Posts made by surreality

This site is quite different from its predecessors. Having been around since before day one of the original WORA -- I tossed a guest essay over for the original site before the forums existed in any incarnation -- I may have a better grasp on this reality than a casual observer with admitted bias.

Each permutation of WORA/SWOFA/etc. had its own uniquely irritating flaws, for one. That's not to say this place probably won't evolve them in time, but it's managed to avoid the worst of them, since, generally speaking, people have grown up considerably. Without having been immersed in that over the years, it's likely invisible, and unfortunately, that means the differences -- which are notable to the people participating here and the many people who have joined this community after having avoided the previous incarnations of it -- are similarly difficult to discern.

You can choose to see 'just more of the same thing', but really, this just demonstrates a lack of experience with this particular bolt-hole of a forum-chain that no amount of dev cred is going to compensate for when you're making judgments about this forum community. In other words, you kinda proved you don't really know what you're talking about when it comes to this particular crowd. Maybe some folks will shred you for it since the post has the air of a 'bring it!' in the subtext, intentional or not, but I suspect most won't care enough to bother, and just write you off as being somewhat confused or ignorant of the reality on the ground.

Either way: admitting bias is actually helpful. It suggests an awareness of it, which surprisingly few people actually have.

If this perception is shared across the board, well, that would explain rather a lot.

Part of the problem y'all may have is the number of times 'the horrible reputation' seems to keep coming up, really, but I can't really say for sure. Some folks definitely react more viscerally to the impression that puts off, which can rather easily come across as, "We're coming to offer a hand to you poor savages," rather than actually attempting to interface with the community itself or attempt to learn what it's about. (Hint: it's not about what even you seem to think it's about.) This goes over roughly as well as a group of fervent evangelist ministers showing up at the doorstep of a pagan commune, if you need a more concrete analogy.

Essentially saying you realize you're slumming it to even deign to talk to someone and then wondering why you might come off condescending, though, well -- that's that self-awareness problem cropping up again, I'm afraid, no matter how noble, positive, or wholesome one's intentions may or may not be.

@Jeshin: while OT, condolences on your dog. We lost a long-lived, attitude-laden feline in recent weeks, so much empathy aimed your way on that.

Not going to fold in any other commentary with that, though there may be some later.

@Roz said:

@deadculture said:

What I would like to see is a MUSH based on the same world as Guy Gavriel Kay's Lions of Al-Rasan, A Song for Arbonne, etc. It's close enough to some themes in our world's medieval era to make it easy to play, extremely low-magic and very engaging, if you ever read either of those books.

HELLO I AM HERE TO UPVOTE YOU TWENTY TIMES

Holy hell yes, this!

@mietze said:

Ultimately, if there is a list of expectations that staff have for a certain role, they're not "punishing" people who can't make those expectations. I advocate for specific lists of expectations, because it allows for more flexibility OOC, and for more diverse people being given a chance, if they can approach staff with a team proposal or other thing that still meets all of the requirements even though it's not Ye Old Typical person who can afford to be online 24/7.

This nails it.

In the specific case of less populated time zones, someone who is able to do things at that time can actually be a great help to players in the same situation, provided they actually get stuff done.

@Arkandel said:

@surreality And yet - again at the time - I was in a cabal with someone who had Juerg issues, who had been told in no uncertain terms sleeping with him would have made them disappear and who went to staff - with logs - repeatedly asking for them to do something. The staff member responsible for it never did, and in fact they accused her of trying to avoid the consequenes of her character actions because they liked him more than her, and staff members over them in the chain of command backed the decision because they didn't want to get involved.

Does that sound at all like something we've been discussing in the thread? That's not an example, it's a thing that actually happened. I was there to see her leave the game over it.

It's not easy to be a good administrator. That's why there are so few of those well regarded by their peers - on top of actually being adept at game-things, being proactive and creative over a period of time they also need to stay impartial and get their hands dirty. That's not the kind of practice which wins friends, and in some cases it can alienate the ones they already have.

