I got a little nostalgic and decided to skim the two warring boards to see what's going on and it got me thinking...
Before I post this, I want to note that I started playing MU games in the mid-90s, have seen WORA/MSB/BM-Day/Etc and have been around for a lot of the "problematic" incidents for almost 30 years (auuuuuuggggggggh), and this post is because I really got to thinking about the bigger picture in terms of the 30+ years I did this stuff.
One of my FIRST game experiences was on Denver (WoD) where I applied as a Sabbat character. I was a WoD TTRPG player and went in as if it was a legitimate WoD game. One of my first scenes as a Sabbat was a "coffee house scene" where a character introduced themselves as a "figure skater Toreador camarilla" (all said in-character). The player did a lot of flirtation RP, so like any Sabbat (Enemies to the Camarilla) i arranged to go "outside of the bar" and then called for a "Storyteller" as my character was planning on attacking and abducting the Toreador.
The character "fled" the scene, and when I was explaining to the storyteller the canonically valid response, the Toreador player claimed that I was "harassing" her oocly.
At first, i suspected this to be a "one-off" incident, a sign of a metagaming VtM player, and moved on. What i didn't suspect was how common this kind of behavior would be over the course of...30+ years...up to and including being party or witness to a sickening deal of poor/unethical OOC behavior to protect one's "standing" in the hobby at the expense of another's.
I started thinking back over the years and how common it was to watch people create egregious theories and stories about players to wiggle out of uncomfortable OOC/IC situations of their own creations, how common it was to see groups of people bullying others, and how over time people collected names of identifiably(and unpopular) unethical players and used those to implicate usually innocent players in coordinated attacks in hopes that they'd be added to the "verboten" list.
Of course, ive mentioned before that it happened to me a few times. Once I requested personal space from a player "coming on to me" in ways that I didn't consent and in result was immediately accused of being an "emotional abuser", and on another occasion didn't disclose that I planned to kill off a character...only for another player who had IC romance designs for that character to accuse me of being a "liar and a sociopath" after I retired the character.
Anyway, my point is this:
WHEN DID WE DECIDE TO ACCEPT THIS BEHAVIOR AS A COMMUNITY?
The ONE constant ive noticed over the past 30 or so years is that this hobby always (and I mean ALWAYS) has had a continuous, rolling desire for a place where people can be attacked and belittled with minimal ramifications. Before the 'split' (eyeroll), protection of the "Hog Pit" and people's "right" to use it as they saw fit was something people were actually protecting as one of two concepts:
- We NEED this place to attack the "bad ones"
- A place where we can be mean to each other is a "necessary pressure valve" to let people fight, in front of everyone, using whatever accusations are desired, for the better of us all
I mean, as adults, we can urge ourselves to understand why "gentlemanly duels with pistols to the death over personal problems" was phased out of our societies, but we can see if it still works in smaller settings, right?
This has been a constant, and people wonder why the social scene in the hobby became this rotten cesspool of unending drama and public displays of weird ooc dominance roleplay.
Basically, the seeds of the (better) community's own destruction were laid the moment some of the worse personalities in the community began to establish the concept of a "transactional popularity hierarchy" that allowed groups of allied players who ran games to exclude/belittle players. The entitlement to be cruel or unfair to others became a matter of friendly allegiance, and the concept of not being cruel for ethics sake took a backseat. Hard work was put into justifying one of any number of weekly belittlements: making fun of people's poses, descriptions, roleplay ability, and eventually mutated into concepts like "This person didnt give me what i wanted, so i attacked"
(On one occasion, I turned down TS with someone, who then told me that since they identify closely with their character, and my ooc decision hurt their character, that they were going to attack me OOCly)
And for the 1 or 3 people who say "nothing like this has EVER happened to me", let's be honest, theres 20+ people per those 1-3 who have.
So, in the end, I think its worth considering how so many MMO RPG guilds, churches, and other groups follow the same behaviors: a self regulated community of people who intend to play fair and kind are often usurped by ambitious people who want control of it. This is the same behavior that drives spin-offs of churches, book clubs, social cliques, etc. (This behavior is common outside of MU, but often protected with things like transparency and behavioral rules)
In an unregulated/unmoderated community there is no such thing as a true "judicial" process. There's no hierarchy or council of rational, level-headed people who make the decisions on who is or isn't in the right; its all argued over who believes who. (Sidebar: I still think it's telling that in a pc and text-based hobby how so few people with the biggest accusations often do so entirely without receipts and rely on convincing others of their story).
It all comes down to the following:
- who owns the MU or board space
- whether or not the complaint comes from inside or outside of someone's circle
- what people seek to lose or gain based on the accusation
And it's somewhat ridiculous to me that the core GOLDEN RING that gets won in the constant negative behavior is...bragging rights? I think people should have spent more time over those 30 years considering the why behind these drama episodes. What exactly was to gain, ever, from the constant unethical bullying?
- Forcing other people not to be included
- Uninterrupted "fulfilling" MeTime
In the end, I think that's all it is. At some point, everyone in this hobby has (or had) a reason as to why they wanted to spend 50+ hours a week at home, on a computer, spending time virtually with people instead of in-person. Sure, there could be medical reasons why people do it, but ultimately everyone in the hobby chose THIS hobby either as a substitute to in-person social activity or as an activity because of a lack of (or unfulfilling) in-person social life
So the reward is ultimately: "Damn it, I need/want this, and this person is ruining it for me"
Now, consider 30 years of finding creative ways to say this, without actually saying it, when considering that its a free, open-to-everyone hobby, and you have no right to force the person who is impacting your much-needed escape. You can force people out solely by attacking their reputation...or evidence.
And people ended up getting REAAAAAALLY comfortable with going with the "lack of evidence" approach in a hobby that is literally a constant paper-chain of text and logging that is done entirely on MU clients and servers that are basically made out of receipt paper.
At the end of the day, I'd met a lot of nice people in the hobby who refused to partake altogether, and those people are saints. We've lost a LOT of those people over the years to the unethical ones because its simply true that there's no point in fighting with the people truly interested in behaving this way because it's bizarre and not worth the effort; find better hobbies (<- me). I've also had a lot of friends who went in and out of talking shit in the conmunity; gods know i did (my interest was in calling out unethical people for their behavior and sometimes joking about how much shit can stink).
But the people who truly protected these negative behaviors, such as the Hog Pit, seemed to be motivated by a few tenets:
- Fear of reprisal from the "good ones" who felt their entitlement to belittle others was for the benefit of all and were interested in plying said "goodness" in form of bullying against those who disagreed
- Allegiances to their friends in #1
- (In my opinion) The misguided assumption that their "super important and serious fight with so and so" was so critical to need to be a public community lashing, would provide them with a resolution (as opposed to what it actually became: a public punishment.)
- Cruel people who simply wanted the public punishment for satisfaction's sake and cleverly worded it as an ethical necessity
I think this is worth reflecting on, especially as I see more old crew peeking in for nostalgia's sake. I personally think about this stuff (despite the fact I'm no longer in the hobby) in the sense that understanding what went wrong here would help me avoid joining communities with similar behaviors (identify them), and perhaps understanding why things can get so bad to begin with.
Anyway, I'll clip this here. It's a fucking shame, really, looking back to think that 10x more effort was put into developing good ways to attack people than was put towards a fair and moderated approach to the community's problems...which in the end left a good portion of the community to the people who presumed they "won the war" by protecting their own predatory behavior in the community.
-J
