial buzz to stumbling and stuttering. With the large number of cocktails competing over claim to the title of true 'brass monkey', and in light of its taste, concept, and cost, I eventually came to accept a more preferred name for the drink: the hobo mimosa.

@surreality said:

I don't think this is accurate, actually; the ad may not get a lot of bites if it's for something other than a MUSH/MUX, but I haven't seen any mention of that being prohibited. Another forum isn't even a game, and that's been permitted -- along with a kickstarter for a tabletop game that's being run by a member of the community. There are threads for things that are not yet, and may never be, games posted in this area, that are just feelers or brainstorming threads for game concepts. It's quite broad, really.

I haven't seen any ads deleted or taken down or deemed 'forbidden'. That isn't to say it hasn't happened, but I haven't seen any indication of the kind of limitation you believe exists.

What I mean by this extrapolation of the analogy is that dedicated forums for community partners, eg. the games from the focus group, like OR does isn't something that MU Soapbox does at all. I don't think it'd really work with this site, really, so that's not a qualitative statement about this place in particular. We only do it on OR because we have, again, a focus group, and our community partners make significant contributions in the form of articles, etc. While MU Soapbox's majority certainly seem to be of a focus group, MU Soapbox as a site doesn't seem to be specifically or explicitly targeted towards a focus group, which is why the complaints about our advertising to a community where the majority aren't interested in our focus are weird to me.

Our 'Other Games' forum is an umbrella in much the way the Advertising forum here is. I don't think that our having dedicated forums in our organizational structure for community partners inherently makes the advertising opportunity in that Other Games forum any the lesser in strictly qualitative terms. I think looking at the whole thing as relative is probably not the best approach. If we didn't have our community partnerships at all, our site and discussion on it would probably suffer from it, though I think one could make a reasonable argument against having them at all. If we allowed them to exist for all text-based roleplaying games we'd be inherently changing what we're about. While we're certainly open to discussion of all text-based roleplaying games and all things in general, our focus has always been on "RPI"s and "RPI-like"s.

@il-volpe said:

Even if you were as straight up honest about it as you claim, it's hardly courteous. You are, in essence, putting up an 18"x24" poster for a hip-hop venue on the corkboard in an indie-rock club while informing us that our club and the indie bands that we want to promote can leave a couple of those little postcard adverts in the bin by your club's door if we really want to.

I don't think that analogy works. Or if you wanted it to be more accurate, you could say, maybe, that our community has been placing postcard advertisements at the MUSoapbox venue (and offers the same in return to MUSoapbox), while allowing hip-hop groups to place full-on posters, something that the MUSoapbox venue doesn't allow at all.

This particular thread of debate just gets really odd to me, because while MUSoapbox's userbase is pretty clearly overwhelmingly of a particular genre with a lot of history, there's really not a whole lot of information that I've seen really defining what MUSoapbox is about, except insofar as it's a MU* Soapbox, in which case while the community might be overwhelmingly of a particular genre the board's intent seems broader. That could be user error or unfamiliarity with previous iterations, but it's a bit odd to me. If, for example, this site was explicitly defined as being dedicated exclusively to MUSHes, we probably wouldn't be advertising Redshift at all, and OR only insofar as many MUSHes meet the criteria.

Some of the criticism levied towards us has been based in our lack of willingness to really become participants in this community, but part of the obstacle to that has been the general 'outsider' treatment and a lack of explicit focus coupled with a community userbase that is definitely focused.

@il-volpe said:

In FS3, one gets a bit of code where players can set themselves to be wielding X weapon and wearing Y armour and fighting with Z person or team, in a gung-ho, or cautious, or just-defensive fashion. The combat coordinator, who can be anyone, then triggers combat rounds, and the code rolls, determines who hit whom, and how much damage was taken, and counts up said damage, etc. There is also a +heal command, which rolls ones healing skill and heals the target appropriately. This, evidently, is enough automation that MUSHes using FS3 will qualify for your game list.

Oh! Thanks for the explanation. The automated systems requirement is definitely a blurry and tricky thing to really hammer down and determine a firm line on. I would actually not include FS3, in this particular case, though if an FS3 game applied @Jeshin might reconsider our requirements on automated systems. Because the damage etc. is manually applied rather than applied by the automated system itself in this case, I wouldn't see it as being all that different from having a dice-roller in-game, really. If a player could, in theory, not follow the dictation/arbitration of the system I wouldn't really call it fully automated. Maybe binding automated systems or something to that effect would be a better definition. Specific verbiage here is something we're definitely happy to discuss, because it's obviously hard to really define and ensure the letters match the spirit. That said, the +heal function as you describe it might qualify on its own.