But even then telling a jerk from an abuser, someone you don't like from someone who's legitimately harming your game... that's the hardest thing. Putting a stop to what someone you might actually like is doing, knowing it'll piss them and their friends off - some of whom might be staffing as well - is plain rare.

It's easy to chastise or punish someone without ties to anything else. Going after well connected players requires actual conviction.

I agree with all of this.

I know I've lost friends over disagreements with them about policy issues, or because I've called them out on crap that shouldn't be happening (as players or staffers). It doesn't mean I like them any less -- but dang if plenty of them haven't liked me less for it.

To some extent, you need 'robot mode'.

• If you're pissed off, don't handle the thing then if you're the one who absolutely must handle it.
• If there's an impartial party willing and able to handle the matter, assign it to them to handle.
• If you're not impartial and you fail to realize this, problems are going to arise fast. (I've been on the receiving end of a similar situation to the one you describe and have seen this in action.)
• You can't think about how this is going to impact your friendship (if one exists).

A lot of people have trouble with this because they make it about themselves. "Will my friendship be harmed if I... " or "Will this bother my friend?" and so on. This isn't actually about the other person and what the other person is doing; it's a case of self-interest, that interest being the preservation of whatever relationship one has with the offending party (or friends of the offending party).

Being cognizant of that makes an enormous difference. Most people aren't. When it's about 'what am I going to lose?' it's harder. You can't let that be a factor, because it's not about you.

This is common sense to me, I dunno.

Clarification: '...this isn't actually about the other person... ' means 'these concerns are not the relevant concerns you should be having, you should be caring about the wellfare of the game, not what is important to you personally'.

@silentsophia said:

He also had a habit of running off players he didn't like or saw as competition for his BDSM eHarem. That's kind of shitty behavior at minimum.

Well, yeah. But a lot of people do that. It's shitty, but different than what amounts to practically stalking a real person from game to game and thinking 'it's a new game!' means there's a clean slate to do the same things to the same person (player-level aggression) that you know were inappropriate before.

A game is a game; it isn't designed to be a platform for somebody's real life redemption story. That so many people treat places as precisely this, no matter how good their intentions, causes a considerable measure of needless grief.

@Templari said:

@surreality All depends on where you pick in the state and what flavor you wish to aim for, but yeah. Farm equipment on ANY Street pretty much can sum up a large chunk of the state. But you were WAY upstate.

So did anything go wrong? Like a friendly neighborhood curious bear visit? Groundhog rush perhaps? Bad pick up lines from the local woodchucks?

So if you decide to make this a thing, count me in. We can develop a haunted maple syrup farm.

It was just the classic horror movie cliche begging to happen -- haunted farm house (everything), Elm Street (Nightmare on... ) Crystal Lake (Friday the 13th... ) -- and to me, that's

We endlessly teased the folks we were staying with that they'd moved from a camp on Crystal Lake to a house on Elm Street, naturally. Because they actually had. (Awesome people, them.)

Will definitely keep you updated, but won't derail this thread with it. If it gets anywhere, I'll send a poke.

@Templari said:

@surreality said:

@Cobaltasaurus I'm going with Ver-may-as-well-be-Maine-mont, myself. I think this is officially covered between the two of us.

Vermont you say? Tell me more and pass me some Cabot?

I spent some time RL in the Northeast Kingdom for work study things. It is a seriously wonderful setting with the most minimal of modifications.

I had a whole flock of people I got to send the following message: "It is 3am. I have just walked through the basement of an old farm house, through rooms filled with rusting farm implements and dusty antiques. On Elm Street. I am a mile from Crystal Lake. I'm heading out to snag a clove, and indulge my vice. What could possibly go wrong?!" ...and I was being 100% literal.

It was awesome and glorious and it's been begging for it ever since.

(I find it so cute VK is still downvoting me.)

Frankly, if people demonstrate the behavior I've specifically listed more than once -- and I don't particularly care where -- in recent years, I would happily tack their IP onto the 'don't even bother' list before the doors open.

