Posts made by Sunny

@Tori

It is excite. It's not usually this bad, but I'm in IT and the acting bridge between finance's paper based systems and the digital world.

I am drowning at work. There is no solution, it's just the meetup of Covid, the end of our fiscal year, and my specific job. All that I ACTUALLY have to do is survive the next few weeks in one piece; balls will get dropped (they always are), there will be at least three fires, and I will forget 2 of the 50 things I have to do (and they inevitably will be 2 of the most important things). This is all a reasonable reaction / consequence of what is on my plate, and everyone involved understands this.

holy shit it still sucks though lol

@cyberdemon

Awesome. I'm really happy for you! I am so glad it's working well for you. It's absolutely not the general case though.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/5/1729/htm
https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/113/8/531/5860841
https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-hs-mental-health-issues-during-pandemic-20200828-aof7ox3mhngkvf6zql36kb43mq-story.html

If anyone is interested in further reading, I have more where those came from. I'm also happy to dig around and find a few that are more laymen friendly if needed, but I figured the horse's mouth would be more effective here.

@cyberdemon

You would think, but it's actually exactly the opposite. People might have the time, but they don't have the energy or resilience to engage in a meaningful way.

@faraday

My post was not about the specific configuration option mentioned, but the entire scene system/collaboration focus of the platform. I think you may have missed the words "all that" in the quoted part.

I think my issue with the "but you can turn it off in Ares..." line is...yes, yes, you can.

Ares does some things really, really, really, really, really well. First and foremost is the scene system, but it has a lot of really good features that are built into it and work really well with that scene system. Those things/features are what make Ares Ares -- they facilitate collaboration and a whole bunch of things down that road.

WHY would you use Ares and then turn all that off, instead of just using a tool that does the other thing natively?

@Lotherio

I guess we're just too stupid for Ares, huh?

Scene systems run on OOC engagement to find RP. I ask other players for roleplay.
A grid-based system runs on IC engagement to find RP. My character asks other characters to speak with her.

That is the difference for me.

It's not active/passive -- I promise, I am very active in sending an IC letter or phonecall out to seek a meeting with the characters that my character needs to speak to -- it's how the game itself evaluates where and how I should be looking to engage with other people. Am I using my character, her factions, the grid? Or am I using the channels and boards and OOC areas to talk to the people I'm playing with first to arrange the thing?

every choice in building a game -- every single choice -- has 3 possible consequences towards any specific thing:

encourages
neutral
discourages

+meetme code discourages walking the grid by being an easier way to get somewhere

Okay, so now we have a bunch of choices:

a- do nothing -- as a result, this piece of code discourages walking the grid
b- remove code -- but that's a convenient thing man, people really enjoy it!
c- compensate -- do something that means that NOT using +meetme provides some benefit somehow
d- ensure other policies strongly encourage walking the grid to the point where the small SMALL discouragement that +meetme provides is outweighed by what other policies or code are offering

If you never stop and consider what impact +meetme has, you automatically do a. That's how code creates culture.

ETA:

+meetme code encourages OOC cooperation by allowing people to go right to pre-arranged scenes
+meetme code is neutral on character creation by not having any relation to a PC's stats

The +meetme code here is an example, rather than 'this is the issue' -- this is an illustration of what I mean when I say that the end goal/priorities are REALLY what all of this needs to build to. Once you've identified your priorities, you know what questions to ask. If you literally do not care about encouraging grid based roleplay, then A is for reals the right answer! If you're more interested in the 'OOC cooperation' metric than you are the 'encourages walking the grid' metric, then that is the metric you need to be evaluating by. Yes, it gets super complicated and hard when you have competing metrics, but that's show biz.

@Ganymede

that is literally how I feel like I am being spoken to right now, so thank you for making me feel less crazy for it.

@bear_necessities

Oof. I don't have an issue with Ares, and I don't know how many ways I can possibly say that.

It's not a criticism, it's a difference in preferences and a square peg with a round hole.

eta: I honestly do not at all understand the INSISTENCE that a particular tool is good at all the jobs, rather than just the job that it was designed to do. It's NOT good at all the jobs, but it IS good at its job. It's not a criticism to say that you can't use your lawnmower to clean your effing pool!

