Best posts made by faraday

@derp said in Sensitivity in gaming:

This thread comes from a place of like -- gushing empathy

I have tons of empathy. But I also believe in personal responsibility. That's why I argue for a middle of the road approach.

There are certain topics where I think there's widespread acceptance that it's a sensitive subject you should warn people about - e.g., suicide and sexual assault. That's just common courtesy.

But for the rest, it's largely dependent on context. When I'm watching Chicago PD for instance, I don't expect to be warned about the inevitable murders. For Gray's Anatomy, I don't expect them to warn me if a child is going to be hurt or die. For Battlestar, I don't need warnings about general post-apocalyptic misery or war violence. There is a certain base level of expectations that comes along with the theme and the overall content rating (TV-14 vs. TV-MA).

I think games can operate in a similar way - establish base expectations, and then communicate like reasonable people if there's a special situation beyond that.

People will RP when:

1. They are available to play.
2. There is something interesting enough to motivate them to play.

While you can certainly target your RP requests to peak activity times, #1 is largely out of your control. If someone isn't available to play, badgering or guilting them about it doesn't increase activity because they were never going to RP anyway. All it does is make them less engaged with the game as a whole, which ultimately leads to less RP overall.

If you care about getting people engaged, focus on #2. Give them something that's actually more interesting to do than just sitting around chatting with their friends.

@sunny said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

ALSO
blinky blinky flashy flashy is super important to remind me I'm RPing.

Yeah. I can't use the web play screen for the same reason I can't use the web versions of discord or slack or verizon tech support. The notifications just aren't attention-grabbing enough in a browser so I'll forget it's there.

We should also keep in mind that the need for some kind of desktop client doesn't mean that we should be stuck with telnet-driven plain text blobs forever. It's just all we have currently.

In terms of features not being available on web, I think a lot of it is just habit/tradition.

For example, consider spawns. Without them on a regular client, everything is jumbled up in one thread. That makes spawns essential, which trains our brains to interact with the game in a certain way. But we don't have spawns in discord, and nobody(*) cares because they're not necessary. Everything is already separated enough.

(*) - I'm sure somebody somewhere cares, but generally it's not a thing people worry about.

Auto-logging is similar. A browser app will never log the same as a desktop app. For somebody who's used to logging every piece of screen text every time they log in, that could bug them But for someone who starts out with Ares... they know they can report a conversation/scene for abuse easily, can download any scene when it's done, and can get an archive of the entire portal on demand. Do they really need live-to-disk-pose-by-pose logging? Probably not.

Challenging the status quo requires looking beyond what current features are available (spawns, logging) to what need those features are meeting. If you can meet that need in a different way, it may not be enough to convince people who have been doing things a certain way for 30 years, but it can begin to shift the paradigm.

@ominous said in The Desired Experience:

If you want to consistently only make four super fantastic sandwiches for you and your three friends and only talk and spend time with them, have a card game/board game night with them instead of going to the potluck. Everyone will have a much better time.

This just literally makes no sense to me. If Gany consistently logs onto my game and plays with their four friends and only their four friends, they're still playing my game. Gany and their friends are having fun. Maybe they're sharing logs now and again for other people to read. Maybe one of their four friends RPs about the shenanigans with somebody else, generating RP for them too. Maybe seeing some activity (even if it's private) helps to convince others that the game is still active.

There are so many potential positives that I really cannot fathom why anyone would think I'd be better off by them going to their own private card game instead.

And there's no negative. It's not like I pay hosting fees per player or anything. There will be no additional RP generated by the absence of Gany and their friends -- in fact, there will measurably be less.

@ghost said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

I'm not saying everyone needs to agree with my views on TS/Romance in some cases being treated like "pseudo-dating". If you disagree? COOL. I just feel this way and thus (up until my end of mushing) marked it as something to be very very very very careful about.

As someone who sees IC romance as purely writing, I can emphatically agree with you that the majority of players I've interacted with do not see it the same way. So. Many. Boundary. Issues. Setting a shared expectation up front can help, but there are some who will push things even if you're super clear about no TS, no OOC bleed. It's annoying.

There are some good folks out there who can keep things separate. They're the best. The trouble is finding them.

@apos said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Like, I get the whole, 'Well they wouldn't have made a game anyways' but I dunno if 'game design by hazing' is really all that productive.

Seriously. It's one thing to have a person mention constructively "Hey have you considered..." based on some past experience, but a barrage of naysaying or people asking for something completely opposite of what you asked about is just freaking annoying and disheartening.

Just an update... Ares is one step closer to a stable release. The web portal overhaul is complete and you can see it in action on BSGU. I'm churning through some bugfixes and installation script updates related to the separation of the portal and the game engine, and working on some more tutorials.

Here's a breakdown of the web portal features.

@ghost said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

"Is it a GAME or a Cooperative Writing Hobby?"

I love most of what you wrote, but I would challenge one part of your thesis: the use of the word "or" there.

If you look at how MUSHers behave across the board, I think you'll find that what makes MUSHes unique from other hobbies is that they exist at an intersection between gaming, cooperative writing, and (to @Ganymede's point) improv acting. MUSHes contain elements from all of these to varying degrees.

That is what causes challenges, for sure, but it's also what makes MUSHes cool IMHO.

For instance, even in a 100% consent-driven game, I still find value in codified chargen in order to create a common frame of reference for what your character is capable of. Even in a "cooperate first" mindset game, I still find value in having some set of conflict resolution other than old-school GM judging.

The BSG games (mine and others) I think show a sort of environment where players with different preferences can peacefully co-exist most of the time. In a more adversarial environment, I can certainly see where clashing expectations would be a bigger problem.

Of course you can doctor logs, but in my experience most people don't. Heck, they don't even deny saying what they did. It's always just "But I didn't mean it like that..." or "But he/she led me on..." or "But I thought they were cool with it..." or something like that. Yes, there are genuine malicious harassers out there, but there are also a lot of people who just lack self-awareness. So you tell them "Well it's not cool so knock it off" and hopefully that's the end of it.

To @Auspice's point about the web portals... yeah, they don't log (though I think the Cheese WebMU does) but you don't need to capture a whole log. Just when it happens, copy/paste into a mail - either to yourself or to staff depending on severity. I would think this could work even for @GangOfDolls' scenario about not storing anything locally.

Worst case for a persistent offender is setting them SUSPECT. Not to just randomly snoop on them, which I would never do, but for the sole purpose of verifying the authenticity of a log that's in dispute. Obviously this will only help if there's a "next time" - you can't retroactively do it.

I'd think privacy concerns preclude any sort of pre-emptive log protection like @Arkandel is talking about. I'd considered a similar system where pages and OOCs were put into a temp buffer and you could generate a log automatically from that for reporting. But I think anything like that would freak MUSHers the heck out. It's a tradeoff between privacy and security.

Not directed at anyone in particular...

I really wish folks would chill with the "remember it's just a game, let everyone have fun" stuff because it's basically saying "if you disagree with this you're against people having fun".

Yes, games are about having fun. But if fun were the only consideration then we wouldn't have stats, we wouldn't have game systems, and we wouldn't have non-consent policies. We'd just let players do whatever they want and have unfettered pretendy-fun-time fun.

But we don't. Because there's more at play here. What one group of folks views as "fun" might cause another group a decided amount of "un-fun". Even if you come down hard on one group's side or another, there should at least be a recognition that there are, actually, two (or more) equally-legitimate sides.

@Carex said in Where to play?:

was rejected because on the restricted list it says they don't want any more businesses for "Automotive/mechanics"
Because repairing cars is... totally the what a place called "Biker King" ran by the son of a biker gang member would be doing.
They said I was welcome to play my concept if I wanted to work for someone at one of the existing auto-shops... which is totally the same thing as a motorcycle repair shop I guess?

I don't play on the game so I have no horse in this race, but I'm not seeing the problem here. Even if you ignore the fact that "automotive" includes motorcycles by definition, the "/mechanics" part pretty clearly restricts all forms of mechanic-related businesses.

So it sounds like you apped a concept on their restricted list, got rightfully rejected, and then they tried to offer a potential alternate concept that might work (working at one of the existing businesses). All seems perfectly reasonable to me. Where's the issue?

@Roz said in Fandom and entitlement:

But I think the overall answer is somewhere in the middle.

That's how I feel.

Battlestar and Falling Skies are two Moore-involved productions where they (according to interviews and such) basically admit they made big shifts in the show's direction without respecting the foundation that had been laid out previously. While that's certainly their right as artists, it's pretty universally recognized as poor storytelling across the industry. Dismissing the criticism as "oh the fans are just being rabid" is a cop-out.

On the flip side, the fans often are rabid and disrespectful to both the creators and to each other. If somebody likes something that you don't (or vice-versa), it's like they're the enemy in some bitter pop culture war of Everything Wrong With Media. It's pretty disheartening at times, honestly.

@too-old-for-this said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

Why wouldn't anyone expect a flood of interest in something new and different?

History? Look at the Advertisements board for other games that have opened in the past year or so. They weren't exactly flooded with apps. And a lot of games in the last, say, five years or so have been quite modest in size.

Does anyone really expect their video to be the one that goes viral?

Double post sorry but I missed replying to this:

@TNP said in To OOC Room or Not to OOC Room (and Other Artifacts):

And there are people - like me - who usually keep channels turned off. One of the biggest things I hated about Arx was the lack of an OOC Room. And I don't even make a lot of use of them.

No solution is going to catch everyone. Some folks turn off channels, some folks don't hang out in the OOC lounge (or are already RPing).

It's largely a matter of preference, but I do think there are objective benefits to the channel option:

• It is available to everyone on the game, no matter where they are.
• With the web portal and/or OOC player bit characters, you can keep the chatter away from your RP windows.
• With channel recall, you can catch up on what you missed later.
• Abuse is more easily reported and monitored because staff doesn't have to keep an alt in the room every minute of the day, and (on Ares) players can make use of the channel abuse reporting tools.

@Ghost said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

What you're in is a Catch-22 with your politics....I can tell you that not a one would be alright with having gotten a sort of socio-political bump over their skill set to support their gender/culture/religious tropes.

While I agree that nobody should be hired solely because of their gender/culture/etc. if they can't do the job, there are well-documented systemic biases and challenges that do require conscious thought and effort to combat. It's very easy for somebody to fall into the trap of thinking that "the best person for a job" is somebody exactly like them, who does the job in the same way they do. And that's the kind of BS thinking that leads to non-diverse workplaces.

ETA - There are a ton of articles about bias in hiring decisions. Here's a nice one: 7 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in Your Hiring Process, and its lead paragraph is pretty spot-on:

A vast body of research shows that...unconscious racism, ageism, and sexism play a big role in who gets hired.

If something is unconscious, it takes conscious thought to overcome it, so it's good that @Arkandel is taking the time to think about these things.

HorrorMUX, Lovecraft, Stranger Things...there have been several "urban fantasy/modern horror" games open in the past year or so, and none of them took off like this. I think that's a testament to this staff hitting on an unmet need. Good for them.

Folks want to think they should have anticipated the popularity and planned differently? Fine. But filling up an ad thread with pages of negativity because a game was so interesting and popular it "sold out"? That just strikes me as shooting yourselves in the foot, honestly. We want more games? We need to encourage creators, not discourage them.

Everybody has different inhibitions. Some folks don't like either grid camping or sitting in an open scene because someone they don't like might stop by and then they feel obliged to play with them. Some folks feel self-conscious asking on the RP requests channel.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, which is why I think it's important to offer a variety of options. If you want to camp on grid, do it. If you'd rather open an empty scene, do that. If you want to ask on the RP channel, do that.

Sure, there are still some glitches about folks seeing what they need to see or filtering the information in a way that's meaningful to them -- that's why Ares is still in beta. It's constantly undergoing improvements. Whatever scene sys somebody cooks up for Evennia would have the same iterations.

This could go under RL peeves but I figured it'd be more relateable here.

I have always hated multiple choice tests with a passion. It wasn't until recently, helping my kid with online school, that I finally realized why.

We both have very literal thinking - kid because OCD, me because (probably almost certainly) autism. So after ruling out two of the obviously-dumb answers, we both find ourselves going: "Well... it could be A because technically blah, or it could be B because technically blah..." And then we have to contort ourselves into this game of "let's try to guess what the teacher thought the BEST answer was when they wrote the test, even though their brain works completely differently than ours..." and it's freaking maddening.

Tests should not be designed to TRICK the students. It's mean on principle, but doubly so for students who have trouble with directions or inferring meaning.

@A-Meowley said in Bloopers:

The wiki is atrocious; barely usable on mobile

Y'know what does work great on mobile? The Ares web portal.

Just saying.

I held this role once too.

I had absolutely zero authority to do anything. All I did was act as a friendly face to relay issues to the "real" staff who could resolve them. That's a recipe for frustration for both the ombudsman and the players.

If your game is in need of a friendly face because staff is too unhelpful, unapproachable, or ineffectual to advocate for players themselves, I think you've got bigger issues that having an ombudsman won't help.