I'd say no. I used to play a lot of text adventures (Infocom, hooray!) but I wouldn't have called them video games, either. I called them computer games. For me a video game has to focus more on the visual presentation. I think it's fair to call MU*s a kind of 'computer game' also, but without further description you'd be glossing over what I'd consider the most important aspects.
I'm really confused where anyone is getting 'outrage' from the posts in this thread. The closest thing to it I saw is @ixokai's discomfort with what feels to him like creepy fetishization of a group to which he belongs (which I, at least, think is a totally reasonable reaction) and even that wasn't even in the same area code as what I consider 'outrage'.
Honestly, I don't think I saw a single criticism of this game that I'd rate much higher than 'eyerolling'.
@cirim13
The thing I find amusing is that when you mentioned wanting an L&L-type game last year I ALMOST suggested KD, but didn't because of the underlying theme. I guess I should have, if you weren't already there yet at the time. 
@silentsophia
I don't really get your first sentence, there. It's unreasonable for him to find this creepy because there's something else arguably similar out there? I'm pretty sure it's possible to find them both creepy!
They did, actually, claim to be a 'haven' -- but for "gay, bisexual, and queer male characters" (emphasis mine). And "players of all kinds" are welcome, as long as they're playing queer (or straight but open-minded) males.
So I see @ixokai's point and get why he might find it off-putting, although I like that they're up-front about things. Like @surreality says, it saves time and effort for anyone who'd want a female character or gets (and dislikes) a fetish vibe off the set-up.
What I'm kind of curious about is: DO superhero games have a history of treating non-straight male heroes poorly? "Unlike many other games that treat even established gay, bi, and queer male characters poorly" strongly suggests that, but as someone who doesn't play the genre, I don't know if that's true. If it is, I can see a non-fetish place this would come from, although given my experience in other genres I'd've thought an everyone-welcome game with strict enforcement against people being that kind of asshole would work also.
Putting a lot of thought into coming up with a suitable challenge for a character and seeming to actually manage to please everyone involved(!).
@Thenomain
...which is why I mentioned really not having had problems even without one.
People messing with pages they oughtn't hasn't been an issue once we banished the bots, and would be easily rolled back if it did, so I don't feel a need to have stricter/more ACLs before allowing players to just make their own accounts. I wouldn't hate HAVING more ACLs, but for me the problems of "annoying players by delaying them" and "making even more work for staff" currently outweigh the potential problem of "a non-spammer making bad changes."
@Thenomain
Yeah, you probably could invoke it from within the game. That might be okay. If Fred can get a wiki account by putting his email into a command on the game, and THAT triggers the invite automatically and he can go from there, with no one else having to touch anything, that'd be fine with me.
But I think we just essentially disagree, because I think wiki account creation should never have to wait for staff to do something. If Fred gets the urge to make his character page at 3am because he doesn't have RP, and he hasn't made his wiki account already, I don't think he should have to wait until staff is around to make him one. I hate it when that happens to me, and I haven't had any problems with players being able to just do it themselves once spambots are stymied.
@Thenomain said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:
The single best find was InviteSignup, which is perhaps the best extension for all Mush wikis that you didn't think of. (You thought of DPL3 already, which is the best.)
::goes to look at that:: If I'm reading it right, then I would still greatly prefer using QuestyCaptcha, because I don't want anyone else to have to be involved in getting people wiki accounts. I just want spammers to find it too much trouble to get one. "In which city is this game set?" (as a random example off the top of my head) is trivial for a real person who plays on the game, but tends to be a major stumbling block for a bot.
This is exactly what I was going to say. The game-wiki I've worked with most, I set up a question-based captcha for account creation also, and bar one brief incident where I guess some spammer actually worked out and programmed in the questions and answers (at which point I changed them and no one has bothered with that since), we've been spam-free since. It's been 3-5 years, I think.
@Thenomain
I wouldn't claim horrifying, but if someone has a bit of social anxiety, it can be a little stressful deciding how to handle the situation. Therefore, it's worse than the accidental downvote, which is easily fixed with no one the wiser.
@ThatGuyThere
Yeah... it's worse if you accidentally upvote something, since people get immediately notified they did, and by whom.
@saosmash said in New Player Onboarding:
getting brand spanking new player input on building easy cheat sheets for other brand spanking new newbies to use figuring out MUSH. It helped a lot because we've all been doing this shit so long we felt myopic about what exactly newbies really need to know to figure out the interface .
@Roz said in New Player Onboarding:
It's been legit fascinating to hear about what terminology brand new MU* players find confusing, what's the hardest parts for them to learn, etc. It's often not the stuff we think of.
Please tell us what! I can't imagine some of it wouldn't be helpful for other genres/games.
::eyes the names thoughtfully:: Only those places?
@Ganymede said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
@surreality said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
"What do you want to do?"
"I dunno, what do you want to do?"
"Anything's fine."
"Anybody got any ideas?"
<silence>This sounds like the beginning of a scene to me; likely from a Cheech and Chong movie.
@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
So far this is probably the biggest source of MUSH-related culture-shock for me, I think. I had my character react a certain way to something they found off-putting, for very IC reasons (though I found it great) — and received an OOC apology for the off-putting behaviour, with a clarification that it wasn't intended to be off-putting. Is this normal?
I know that I've run into this fairly often where the person (or once in a while me!) is just making sure the misunderstanding is IC, not OOC. Sometimes it isn't and once it's cleared up the player doesn't want their character to have reacted that way, but I'd say the more frequent response (whether the misunderstanding was purely IC or also OOC originally) is something along the lines of, "it's all good, X just took it the other way." Which is to say that the person may not be trying to avoid the IC conflict, just clarifying and aiming to avoid any potential OOC conflict.
@ThatOneDude
I just say, "Could I have change for a 20, please?" If I'm at the till, there's not much worry I might be asking the random customer behind me. Especially when the cashier is the person I've already been interacting with, by then.
They make you wear a nametag because at some point someone presumably decided this was friendlier, same as they somehow decided calling customers by (first!) name made them feel valued. First-name exchanges between people who are essentially strangers always feel awkward and over-familiar to me and I avoid them as much as I can.
@silentsophia
Even excuse me? Hm. 'Excuse me' is what I generally say if I need someone's help; is there something you prefer?
Realised one of the updates partially broke this -- it should work properly again now.
