Posts made by faraday

@Wretched That article is so on-point, thanks for sharing.

Re: calendars -- I can't use electronic calendars. I've tried, but I constantly forget that they exist. It has to be physical and in-my-face every time I walk into the kitchen so I can see that I have something to do tomorrow. Even the ones that do pop-up reminders, I'll be like: "Yeah, yeah, I know..." then promptly get drawn into something else and forget. I will set electronic reminders on Alexa or whatnot, but it can't be my only tracker.

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

So long as it's only "allowing more flexibility" and not a new paradigm.

That is entirely in the hands of the MU community. MU players control what becomes the norm by how they behave.

The one practical thing holding it back from becoming the norm, IMHO, is the MU time clock. IC time continues to pass for the rest of the game even if your scene is lagging. It's the same reason people hate timestops. It ties your hands from continuing with other RP, and potentially makes your own RP moot based on other things that have now transpired.

That natural tension doesn't disappear just because somebody's using a different MUSH client to participate in the scene.

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

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

Folks can side-eye it all they want, but it's not doing anything that MUSHers haven't been doing for years.

Just because people have been doing it for a while doesn't mean it's not worthy of side-eye. I hated WoD timestops as much as anyone.

So then don't play in those scenes maybe? But if I want to spin up a multi-day scene to play with my friend from England whose timezone doesn't line up with mine, or my friend from Seattle who is super-busy with a new baby and can't get online for hours at a time, then that's my business, not yours. Allowing more flexibility hurts nobody and enables RP that simply wouldn't happen otherwise.

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

In all the Ares talk of their web scenes and stuff that is one thing I have wondered. How do they keep that zest going when it can be a while between poses? Or is that just a me problem?

The browser notifies you when there's new activity, just like a MUSH client does. It's conceptually no different than using Discord or Slack's web client. Some folks prefer a desktop client for understandable reasons, but any expectation that "web scene = slow scene" is being driven by the people, not the technology.

You can do a regular "real-time poses every 10 minutes" scene in Potato or you can do one in the browser.

You can do a "I'm gonna pose at you once every couple hours while I do chores" scene in Potato or you can do one in the browser.

You can even mix and match some people on the browser and some logged in with traditional MU clients.

The only thing that Ares lets you do that you can't easily do on a regular MU server is an async scene where folks pose at each other here and there in their own respective timezones / work schedules without both of them needing to be online at the same time. That kind of scene has always happened in MUSHes too; folks just had to go off-game to Google Docs/email/livejournal/etc. to do it. Now you can do it within the game itself.

Folks can side-eye it all they want, but it's not doing anything that MUSHers haven't been doing for years.

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

That is super niche. It doesn't surprise me that people who find that lacking will lean more into other stuff. Or that people who do enjoy it also enjoy other things and will divide their time further because there's more options for pastimes.

I don't see any evidence that it has to remain "super niche" though. People who enjoy video games will sit down and play them for hours on end, so we know there are people with blocks of free time on their hands. MUDs are still pretty huge. Play by post forum sites boast thousands of members and hundreds of games, so we know there are people who enjoy text-based RP. Storium had almost 7000 backers, but if you follow the community you'll see common complaints about the slow pacing and games fizzling out because one person dropped out, things that MU's dynamic/revolving-door nature do help to address.

I find it impossible to believe that there aren't a decent number of potential MU players out there.

But to snag them, we need more approachable tech, better tutorials/welcome wagons, and people willing to bend a little to accommodate them in actual RP. It's the latter that I see as the biggest challenge.

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

But overall - this thread makes me feel like that I should really sit down to learn more web-dev stuff. I can do it, but it's not really coming easily to me, dammit ...

Web dev doesn't come easy to anyone. And that's kind of the problem I ran into with Ares. It's 1000% easier to add the text-based commands to Ares than to add anything on the web side. It can be overwhelming, especially to folks without a lot of coding experience. People have done it, but it is not an easy learning curve.

Also, with Django - I wouldn't be surprised if you eventually run into the same issues I had when Ares was using server-side rendering. The more I added to the portal and the more people used it, it started to really impact server performance. That's why I shifted to a Javascript framework for the front-end. Not only did it improve performance, it also enabled more client-side fancy features. Unfortunately, that just adds yet another several layers of complexity to the mix (and another language to learn).

