[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wi

[Dan Shiovitz]

On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> On  7 Aug 98, Dan Shiovitz wrote:
[..]
> > (If you want, it might be better to do a chit system instead of a
> > voting period. You have X chits you can give out. If a person
> > accumulates N chits, they get whatever penalty is appropriate. This is
> > basically a slightly-more-decentralized version of the voting system.)
> 
> I like these ideas, though I'd much rather disguise and hide the 
> "voting" aspect.  Yes, this is a form of player voting, but I am 
> wary leading players into thinking that anything relating to mud 
> administration is democratic.  Changing the aspects of "voting" is 
> more politically painful than changing mechanics of @gag.  And all 
> @gags are not created equal. :)   A player with game master privilege 
> would have more "votes" or weight.  Such mechanisms for OOC 
> enforcements may be integrated into in-game thematic constructs. 
> (i.e. literal as well as mechanical "toading") 

This is obviously a matter of taste. My personal feeling is it doesn't
work on a roleplaying or other "realistic" mud (well, not usually. if
you're roleplaying virtual people fighting it out in cyberspace, say,
voting could get the person's in-game sysadmin to delete their
account.. but in general, no), so I don't mind making it open in the
same way you have chat channels and stuff. 

Re: the democracy issue, hmm. On the one hand, policy and code are
obviously intimately connected. But it might be .. interesting to
*make* a democratic mud. Again, I don't think this works for realistic
muds where, IMO, meta-policies should be be as invisible as
possible. But for chatmuds, I don't see why not. It's tricky to get
these right because you can obviously only do policies that are
supported by the code, so people can't vote anything into existance
that the admin doesn't want to code. 

> This also might have implications in enforcement of role-playing in
> an immersive RP environment.  How about the @GOP command?

GOP? I'm not sure what that means, but I see an obvious equivalent of
this for voting/chitting people as good roleplayers or bad ones. 
This is biased against people who don't interact with others much
(roleplaying the silent ranger, maybe), but, mm, I suppose that's
work-out-able. 

As a btw, has anyone done any categorization or studies of the
different types of nuisance players? It seems like there's a number of
possible behaviors, spamming, harassing, pkilling, pstealing, etc, and
it's not necessarily clear that individual people engage in all of
them. 

> --/*\ Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD     Internet:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com /*\--
--
Dan Shiovitz || dbs at cs.wisc.edu || http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbs 
"...Incensed by some crack he had made about modern enlightened
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of hers, Florence gave him the swift heave-ho and--much against my
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