@silverfox Nah, actually, I think what you're saying is reasonable. There are some cultural issues that really should be addressed. There's a lot of cliqueishness. These places (MU*'s and their satellite locations like websites) have a way of drawing people in and then abusing them until their emotional investment in the game/community is shot to hell. It's done this to I don't know how many people. It has faced the SJ-left takeover that so many other forms of media have, essentially requiring new people to at best hold their tongue on politics if they disagree, with regular ideological purity testing becoming the norm more and more. There is little incentive to innovate as far as actual game mechanics are concerned. People with a reputation for better or worse are entrenched in that reputation like a fucking caste system.

The community definitely needs a lot of work, and I get exactly why you think it might merit prerequiring more emotional maturity than most communities.

I've noticed there's an absolute dearth of people below the age of thirty who are interested in this. They're just not here. Honestly, I've sort of moved on from it, too, opting to RP online using other services like forums, chat rooms, and Discord. In the past, I would argue in favor of MU*'s because I like command lines, which is what they function on. However, most people don't like command lines; in fact, most people find them fucking insufferable.

When people who like to RP but don't like to MU* prompt me for an argument for why they should give MU*ing a shot (aside from 'they have command lines', which, as it turns out, is the exact opposite of an argument to most of those people), I simply can't come up with much. The only other thing I come up with is: 'they have grids and inventory systems.' Now, I could elaborate on what I mean by that, but since we've all played MU*'s we understand. Going from one room to the next like they're nodes in a graph creates a psychological sense of geography. Having items which have descriptions and mobs with the same, plus weird little coded doodads that have their cute little behaviors is compelling, at least to me, and presumably to everybody else here who posts. It adds to the atmosphere. It lets you layer exposition where it needs to be, without dumping several thousand words of text on someone who doesn't want to read it; they read the parts they care about, and ignore the rest.

Thing is, when I present it to these Zoomers, they just don't understand, and if they do, they don't care. If I'm talking to them about it in person, I can watch their eyes glaze over. It's worth noting that I do not regard these people as stupid, wrong, or uncultured for having this disposition. In fact, I regard myself as kind of out of touch.

So, bearing this in mind, I want to raise three topics:

• how can we get new people to actually play these things, and make new ones with their own ideas (that are hopefully at least somewhat orthogonal to our own culture)?,
• how can we revitalize this medium to be actually relevant again?, and
• should we even bother trying to do the former two things, since we ourselves can just jump ships to new things?

@Ghost So why are you obsessed with this Rick Sanchez guy?

@silverfox Nah, actually, I think what you're saying is reasonable. There are some cultural issues that really should be addressed. There's a lot of cliqueishness. These places (MU*'s and their satellite locations like websites) have a way of drawing people in and then abusing them until their emotional investment in the game/community is shot to hell. It's done this to I don't know how many people. It has faced the SJ-left takeover that so many other forms of media have, essentially requiring new people to at best hold their tongue on politics if they disagree, with regular ideological purity testing becoming the norm more and more. There is little incentive to innovate as far as actual game mechanics are concerned. People with a reputation for better or worse are entrenched in that reputation like a fucking caste system.

The community definitely needs a lot of work, and I get exactly why you think it might merit prerequiring more emotional maturity than most communities.

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

@TNP It's Rick, our repeater troll. He created the account under the name 'Weimerican', to give you some idea.

https://dailycaller.com/2017/05/05/welcome-to-weimerica/
https://www.returnofkings.com/146430/a-guide-to-weimerica

Enjoy. (If you enjoy throwing up a whole lot.)

So I read these two articles. Do you think they're inaccurate in some way?

@Ghost This place being what, the Internet?

@surreality @faraday @gryphter

The thing is, all the things listed that make it special, that make it separate, have been replicated individually elsewhere. Now, I know that these things have not been replicated wholly, but there's really nothing stopping people. It's why I am concerned that the medium might be all-but-obsolete, and I may just be being a thirty year old boomer.

I still play Doom, albeit through the "updated" Brutal Doom and its variants, because I'm old fashioned like that. I try to sell the youngins in my fraternity on Doom and Brutal Doom, but they just aren't captivated. They tell me things like, "Man, what the fuck is up with this pixel shit?" or "Hey, this reminds me of Halo." I realize that this is turning into a bit of a tangent, but I guess my point is, I think it's worth actively considering that I -- we -- might simply be out of touch. I'm actually of the view that the old ways are "up for review," so to speak, and a failure to draw in new blood will amount to a determination of it actually just being the AM radio of the Internet. Something that persists, but only because of older users who refuse to update their habits.

I'm legitimately not of the view that the old ways are fine as-is. If they were, people would be coming in droves, since roleplaying games are all the rage these days. They're normal now! And yet nobody wants to play on these command line games. So I'm trying to think up some way to make it so that people, when they hear about these new features that you really can't replicate on a website or whatever, go, "Whoah, dude, that's awesome, where do I click to find out about that?"

The problem with what I'm suggesting here is that the old fogies from the beforetime (that's the people on this site, frankly) might see these new twists and turns and go:

"Nigga what the fuck? Are you retarded or some shit? Fuck outta here with this newfag trash."

I mean, it would follow that this would happen, since updating 30 or so years of accumulated culture entails actively rejecting parts of it, and I don't mean for political reasons, either. Like maybe this conception of "applications," or whatever else people hold dear, just needs to go to be replaced by a system that keeps stupid shit from getting out of hand.

I'm still looking forward to Rick and Morty, Season 4, which is slated to come out in November, even though there was a decided drop in writing quality in Season 3. Like Game of Thrones, I will hold out for a while, even though I skipped Season 8 of that.

I've noticed there's an absolute dearth of people below the age of thirty who are interested in this. They're just not here. Honestly, I've sort of moved on from it, too, opting to RP online using other services like forums, chat rooms, and Discord. In the past, I would argue in favor of MU*'s because I like command lines, which is what they function on. However, most people don't like command lines; in fact, most people find them fucking insufferable.

When people who like to RP but don't like to MU* prompt me for an argument for why they should give MU*ing a shot (aside from 'they have command lines', which, as it turns out, is the exact opposite of an argument to most of those people), I simply can't come up with much. The only other thing I come up with is: 'they have grids and inventory systems.' Now, I could elaborate on what I mean by that, but since we've all played MU*'s we understand. Going from one room to the next like they're nodes in a graph creates a psychological sense of geography. Having items which have descriptions and mobs with the same, plus weird little coded doodads that have their cute little behaviors is compelling, at least to me, and presumably to everybody else here who posts. It adds to the atmosphere. It lets you layer exposition where it needs to be, without dumping several thousand words of text on someone who doesn't want to read it; they read the parts they care about, and ignore the rest.

Thing is, when I present it to these Zoomers, they just don't understand, and if they do, they don't care. If I'm talking to them about it in person, I can watch their eyes glaze over. It's worth noting that I do not regard these people as stupid, wrong, or uncultured for having this disposition. In fact, I regard myself as kind of out of touch.

So, bearing this in mind, I want to raise three topics:

• how can we get new people to actually play these things, and make new ones with their own ideas (that are hopefully at least somewhat orthogonal to our own culture)?,
• how can we revitalize this medium to be actually relevant again?, and
• should we even bother trying to do the former two things, since we ourselves can just jump ships to new things?