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

[Mike Sellers]

At 01:04 PM 12/7/97 PST8PDT, Marian Griffith wrote:
>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?

I haven't seen the papers Raph is referring to (attributions, Raph? I'd
love to add these to my collection), but it definitely seems to be the case
that a certain percentage of the population will act anti-socially when
such behavior is not only allowed, but enabled.  I suspect this has more to
do with personality and real-world issues than it does with age, other
kinds of games played, length of time playing the game, etc.  IOW, it is
*NOT* the case that the classic obstreperous jerk is a "14-year-old pimply
boy."  The most powerful, aggressive ones I've seen have been lawyers,
accountants, or moms -- and clearly, while most PKers are men (not just my
opinion, I know of unpublished research on this), the most
aggressive/heartless are women.  That was something of a surprise to me.

>The whole problem with jerks (and worse)  on muds  seems to have to
>do with psychology more than with the game itself. 

Yes! Absolutely.  This is the reason I feel like we've opened Pandora's
Box: we've taken what was seen as a not-too-important set of technologies
(computer games) and unleashed a whole host of very real and powerful
psycho-social issues for which the players, the admins/designers, and the
customer support types (if any) are utterly unprepared.  You don't find too
many counseling psychologists writing MUDs or lurking in customer supports'
cubicles (and in the worst cases, you do find people chock full of denial
that there is even a _need_ for something more than technical expertise
here).  

What this tells me is that we're only going to be able to account for this
sort of phenomenon and keep it from ruining our games by understanding and
anticipating the human psycho-social landscape behind it.  


>> > - 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.

We talked here recently about IC vs OOC communication.  I wonder how it
would be if we removed a layer of the anonymity of the MUD by allowing you
to do a "player" or "ooc" command that gives you the *user's*
description/information -- name, age, gender, that sort of thing, not their
address or phone number.  At least then (with somewhat robust registration
features) you'd have a chane of knowing who the *player* was "across the
table" from you.  This might actually have the result of channeling OOC
chat away from the main game AND not giving jerks the feeling that they can
fully hide behind their character.  Thoughts?  


Mike Sellers                                    Chief Alchemist
mike at online-alchemy.com                         Online Alchemy              

        Combining art & science to create new worlds.