Best posts made by Thenomain

@Ganymede said in Mobbing in Text Games:

@Trix said in Mobbing in Text Games:

There's this thing called 'academic mobbing' that can be freaky accurate when applied to how people behave in mud communities.

We sometimes call this "dogpiling."

And sometimes it's easy to drag yourself into dogpiling someone.

The people who I directly told this to already know, but for everyone else: If someone says they're feeling dogpiled, stop and think about it. If your first reaction is to tell this person how wrong they are for feeling jumped on, then it's not uncommon that you're making the situation worse.

The best thing to do if you're feeling dogpiled on a game—if you can recognize it—is to find the original point and take it private.

The best thing to do if you're the one singled out for discussion is to be honest up front, either engage or say you're not the person for it.

Staff should have jumped in by this point, but @Ganymede's numbered suggestions implies this. But a dogpile should be stopped as soon as possible. It's often the worst behavior from all of us.

How to Robot: Stop taking it personally, but don't turn off your emotions. People are people, and if they insult you, you do not have to take it. You do have to pick your battles, tho, and that's where you can improve. The more you know where those lines are, the less you have to concentrate on paying attention to them, the better you'll become.

It's harder for some people (me, for example) than others.

Don't go out of your way for these people. Go out of your way for the people who make you feel good. Otherwise, hit your buttons and move on knowing that the next person won't be like that.

Edit for something interesting that came to mind: When I call Apple tech support, they do not parrot my issue. 'I'm sorry that you're having problems with <exactly what I said>, Mr. <my last name>.' No, you little shit, you are not sorry and I want you to stop acting like a robot. Apple's response is much more human, like, 'Oh, let's try to fix your <underlying issue> then.' Incidentally, this is the attitude of most upper tiers of tech support, if you end up with them. I don't think this is coincidence.

I guess what I'm saying is that you 'robot' by not acting like a drone.

@faraday

That is a much better analogy, yes, but I still want to make my point clearer than the analogy: Just because something is technically possible does not mean we should take it as justifiable.

Your example includes this (to be fair, so does mine), but again I think we as netizens or even as full world citizens should be able to discuss rights intelligently.

I like the side quest where your son gets kidnapped and you look for him. It would have been really cool if that had the depth of choice that a main quest would have, especially Like the one in New Vegas.

Apocalypse World, a horrifically dark game system and world, has a few rules about how to play the game, something that nearly all other RPGs out there explain as a simple "just pretend that's all you need!"

Rule Number One: Play to see what happens.

GM's Rule Number One: Barf forth theme.

The author has distilled one of the methods of playing an RPG down into straight forward steps, clear enough that if you don't play the game this way you can say, "No, you're wrong."

This is really what we're talking about in this thread. Not so much how to portray darkness, but how to get players to stick to theme and treat their character as a living creation that is not themselves.

Once we can work that out, we can tell people that they volunteered to play a game where bad things happen and ask them where the disconnect is.

I am over 20 feet from you and in a busy cafe and I can hear you chew.

Stop.

Yes, I'm staring at you for a reason.

edit: Oh god, you're a grunter, too. Stand, grunt. Shift weight, grunt. Maybe I'm too Victorian, but all of that grosses me out.

I felt bad enough for chewing out HR for being an asshole to me here that I went to him to apologize. Suffice it to say, he had no idea what I was talking about. Some of us have thin skins at varying degrees.

His Being An Asshole persona is a wildly rude exaggeration of his normal self. He can be blunt on a game, but yeah, if you run into him in RP you're in for a good time.

@Ganymede said:

3. In context, white men are the class of persons with the greatest power to change the situation so as to minimize the incidences.

You know, as a white man, I've been told off for involving myself in some other demographics' problems because I was a white man, even if what I was trying to do was understand and/or help, more times than I'm comfortable with.

I'm not shaming anyone, here, but if someone offers to find understanding then telling them to GTFO is not the solution.

This may not be directly related to the conversation at hand, but it is a peeve of mine. It's a little harder that I feel like I'm being discriminated against because of my social class and skin color, which makes the thing ironic, which pisses me off even more because I think, this must be the normal position of the people who I'm trying to understand, so I understand why they don't trust me, but they should trust me because I'm treating them like a fucking human being and arrrrrgh!

Ahhem.

Sorry, carry on.

--

edit: It's okay to tell someone to GTFO because it hits too close to home and you're not emotionally prepared to talk to someone about what's wrong with "them" (quotes to indicate the label, not the person), but these people should still recognize that an individual was reaching out to potentially help. Trust doesn't always come easy, but until I become a senator for the state of Ohio, I'm going to be pretty limited as to what I can do. Trust and Understanding go hand in hand.