First off, thanks for your post and for being relatively civil with it, @Ninjakitten, because I think it gets to the root of some of the issues here, namely in perception (at least in the case of criticisms from people who have actually looked at our site). I would definitely say that the recurring theme of this thread has been that the perception of our intent is different from our actual intent. I'd really like to get to the root cause of that perception, and not get mired in people continuing to try to equate the perception of intent to actual intent.

@Ninjakitten said:

Verbiage on your site implies it is for/about text-based RPGs.

Verbiage on our site implies that it is for/about "text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character and story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature". It then goes on to make specific mention of 'RPIs' and note that our site is dedicated to games of this type. That's right on the tin. People keep saying that's somehow unclear, or completely ignoring everything past the first fifteen or so words. Maybe after that the language used is blurry for people not familiar with the genre themselves? And you know, if that's unclear, I'd love to hear HOW it's unclear. Obviously it's been unclear to you and that's concerning. But except where a few likely have malicious intent, I'm sure that the error in peoples' perception of our site's focus is our fault and not theirs; the issue is that in order to understand what led to that misunderstanding, we have to understand what led to it, specifically, and to really have productive discussion leading in that direction we have to acknowledge that 'perceptions' are not facts which hasn't gone so well so far, on both parties' ends. In many ways, I see our criteria for community partners as being a reinforcement of our site's focus.

@Ninjakitten said:

The actual requirements for 'counting' as a text-based RPG and not merely an 'other game', as later laid out, are not fulfilled by the majority of our kind of MU*.

Most of the requirements are right there on the first page. We don't argue that they're not fulfilled by most of your MU*. They're not fulfilled by most of the games we've played or that are out there, either. We're not trying to say that only these games are text-based RPGs. It's a very narrow niche, but it's still reasonably broad enough to apply to a pretty decent number and a very dedicated fanbase -- a fanbase that doesn't really have a site dedicated specifically to that niche, which is why @Jaunt mentions the longevity of that niche.

@Ninjakitten said:

Your site appears to speak of wanting to bridge the divide between various sorts of text-based RPGs.

I think in this particular case whenever 'bridge the divide' gets brought up, nobody's actually referring to anything in our mission statements. Unless I'm mistaken, they're quoting something @Jeshin said a good while ago? Basically the statement's been taken out of context over and over and over again throughout the duration of this thread. The site doesn't speak of bridging the divide, @Jeshin does, and @Jeshin's definitely the bridge-building type and I think he's been incredibly patient with things on this thread, really. There are a few very specific divides that our site endeavors to bridge (for example, between MUD, MUSH, etc. games that match our particular definition of what has historically been called 'RPI', which have historically argued over definitions to try and exclude each other for decades).

@Ninjakitten said:

Y'all are basically saying our games aren't "text-based RPGs".

We never said this. Ever. I don't think it's really implied by our site's clearly-stated focus group, at least from my perspective and understanding of the niche/genre. But if people are getting this implication, that's concerning, and I'd like to get to the root of why they get this impression of our site. That way we can fix it

@Ninjakitten said:

Roleplay is our games' SOLE reason for existing -- the only kind of "play" there IS on our games.

And that's fantastic, and many of 'your' games (and in many cases these are MY games, too) qualify for our criteria. Others don't. It doesn't mean they're not text-based RPGs. It means that they're not part of the narrow niche that's typically referred to as 'RPI'. I avoid calling it RPI, because my use of that title is restricted to a specific codebase. Moreover, I generally think that calling a codebase 'Roleplay Intensive' when there are hundreds of other games out there that may very well be MORE roleplay intensive with different features is pretentious and stupid. Really, I think the whole 'RPI' distinction and need for definition thing's rooted in a large number of MUDs out there that call themselves RPEs but aren't really roleplay enforced which is a whole 'nother problem and thing to debate, really. I think that one's uniquely a MUD problem, but if it isn't, I'd be kind of tangentially curious about how other codebases and approaches to the medium have handled their definitions regarding roleplay stringency and if they've seen similar blurring.

