[MUD-Dev] META: List combat character and racial memory (was Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...))

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 14 Jul 1998 14:16:08 -0700 (PDT) 
Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote: 

>>> As someone asked, "How does this list manage to stay violence
>>> free?"

>> It doesn't, we just have a particularly courtly form of combat.
>> Its equally violent in principle, just less bloody.

> Well, there's a few different issues here.  One is the term
> "violence" - we normally don't imagine that we are hacking each
> other up with swords, that I've seen.  Another is "harassment" or
> "jerk-like behavior", which seemed to be more what Marian is worried
> about.  *That* is what could easily skyrocket here, but has been
> kept low by careful population control.  The "combat" which goes on
> is more the combat of our ideas - one person places their idea into
> the arena, the others throw questions and counter-ideas at it and
> lets them do combat, as it were.  

As you later mention, this is heavily reliant on the distinction
between personal identity and the ideas one espouses.  Some, and it
has happened here on the list, identify with their ideas and posts
such that "attacks" on the ideas are considered attacks on the
individual.  Others consider their ideas and posts to be be logically
external and not directly representative of themselves.  (FWIW This is
probably the point I watch out for most aggressively as list owner as
I consider it to be the ultimate achilles heel of societies like
MUD-Dev.  Once one starts that indentification and it gets accepted
you're already far down the slippery slop.  Other foibles are
comparitively easy to address as an external retro-active moderator.
That one is a killer.)

Are you synonymous with your posts, are your posts a (possibly
bidirectional) reflection of you, or are your posts something that you
happened to emit which must then survive on their own rights?

> This also harkens back to our discussion of "if you PK my character,
> are you *really* PKing my character, or are you PKing *me*"?  As I
> recall we had a fairly long (and quite enlightening) discussion
> about this after I responded to an essay which stated baldly, "My
> character *is* me."  To extend the metaphor, then, our characters
> (or more generally, "tokens") which we "play" here on the list are
> our ideas.  When I put forth an idea of mine on the list, and
> someone else throws counterideas at it, it can be thought of as
> similar to someone attacking my character on a mud.  I take neither
> personally.  Others feel very differently, as we found out.

Bingo.

>> I don't keep track of how many members post with any regularity.  A
>> quick scan of the author index for 1998Q2 shows 75 discrete posting
>> addresses that are actually posting to the list.  There are many
>> duplicates (two listings for Raph Koster for instance with variant
>> spellings, and two for me from different addresses), but I'd
>> guesstimate that that accounts for less than a third of the total
>> count, leaving us with 50 posters (or 37 if you take accept 50%
>> dupes) as posting in that period.  That's not a bad number, and
>> considerably higher than your 20 (which I'll admit I subjectively
>> thought was high when I read it).

> Note I said *at any one time*.  There are plenty of folks who are
> active for a while, then get busy and drift away.  For instance,
> Orion has been subscribed just as long as I.  Do an archive search
> on both our names, however, and I imagine you'll find hundreds of
> posts from me and only a dozen or so from him.  I don't consider him
> to be an active member except for those occasions where he goes on a
> brief flurry of posting activity (usually when people start talking
> about combat systems...).

There are several factors here.  The choice of window size (a day, a
week, a month, or the three month window I selected), will vastly
impact the count and its relevance.  This is especially true at the
thread level.  As you commented on Orion Henry, some threads draw out
some list members and others don't.  A smaller window will tend to hit
those who A) are interested in the threads current at the time of the
sample, __and__ B) post more to almost all threads.  The particular
balance of threads at the time of the sample will control how
representative the same is of the general list traffic.

I chose a quarterly window as it was easy (the archives do the
counting for me) and seemed long enough that the per-thread aspects of
the count would be comparitively minor in the total value.

>> This is not to say that I'm not a (benign?) dictator, or that you
>> shouldn't perform suitable sacrifices in my O! so worthy honour.

> Yes, exactly.  Your administration of the list is very similar to
> that of the muds that I thought were best admined.  Clearly define
> the boundries of acceptable behavior, then let players run free.  If
> they cross those boundries, they are delt with quickly and
> decisively.  If they never cross the boundries, it's like there's no
> admin at all.

<bow>

Thanks -- that's exactly how I try and do it.

>> The period when the list /was/ invitation only (remember, that
>> hasn't been true for several months now) was significant however.
>> It allowed the list culture to evolve, consolidate, and to become
>> deeply accepted by the membership.  This is important to the extent
>> that it provides a commonly agreed upon and accepted premise for
>> new members conform to and join.  In the MUD world this would be
>> equivalent to having a beta-test period to form a central knot of
>> players for the new players, once the game is opened to the public,
>> to coalesce about.

> Agreed.  And as mentioned before, because of the permenancy of the
> actions performed here (== posts), this is achievable with *far*
> fewer players.  For this to work similarly on a mud, you need enough
> oldbie players such that there are a signifigant number of them
> around at any given time of day at most major locations.  If there
> is a knot of old-timers that are around to give guidance, but they
> are in a different location or play at a different time than a given
> newbie, it's like they don't exist.

A good point, and one I'm curious how much the archives impact on.
Per the web log statistics:

  http://www.kanga.nu/stats/
  http://www.kanga.nu/analog/

The list archives are getting hit regularly and with some depth.  Look
at the number of hits on the search pages.  (23 in the 6 days of this
month alone and 53 searches done in those same 6 days), and the hits
on the archive index pages (38 for the first 6 days of this month for
the 1998Q3 date index, 12 for the thread index (nobody seems
interested in the author index, wahh!)).  Looking back at previous
month's stats shows the hit rate on the indexes and search pages
growing almost exponentially.

  Note: Hits on search pages are likely not a good counter as they are
likely cached locally by either the browser or the proxy/firewall.
Hits on the the webglimpse CGI are a faithful count of all the
searches launched and are thus interesting and representative.  Hits
on the the quarterly indexes are a more interesting as they are also
likely locally cached and so are closer to the count of the total
number of unique sites that requested the indexes (this of course
ignores the lack of sesssion-to-session cacheing).

The question is precisely how much of a racial memory are the list
archives proving to be?  Cruising the server logs, a fairly large
percentage of the archive browsers appear to be NON list members.  We
also get some really interesting domain spreads (look at the pie chart
on the monthly stats pages).

Just how often and how deeply do y'all use the archives?  What impact
are they having on your and your projects?

NB Does anybody know who 208.240.161.41 is?  The traceroute there is
*really* interesting.  They sure hit me a lot.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...