@surreality Yeah but creators don't need to know every nitty gritty thing that goes on under the hood of the game server. Sometimes highly-technical questions require highly-technical answers. One can argue this thread isn't the right place for it, but somewhere at some point those types of conversations need to happen.

Both Evennia and Ares offer tutorials that describe what game creators need to know to make a game. That, it seems, is your primary concern and I agree 100% that it's important.

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

I think the thing a lot of people are trying to get across is this: everything said right here may as well be written in Aramaic to most of us -- and that's just 'what it does/can do', not even 'and here is how to do it' or 'why you'd want to do it' or 'this is what you'd want if your end goal is X'.

Yeah but that's because it's a highly detailed code conversation. (Referring to that small exchange between Ghost and Griatch - not the general thread of course.) What @Griatch said perfect sense to me. Unless you're a coder, you're not going to be doing your own interface layer to Evennia, so I'm not sure what it is you're looking for in terms of general information?

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

@faraday Gotcha, I think when last I checked it was possible. Good to know, though!

I think maybe you're thinking of wikidot. There was an extension that posted logs and character pages to wikidot, but it was deprecated with the further development of the web portal. There's never been anything for mediawiki.

@surreality Ares doesn't work with mediawiki at all. It has its own internal wiki.

@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.

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

Empowering people to create is something every engine dev wants I think. Thing is, unless you want exactly the game mechanic as someone already did that you can then just add a world to, you will at some point have to get down to programming. All we can do is try to make that step easier, but the step will have to be made eventually.

I think you're underestimating the number of folks who are willing to use exactly the same game mechanics though.

Ares isn't just a MU in a box for a single game/genre. I mean look at the games that have been made / are being made with it so far. We've got pirates, modern horror, modern soap opera, modern post-apocalyptic, anime robots, Battlestar, Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, fantasy -- almost all of them done without a lick of custom code.

Storium has a wide breath of games that are done just with their simple card mechanics. PlayByForum/Discord/Tumbler RP uses virtually no mechanics at all.
There is a vast market out there for code-light or pre-made mechanics games.

Where I think we still fall short though is making it easy for the game administrators. Ares goes a long way compared to Penn/Tiny (where you basically need a server admin / coder just to get started) but it's still a long way from Wordpress/Storium point-and-click game building.

Yeah I mean really - it doesn't matter what generation they're from. I was just being flip. A single MUSH running on current infrastructure with current levels of tutorials/expectations/gameplay models getting overrun by hundreds of any kind of player would be pretty crushed.

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

if I threw down ads and had like, 100 people log in as guests to ask questions on how to MU, there's no way I could support that.

I'm not keen on being overrun with hundreds of millenials either, but there are a couple of things to unpack here, mostly around why would it require so much support.

• MUs are highly social, but the unwritten rules are obscure and wildly variable from game to game. Also we're not the most newbie-friendly bunch, as a general rule.
• Traditional MUs are not very user-friendly, from custom clients to obscure command-line syntaxes, to very basic things being done differently from game to game. Ares' web portal, new clients, etc. can help with this, but only to a point.
• MUSHers still come to games with the GM/TTRPG mindset, expecting to be entertained instead of expecting to tell their own stories. That creates a heck of a lot of workload for the game admins, which is not scalable to hundreds of players.

Can we combat these issues without veering too far away from what MUs are at their core? If so - how? I dunno. It's an interesting question.

Evennia is awesome too, and I've pointed folks that way when the kind of game they wanted to build seemed better suited for Evennia than Ares. As @gryphter says, you can do anything you want on either platform with enough code work, but it's a question of what gets you there faster.

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

This is an interesting point of view. Using the command line is generally an important skill to have when doing anything programming- related though.

That's the thing, though -- running a game, ideally, shouldn't require programming. It shouldn't require you to be a server admin. I can spin up a whole website in 10 minutes with Wix or Wordpress or whatever. I can set up a Discord voice chat server or forum or Storium game with a few clicks.

