Posts made by Roz

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@Arkandel
I just don't see the difference between typing things out and filling out a webform, when it comes to making a MUSH character, other than the UI.

Except that UI is huge and is a big part of why someone chooses to put in the work to figure out any sort of website, program, app, etc. You can't just say "there's no difference other than the UI" as if the UI doesn't matter. It does matter. That's why there's a huge industry in developing UI.

I don't understand why you think there's literally no difference in "interacting with a website that behaves in a manner that's familiar" and "downloading and interacting with a brand new program using command line syntax that's entirely alien."

An incoming player dabbling around might toy with it, but if they aren't immediately hooked by the potential of great depth, the storytelling, the new venue in playing a game... the UI isn't going to snag them in, in my opinion. I may be wrong, I often am.

It's more a matter of the fact that someone might actually be a potential player who would absolutely be hooked in by all those things you mentioned -- but the UI is their first introduction and it's weird and unintuitive and offputting, so they move on. The point is that you're losing players who could be really productive and valuable to a game.

Once again I state: UI is not the barrier to entry, nor is the back-end protocol.

Once again I state: I have heard from lots of people that UI is the first barrier to entry.

MUSH is just not a venue for the short attention span, those that are lazy or those that have a very low motivation to learn something new. I put my money on that statement. You all disagree, and that's fine, I'm just stating repeatedly that I don't think that UI changes, protocol changes, or whatever, will fundamentally change MUSHing past some sort of invisible tipping point of ease-of-use.

All I've seen from your argument is that you personally find to be barriers of entry once people have invested a certain amount in the medium. I think you're looking at it from a perspective that's far removed from actually thinking about how a brand new player sees things upon their first introduction to the medium.

@rook You're right, of course, that MUSH is niche. I guess my point is that it could possibly be a little less niche. And that there are a lot of cool RPers out there who could take really well to it and bring a lot to the hobby. I'm not talking about trying to make MU* a huge giant thing with millions of players, but I do think there's plenty of fresh blood that could make the hobby better. So that's my concern.

@rook There are giant industries dedicated to designing UI. Like. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around this idea that it doesn't matter how approachable and user-friendly a program/application is. Like. Sorry, that's a ridiculous idea. Ease of use has a huge amount of influence over whether a person picks something up.

The standard MU* UI is weird and confusing. And no, it's not just weird and confusing for people who ~want more pictures~ or something, and that's a pretty patronizing way to frame it.

MSB is not any sort of indicator about barriers to MUSH, because we're all already here. We already made it past the initial hurdles. The truth is that there is tons of text-based RPing online far beyond MU*. It's on Tumblr, it's on Skype, it's on Facebook messenger, it's on Wattpad. There's a huge audience for the kind of RP we do, and our platform is actually better for what they're trying to do, but it's just hard to get into MUs* because, as I said, our UI is weird and confusing. You can't even get to issues of culture until you get past that hurdle.

I mean, I'm not saying that I've done a formal survey, but I am saying that I've staffed on a game where we specifically did a lot of outreach to non-MU* RPers and we listened to a lot of feedback regarding what people struggled with. And a lot of it was eye-opening. And we also found a lot of really awesome RPers that we were able to help past those initial hurdles to get them engaged, but those hurdles were real and intimidating and I'm not just making them up.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

UI is just UI. It doesn't impact Gameplay in MUSH as much as this thread seems to imply.

Pretty much everyone who is looking into RP online experiences web interfaces and widgets every single day. Very few of them experience a command line interface. This is actually a dramatic difference to learn. One of them can look very familiar. One of them can look entirely alien.

My experience dealing with new players coming from different RP platforms indicates that the UI is, in fact, a big deal in terms of a starting hurdle.

@golgoth said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

These are all solved problems with a basic web interface.

You're right, a lot of this is solved with a basic web interface... But now I'm starting to think: Why can't this be solved using a telnet client? It might need to be coded as a 'per client' thing (at least as far as I'm thinking) but I think I might be able to figure something out sometime. If I get time.

Because telnet is ancient and limiting and will always hold back the ability to advance too far. That's kind of the point of moving on from it.

