@Ashen-Shugar said in Game Death:
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Burnout is a huge mess. Staff and players alike get this. We grow tired of a situation, a gaming engine, or anything else. And frankly there really is no ready solution to this. The reason? Burnout means something different to each person. The best way to deal with this is to talk to the person/staff getting burnout and see if there's an active solution to it. If one person burns out, likely others will as well eventually on similar reasons. Likewise, if you are the one getting burnout, it's generally common decency to alert the staff of why you are getting it. Again, burnout is not a bad thing, it just happens. But maybe something can be done to help solve it, if not for you, then for the next person.
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People change. We grow up, we get old, sometimes we die. Lots of people who have mudded like me are getting close to retirement age, and we're not the spring chickens we once were. One day, we may leave entirely or not be around anymore. Shit happens. What we should do is pass on what we know to the younger generation so that they can apply what they want and so forth. Teach, learn, exchange, freely, openly, and without all the emotional baggage we tend to bring to the table. You can learn from an asshole or an enemy just like you can from a friend. Ignore the crap and take what you can from it. We're all (for the most part) adults, let's start acting like it.
These. These are the biggest.
Rules in place, staff sticking strongly to policy, a clearly defined theme, all the staff meta you can throw a stick at, players inspired to run their own stories, interactive players and player groups that go outside their circles. Everything could be right ...
But people changing and burnout is the biggest cause of game life and death.
What happens in real life when this happens? Everyone sitting at the table to have fun says 'lets play something different', and you have Civilization night, or your favorite TCG, or someone brings a movie. All good campaigns eventually die (I ran a 10 year TT Al-Qadim game once ...).
On a Mu* when this happens, game death. It could start with policy or theme disagreement between staff and players, it could be someone feeling the theme is just played out, it could be a new place just sounds better, really anything. The Mu* community doesn't just agree to do something else, they just leave without a word, they exchange bitter words with others sometimes, sometimes they call it a split, and everyone goes reclusive and moves to other games, sometimes bringing friends with them, sometimes going solo. Sometimes they reconnect by knowing each other as 'RL' social media friends (sometimes they meet RL and are long distance friends) or doing shout outs here and places like here.
This leads back to the revised idea of Gateway (or old name, I know some people like that even though they settled on this forum being MSB and not using old names to refer to it).
A Mu* that offers a system to play anything (from just dice to customizable CG such as fate/fudge, Open D6, etc.). I've said it earlier this year, my want is a place where folks can just change games or enter each others campaigns and theme worlds when it suits their fancy.
Despite burnout and disagreements, we all go back to the same ideas for adventures. Everyone goes to the new supernatural horror place, even if its just another WoD or some similar western mythos based consept of urban dark fantasy, every 3 years a new Western place opens up (sometimes popular, sometimes a few solid regulars), every 2 years a new BSG place is out there. There is no startling new 'genre' for RPGs we haven't discovered yet, they really rehash old genre's and change the meta/fluff around.
Instead of hoping the inspiring folks that do PrPs or don't mind storytelling for the game itself will come to the new place, why not a place they can just do their own thing, a few tools to get a new campaign or game running on the Mu*? Everyone can set up wiki or wikidot these days, is it that hard to have a campaign bboard with a link to theme website, with myriad themes running in the same box? A few rooms for a grid, that could utilize fancy TP room descs to chance rooms about as needed, or actively use creative places (we've all seen grid locations that represent an area of a city where the places were the stores and businesses and homes and such at the location).
When someone is tired, they say I'm going to go play on so-and-so's campaign/world/area with my other char I made for that game. Or they say, we don't have a good space cowboy theme, lets make a space wild frontier theme on wiki, I'll start a campaign and build a few rooms folks can start playing in.
Slowly Game Death is becoming more popular as we're finding it easier to leave a game we find boring or are dissatisfied with in favor of another game. We've made friends with the people we like to RP with and tend to pull them along with us. The older places manage to keep going, but not like it used to be where folks were surprised a place would close after 5 years in the early days.
I suppose even a shared place, it all comes down to mechanics, the mechanics people will come and go, and it will make or break who wants to share it, much as it is the life/death of genres in general.