The secrets of the Covenants are: We are going to power creep the shit out of this game line.

"Just a moment. We're improving your Skype experience."

No, no you're not. Stop lying to yourself and others and you'll be on the road to being a better program.

That is rather my point, but made in such a way that hopefully explains to the OP that the question is limited, that there is a third choice and perhaps more. We have fenced ourselves in with the concepts of what we're allowed to do, and something that should be asked is: Why?

There are answers, and some of them make sense, but between the last two Big Things in WoD—Haunted Memories and The Reach—we have largely lost touch of this. "Plots" have their place, but it's not every place.

Between the two, however, staff direction is more important, else how do we know what is okay to do on our own time?

@Ganymede said in Good or New Movies Review:

@thebird said in Good or New Movies Review:

Also, Captain Amercia: Civil War was a bit of a train wreck, too....somehow I think I'm in the minority there.

I didn't find it a train wreck, but I did find it anti-climactic, even though I did not quite foresee the ending.

I found it a nice amount of Drama in my Superhero Movie. It wasn't tight, but it did what it wanted to rather well.

Also, Peter Fucking Parker. I think I'm going to have to replace the Toby McGuire Spider-Man as the most true to concept I've seen.

@Alzie said:

The problem isn't with staff knowing what players are doing, the problem is that players attribute past experiences universally.

The problem is that sometimes people define "players" as a universal group, as much as visa-versa.

The problem is that coded systems (code or systems) do not survive the first encounter with the end-user.

The problem is that perception is not invalid.

The problem is that people are not emotionless robots.

The problem is that people are social.

The problem is that Mu*ing is social.

The problem is everything.

@Chime collects posts and responds to them all at once.

Harassment is a problem.

Harassment to someone's boss, family, or not game related friends can just fuck off my game. Probably with warning first but maybe not, depending how malicious the harassment. Reaching out to make a person's wider life difficult is a dick move and using a game as the vehicle for it is betraying my trust as a provider of a game.

As I think I've largely staffed on games with an explicit No Harassment rule, I think I'm on pretty solid ground. As this philosophy has come from watching people threaten suicide over game relations and try to ruin marriages through the context of the game I feel on pretty solid footing.

Mind you, if a marriage can be ruined by something someone is or isn't doing on a game, that's not my responsibility as a game owner, but man would I want that situation off my front lawn as quickly as possible.

@Tyche said in RL things I love:

@Insomnia said in RL things I love:

I just love that this is happening. NSFW, maybe? 3D printed clitoris to teach girls about sexuality in France.

Really? I mean it's not like giving a smart phone to a cave woman. Woman have had this equipment for thousands of years and billions of them have figured out how to use it without the 3d models or classes.

Like any tool, you can always become better at its use.

Haunted Memories Changeling Sphere. It took players to want to finish the storyline, but finish it did. No regrets.

@Ganymede said in RL things I love:

@Auspice said in RL things I love:

Just the once.

....so far

I'll get the lye.

Ganymede: Lawyer and Professional Lyer.

I think people will have a relatively good idea how they will be accepted within a week of logging on, but it has to do not with the players but with the characters. The latter is why we still have the infinitely annoying question/response of "What should I play"/"Whatever you want". This is obviously not true, but we usuallydon't have a better answer.

The games with good social binding seem to have two things going on from them. First is that there is little to no antipathy among staff. If there is stress in staff, players will feel it, usually because staff has friends in the player base and it will get out, but also because a stressed staff works differently than a relaxed staff. For one, a relaxed staff is more into the game, and nothing helps a game more than staff being interested in it, and nothing kills a game like staff losing interest even if they are still going through the motions.

The second is that all new players are introduced to the game. I want to mention the AetherMUX quiz and casual newbie channel again. They also had reccs read by other players, so everyone had a chance to see everyone saying good things about everyone else. The game did not just expect a positive atmosphere, it created one.

It was also easy to make a character. It was easy going from idea to grid. There was no wrong character stat (except maybe the Sylvan race, and we spent a lot of time trying to come up with ways to fix that). The grid was small enough that everyone could gravitate toward a scene, and the culture of the game's setting were not exclusionary.

I was a dark and brooding bastard when I coded here, but today my heart years to return to this, for people to make games with a focus on drawing people into telling stories. Not just open-world RPG systems with rooms.

I collect RPGs.

I don't play these RPGs, but I read them. I collect what ideas they have, the world-building and systems, and I imagine what it would be like to play these games if there was enough time in the world to do so.

Right now my favorite systems to collect have been Apocalypse World and Fate Core, but more of the former than the latter. I'd love to collect Invisible Sun, but as it Kickstarted at nearly $200, hahahahaNO.