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

[Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt]

On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Dan Shiovitz wrote:

> 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. 

You could set up the judgement as well at the penalties to be an
in-game-context event, even though you perhaps would have to
short-circuit some of the cause/effect feature you may have build in
the game to ensure the effectiveness of such a system. As an example
(in a mideval-like scenario) you would have the town elders set up a
meeting hearing the evidence, etc, sentencing a player to 2 weeks
(realtime) of jail (removing their ability to communicate with anyone
who is not actually visiting them, limiting their movement around the
game to the jail cell). Ofcause for this to be effective, (and it have
to, otherwise you have not really solved any problem), the criminal
should more often than not actually end up in jail.  Here perhaps you
need to short circuit some of the rules of cause/effect so that
atleast the 'criminal' gets his punishment.  Something like a message
the next time the person logs on: "During you sleep, some guards came
and threw you in jail" (or something more elaborate, but to exactly
the same effect). Such forcing of things are ofcause not desired if
you aim at a "realistic" game environment, but the alternative is that
the entire process is out of game-context. You could try to implement
it in a more realistic procedure (such as the guards actually showing
up and dragging off with the criminal, but you still need to make sure
that punishment is more often than not, is measured out.  Also you
need to set up in-game concepts for other out of game-context
penalties such as banning and deletion. As an example banning could be
"the casting of a spell that banish all souls with origin in a
specific plane or dimension", probably requireing the aid of a higher
being such as a god or its vatar (enter exciting description here),
deletion (in a game that implement easy or atomatic resurrection)
could be explaind away as some major banishment of a given soul. All
this ofcause take some carefull planning and tying in with all the
concepts of the game, but i feel that perhaps it is not that hard to
hide the administration context inside the game-context.



Hans Henrik Staerfeldt        |  phone-mail: 40383492 at sms.tdm.dk      
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Student of Computer Science   | Scientific programmer at Center for
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