Best posts made by Duke Nukem

@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?