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

[Marian Griffith]

On Sat 06 Dec, Koster, Raph wrote:
> On Thursday, December 04, 1997 3:53 AM, 
> Ling[SMTP:K.L.Lo-94 at student.lboro.ac.uk] wrote:

> There are lots of papers on "psychological disinhibition" in a virtual 
> setting that offer great insight here.

Are those papers saying that there's a certain percentage of people
who will behave anti-social when they belief they can get away with
it?
The whole problem with jerks (and worse)  on muds  seems to have to
do with psychology more than with the game itself. The later merely
provides a convenient playground for those types.  At least that is
how I interpret the behaviour of a significant portion of the play-
ers who misbehave themselves.

> > - But mudders get 'arrested' too!

Actually I've always thought that  'muting' is a much harder punish-
ment for a player  than killing a character.  Especially the vicious
variant  where the game does not allow the other players to see  any
line of text with the name of the muted character on it.  This makes
the players virtual ghosts in the mud.  Of course you must take away
some offensive capabilities regarding other players as well  or some
will view it as the ultimate form of sneaking.

> > - Yes but it is a persona being arrested.  Anyway, there are plenty  of
> >   other muds to go piss on.
> Not even another mud; just make a new character in the existing one.

This is one thing that any mud that wants to keep its players in line
must address. Either through requiring characters to be registred. Or
by providing some in-character means of controlling the creation of a
new character. There was mention of games that allow child birth as a
means of immortality.  That could easily be expanded to provide a way
to control creation? i.e. unless you find other players who are will-
ing to birth a child for you, you can not re-enter the game. And as a
member of a house your actions reflect on all other members,  so they
will be careful who to accept into their midst.

> > - So get muds to form an informal mud alliance where someone  black-
> > listed on one mud will find life difficult on other muds.

A good idea, but probably impossible to enforce. Not to mention the
risk of abuse by imms on the allied muds.

> This raises some of the issues I was getting at with scale and 
> communication. Let us assume as premises a lack of a global namespace, 
> and that large scale makes for increased difficulty of communication. 
> In the case of the "other muds" scenario that you describe, a lack of 
> a global namespace is of course implied.

> As far as increased difficulty of communication... If you have a large 
> enough world, the effective distances become large enough that 
> traveling to a different city to act out your jerkhood is almost 
> equivalent to traveling to another mud. Yes, act out long enough, and 
> with the same identity, and eventually word spreads. But It's very 
> EASY for the jerk to go from place to place, and comparatively hard 
> for WORD of the jerk to go from place to place. (I don't know exactly 
> why this is so, since word is carried by travelers with the same 
> mobility as the jerk, but nonetheless it is so).

Even on a smaller mud this can be a problem. Not because somebody who
misbehaves is not recognised,  but because there is no common idea of
what is unacceptable behaviour.
E.g. on a mud I used to play there were areas that allowed players to
attack each other,  which was impossible on the rest of the mud. This
was justified by that it made those areas more challenging and becau-
se there seemed to be many players who enjoyed the additional risk.
After a while  players started cropping up  who thought it was fun to
summon another player to such areas and kill them. Especially newbies
and they justified their actions by saying that anybody could protect
herself by using the nosummon command. Many of the players who didn't
agree with the principle of the killing still agreed that the fact it
was possible  to protect yourself against being summoned  made it the
fault of the victims that they were killed.  Others thought it simply
bad taste kill newbies and still others started to hunt those killers
but this put them on bad footing with the imms of that mud because it
too strongly resembled harassment of the killers.  In the end nothing
could be resolved.  More rules and changes to the game were added  so
players found it more difficult to abuse the system, but this did not
solve the basic problem.
The big question pertaining the topic of this discussion now is:  Who
was 'right' or 'wrong' in this situation.  Some players were punished
for breaking the rules in their attempt to enforce a social code that
most players could not entirely agree upon.  Most everybody agreed it
was wrong to attack and kill newbies but they could not agree whether
the act of summon-killing other players itself was right or wrong.
This is a big problem if you rely on players to police themselves...

> So the jerk keeps moving, and word never catches up. And by the time 
> he cycles back around, well, everyone has forgotten the first 
> incident, if they noticed it at all...

> > - This might work, difficulty in implementing due to the way people 
> > can change their id so easily.

Which is why site bans exist.