@Ninjakitten said:

In over 20 years I've been on exactly one game where death wasn't permanent (because of the story-world itself, and it didn't harm the RP), and only a handful where there was no risk of dying unless you agreed you would. Even then, many characters died -- permanently -- because the story or another character made that the most logical or beautiful option.

Permanent death is probably MORE common on roleplaying MUSHes in my experience than it is on MUDs, independently of automated systems, sure. I'm not sure if non-consent permanent death is all that common outside of games with automated systems, but if it is I'd tangentially like to hear how that works in terms of arbitration of conflict or disputes -- it's not something I've seen, personally. I think, maybe, what I'm gathering from this is that you didn't feel the automated systems requirement was made clear in that first line? It's sort of made implicit in the mention of RPIs in particular and the 'of this nature' qualification when 'text-based Roleplaying Games' are mentioned, but I could definitely see how that might be confusing or not very well conveyed to somebody not familiar with the genre. That's useful information and something we're happy to discuss. The problem is that a lot of the 'discussion' has been more along the lines of 'I feel x about y', 'I don't see that from my perspective', 'FUCK YOU, GET CANCER, ETC.'. Which is really frustrating.

@Ninjakitten said:

Now, particularly given that in OUR culture, entirely automated systems are frequently felt to be things that replace RP, not count as it, using that to exclude us from the category of "text-based RPGs" is pretty damn offensive, and not exactly conducive to bridging any divides there might already have been.

We're not interested in excluding you from the category of 'text-based RPGs' and if we were we'd kind of be fucking morons. We refer specifically to 'text-based RPGs of this nature', not to all text-based RPGs, and the 'of this nature' is referring to RPI or RPI-like games. We can definitely talk about ways to make that more clear though.

@Ninjakitten said:

We object to the representation of said focus, and the way it's been discussed here.

I don't know how many more times we could reiterate, here, that we have a focus group and do not purport to represent all text-based roleplaying games. If you perceive that our site is doing it, I'd be happy to get to the root of what causes those perceptions so we can fix it, but I'm not interested in continuing to debate it with people who have taken their initial perceptions and now hold them to be fact rather than just that, perceptions. I don't think that's unreasonable. I think @Jeshin's been remarkably patient and reasonable, and honestly, I've tried.

@il-volpe said:

It's all the more offensive that they're not actually representing highly-automated MUs -- as I understand it, any MUSH using Faraday's FS3 qualifies, because of the semi-automated +combat system and the automated +heal.

It's likely that most of these MUSHes would meet our criteria, too, which is why we've found the MUSH-exclusion argument to be odd, to say the least. There really haven't been many games that have applied for community partnership and been turned down, so if you want me to understand this perspective it would help if you offered some sort of evidence that leads to this conclusion that we exclude highly-automated RP-centric MUs, so that we could directly remedy the cause of that misunderstanding.

@Alzie said:

So, why are we still having this discussion? They said they wanted to treat this place like twitter and announce their new posts. Move on. They're certainly not interested in addressing the discrimination inherent in their website's design and that's perfectly fine since none of us are involved in paying for keeping it on the net. Ya'll are acting like anything they say about anything means anything.

I think discrimination in this context is kind of ridiculous, but in a very basic sense, stripped of connotation, it's accurate. Our criteria for games is discriminatory. We are discriminant. In much the same way a man who loves chicken might discriminate by going to Popeyes. Why does this need to be addressed? @Thenomain has tried to articulate a reason, and if there is a compelling reason, I'd really like to hear it, but so far nobody's really offered one that I've found sensible. Rather than giving a reason, most people have opted to insults, or just opted out.

@Thenomain said:

You did. It's on your first page.

I'm not seeing it. Maybe it's because we've refined our mission statements to ensure language matches intent, though I don't think there's been any significant change (@Jeshin should be able to clear this up, I imagine), but what I'm reading is:

"Optional Realities is a community and design blog for text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character and story-driven games that include permanent death as a feature. While many call this genre of game an RPI (Roleplaying-Intensive Game), Optional Realities is dedicated to all text-based Roleplaying Games of this nature, whether they be MUDs, or MOOs, or MUXs, or MUSHes, or RPIs, or any of the other sub-genres that we've divided ourselves into over the years."

I think that's pretty clear as far as the focus of our community goes. It doesn't really delve into the 'automated systems' component of the criteria, but that's borderline implicit in the genre mention and in the permanent death feature itself.