That, from my perspective, is a lot more fair than letting even a jackass invest their time -- everybody's matters, even that of shitty human beings -- and then yanking the rug out from under them. There's simply a point at which the pattern is too obvious to NOT shift the scales from "it's more fair to give this person a chance at redeeming themselves" to "it's unfair for the other people here to have to tolerate this person's bad behavior in the name of giving them a twenty-second chance to behave like they were supposed to in the first place".

There's a salient difference between 'annoying' and 'has proven themselves to be consistently unethical in their dealings with others'.

Annoying varies based on tolerance to whatever it is the person does that makes them annoying. "The rules don't apply to me" is another animal entirely.

Jeurg, for instance, didn't make it onto my 'unwelcome' list for his creeperism or mind control panther fetish. He made it onto that list because, on another game, a player clearly informed him they wished to have no contact with him IC or OOC again, anywhere. On another game, he determined who this player was playing, and actively sought them out to interact with them, and later gave them extensive grief for not being nice enough to him, and kept flinging drama in that player's direction. This isn't hearsay or guesswork; he said all of this himself without any prompting or inquiry -- proudly, even. He clearly figured it was perfectly all right to continue doing the things that had made him persona non grata the first time simply due to a change of venue; I somehow doubt the other player in this situation feels the same.

This is precisely the sort of bullshit the hobby does not need, but that's my opinion. No one person dictates that to the hobby at large. You can bet on it, however, that a game I run will operate on that principle, with full disclosure to that end. Enough games have died the death of a thousand papercuts thanks to Geek Social Fallacy #1 already.

I was, initially, trying to make the point that assuming staff are monsters by default is a damaging trend in this hobby.

But frankly, if simply making that statement with an example of someone doing it gets me accused of shit, I am going to go for the fucking throat and there is not going to be an apology for it afterward.

It does, actually, demonstrate why it's a problem.

On one hand, you've got the reality that people who work hard to ensure they are being fair and reasonable and all the rest, usually making sacrifices to do so and getting no small amount of abuse for doing so, are not exactly doing it because it's super fun. Generally speaking, they're doing it because other people having fun, for whatever reason, is important to them.

The reason can be a shitty reason, but isn't always the case. Some people might want everyone to like them, or heap praise on them, or whatever else along those lines, but most people I've come across understand the basic principle that the more peaceable the kingdom, the better the odds are that fewer problems will arise and the more fun they will get to have, too, doing the same things everyone else is supposed to be doing: just playing the damn game.

I don't take this quite as far as @Ganymede does in its interpretation, that whichever party is the most grating presence, right or wrong, should be shown the door, but I do think people go too far on handing out the twenty-second chances for some of the worst offenders. (Spider being a prime example.)

There is a point at which being "fair" in the handing out of 'just one more chance' to people consistently doing damage to the well-being of the game community becomes unfair to everyone who is subject to their outbursts, abusive garbage, creeperism, or whatever their particular bit of nasty is.

I don't even pretend I have the solution to this one. While I don't agree personally with Gany's, she has one that works for her, and if it works, it's more than what a lot of places have.

A big difference in how a MUX works vs. a tabletop game is simply this: people generally have to earn their welcome to a spot at the table. We can obviously have invite-only games, and there are some out there, but that still isn't quite the same thing. A MUX needs more people than the average tabletop game does to properly thrive. The closest thing I have to a 'solution' is based on this, to some extent -- that being that some folks, and they're very few in number even after close to 20 years, have earned not a welcome, but an unwelcome. Spider, Jeurg; that class of 'unwelcome presence'. VK -- used as an example since it's all present here for clarity and thus makes a good example -- may have obviously pissed me off and I may be personally wary as hell of her, but she does not even come close to the level of consistent horrible that, to me, would earn an 'unwelcome'. There's nothing she's done that suggests doesn't care about the rules or is eager to break them if she can find means to do so to benefit herself, that she thinks rules don't apply to her, or that she thinks lying to other players to get around no-contact requests or exploiting them for her benefit is OK. I'm talking about people who make consistent practice of these kinds of 'the rules are only there when it's convenient to me or I can use them or staff as a weapon to browbeat others' behaviors, not people who I find personally irritating.