I've made Ares as easy as I can imagine given the tech requirements. You don't need to do any code to set up a game, but it still requires you to ssh onto a server and mess around with the command line occasionally. That is freaking intimidating to a large number of people, and it's an obstacle to having more games. Having (comparatively) few games, in turn, is an obstacle to having more people.

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

Really it kinda sounds like we just need to find a way to direct people towards Aresmush; though there's still the problem of CREATING games seeming like a bit of an impenetrable pain in the ass.

Full disclosure: Ares is still in beta, so anyone wanting to run a game in it should go in with eyes open. It's generally stable, but bugs happen. I just messed up achievements in the last upgrade, for instance

That said, setting up a game in Ares with the stock codebase is extremely easy. Yes, you need a server to host it on - which currently is $5/month - but there's an installer to set everything up for you, or I have a program where I'll do the initial install (conditions apply).

If you want custom code - of course that's a lot more work. Potentially a crap-ton of more work depending on what you want to do. But that's true of any codebase.

Which reminds me -- I think that the compulsion to have to have custom code on virtually every game is what's keeping us (as a hobby) from moving to a sort of shared hosting model like Wordpress/Storium/PlayByPost/Tumblr/etc. Which would not only make setting up a game super trivial and accessible, but it would also provide a common platform for folks to find said games. And to play said games, because they'd all be using the same commands/conventions. Of course, the immersive/interactive bit with custom code is what draws some people to MUs, so YMMV.

For Ares, you can technically spin up a local game on your Mac, or on a Windows PC using a virtual machine, but it's really a PITA. Save yourself the headaches and just take digital ocean's free month to try it out.

Like @Auspice and @ZombieGenesis, I also approach writing stories/novels completely differently than I approach writing MU scenes. One is improv, give-and-take with other people. The other is a solitary endeavor where you have complete control. Sure, you need to have some interest in writing -- it is a text-driven genre -- but it's a very different experience. Which is why I don't think "advertise only to creative writing types" is the answer either.

Certainly you could pick any individual aspect of MUs and find it elsewhere. It's all online roleplay, after all. MMO RP has the "live" scene aspect, but the storytelling is limited by the game engine. Storium and PbForum games can have deep characters and even some light mechanics, but they're sloooooooowwwww. Etc. Etc. But nothing I've found really comes close to MUs.

@surreality Yeah totally. It’s kind of like how LARPing is the intersection of acting and RPGs, only MUs lack the unifying conventions/culture. Each game is wildly different. I don’t think LARPs have that same phenomenon, but I haven’t done much LARPing so I can’t say for sure.

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

IMO the only people who should have MU suggested to are people who are (ex.) "looking to primarily do writing online".

I think it's pretty honest to say that Mushing is not a place where youre going to get the tabletop RPG experience.

I agree that it’s not a TTRPG experience, but it’s not a creative writing experience either. It has elements of both and elements of neither, which is what makes it a niche hobby to begin with.

What makes MUSHing unique to me is mostly cultural, not code-related.

The biggest thing is that MUs are dynamic. The game is always turning, at some ratio compared to RL. Scenes happen in hours (usually) or days (worst-case), not weeks. Stuff happens. Stuff changes. You can tell your own stories; you're not locked into a GM-fed narrative. This leads to a depth of character development I haven't seen elsewhere. You can impact the story in ways that I haven't seen elsewhere. Games don't stall because one player gets busy or drops out, which is a big problem elsewhere.

There are some other aspects too that make MUs different - the openness (lack of a fixed group), the paragraph length (hitting a narrative sweet spot between short emotes and wall-of-text), OOC community (channels, logs, etc.), TTRPG influence (sheets/rolls), code support (combat/clues/whatever.)

As for how to get young people involved? For me personally, that's what Ares is all about. I've shown it to my kids and they just 'get' it. I've tried to show MUSHes to people before and I get blank stares. I understand that people like the grid and the immersion of walking to a room and just running into somebody there. But it's just not a very approachable mental model for people outside the hobby. The 'scene' model is, because it mirrors every other medium of writing/television/etc. (Ares has a grid, btw, but that's mostly to appease the veterans who see that as a defining part of MUs. I don't think it's a selling point; quite the contrary.)