@WTFE said:

is that you stop shitting over here where you hold the people in such obvious disdain that you won't even actually discuss your goals or basic principles

I don't hold this community in general in any sort of disdain, though some of the individuals in it are particularly unimpressive. Let me basically summarize how this has gone:

1. People get upset about our criteria for community partnership.
2. We elaborate on the criteria, explain why we have them, and reiterate that our community has a focus group but is inclusive of discussion in a much broader spectrum.
3. People continue to debate our criteria, though I'm skeptical that they could name three (3) (that's your thumb, index, and middle fingers when you need to count off to double check, @WTFE) games that have applied that we've actually rejected.
4. We again explain that our community has a narrow focus group but that we're inclusive of broader discussion topics, insofar as we can be while still having said focus.
5. We go back to rote advertising because the debate's about run its course.
6. The thread blows up with insults because we've stopped engaging with a debate that's no longer interesting and that has long since ceased to have a point.

@WTFE said:

Yes. The inclusive "if you're not matching our specific idea of what games are, you can go to the back of the bus^W^W^W^WOther Games area of the board" approach.

Can you go ahead and break Godwin's Law, since you've already gone ahead and started analogizing building a community around a core focus group while incorporating discussion of concepts with broader ramifications to Jim Crow laws?

@WTFE said:

That's 390 opportunities for you express your interest in this community and actually start participating in it. 390 opportunities that you not only ignored, in some cases you practically spit upon.

I've engaged with several members of this community, but at some point enough becomes enough. If you're upset that your vitriolic attacks aren't getting enough attention you're just going to have to live with it or learn to be a more interesting person to converse with because so far you've been about as interesting and engaging as a tree stump.

@Thenomain, if you're interested in chatting somewhere that hasn't slowly transformed into a public restroom, I do respond to chat messages here when I have time to stop in. It's unlikely I'll be putting too much effort in responding directly in this thread, though, unless I see a particularly interesting point.

In any event, just to make some final points before I mentally sublimate @WTFE into some sort of attention-hungry tree stump...

@WTFE said:

See, this is why I think you're a yapping little shih-tzu. Dude, I fucking LINKED to my first post in this thread. Please point to where I called you names in it or where I insinuated that you are in some way awful people for targeting a specific subset of games. (Hint: this is not possible.)

@WTFE said:

You're here, presumably, given that this is in the "Adver-tis-ments" section of the board, to get people to want to come over to your community. And yet here we have you saying, basically, that you're more open to different opinions there than you are here.

This is a strawman. We have limited time here, as Jeshin immediately expressed afterwards. Further, it's not that we're not open to different opinions so much as those opinions haven't been made in a particularly compelling way. I understand what @Thenomain and recently @Sunny have been trying to express in that catering to a specific focus group while still engaging in a lot of broader discourse can send mixed messages. That sort of criticism and discussion is appreciated and I think there's a lot we could do to be more clear about what, exactly, the community we're building is, or is supposed to be.

@WTFE said:

Do you genuinely not see how stupid this is?

Hey, look, here you are immediately calling us stupid in your very first post based on words you inserted into @Jeshin's mouth.

@WTFE said:

where I insinuated that you are in some way awful people for targeting a specific subset of games.

Right here. Also in your very first post. Hey, look, I read it.

@WTFE said:

By being so dogmatic, rigid, and inflexible, and by sticking to a definition of game that specifically excludes the styles played by most people on this board, you are actually being off-putting.

Hey, look, here you are immediately starting to attack us for sticking to a narrow subset of games within a genre that only appeals to a minority percentage of people on this board. If I make a Digimon MUSH and advertise it here are you going to come throw a fit in the thread because the majority of this forum's participants prefer Pokemon? Get the fuck over it, man. I don't really care if you think it's somehow ideologically reprehensible when Pepsi advertises in a neighborhood where most people prefer Coke regardless of the fact that some Coke-drinkers might like a few Pepsi products.

@Sunny said:

Except the whole 'coming into a community I don't intend to participate in' bit, which is, again, completely classless.

You should probably not make assumptions about my intentions. I was very interested in this community, and participating in it insofar as my time and interests allowed, up until the insults started getting thrown around left and right.