@Cobaltasaurus I'm going with Ver-may-as-well-be-Maine-mont, myself. I think this is officially covered between the two of us.

@Derp said:

There is no substance to it, it's all about how loudly she can protest and exhaust the other people.

This is exactly the sort of behavior I was describing, so that she went and demonstrated it to perfection was almost like a bonus.

The 'protest, whine, play victim, throw out accusations without any foundation' bullshit behavior from certain parties was one of the two reasons I quit staffing recently. (The other, being totally burnt out after having dealt with the above for months and running out of patience with it, which is something you just have to have to deal with people who are utterly blind to their own behavior as well as basic reality.)

This is pretty much one of the fastest ways to lose ethical staff: heap abuse on them until they decide that trying to ensure everyone's getting as much happy as the game allows is not worth putting up with your crazy flailing.

When you really drill down on it, having ethics requires a lot of self-examination. Having ethics requires a person to ask themselves, often, "Am I doing the right thing?" to avoid the as many of the 'grey area' errors mentioned wayyyyyyyyyback when as possible, if nothing else. If you're not capable of this, or consider this to be a sign of a guilty conscience, well, good luck having actual ethics worth half a damn. You can follow the rigid letter of the law and still be an utterly unethical fuckhead, since no set of rules covers every permutation or circumstance. A sound ethical foundation is required to structure the rules in the first place, but solid practice of those principles is what fills in the gaps to cover all of the endless circumstances nobody ever warned you were possible, or no one ever thought people needed a rule to cover in the first place. (See endless discussions of social contracts as a demonstration of this.)

@VulgarKitten said:

Wait. Tell me more! Could you expand on this even further?? With more assumption?

You realize you're not even making sense, right? I'd be embarrassed for you, but ignorance is bliss, so you go on chasin' that happy.

Goddammit, do I have to start talking about my breasts again all the time? Please let's not go there.

Princess Cattypanties, get it through your little brain:

It does not matter how much a staffer cares (or would care) about the thing you want handled in some fashion if they do not know of your issue, or do not have the authority to act on it.

'Cares' means jack shit in most staff corps.

Things that do count:

1. Who has the authority?
2. Who knows what's going on?

The simple fact that staff members have been considered in ethical breach for even looking into something like this for a player on request to acquire the 'knows about it' part because they're snooping jobs not assigned to them?

'Obviously doesn't care' as cause for shit not going right is hopelessly myopic.

@VulgarKitten said:

@surreality said:

Acting like staffers with ethics are rare as unicorns on the hoof is pretty amazingly ridiculous, which is absolutely how @VulgarKitten's post comes across, especially in how... myopic it is in regard to how most MU* staff corps actually function.

So wait. I'm sorry. I think I just hallucinated. My post that says "which, of course, doesn't always happen." comes across like staffers with ethics are rare as unicorns on the hoof? Sounds to me like you're viewing this through a certain lens. A lens named 'I'm probably guilty of this so I'm going to react strongly right now'.

(I'm not even the one who downvoted you for that one, so I'm going to giggle a lot right now.) This tactic is exactly the kind of behavior I was describing: casting aspersions based on foolish assumptions. Thank you for being an example?

I told you precisely how you were being myopic: you assume knowledge and authority to act, both of which are not something you can assume about any staff structure. Both are required to get something done in the case you describe. 'Gives a crap' quickly becomes irrelevant if either of the other factors aren't running in your favor.

And really, see below, 'cause HR covered the rest of this quite neatly.

@HelloRaptor said:

How does this relate to anything to do with logs? I mean, everything is dependent on a non-corrupt staff. If your starting point is corrupt staff, you're already in a shit place.

We were talking (at some point) about how ineffective logs can be. This was an example. Uh. Duh.

