[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 13 Jul 1998 11:50:39 -0700 (PDT) 
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.

> The answer is that it is invitation-only, and at its core a
> dictatorship.  This keeps quality up, but number of players low
> (have we ever had more than about 20 active posters at any given
> time?).  I think most here would agree with me that this is a
> desirable effect; you could do a mud the very same way as long as
> you didn't mind spending a lot of energy on it and after four years
> only having 20 active players. :)

MUD-Dev hasn't been invitation only since April '98 when we moved from 
Null.Net to Kanga.Nu.

Side data:

  Membership is up to almost 200 -- growth since publicising the list
on r.g.m.*, MudConnector, HotBot etc has been fast.  I haven't graphed
the growth rate and don't have any averages alas.  The number of
double subscriptions (one member subscribed from multiple addresses)
as shown by the difference between the subscriber count and the reader
count (readers have list posts sent to them) is 8, of which I know at
least 3 are members who have tuned out while they are on holiday or
similar.

  Posting authority count has grown more slowly, currently sitting
just over 100.  This is fairly significant as posting authority was
only in the 70's when I first instituted it, and authority has only
been granted on request (I think 4 exceptions for specific members).

  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).

More critically you may notice how little dictating I do, and how much
the membership takes over that job for me on occasion.  A simple
search on the archives for "Writing as list owner" will give you the
matches for my high horse riding (less than 100 in almost three years
and the majority of those are not dictums but comments).  

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.

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.

If you wander thru the archives you can see this culture evolving
quite clearly, and (I think) starting to stagnate a little (certainly
the rate of change seemed to fall right off) just before I took the
list public.  Without that grounding period for the list we would
likely be in deep noise trouble now.  Certainly the quality of
discourse would be lower.

--
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...