Posts made by surreality

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

people who default to assuming everyone thinks the way they do, that everyone understands exactly what they mean, and that anyone who disagrees is a simpleton, people who generally cannot by any means be lead to understand that none of those assumptions are correct or even particularly coherent

This is what I'm talking about. Too rarely is this communicated clearly, or without sniping. If more games did this, we'd be better off. Unfortunately, there isn't a great way to do this.

Currently, we have a lot of 'this is a game'. Well, what kind of game is it? Is it meant to be a tabletop simulator? Because that's what some people think of, and if it's not, that should be stated up front. (And so on.)

I don't think this is some intrinsic fault of all game runners, an indication of hopelessly stunted communication skills, or any indicator of permissiveness or lack thereof re: bad actors. It's a need to externalize our internal assumptions clearly, which is to everyone's benefit.

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

sometimes I really think people just try to solve these problems that are mostly imagined or hugely overstated ones bc it's way more palatable than "maybe so many people quit mushing bc of mushers"

This is a real factor. Like any hobby, assholes in it can drive someone away from it, and none are asshole-free.

A bigger issue, to me, is that expectations are typically unrealistic by default. This is harder to avoid than it may seem, because people creating games, like everyone in the hobby, have a set of unspoken ideas of what the hobby even is. (And goddamn if people can't stop high-horse shit-talking anyone who prefers some other way. This not endearing.)

As a result, when games are created, 'how they work' on this level is not always explicitly outlined. We don't have a particularly good vocabulary to describe the various flavors of games under the MU umbrella, which exacerbates this considerably. It makes it difficult to define the game for creators, and difficult for players to determine whether or not a game is for them when browsing.

This is not a small hurdle.

Re: being judgy... uh, yeeeeeeah, that's gonna happen.

If someone is being an asshole, I'm not going to sit back and say to myself, "You know what, self, I'm not going to make the judgment that they're behaving like an asshole, because that would make me an asshole!" because then the only appropriate thing to judge is having a bloody opinion, ffs.

That is wayyyyyyyy too twisty a moebius strip for my tastes.

Having had buckets of people who state OOC they are men tell me how I'm 'playing a woman wrong'? Yes, I judge these people. I absolutely judge these people, and not kindly at all.

Why? Because at best, they're ignorant. More often, it's a control tactic, aimed on getting me to fall in line with what they want my character to do based on what all of these other (probably fictional or imagined) women do, based on the assumption that I'm afraid of losing my right to have tits if I don't comply, at which point I judge them all the more harshly because it doesn't work like that, and there's only so much oppressive stupidity I can truly forgive.

@Macha All the hugs. I get this, too.

Lay down, start to drift off, then it's like a fear drops straight down like an ice cube down my back, and since all of those are kept together in a mental thought cluster, all the rest go, 'wheeee, time to playyyyyyyyy!' and, welp, then I'm up.

Atlantis conveniently underlines my spelling borks, which helps warn me if I'm going to commit a stupid. It's fairly rare? But I eyetic when I'm using a 'sooooo' or a name that it blips over.

I need a 'punctuation, it's a thing!' and a 'Did you really intend for that sentence to ramble on for six lines?' check.

I started in '96 and there are a number of folks who have been around considerably longer. Nnngh, need to spike this coffee now, don't I.

Some games are definitely more positive than others.

I don't, for instance, discount the experiences people have described about running into people who vomit sexist and homophobic commentary all over the place when they play -- I am just lucky enough to not be in those particular spaces.

That's one thing you will discover more and more; the cultural 'norms' for any given game are going to vary, sometimes quite a bit. There's very little that's truly uniform. The best bet is to browse around some and find spaces where you do feel the most comfortable. (Even good places will have their 'moments', but that tends to just be life.)

@Wretched I think of these as mental horseflies in need of a flick of ponytail, yes.

Let's admit it, that one's extra funny because all the seemingly flaky scatterbrained stuff makes it seem like we'd just be THE WORST EVER in an actual crisis.

And yet no.

Like, somehow I managed to be the person freaking out the least while almost dying a few years back. I mean... how was I the only one with their shit together under those circumstances?

Welp, that certainly nails why I'm the only person in my family who isn't running around with their hair on fire in any given emergency...

@Auspice A lot of the tactics you're describing remind me of the shady tactics of payday loan agencies. Not remotely OK. Will keep my fingers crossed for you -- it sounds like this place is best to get the heck away from when you can no matter what.

@Auspice Holy motherfuck that is insane and not OK. Fingers crossed there's some legal recourse for this that will smack them upside the head something fierce, with a quickness, and free of charge.

@WildBaboons I would be furious.

I have posted this before, but share it again, with assurance I'd totally do this for the one I love if we were getting screwed about like that.

...yep, that's real mail we got, and I will always find every single thing about it comical and ridiculous.

It is still not as ridiculous as the nonsense you're describing.

@eye8urcake Empathy hug sent, if welcome, 'cause... nnnnngh, yeah.

@Griatch I really don't think anyone has.

@Griatch I don't think anyone is blindly doing... anything, so I'm not sure where that impression comes from. It's specialized knowledge, which is kinda the antithesis of blind anything.

@faraday Yep, that's it in a nutshell. It's like military terminology, really -- at a certain point, the eyes cross and there's a fizzle-pop and a burning smell.

@Griatch Was in reply to faraday's comment, but is generally to the thread. Making things accessible to creators is typically a matter of translation, but it's pretty important. It happens with any specialized terminology, really.

@faraday It is, yes. Thing is, Ghost is talking about using these features to make things accessible to players and the people creating for them. That's... not that.

This is the kind of thing that would put me off trying it, even if the end goal is what I have in mind. I am not a coder, but a lot of people have still come to me with even more basic knowledge in search of help, and they're the people who have an active interest in creating and running a game. We outnumber the coders (unfortunately). Making things accessible to us is a huge part of making things accessible to the players.

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

The input from whatever client (in Evennia known as the inputfunc) is already today completely generalized and could come from wherever client - like a telnet connection, GMCP/MSDP or a JSON blob from the webclient or an optional REST API. Once parsed by the wire protocol, the inputfunc looks the same to the system, regardless of source.

I think the thing a lot of people are trying to get across is this: everything said right here may as well be written in Aramaic to most of us -- and that's just 'what it does/can do', not even 'and here is how to do it' or 'why you'd want to do it' or 'this is what you'd want if your end goal is X'.