@Sunny said:

If y'all would fully stop all attempts at claiming that you're inclusive of all of mu*dom with your qualifiers and refusal to be definitive, that would pretty much solve most of the issue

I don't entirely disagree with this, but I think the problem is that we need to be a little more definitive of what constitutes inclusion vs. exclusion. We're not actively trying to exclude anybody, and most of our forum policies are built around inclusion. We have several regular posters who aren't part of the target 'RPI' community, and they're welcomed as much as anybody. At the same time, we're not going to change the goals and basic principles of our community to appeal to a wider audience, and I don't think that really qualifies as exclusion, though it's certainly likely to narrow the number of people who are interested in our community.

@Jaunt said:

Our community is a specific genre of MUD that is over 20 years old. If the style of MUSH played by "most" people on this board is not represented on OR, then those people don't really need to worry about OR. It's that simple.

OR exists for the games for which it is relevant. It not being relevant to your games does not equate to us shitting our your birthday cake.

This is, a thousand times over, the reason why I'm not really interested in engaging in 'discussion', particularly with the likes of @Sunny and @WTFE and company where the 'conversation' has mostly consisted of calling us names and trying to insinuate that we are in some way awful people because we're targeting a specific subset of games. I'm really under no obligation to 'discuss' anything under those terms. Engaging with @Thenomain has been interesting, but the tendency to seemingly rabble-rouse and encourage 'logical arguments' that have consisted exclusively of flagrant insults and bile-spewing turned me off really quickly. Why would I want to converse with people who are seemingly only interested in throwing shit at me because the site I represent doesn't cater to their particular tastes?

@Thenomain said:

Last I checked (two weeks back), OR represents itself as a site for discussion of all online text-based role-playing games.
All.
Not some.
Not even only those that fall inside the Three Rules of Jeshin's Best-Game Ideology.
All. Even Choose-Your-Own-Adventures.

Discussion of all online text-based role-playing games is something that we encourage on our site, and all games are up for discussion, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a narrower focus group in mind.

I'm up for discussion, whenever and wherever so long as it's interesting, intelligent, civil, and thoughtful. This stopped being any of those four things a long time ago. We've had some marvelous people come by and participate on OR from advertising here, and unless Jeshin tells me otherwise, we'll continue to post our advertisements, but unless the quality of 'discussion' improves drastically, or people start to discuss things rationally and by making logical points instead of shoving words in others' mouths and spewing insults, I'm personally going to bow out of it.

This idea that not wanting to engage with the handful of heavy posters in this thread, who, aside from @Thenomain, @Surreality, and a few others, seem to mostly be interested in getting a rise out of people is equitable to pissing all over the carpet is pretty odd to me. It reads more like people pissing on their own carpet, and then throwing a fit when I mention the smell, to me. Do you berate people when they stop responding to personal attacks in other discussion threads, too? Probably, and that's okay. It's not how I like to engage in discussion, though, and it's the reason I haven't contributed significantly outside of this thread (despite reading several others).

OR isn't going to appeal to everybody on Musoapbox. We don't expect for it too, and that's not a promotional issue, that's a difference in target audience. OR is not Musoapbox 2.0, or TMS 2.0, or TMC 2.0. OR has a target audience, and if you're not part of an audience, or you're not interested in really finding out what people in that audience find so compelling about a genre, or you're not willing to accept the trade-off in target audience for the general discussions, then by all means, stay away. It doesn't offend me that you're not interested in OR, and it really shouldn't offend you that OR isn't for you. It's not really that complicated. We certainly have material and ideas and discussions that have appeal wide outside the auspices of our target audience, and which may be useful or informative or helpful for people outside of our typical users, and everybody's welcome to discuss those ideas, but if our community focus is too much of a turn-off then so be it.

So, let me pose a question. How do you think OR as a community would behave if MU Soapbox advertised on our board? Because I certainly wouldn't be anything but supportive of people from our community coming here to check out the discussion and see if it's for them, and I certainly wouldn't try to quash that advertisement because a handful, or even a majority, don't find that it's what they're looking for.

@WTFE said:

You may want to try giving your lapdog (@crayon) a good sharp tug on the leash, but your pit bull you may want to just put down.

I'm sure you feel real clever and all, and your ability to get so much attention without once making a single logical or coherent argument or point that wasn't essentially grounded in insulting people or making statements without qualification or substantiation is pretty impressive in its own right, but I'm still pretty unimpressed with your contribution to 'discussion'. As many times as you've reiterated the dog metaphor, you've been pretty clearly behaving like a belligerent attack dog from the get-go.