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Yup, that's the overall attitude that makes the hobby generally unwelcoming to outsiders who might be interested in giving it a try.

If that's true, then labeling the very reasonable expectation that people learn to use the tools that are required by the venue in order to use it effectively (or at all), is another.

There's a difference between "the code and syntax and culture that has become ubiquitous across MUSHes is not intuitive and maybe needs to be improved OR at the very least maybe we could talk about how to write better educational tools for newcomers" and "people shouldn't have to learn the tools."

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I honestly don't think that the requirement to download and install an app in order to play on a MUSH is an issue at all. Millions of smartphone users understand the concept of "you need an app for that", as do most computer users.

The issue of people not wanting to type complicated commands, well that's a little different, but I look at it like this. You're communicating with others in a text-only medium. You're using words to convey visual information, emotion, sounds, moods. If you can handle all that, but are stymied by the syntax for the command to make a bbpost, then you're probably in the wrong hobby.

Yup, that's the overall attitude that makes the hobby generally unwelcoming to outsiders who might be interested in giving it a try.

Today I accepted that I will in fact need to resign from my job. I've been struggling with it since the start, and there are just too many reasons why it's just not a good fit.

On the upside, accepting that gave me that inner feeling of relief that told me it's the right call.

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

What do you do now between poses? Honest question. I feel like everyone I know also has a web browser open while they're RPing, so I don't see how what you're saying it's actually different.

Mostly house work or dishes, basically things I will be happy to leave to check the client window. I do not have a browser open, if I do it does quickly lead to RP death.
I would postulate that everyone having a browser open is likely why 10 minute waits even in a small scene have become the norm, which at least to me is not to me a good thing.

Edit to add: though I will freely admits my preferences do not necessarily match most peoples, sicne I would prefer an average pose delivered in 3-5 minutes to a great one that took 10.

Idk man, I always have my browser open and regularly take just 3-5 minutes to pose. I'd be way slower if I were doing housework.

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@griatch said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@thatguythere said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

For me RP needs to be real time. Again, it doesn't mean this is the only 'valid' way to do it, but that's what would work for me.

This would be the biggest sticking point for me to move away from telnet. If the RP is not real time I lose interest. I tend to wander a bit waiting for a pose if it is longer than 5 minutes. With MUSH this is when i get my house work done peeking back every couple of minutes until things pick up. Sadly with web based this would be were I found a video to watch and the scene would likely be forgotten about.

Out of curiosity, why do you feel telnet is needed for real-time interaction? Modern web browser clients with websockets or ajax/comet can (and do) also produce real-time game play. I can see the argument for long-time mud-clients having more features than their browser equivalents, but telnet has nothing to do with that? Maybe you are referring to "forum RP" when you say "web"?
.
Griatch

I don't think telnet is a requirement for real time, but in the current MUSH environment things have drifted to the point where things move slower than I would like, I can't see how moving the way to play the game to a program that presents literally thousands of other things to do while RPing will not adversely affect response times. It is not a tech issue but a human behavior issue.
And I will admit I would be part of the problem, if I ended up waiting more than five minutes I would wander down a youtube rabbit hole and cause the whole thing to be even slower.

What do you do now between poses? Honest question. I feel like everyone I know also has a web browser open while they're RPing, so I don't see how what you're saying it's actually different.

@lithium said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

If someone doesn't want to tinker with a modern programming language, they're certainly not going to tinker with the mess that is MUSH code.

I have to point out that this is not entirely true. I learned MUCode for free, at a time when trying to learn Python for free was less possible. The coding boot camps and such were all several hundred dollars, and I did not /have/ several hundred dollars to learn a coding language for what was, in essence, a hobby.

Okay but like -- we're not talking about how things were at whatever time you learned MUSH. Clearly it was a while ago, since you say that trying to learn Python for free was less possible. But now? There are like COUNTLESS times more resources and help for learning languages like Python or Ruby than there are to learn MUSH.