@bear_necessities

I understand that you really genuinely don't see the difference, but I am going to reiterate that for those of us who do really register the difference, it is a big deal.

Code creates / influences culture. The way a platform is presented and setup dictates how people interact with it.

It is my opinion that rather than focusing on what people prefer / think / state, a game creator needs to consider what their end goal is, and then create the tools to support that. If they do not consider their end goals and base it instead on other inputs, your code/tools will enforce a culture/game that is not what you're aiming for.

For example, to encourage grid-based roleplay, you would not put in tools that allow people to skip the grid to get to RP (meetme, teleport). Instead, you offer tools to help people find their way (directions), and you bribe them with rewards for being out on that grid -- be it XP, bits of lore, whatever. You also don't put in tools to let them take themselves off of the grid. If you put those tools in, people will use them, they take themselves off of the grid, and now you aren't encouraging grid-based roleplay any more.

Using Ares as presented removes a lot of these thinking-steps and assumes you're going to go a particular way, encouraging a particular culture. It can be used to encourage other cultures, but you have to approach it critically and think about every piece of it that you implement, and what that piece is going to ultimately do to the culture and how people interact with your game.

ETA: The culture of a game only "just happens" if it's not done intentionally. These things CAN be planned for. It's not magic.

ETA2: For a counter example of what I'm talking about (sort of), consider PVP. If your policies all say 'this game does not encourage PVP', but you developed a code-system that gave XP for killing other PCs based on how much XP they had spent, it does not MATTER what your policies say, people will actively engage in the PVP your systems have encouraged.

ETA3: Ares comes packaged with a particular culture. It can be used in other ways, but out of the box it absolutely encourages the specific culture that it was designed to encourage. This is a BENEFIT, a huge one, until the people using it don't understand that X or Y choices that the platform itself made for them has A, B, and C consequences on their game.

I know "haven't joined" wasn't exactly the question, but for me I just don't have the oomph to try a new game, particularly when I have a rough time with Ares. I'm not capable of adding anything right now, because even current commitment are too much.

It's not you, it's me -- and you're starting up a game months into a global pandemic. Low engagement is a thing.

Also, people are exhausted. If you try to make exhausted people be something besides not lazy, they will go somewhere they can rest. Even the MMO I play on has stopped idle-purging for the time being. The mush I still have a PC on has really really really really really lax idle/engagement policies, and if it didn't, I would've bailed forever ago.

@chibichibi

I'm sorry for your loss.

@Ganymede

Just because I choose not to argue with you about this does not mean that I think that you're right. So that we are perfectly clear, here.

@badger

You are allowed to be human! Cut your brain some slack! This pandemic shit is traumatic.

It just needs to be internally consistent. We don't actually need the answers to the questions, but YOU, The Storyteller, does have to have the answers / know the big picture, because otherwise the little picture / little pieces the players get don't make sense.

It's like the parable of the blind people and the elephant and everybody touching it has a different idea of what they're touching, right? But if that's your game, it always has to be an elephant -- if you have a hippo today, a zebra on Tuesday, and an elephant on Friday, the picture your players walk away with is NEVER going to make any sense.

The answer can be anything from "aliens" to "global conspiracy" to "you are actually in a simulation" or whatever, right? It's just that there has to be an answer there, and every single decision you make has to be consistent with that answer, whether or not you share that with your players.

Once upon a time, the 'answer' that never hit my game's grid was 'Set is asleep under the city. Yes, that Set.' It informed EVERYTHING, but touched nothing we actively did directly.

In no way is this meant to be dismissive of very real fear/concerns -- they're huge, and this is something that's REALLY hard to deal with, but but but but but but -- folks, no matter what you do or what choices you make, you're doing the best you can with what you have AND THAT IS ENOUGH.

Even if our children run wild like total little monsters and accomplish absolutely zero -- ZERO!!!!!! -- this year, they will be okay academically. Children are HUGELY resilient, and this upcoming environment doesn't suit anybody at all. They're all going to struggle, they're all going to fall behind, and they will catch up. They have you, mama and dada (and teachers!!!). You're doing the best you can for your family (and students!). THAT is the important part. They'll be OK.

You are enough. You are enough. You are enough.