@Thenomain said:

And yet, you refuse reasonable conversation here.

You're assuming that all of this conversation has been reasonable. I'm pretty sure we can both acknowledge that the majority of it has not been.

@Thenomain said:

You are not entitled to define the hobby without input from all parts of the hobby, even if you disagree with them.

Whoever said we were trying to define the hobby? Again, begging the question. Making assumptions. Inserting words in mouths. Then come the attack dogs, @WTFE and co., to vehemently spam insults and contribute literally nothing of substance.

@Sunny said:

Condescending, lying, generally icky behavior...

Can you provide some examples of this? As far as I'm aware if there's been any lying it was unintentional. If you think we've been condescending I feel like maybe you've missed the tone of some of the posts fired our way. I've actually been making a point of trying to keep the tone of discussion civil, but it eventually reached a point where in order to do that, the only responses to this thread I've been making have been updates. For almost a month now.

@WTFE said:

But @Sunny! Science fiction is just different from fantasy, not better!

Yes, debating the preferences of a group or community with regards to things like permanent death and automated systems is pointless. They're requirements for games that join the OR community. We've considered changes, but nobody's really given us a compelling reason to. If that niche doesn't include your game or your preferred game, that's not a qualitative judgment of that game, but an indication that said game doesn't fit the interests of the community that we're building. We're not here to get mired into some sort of MUD vs. MUSH debate, either. Multiple games in our community are MUSH, MOO, etc. and the distinction doesn't especially matter.

I haven't found any of the arguments and debates made to have been particularly compelling, and few if any of them seem to have a point besides antagonizing people in the Advertisements board. Some of what @Thenomain has offered has been interesting, and some of their criticisms have helped us to refine the way we approach promotion or the ideas that we've discussed through articles.

Most of what I've seen, though, have been personal attacks and strawmen. We're more than happy to read criticism and if people have ideas as far as our approach to promotion I think Jeshin and I would both be happy to read them. I'm not here, however, to debate MUDs vs. MUSHes or our requirements for inclusion as a community partner or some of these other things that have been coming up, though Jeshin is likely more than happy to refine our requirements as we go. Personally, I don't much care about the distinction between MUDs and MUSHes because as far as I see the distinction is generally pretty small and getting smaller by the day. Our community includes games regardless of their codebase or what they call themselves, based on the criteria we've been questioned on time and again. I'd be willing to wager that most roleplay-centric games, regardless of whether they're MUD or MUSH, qualify, so long as they include permanent death. Debating our desire to see permanent death and automated systems in our community partners is about as useful as trying to argue that JRPGs should be included on a site dedicated to fighting games.

@Thenomain said:

While I'm not opposed to standing against our group of Mushers, I don't disagree that trying to continue this conversation is a lost cause when, as you and others say, most points of contention are outright dismissed. It's like arguing with a wall.

I'm not standing against your 'group of MUSHers'. I'm asserting the validity of our criteria and preferences, while making no assertions at all about the validity of your own. If you have points of contention I'd love to hear them, but generally speaking I'm pretty sure arguing to change somebody's mind and expecting it to actually happen is a bad idea when we're talking about preferences, and that's what most of these points of contention have been. Admittedly, maybe I've missed some valid points. They're probably pretty easy to miss in the barrages of personal attacks.

@Thenomain said:

You are not entitled to your opinion.

How is OR as a community not entitled to define the criteria of games that the community includes? How are we as individuals not entitled to determine our own preferences with regards to what sort of games we enjoy playing, and what qualities those games possess? I'm certainly entitled to an opinion, and preferences, and it's going to take a lot better than a handful of people predicating their arguments on personal attacks or strawmen to convince me that I am not, in fact, entitled to my preferences.