If someone has a brain that is code-capable they don't need much more than the built in help and mushcode.com, at least (and I cannot stress this enough) IN MY OPINION. I learned by looking at code I knew to function and seeing what they did, when I saw a piece of code I didn't recognize? Help in a bare bones server I had up taught me what it did.

And if someone has a code-capable brain, all they need to learn Ruby or Python is free online resources and a sandbox to start tinkering. The difference is that they'll have countless more resources to help learn and answer their questions. And also the languages are just -- easier to learn. Easier to read, easier to parse, easier to use.

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I honestly do not think that simply moving from MUSHcode to Python (or Ruby) will make it 'orders of magnitude' easier. Sure, it might help some folks, but IMO if you don't have the aptitude for coding, simply switching languages isn't going to make any difference. The problem is that doing anything non-trivial in /any/ programming language requires real skill. Non-coders probably won't have those skills, or be interested in developing them.

Lol. I once showed a real coder (a man who has worked as a systems architect in C, C++, and C# and node.js and all kinds of languages for 20+ years) some MUSH code and he stared at it in horror and couldn't figure it out.

He could probably learn Python in a day.

And that's an /experienced coder/ learning. Not an inexperienced one.

That was my first reaction too, but I stuck with it and eventually figured it out

My point was that simply switching languages wasn't going to help people who weren't interested in learning a programming language or who lack the aptitude for coding.

No, but it will make it a whole lot easier for folks who are inclined to try out learning a bit of code. Like, the idea that changing to an easier and more powerful programming language with tons more resources to learn in the world somehow will have no effect on anything is just -- weird.

Yes, people who don't want to try ever learning code will continue to not try to learn code. That will be the case no matter what.

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sunny said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I honestly do not think that simply moving from MUSHcode to Python (or Ruby) will make it 'orders of magnitude' easier.

https://codecombat.com

This exists for learning Python. I have used it to teach teenagers, and I do not code. This truly is orders of magnitude easier than how we had to learn to use mushcode. This isn't even considering the fact that I can literally go take a class from a professional instructor, do a coding boot camp, buy any number of hundreds of books, watch instruction videos on youtube...and I could continue going on listing ways to learn, NONE of which exist for mushcode.

Motivated learner, apparently with the aptitude for programming and with access to quality instruction tools. Results not typical

If someone doesn't want to tinker with a modern programming language, they're certainly not going to tinker with the mess that is MUSH code.

@thenomain I really think you'll find a lot more people who define MUD with the characteristics @Sparks describes than the definition you're trying to use.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

But if its cutting out the game runner's access to changing the system (a strong point in going from MUD to MUX to MUSH 25-30 years ago) to suit their themes, a part of the creativity of MU'ing is potentially being lost.

New platform development wouldn't have to mean this.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@apos said:

Just wanted to add more cents to the pot. I re-arranged based on easiest to most difficult to address.

1. Technical barriers for entry. Specifically downloading clients, and then figuring out extremely complicated commands in an archaic command line that's not at all intuitive. I think Ares/Evennia and a client that's much closer to what people would expect from other games would be a world of difference. Right click, drag and drop, and the typing is pretty much all for creative writing, not archaic commands.

For creative writing, all the bells and whistles can effectively be ignored; +phones and coded vehicles are clutter in the way of RP.

I don't think that's true, I don't think that's what it looks like to people new to the hobby, I don't think it's how we present it, and it also ignores the fact that there is still plenty of code that is required. We don't have to talk about the bells and whistles: just start with the weirdo process of downloading some weird client, figuring out how host names and port numbers work, connect to a game, understand that it's some weird textual/virtual grid, see people maybe talking to you in different ways, maybe have instructions in the welcome room desc that gets quickly scrolled by and you don't even know how to bring it back up again with the 'look' command.

This, to me, is one of the biggest problems. We think of lots of things as intuitive that are entirely alien to people who have never played a MU. And you kind of just proved my point by dismissing the very idea of a technical barrier to entry with "well people don't have to use these additional code toys to RP."

@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

A lot of these formats are actually not great for RP, and that's another thing I've discovered from players who try out MU* and manage to hook in: they find it a much better platform for RP than others they were using before. Like, guys, we actually have a lot of potential to bring in a lot of new players, we just need to lower the bar a little where we can.