Though you're right on one point: I do actually take this shit seriously, though not because of any guilty conscience. (Like I said, nice try there.) I take it seriously 'cause holy shit have I seen whiny princesses screech and flail about how they're being persecuted when the persecution is 100% in their head and they are actually the aggressor and abuser to you and others, staff and player, for months on end, because they have lost any and all touch with reality and you're the staffer who doesn't have authority to deal with them on your own. Really, considering the boatloads of drama you've managed to create over a character name across two MU*s and at least one forum for even thinking this is some kind of major issue at all, honey... don't think where you fall on this particular scale of 'batshit crazy person with a persecution complex' is a mystery to more or less anyone with so much as half a brain.

Duh, indeed.

It's also an issue that there really are some folks who feel they can do whatever they damn well please, and you are obviously corrupt if you have an issue with it -- or are just that person who so much as says 'no' to even the most over the top request. There are others who will deliberately ramp up their crazy higher and higher and get increasingly nasty to bully their way through to what they want, all the while crying victim to anyone who will listen, and then explode into finger-pointing "I TOLD YOU THEY WERE OUT TO GET ME!"s the moment staff does take action because they've gone too far one too many times. (That's no reason for staff to not take action, mind; it's just a really quick way to get to that 'corrupt' label in the eyes of anyone who buys the bullshit victim routine that some people are quite good at.)

The 'staff are corrupt' battle cry is a bit overplayed. The people who are actually corrupt are fairly blatantly so. There's a grey area of middle ground in there in which people screw up by not properly thinking things through, and a lot of people fall into this category even if they're otherwise entirely ethical. Acting like staffers with ethics are rare as unicorns on the hoof is pretty amazingly ridiculous, which is absolutely how @VulgarKitten's post comes across, especially in how... myopic it is in regard to how most MU* staff corps actually function.

@VulgarKitten said:

Also, even when there are logs pretty clearly showing one thing was said, and another thing was done? It's all dependent on a non-corrupt staff to care, which, of course, doesn't always happen.

Or know. Sometimes even looking into an issue you are not assigned is considered a serious breach of ethics -- so damned if you do, damned if you don't. You're also assuming they will have the authority to do something about it, which is not something that should be assumed pretty much ever.

@Arkandel said:

In my experience most staff aren't corrupt, they just don't want any part of this. Whatever this is. They'll just ask people to jump through any number of hoops sufficient to make them give up and go away before they're forced to take sides.

And if you do make a decision, that's precisely how it is perceived: as taking sides. Not making a call, not even 'reacting to the glaringly obvious breach of policy' when such is actually the case -- but taking sides. Which is not really a good thing, and generally it's assumed you're corrupt the moment you make a call, since one or the other of those sides is the one decided against.

@Arkandel said:

I wonder why no one has combined the two.

For instance I can't roleplay from work or when I'm on the move, but I could post once an hour or something for a 'scene'. And it'd give a way for people to play together on a MU, even sporadically, who due to timezones or other obstacles don't get to do so as much.

You could do this rather easily just writing poses into a log file back and forth on a wiki.

Essentially, set up something like a 'log' page (like any other RP log) and just build it back and forth as you go, since multiple editors are possible.

@Groth said:

What I've really grown to despise is rumours because whenever I investigated them they'd turn out to be laughably inaccurate, resulting from a combination of Chinese whispers and someone with an axe to grind. They're toxic to game atmosphere and genuinely harmful since a non-zero amount of players will believe the rumour to be true and avoid a player for something they didn't do.

This. Lots of this. Having gone through a ton of this recently... yeah.

Generally: people screw up. It happens. What they do after that is, IMHO, a better definition of who they are than the fact that they screwed up, as, like @WTFE said, everybody screws something up sometimes. Sometimes it's fixable, sometimes it isn't, but it's a much clearer test of someone's nature when you see if they make a good faith effort to fix things, or just try to keep pretending they never screwed up in the first place. I'm willing to trust the former type's intentions; the latter? They can just fuck right off.

Working on a glossary to contribute to this effort; whenever it's done anyone who wants it can grab the files from the wiki. (Reno will have a copy if they want one.)

Are there any terms you can recall that confused you when you started? Any terms you know of that are different in the other mediums that might be good to list so we can point people toward the terminology used in MUX?