Read and discuss Jeshin's article on community managing and handling trolls!
http://optionalrealities.com/the-community-manager-vs-the-troll/
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=320.0

Contribute to discussion on the possibility of porting the OpenRPI engine to Evennia!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=309.0

Engage in discussion of the differences and overlap between one's community and one's game!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=315.0

Submit an entry to our Villain/Monster concept contest!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=301.0

Read and discuss Apollo's new article on where to get started in game design!
http://optionalrealities.com/so-you-wanna-make-a-game/
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=310.0

Keep abreast of discussion regarding an Evennia conversion of the OpenRPI engine!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=309.0

Join and conribute to discussion regarding roleplay, theme, and lore documentation!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=181.0

Or make a submission to our September contest, by designing a monster or villain!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=302.0

Read and discuss Sabrelon's article on Customer Service and MUDs!
http://optionalrealities.com/customer-service-and-muds/
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=306.0

Enter our contest on Monster/Antagonist design!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=301.0

Participate in community gaming on League of Legends and more!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=210.0

Join discussion on the merits of permanent death as a feature!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=213.0

@Thenomain said:

Reply the second. I don't see discussion in the articles. I don't see discussion here about replies to your articles. Nothing is wrong with that, but with the medium what I got from the articles is that they were tips and hints, that they were one-way.

I'm not sure what we can do to encourage article discussion any more than we already have with the article discussion threads. They don't tend to attract too much discussion, but it's something we've been working on. If you have any ideas for gearing articles more towards discussion and debate, I'd love to hear them.

@Thenomain said:

Even here, my criticism of the ideas seems to be met with flat explanation.

The flat explanation approach is partly because sometimes it feels like there's a language barrier, and partly because I can only really realistically justify devoting so much time to debating ideas here that I should be debating on OR. Moreover some of the criticism that gets tossed about is hostile and unreasonable or strawman'd to the point that it's not really conducive to discussion. A lot of it has been boiling down to 'I think you're wrong'. Which is fine! People are entitled to their opinions and can feel free to snark away, I've been known to snark it up from time to time myself, it doesn't especially bother me, but I'm not going to devote large amounts of time or dive into debates that are grounded in criticisms that aren't really intended to be for discussion or debate so much as browbeating. I do try to respond to you once a week at least, because there are some pretty interesting points and perspectives in this thread.

@Thenomain said:

My response here: There is no content here.
Crayon's response there: (Practically a whole new article.)

Right. And that was discussion, and that's the type of thing we'd like to see more of in our forums. Why don't more of our design articles engender heavy discussion on our forums? I think part of it is that they tend to be a bit on the technical side and may get TL;DR'd. Regardless of whether we disagreed on some ideas, the input and discussion, even if it's as simple as 'this reads as having no actual content and is too abstract to be useful' helps to refine ideas and put them through a sort of crucible. That's what I, at least, want out of our articles: a crucible for game design and administration ideas and a sounding board for sharing those ideas with other designers.

@Thenomain said:

Cool, because attempts at discussion with you guys here have been cold at best. I really do think you guys don't want to talk about things you think are right.

I love talking about things that I think I'm right about, and from time to time I like to argue the points of a side that I think is dead wrong. What I don't much care for is debating something where I think both perspectives are equally valid, but have a personal preference one way or the other, because it doesn't really accomplish anything. The reason debate's been tepid at best here is because most of the criticism has been founded on the basis of this 'Us vs. Them' mentality or a 'MUSH vs. MUD' grounding rather than on actual ideas themselves. And I don't really care to debate that because I honestly don't really care about that contention. Most 'criticisms' tend to turn into a circular debate that routes right back to our site's criteria for community games, particularly the requirement for automation which I think Jeshin and I have both made a pretty lengthy effort at explaining to satisfaction. If you're adamantly against automated arbitration and decision of in-game outcomes (eg. coded combat, automated dice rolls, etc.) or you're completely against permanent death you're probably not our target audience. And that's okay, games and players of games that aren't our target audience are still perfectly valid.

@WTFE said:

You're here, presumably, given that this is in the "Adver-tis-ments" section of the board, to get people to want to come over to your community. And yet here we have you saying, basically, that you're more open to different opinions there than you are here.

It's not a question of openness. We're perfectly open to different opinions regardless of where we are. We might not always agree or see debate on a subject the same way, but debating to change the beliefs of the other party is generally bad form and a fool's errand for people who have even the faintest experience with debate. But we can only really commit to debating so much, particularly when the parties involved start going after the nearest straw men or circuitously assailing the validity of opinions and preferences.

@WTFE said:

By being so dogmatic, rigid, and inflexible, and by sticking to a definition of game that specifically excludes the styles played by most people on this board, you are actually being off-putting.