> And of course, there's this. :( The death knell of normal societal 
> enforcement. Mike Sellers said:

> > I don't see how the difficulty of long range communications fits 
> > into this; most policing and governance can and should be handled
> > on a geographically local level

> The problem is that "locality" may as well not exist. You don't have a 
> local setting because travel to other areas is easy (for the PLAYER 
> though perhaps not for the character). You don't have effective 
> policing because you may not have the criminal to police.

Muds are essentially a single playground no matter how much hometowns
and areas there are.  Unless travelling between areas takes realistic
amounts of time  but that is something few players are willing to ac-
cept on a game.

> In the real world, we have fingerprints, descriptions, birth records, 
> dental records, family histories, school records, etc. It's been 
> well-explored in jillions of dimestore thrillers how thoroughly 
> someone can vanish if they do not have the above elements present. Yet 
> in the virtual environment everyone lacks those elements. They are 
> ALWAYS a persona.

There is nothing you can do  to prevent a determined jerk from ruining
the fun for others. You may at least try to prevent the less determin-
ed ones from acting.  Some people  truly do not understand  that their
actions may upset others. Some know but do not care, or worse, that is
what they are trying to achieve in the first place.  You can enlighten
the stupid and threaten the faint hearted with dire punishment but you
can not stop this problem. Some kind of psychological test to see if a
new player has developed beyond the mental age of 4 might help, but it
is kind of hard to enforce this ;)

> Now, do outraged citizens eventually catch up with The Jerk? Yes. But 
> whereas in the real world a criminal who escapes from the scene of 
> more than say 20 murders is literally one in a million, a virtual 
> criminal can easily rack up hundreds of times the kill count.

Depending on the mud, but yes. Killing is easy on a mud and the would
be killers also know  that part of the players  could not care either
way what happens to others.

> There's an oddball factor complicating this. The consequences for the 
> aggressor are light, "virtual", easily shrugged off. The consequences 
> for the VICTIM are often traumatic, deeply troubling, not easily 
> recovered from, and quite real. Not every virtual citizen is going to 
> see their murder in the virtual setting as a crime; but many will. My 
> experience is that far more than half of them will. Doing simple math, 
> that shows us that the societal impact of a jerk like this (on the 
> virtual society) is much worse than it is in the real world (on the 
> real society).

It is in the nature of the aggressor to not think about the implications
of his actions for his victims.  If they would not many of them actually
would be aggressive.

> Tossing in other things that factor into this: there's a general lack 
> of major support structures for victims, in the virtual setting 
> (family, friends, Salvation Army, what have you); and it's very easy 
> for a traumatized victim to just "check out" of your virtual 
> environment and thus not deal with the trauma.

Indeed. After one such incident I decided never again to allow people
I met on a game to learn my real name  and to never again visit a mud
that  allowed players to attack others.  As a matter of self defense.
And I vote with my feet against games that add this 'feature'.

> This means that you hemorrhage players. Yes, the ones that "couldn't 
> stand the heat" and therefore get out of the kitchen... but still. 
> Particularly if you are a commercial endeavor, but even if you aren't, 
> this is a real serious problem.

It should worry any implementer of a mud that the action of one deranged
mind can drive out other players who contribute far more to the game. In
this respect I strongly disagree with Bartle that 'killers' have a place
in a balanced mud.

> To put it crudely:
> In the real world, a serial killer kills 5 people before he is caught. 
> He never kills again. You end up with 5 dead people, and maybe another 
> few who give up on life because of it.
> 
> In the virtual world, a "virtual sociopath" (my term for those who 
> take actions against others in the virtual context because they do not 
> see virtual social mores as real) kills 50 characters before he is 
> caught and killed.

He is not killed, and you can only hope he is stopped unfortunately.
But your point is clear.

> You end up with 50 dead characters, out of which 5 
> quit the mud, eg are actually "dead" to the context. You also end up 
> with another 5 who quit because they saw their friend killed--also 
> "dead". And our killer returns to kill again the next day under a 
> different name, effectively anonymous.

Worse still is those who vent their frustration in this way. It makes
a huge difference  if some totally anonymous player  starts a killing
spree or if somebody known suddenly attacks everybody.  The later has
a much more psychologically devastating effect on his victims.

Marian,  who is afraid this thread is going to degenerate into a pro-
or con-pk discussion again.
--
Yes - at last - You. I Choose you. Out of all the world,
out of all the seeking, I have found you, young sister of
my heart! You are mine and I am yours - and never again
will there be loneliness ...

Rolan Choosing Talia,
Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey