Best posts made by faraday

@arkandel said in Mismatched themes and expectations:

Ultimately where is the line between me trying to play out something I think is cool, and turning the game into something its runners don't?

I think the onus is on the players. Unless the game states otherwise, players shouldn't play out goals that change the game's central conceit. That's akin to being invited to a chess party and trying to strongarm people into playing poker. There's nothing wrong with poker, but that's not why everyone is here.

So if I were running a gritty post-apoc survival game and somebody wanted to make solar panels and turn it into a happy little utopia, or discover a giant cache of medicine or whatever, I would politely take them aside and chat about it. Maybe there can be an interesting plotline about how they're trying to do it but they end up running into insurmountable challenges. Or maybe the game isn't a good fit for what they are interested in RPing about.

I also think that sometimes games set themselves up for clashes of expectations, and that's where I feel this topic belongs in the game design thread. I think we all know that MUSHes are 90% social. BarRP, relationships, chats in the park, etc. When building your game, you've got to not only consider the plots, but what people are going to do between plots. Maybe a highly-relatistic post-apoc setting where it's 100% grimdark isn't a good fit for a MU and you should reconsider. Or make it invite-only for only folks you know share your vision and not the general "good-looking survivors who never die of dysentery and always magically have enough to eat..." Hollywood vision of post-apoc.

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

Do all players deserve the same access to the spotlight?

No. As a game-runner, I don't owe anybody anything other than a comfortable and safe environment to tell their stories. Spotlight has to be earned.

• Activity - just showing up and playing nets you more opportunities to have a moment where you do something cool.
• Initiative - following up on plot threads and doing something beyond BarRP nets you more opportunities to get involved.
• Being helpful - I'm much more inclined to run a special focused plot for somebody who's contributed to the game in other ways than somebody who just sits in the OOC room all day.
• If you do want the spotlight, make a sensible character choice - A Viper Pilot is going to get more chances at the spotlight on a BSG game than the cook. On a western, a gunslinger or doctor will probably have more opportunities to get involved in stuff than a farmer. That's just common sense.

Now spotlight can sometimes be used in obnoxious ways, which is why I think people are sensitive to it. It's poor sportsmanship to run a plot featuring your own PC and not let anybody do anything else meaningful. That's like inviting people over to play basketball and hogging the ball the whole time.

Similarly, excluding otherwise proactive and decent people from having plot opportunities just because they're not your buddies is equally poor sportsmanship. It would be like inviting people over to play basketball and only letting your friends have a turn on the court.

So don't be a jerk, but recognize that nobody's entitled to anything.

@Ghost said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

This has been a problem in mushing since the first WoD mush/online RPG ever. It's never going to be solved. The only fix is to target fair players who don't metagame as your core players.

Or you accept that metagaming is not a problem but a natural part of the gaming experience, and as long as it's not being used unfairly (which is in the eye of the beholder of course) does no harm at all. Again, it comes down to what kind of game you're trying to run.

For a corollary - look at video games. There are those who would cry foul that anybody utilizing internet resources to look up Minecraft strategies is a cheating metagamer and should just play the game with blinders on and get-off-my-lawn already. But I would argue that view is in the decided minority these days. As long as everyone has access to the same information, using that info to enhance your playing experience isn't inherently bad. It is a game, after all.

I'm in favor of this general philosophy, but I see it as an insurmountable challenge.

• The majority of MUers regard MUs as games, not stories. Yeah, there are some stories involved, but in many ways the stories are secondary to the game aspect - XP, advancement, minigames, status, and even TS in a way.
• An awful lot of MUers (perhaps even the majority here too) view their character not as a fictional character in an ensemble story, but as their personal proxy. When their character wins, they win. When their character loses, they lose. This is why we see so much unhealthy IC/OOC.

I don't see how you can incentivize people against these core ideals. It would be like trying to incentivize somebody to take a dive in a game of chess or to end their Uncharted game midway through. Sure, you might be able to bribe them, but it's going to be unnatural and probably resented because it runs contrary to the whole reason people are playing.

The only way I can see to steer away from this is to remove the game-y aspects. Downplay stats, remove XP, remove artificial systems of advancement, make weaknesses as important as strengths, remove the quest-y aspect of our plots. You know - all the things that RPers generally despise. But until we start treating these things as stories instead of games, I don't think we can reasonably expect people to embrace them in a literary fashion.

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

You can make new games or poll for what people want to play all day long, but if those 10-15 unique IP logins aren't staying, it likely isn't because of the choice in game itself.

There are all sorts of reasons why games fail, but the biggest one in my experience is critical mass.

MUSHers basically expect RP to be available on-demand. If they can't find it, they'll leave.

There are some things staff can do to combat this, like making sure you remove obstacles to RP (like don't spread people out among factions/planets, give them reasons to interact, run plots and scenes for people to jump into), but all of that basically requires butts in seats. A recognized IP is invariably going to get more butts in seats from Day One than an original one, and thus have more chance of achieving that critical mass.

Certainly there have been original-theme settings throughout MUSH history that succeeded in spite of this. It's not impossible, but it is a challenge.

@arkandel said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

It's up to the community to regulate itself, which I'm hoping we can do, but which also puts everyone at the relative mercy of cliques.

Haven't we proven time and time again that the community doesn't regulate itself? Freedom of speech means you can stand on the street corner shouting horrible stuff; it doesn't mean you can do so in my living room. The person in charge (whether that's the home owner, business owner or forum owner/s) has to decide what level of discourse they find acceptable, which in turn decides what kind of environment they're going to foster.

You can remove 'meetme', but you can't force people to engage with your grid. Speedwalking has been a thing since I started playing in the 90's, that' s why tools like meetme came about in the first place.

You can remove the scene system, but people have always found a way around the grid. TP rooms, private apartments substituting as some alternate location, google docs RP.

Obviously you should not have tools that run contrary to your culture (e.g. having an elaborate set of PVP code & rewards if you don't want PVP in your game), but code doesn't create culture. People do.

@botulism Agree with the sentiment, but in practice it’s not that simple. I’ve no doubt that @arkandel wants to do the right thing, but if wrongdoing isn’t happening in front of you and there’s no actual evidence beyond someone saying “so and so did this bad thing somewhere else” — it’s often not clear what the right thing actually is. It’s a fine line between holding someone accountable and guilt-by-accusation alone.

@groth said in Talking 'Bout Ares:

That's not really your fault. Commands starting with @ are hardcoded and commands starting with + were coded for that specific game so which commands start with which not only changes game to game but also changes within the same game as the coder gets around to implementing their own preferred version of default commands.

It's even more complicated than that. On any given Penn game you could have:

WHO and help (no prefix)
@desc (@-prefix for a modifying command)
&attr (for setting an attribute)
+help (for game-specific commands)
rumours (a local command that just happened to not have a prefix)

The players literally don't care where the code lives. The prefixes don't help them in the slightest, and can be VERY confusing when there are overlaid commands (help vs +help or @desc vs +desc that do completely different things).

It's just a bad user experience. Full stop. A command line interface is bad enough without adding extra complexity on top of it just to make it easier for the coder to figure out where the code is running from.

Kind of tangential to the discussion but I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the tools I've added to AresMUSH to help players report abuse.

I want to stress that this is not global logging of all pages (for the aforementioned privacy reasons), but highly targeted and limited logging that can be activated when someone is harassed to provide a verified log directly to staff via job.

Channel Reporting

If someone is behaving badly on channel, you can bring it to the game admin's attention - along with an automatic, verified log of the channel recall buffer.

channel/report <channel>=<explanation>

Page Reporting

If someone is harassing you via pages, you can enable page monitoring. This will keep track of the last couple dozen pages to and from that person. The other person will not be notified that you are logging pages.

Once you have the pages logged, you can bring the matter to the game admin's attention using the page report feature. The pages from the log will automatically be included as an official, verifiable log. You can report someone more than once if the problem happens again.

page/monitor - Shows who you're monitoring.
page/monitor <name>=<on or off> - Starts or stops monitoring pages from someone.
page/log <name> - Review your page log with someone. This is what will be included if you report them.
page/report <name>=<explanation> - Creates a report, including your page log with that person as evidence.

Mail Reporting

You can report an offensive mail to the game admin.

mail/report <#>=<explanation> - Reports an offensive mail message.

I realize these tools are not perfect (page reporting in particular requires the harasser to continue to harass you after you've activated the log) and do not cover every possible circumstance. I still think it's a heck of a lot better than what we have today relying on unverifiable plain text logs.

