[MUD-Dev] Totally OT... (Or is it?) (yes it is ;)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Marian Griffith <gryphon at iaehv.nl> wrote:
>> Reason being, IMHO, that "correct behavior" is such a vauge term, and
>> depending on the player's culture/country of origin will vary greatly
>> from player to player.
>
>I am sure that it is possible to find something that (almost) everybody
>can agree on.  However it is practically impossible  for the players to
>enforce anything.  They have no control over the game, or the way it is
>working. Only the people who do the coding and the people who make sure
>it is running can do anything about enforcing things. I think they have
>to provide safeguards against admin abuse of private information, but I
>see no way how the players can enforce that.

I never expected the majority on the list to agree with me, simply
because the list is heavly biased.  Actually I knew the attitudes in
advance. I am not going to bring up all the arguments though, because
that would involve a lot of theory, philosophy and deductions.
Unfortunatly the attitudes are heavly colored by Taylorism (scientific
management guy) and the belief that ownership of a system implies a
right to control the people acting within the system.  Spoke to a
norwegian friend working in the US today, he confirmed my observation
(along with american professionals' observation), the attitude is that
the employer "owns" the employee much more there than over here. (I
know this is different in some game houses)

Anyway, the issue is not what users should or can enforce, but first
and foremost: What is a good design?  Second: exessive logging is
immoral, in my view, independant of what shade of western culture you
live in.

The cognitive psychologist Norman calls most people's view of how the
human mind works for "folk psychology".  "folk psychology" is in the
best case misleading or incomplete, I am tempted to say: wrong.

I guess this along with the natural "it is my system, I don't want to
be made responsible for what I do with it" is causing the current
position.

That aside, it is the owner's (ultimatly "owner of the company")
responsibility to make sure (enforce) that his system's moral is both
legal and user friendly. I'm not sure what ACM's ethical guidelines
says, but they are probably too weak to be useful (they are the result
of a least-common-denominator process)

Ola.