I'm sorry that I have my own ideas and opinions about games and that while I understand the validity of other peoples' views and see the advantages of different approaches, I prefer my own. It should be noted that it's not a definition of 'game' that we're clinging to, but essentially a definition of a target audience. If most of the players here don't find that the games we target are the sort that appeal to them, then that's okay. Obviously some of the posters here see the appeal, and honestly it's the insistence on trying to invalidate the opinions and preferences of others that I see as being off-putting. I'll accept dogmatic, at least personally, though. I won't speak for Jeshin, but dogmatic is probably pretty on-the-nose.

@WTFE said:

Your "debate" has consisted entirely of saying, in effect, "that is incorrect".

I'm not sure what else you expect in response when you keep trying to debate peoples' preferences in games. I'm sorry if I don't find "Science-fiction is better than fantasy" or "Real-time strategy is so better than turn-based strategy" to be a super compelling debate that's worth investing a great deal of effort into discussing on the internet with strangers. I strongly suggest you reread most of your posts in the last page with your statement right here in mind.

@WTFE said:

There's another approach: if you don't have time to engage, just keep your mouth shut until you do. How's that for a strategy?

Oh, I see. We should just not advertise because a loud, vocal, and incredibly hostile portion of the posters here disagree with our preferences where it comes to test-based RPGs despite other people on this board clearly having been more flexible or interested themselves.

@WTFE said:

That's four people in the last three pages alone who've (mostly) politely told you why what you're doing isn't working here.

Oh, we're having a popularity contest now. There are at least two posters in the past couple of pages who aren't staunchly against every single idea we put forward on the basis that we target MUDs and MUSHes that meet a certain preferred criteria. I guess that means 1/3 of the people posting in this thread are interested, and you know what? If what we have to say appeals to one in TWENTY people, I'm happy with that. Being the minority, particularly in only a specific venue, doesn't invalidate somebody's opinions.

@WTFE said:

Yes. You're ever-so-open to input.

You're not offering input, really. You're just expressing that you think we're wrong and then attacking people for not agreeing with you.

@Derp said:

You know what really screams being open to discussion and wanting to engage in a lively and active debate on things? Going to the 'Staff Ethics' article, having it read like a commandment, rather than pensive back and forth, and then seeing at the bottom that comments are turned off.

There are forum threads for discussion of each and every one of the articles. The one you're referring to in particular is an opinion piece, and doesn't even necessarily reflect the opinions of OR's staff, we're not putting it forward as 'this is dogma' and it's certainly subject to debate. If you've ever participated in a debate, though, you should know by now that most people don't make their points by waffling back and forth. If they want to argue in support of a view, they do so firmly. Comments may be closed, but there is a big 'Join the Discussion' button at the end of every article.

All of that said, there are some articles, particularly some of the design ones, that are going to be less of a conversation piece for debate and more of a thinking piece for game designers, so I suppose I may have done a disservice in highlighting only discussion as a goal of our articles. While discussion is certainly the primary goal, being informative and provoking an exchange of useful ideas is definitely a secondary goal. Though, I think in most cases these two goals are one and the same.

@Thenomain said:

but it still mildly baffles me that Crayon responded to essentially me, essentially from here, and didn't say, "Hey, Theno, here's my response over there. It might help."

That's my bad, really. I should've popped you a link when I responded earlier, as that was my attempt to provide at least some elaboration based on valid criticism that you provided. I posted on our threads hoping that it would spur a little more debate or discussion, but I certainly should have dropped by and linked the post.

In summary, I don't really expect that Optional Realities is going to appeal to every person in this community. That's okay. I don't think that not preferring the same niche-within-a-niche as far as OR's criteria go makes parties that prefer games outside that criteria 'wrong' or 'incorrect'. @Thenomain, for example, despite self-identifying as not really feeling like a part of our target audience has made some valid arguments in support of their own preferences, and has offered feedback and criticism on our ideas and articles regardless, which I value. For example, he pegged my article as being abstract and conceptual and not really offering much by means of concrete suggestions to the point of being useless, and that's a valid criticism. It probably applies to most of my writing because I'm prone to abstraction. I value and appreciate that, even if we aren't necessarily going to agree on a lot of things.

Effectively, there's a difference between offering feedback and criticism and trying to debate while predicating your entire argument on telling us you disagree with our preferences and that most people in your community disagree. One is useful and something I'm happy to discuss and the other I just don't find particularly interesting or meriting of debate. I'd like to discuss, debate, and receive feedback and criticism on things a little bit more meaningful than chocolate vs. vanilla.