[MUD-Dev] Guilds & Politics [was Affecting the World]

[Felix A. Croes]

Last Wednesday, Mike Sellers wrote:
> At 09:15 AM 12/3/97 PST8PDT, Koster, Raph wrote:
> >Just as a quick aside, many of the solutions adopted in UO (which are 
> >undeniably externally imposed solutions) were imposed purely because 
> >of scale. What we found was that when dealing with a mass market 
> >audience you have:
> >
> >- more jerks than you can handle
> >- more jerks than mass market people are willing to handle in their 
> >play space
> >- a playerbase that assumes the game will settle their grievances, 
> >rather than themselves
> >- the same tiny proportion as usual of people willing to enforce 
> >societal mores.
>
> Yeah, this profile is becoming increasingly common -- we certainly were
> awash in this with M59 (as I'm sure Rich can tell you ;) ).  In fact the
> first two points are encompassed by "Hanke's Law", which basically says
> that "in any virtual space, there will be some irreducible number of jerks
> [sometimes a stronger term is used here ;) ], and in general they will be
> more than any standing 'customer support' organization can handle."  This,
> in my experience, has become axiomatic with large Internet spaces.  
>
> However, I definitely disagree that this means that only externally-imposed
> solutions are viable.  In fact, as we saw with M59 and as you guys are
> seeing now with UO, I believe that relying solely or even primarily on
> external solutions is doomed to failure -- and the larger or more immersive
> the world, the more this problem is amplified.  
>
> Rather, I believe that we can (and must) make use of that small proportion
> of people (the usual 10% or 20% who do 80% or 90% of good things in any
> community setting) to create and enforce their own societal mores.  We can
> best do this by understanding who these people are, and then giving them
> limited, compartmentalized, generally localized power -- but real power
> nonetheless to affect the social landscape of the game.  In effect, this
> enables "the game" to settle their grievances, only now some of them have
> essentially become part of the game from others' point of view -- and as we
> know, often the best game play is created by the people in the game, not
> the monsters or situations we create externally.  The same goes for
> resolving problems.  

Unless the power to affect the game is available to everyone, this is
still what you called an externally-imposed solution -- there has to
be a sheriff to appoint the deputees.

In my experience, the mature, responsible players are even less
motivated than the paid staff to deal with the jerks.  Dealing with
the jerks is not actually a very enjoyable occupation.

Also, I think that you perhaps use the idea of letting the game solve
itself too easily.  Any workable solution has to include the troublemakers
in the game, too.  That will be hard to accomplish without making it a
game especially for those players (cf. ichat), or removing the
differences between troublemakers and other players (cf. quake).


>[...]
> >So I have an answer to that question of a while ago, "How DO you 
> >govern a mud with thousands of players?" Well, you try not to, but in 
> >the end the answer is "painfully, with great difficulty, and a lot of 
> >imperfect code crutches."
>
> I disagree, at least in terms of the imperfect code crutches.  It's going
> to be painful for some folks, no doubt, but that's part of the adjustment
> of all of our social mores while these new societies get started.  My goal
> is to make that pain as small and short as possible, and to eliminate as
> many of the code crutches as we can.  I don't think the solutions we've
> seen thus far scale to where the Net and online entertainment spaces are
> going to be in, say, three to five years.  IMO, we absolutely must stop
> looking at this as a problem with a technical solution, and begin
> addressing it as a predictable and tractable situation with social
> solutions.  

Agreed, with one qualification: I want the result to be a mud.

Felix Croes