@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

Okay, that makes more sense to me, thank you. I was coming from the perspective of writing off = the shunning thing you're talking about, but 'I will quietly not play with them' is different. Thank you! I feel a little bit better.

Yeah I meant it in the sense of "griping and/or going out of your way to avoid RP with someone", not overtly malicious shenanigans that make hog pit headlines.

Jane is still harboring a grudge against Mary from some game eight years ago / Tom thinks Jane is an idiot and won't RP with them outside of staff-run plot scenes (and then will avoid direct interaction) / Mary thinks Bob is a low-down dirty powergamer who's always trying to make his character shine / Bob turns his nose up at Jane because she only likes relationship RP and doesn't participate in big plots / Harvey is pissed at Tom because Tom's PC said something mean about Harvey's PC / Sam won't RP with Jane because she poses too slow/fast/long/short/pick-a-peeve / ...

I could go on and on and on. These things may not be as directly harmful as some of the harassment/flaming/etc. we hear about, but it's not good either.
Imagine being a GM in a TTRPG where half of your friends can't stand the other half, and everyone is constantly complaining about or avoiding each other. It's just draining.

It's not always like that, but it's common enough that I think @Ghost's perspective is entirely justified.

@Ghost already knows that we're kind of on opposite ends of the ballfield here, and that's okay. As long as you're not harming anyone, I think that everybody should play these games the way that's fun for them. If that means tuning out the OOC stuff, more power to them. That's why the Ares handle system is 100% optional. People have a right to privacy.

But since we're talking about the "OOC Game" I wanted to say why I'm in favor of it, and why Ares does encourage it.

I think that anonymity and emotional distance are at the root of the general toxicity of the Internet at large. It's so easy to tear down a name on a screen, or to think the worst of someone, or be unduly irritated by some perceived slight when you have no other connection to the person.

The way you fight this is through empathy, and one way to do that is building interpersonal connections. So when you meet SomeChar@SomeGame, it's like: "Oh, it's @Three-Eyed-Crow! We had a blast playing nurses on TGG together back in the day." I haven't really RPed with @Sparks, for instance (maybe once somewhere?), but I would definitely approach a first-time in-game meeting more positively than I would some random stranger based on our conversations here.

Of course this works both ways. If you get a bad reputation, that can work against you, and people can hold grudges. It can make it harder to break into friend circles when you're the new person. But all that is true in real life too, and the solution in real life isn't to isolate yourself. That's my 2 cents anyway.

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

Why is chargen still so "type: +attribute set Dexterity 4" and not "table selection on a website"? I can see where the CLI will always be relevant in terms of emotes and writing poses, but the evolution of computing was to place an attractive API/GUI/Interface on top of the convoluted CLI, and let the experts worry about the codebade while developing the user experience.

Yeah, I mean I don't disagree, but... I have all that already? Some things are more refined than others, but Ares is pretty much at the point where someone can play the entire game through the web portal without opening up a MU client or typing a single command. https://aresmush.com/web-portal

Tech alone doesn't solve the problem though. As you mentioned, there are significant cultural issues at play too. And having a slick web GUI still doesn't help the game staff who need to play server admin.

@Ghost said in Privacy in gaming:

Do most MU-providers run on HTTPS and have certs? I wonder if their CA cert would allow the games on their servers to fall under the umbrella of that cert.

In my experience, it's not that simple. The MU server process will need access to the actual server certificate file, and those are usually locked down to root. There's a complicated dance I had to go through for Ares to make that work, and it still requires sudo access (which you aren't likely to get on a traditional MU provider). Also, depending on the way the cert is set up, it wouldn't apply to sub-domains. mymush.somewhere.com doesn't automatically get to piggyback off of somewhere.com's certificate.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Privacy in gaming:

They're both very important discussions, but they are not interchangeable at all.

I would argue that there are several separate topics at play here:

• What can be done on a tech level to better protect the transmission and storage of data (e.g. @Ghost's SSL stuff, talking about database security, etc.)
• What can be done by ethical staff to establish solid privacy practices to protect themselves and their players.
• What can be done to guard yourself against unethical staff snooping without any justification and/or abusing your private data (IP, email, any info gleaned from OOC chatter or RP) for their own ends.

It's good to remember that the latter problem exists, but we're not going to get much mileage out of it. As @Derp points out there's precious little you can do beyond leave.