Okay. I like this.

I'm not a coder. What can I do to help?

I mean, the stuff that I did while I was still staffing was things like -- write some really, really basic "Intro to MU*" type of guides. Take a hard look at terminology and try to recognize what stuff seems obvious to us but totally unintuitive to someone brand new. I wrote up descs for different "paths" through the chargen rooms to basically be like "If you are BRAND NEW, please follow THIS PATH by typing THESE THINGS" type of deal. And those rooms had a much more detailed outline of how to do things, how things work, etc.

Also we, like -- just went to places we knew people were RPing about our game theme. (For us, there was a lot of Tumblr RP around the IDW Transformers comics, so we advertised on Tumblr.)

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.

And what I find kind of amazing about this, is how ill-suited and often semi-broken for real-time, text-based RP a lot of these formats are (I've read Facebook RP, man. I have read it and shall never forget). But people muddle through because life finds a way, to quote Jurassic Park. I think part of the reason Arx is so - comparatively - explosively popular is because it's found a way to hook some of this audience into a MU-like format, which is MUCH better for this kind of RP in so many ways. Once you get players into this format, its positives for what we do become clear. It's an indication of what's possible, to me, not an anomaly (and it displays the problems of scale when you manage to tap this audience, but that's another conversation).

Yes yes yes. A lot of these formats are actually not great for RP, and that's another thing I've discovered from players who try out MU* and manage to hook in: they find it a much better platform for RP than others they were using before. Like, guys, we actually have a lot of potential to bring in a lot of new players, we just need to lower the bar a little where we can.

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.

That's not actually been my experience. I mean, it may turn off some newcomers, but there are also a lot of other options out there with much slower pacing for those people. My experience is that there are people who are ready to dive in to the kind of pacing we have on MU*s, but their turn off is the technology. They have to download a client and connect to this game and figure out commands and learn all the lingo that everyone already knows. When I was on staff at Transformers: Lost & Found, we got a lot of these kinds of RPers. Their experience is maybe somewhere like Tumblr, and there's a really high bar of education that a lot of us don't really think about.

So for me, a new web-based system isn't about adjusting pacing. It's about adjusting user-friendliness.

Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs. But even people that RP in a very similar environment find it difficult to transition, and it's almost always the format cited, with the 'I need to download something' and 'the syntax is really intimidating and confusing' for command line stuff. And if the MUSH has off game materials, like needing to buy books (well, steal PDFs), that's another big bar to entry.

I dunno if there's a huge rush to fix it though, since non-sandboxes would have a lot of trouble handling the kind of populations that would be possible by tapping into the big RP communities. I just can't see a MUSH being able to sustain like 15k people without fundamental design differences.

On TLF, we spent a lot of time trying to go down to the bare basics of everything to write up our guides and welcome rooms on the game. We talked a lot to players we got who were entirely new to MUs and we tried to find out just what things we were taking for granted. We switched up our terminology and tried to refer to MU norms in ways that made more sense for people who had never been on them. (Instead of talking about channels and clients, we tried to frame things as basically a chat/RP program.)

You have to make a serious effort to recruit and retain people who are newcomers to the platform. I mean, sure, you can get people who are more adventurous about picking up weird, complicated stuff. But I feel like a lot of people don't recognize just how high the bar really is. But I know we really did find it worth the effort on TLF, because we managed to snag some really fun players who were entirely new to MU*s.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.

That's not actually been my experience. I mean, it may turn off some newcomers, but there are also a lot of other options out there with much slower pacing for those people. My experience is that there are people who are ready to dive in to the kind of pacing we have on MU*s, but their turn off is the technology. They have to download a client and connect to this game and figure out commands and learn all the lingo that everyone already knows. When I was on staff at Transformers: Lost & Found, we got a lot of these kinds of RPers. Their experience is maybe somewhere like Tumblr, and there's a really high bar of education that a lot of us don't really think about.

So for me, a new web-based system isn't about adjusting pacing. It's about adjusting user-friendliness.