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

[JC Lawrence]

On Fri, 19 Dec 1997 12:56:31 PST8PDT stad <Ola> wrote:
> "Jon A. Lambert" <jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>> I would tend to agree with Matt.  If you use the "invitation to my
>> mud" as "invitation to my house" analogy, the player jerk is very
>> easily identifiable from the character jerk.  As your house gets
>> larger and you

> The problem is that I don't accept the analogy.  I expect people to
> not throw my furniture around the house.  However, they should (in
> my opinion) be allowed to do so on a mud from an admin POV.
> Actually this personal relationship between players and the HOST, is
> something I really dislike.  I view this as a better approach: the
> mud is the home of the users, the admin is the (invisible!) janitor
> who keeps the machinery running.

I weigh in on the SysAdmin is the host side, mostly due to the fact
that he has the ultimate authority and effectively the users are there
on his sufferance.

Extending the metaphore of this list as a MUD, there are obvious
parallels in the relationship of the membership to me as the list
owner.  I'm not about to critique my list adminning on the list (tho
I've laid some real doozies) but I do invite discussion of the
character and type of administration of this list or other liists and
how that could, would, should, or should not be paralleled by a MUD
admin.  I'm increasingly coming to the view that lists can provide an
interesting and very (often excessively) controlled (even
exclusionary or narrow) microcosm example of a larger MUD environ.

It should also be noted in this that the membership of a list of
necessity form a much more tightly defined society than the membership
of a MUD, the primary reason being that all the membership of the list
has an identical experience track for the list (ignoring length),
whereas MUD users tend to form sub-groups, cliques, go solo, or
otherwise distort ot break the possibility of there being a single
communally shared experience track.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...