@mietze said in Privacy in gaming:

Bans are almost always announced. The other stuff rarely is. Which does tie back to a certain part of privacy (not making every player's disciplinary strikes or problems public on game). Man, I feel like I should be proud of myself for staying OT.

This. For instance, I got a lot of flak on a game for "not doing anything" about a particular problem player, when in fact there was a series of escalating counselings/warnings/etc. happening behind the scenes. They just weren't broadcast to the world, nor do I think they should have been. It wasn't until the person was banned that everyone was like: "Yes! Finally she did something!"

If the problem is bad enough that the person doesn't belong in your community, then you ban them. Otherwise I think rehabilitation is more productive than punitive actions.

@Ganymede said in Punishments in MU*:

Faraday is from Venus; Thenomain is from Columbus.

C’mon, I made ARES. At least give me Mars.

@carma said in A healthy game culture:

Can you give an example of unpoliceable poor sportsmanship? I'm interested in learning.

What @Kanye-Qwest and @mietze said are good examples.

You say that patterns will emerge, but in practice they often don't.

• Jane avoids Bob because she just doesn't find his RP particularly interesting.
• Jane avoids Bob because she's being a poor sport and holding a grudge over something that happened four scenes ago.
• Jane avoids Bob because he's a sleazy stalker type who oversteps boundaries enough to make her uncomfortable, but not overtly enough to actually report him.

In one example, Jane is at fault, in another Bob is, and in the third it's just clashing RP styles and not actually a problem.

The trouble is - as a game-runner, these all look the same from the outside: Jane isn't RPing with Bob. Unless somebody complains, you'll never even be aware that there's an issue. And even if they do complain, it can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to get to the bottom of what really happened.

Everyone is clearly entitled to feel how they feel about logins. Some folks get discouraged by a small WHO list, whether or not people are RPing. Some folks get discouraged by a big WHO list where everybody is idling. There is nothing objectively wrong with either position.

What is uncool is folks saying: "Hey, you know that thing you find fun on these games? Hanging out and talking to your friends? You need to stop doing that so I can feel better about my potential to find entertainment."

The core question should be: is there RP available?

If there is, then focus on that (go play!) and don't worry about what the other people are doing with their time. If there isn't, also focus on that (try to generate some RP!) and don't worry about what the other people are doing with their time!

@pyrephox said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

and one of the things I like to do is take a look at the other character's wiki or finger to see something I can hang a scene hook off of that makes our conversation a little LESS 'hello random person' - ... There's nothing wrong with wanting a scene that has 'purpose', but that means, you know, put in the effort to build the scene with purpose.

Exactly. I'm also not a particular fan of "random people with no reason to interact meet in random public place to talk about the weather." It's awkward. It's boring (for me personally; not judging those who enjoy it).

But it's really not that hard to find a reason for a scene. Even the Superman example given earlier - Clark is a journalist. Journalists are great RP-drivers because they can concoct a meaningful reason to talk to almost anyone. Clark may be his alter-ego but it's still a big part of his life. I wouldn't see those relationships and interactions as meaningless just because he's not wearing his cape at the time.

Jurassic Park (the first one) is another good example. There are a number of scenes that don't move the plot along in a direct way, but are important for building relationships between the characters so that they care about each other (and you, the audience, cares about them) when they finally do get around to being chased by dinosaurs. Those non-action scenes aren't pointless; they're essential.

I don't think there exists a strict set of criteria that can definitively categorize the different types of online RP. Nor do I think there are even clear categories in the first place. It's more of a continuuum. Was Firan a MUD? A MUSH? Both? Neither? Does it even really matter?

Some of the hallmarks of why I prefer MU-style RP over other things like Storium, MUDs, play-by-forum, etc.

• Scene-centric narrative writing (full paragraph, cohesive stories)
• Continuous time (moves the plot along at a fixed pace relative to RL... this tends to drive more synchronous RP, though it's never been a requirement)
• Ongoing narrative (more of a TV show than a short story)
• OOC community and coordination
• RPG-lite chargen systems (don't get in the way, but allow some structure)
• A persistent world than can withstand (to a point) players coming and going.

I realize not all MUSHes have all these things, and some other styles of games have some of them too. I think it's like diagnosing an illness. You don't have to have ALL the symptoms, but the more you have, the more likely it is.